If you’ve ever built a cheap intro offer because you assumed price was the thing standing between you and more members, you’re not alone. Daniel Purington did the exact same thing at his CrossFit gym, and he described the results as “a dumpster fire.”
Daniel runs a CrossFit affiliate that will do north of $700,000 in revenue this year with less than 200 members, operating out of just 1,800 square feet.
He didn’t get there with a cheap on-ramp. He got there by completely rebuilding his onboarding process around what today’s market actually wants, and it more than doubled his revenue while solving his biggest staffing problems along the way.
Watch our interview below or keep reading for the key points.
The Problem With Cheap On-Ramps
Back in 2021, Daniel’s on-ramp was $70 for three 30-minute sessions, followed by an upsell into a $179 unlimited membership. On paper it looked like a smart, low-barrier way to get people in the door. In practice, it brought in people who weren’t ready to commit to anything, and retention suffered badly.
The logic behind a cheap intro offer usually goes something like this: People aren’t buying because the price feels too high, so lowering the price should fix it.
But Daniel found the opposite was true. The low price wasn’t attracting price-conscious buyers who just needed a nudge. It was attracting people who had no real investment in the outcome, and once they hit the unlimited membership price, there was a wall to climb that the on-ramp didn’t prepare them for.
This is the trap a lot of gym owners fall into without realizing it. You’re not solving a value problem with a lower price. You’re often creating a mismatch between the experience someone had and the price they’re eventually asked to pay.
What Daniel Built Instead
In late 2021 and early 2022, Daniel rebuilt his entire onboarding process from scratch. What he runs now is a five-week, $499 on-ramp that blends personal training with curated access to either CrossFit or small group strength training, depending on what the prospect is after.
Here’s the structure:
- Four private training sessions, 45 minutes each, spread across the first four weeks
- Curated access to CrossFit or small group strength training
- An InBody scan
- A nutrition consultation
- A final strategy session in week five where the actual membership is prescribed
The word “curated” is doing a lot of work here, and Daniel chose it deliberately.
His team tells every new client something specific during the sales conversation: They’ll never be put into a class or session with a movement pattern they haven’t already learned one-on-one. That single promise builds trust fast, especially with an avatar that already feels intimidated walking through the door.
Daniel figured this out by paying attention to the language showing up in his Google reviews and goal review conversations. People kept saying things like “I was intimidated” or “I wish I’d known this before I started.” That told him his prospects didn’t need convincing on price. They needed to feel like someone had their back before they were thrown into a group setting.
Why Personal Training Comes First
In Daniel’s model, every new client starts with private training, even the ones who came in specifically wanting CrossFit.
The first on-ramp session is always run by his operations director, partly because he’s the most available, and partly so one person can track every administrative detail: the waiver, the payment, the goal review, the nutrition consult. After that first session, the client is handed off to one of three other on-ramp coaches who stays with them for the rest of the five weeks.
This structure does two things at once: It gives the gym a controlled way to introduce someone to the movements they’ll see in class, and it builds a real relationship before that person ever steps into a group setting.
By the time they reach week five, they’ve had five weeks of one-on-one coaching and multiple honest conversations about what’s working and what isn’t. The final prescription isn’t based on a 15 minute sales conversation. It’s based on real data.
The Upsell Nobody Has to Force
Somewhere in the middle of the on-ramp, every client gets exposed to whatever service they didn’t originally sign up for. A CrossFit prospect gets a session or two of small group strength training. A small group prospect gets exposure to CrossFit. Daniel calls it giving people a taste, and it happens naturally as part of the curated path rather than as a hard pitch.
The results speak for themselves. A prospect who originally wanted CrossFit at roughly $215 to $217 a month often leaves the on-ramp choosing small group strength training at $320, or the top tier membership around $420 that includes both. Daniel’s average revenue per member sits around $350, more than double what a typical CrossFit gym pulls in. Nobody is being talked into a higher price. They’re choosing it because they already experienced it and liked it.
Nutrition follows a similar pattern. Daniel used to try selling it upfront, then moved it to week two, then week three. It eventually landed in week five, during the strategy session, because that’s the point where enough trust has been built for the conversation to actually land.
What This Does for Staffing
Running a straight group class model makes it almost impossible to build full-time careers for coaches, because there simply isn’t enough revenue generated per hour of coaching to support a livable wage. Daniel solved this by shifting a meaningful chunk of his schedule toward small group strength training and personal training, both of which generate two to three times the hourly revenue of a group class.
That shift let him build a staff of genuine professionals rather than a rotating bench of part-timers. His head coach is a doctor of physical therapy. His operations director spent 25 years in the military and ran operations for a media design company. His full-time coaches earn $60,000 to $70,000 a year working under 30 hours a week.
If your gym is running into constant staffing turnover, it’s worth asking whether the real problem is your hiring process or the fact that your service mix simply can’t generate enough revenue per coaching hour to support a full-time wage.
The Real Lesson Here
Daniel’s revenue went from roughly $20,000 a month to a recurring $50,000 to $60,000 a month, all within the same footprint and largely the same member count.
If you’re running a cheap intro offer right now because you think price is your problem, chances are you’re solving the wrong one. The gym owners seeing the biggest jumps in revenue per member aren’t competing on price at all. They’re building a curated, trust-first experience that makes a premium price feel like the obvious choice.
If you want help rebuilding your own onboarding process so it drives retention and revenue instead of working against you, book a call with our team and we’ll walk through what that could look like for your gym.
