Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Can you believe that some gym owners take home more than $20,000 a month from their businesses? Like that’s what they take home, not what the business grosses. I’m going to tell you how they do it today. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. I want you to subscribe so you don’t miss a show because we are literally giving away the cheat codes to gym ownership on the show every single time. Now at Two-Brain, we track net owner benefit, and we do it over three months and give you a monthly average because we want sustainable numbers. So, this is not just flash-in-the-pan, “I paid myself a huge dividend, and I’m on the leaderboard.” These are three-month numbers that show sustainable income levels for gym owners. Now again, it’s not gross revenue. So, when we talk about these numbers, it’s not what the business grosses. Back in the day, my business grossed $20,000. Our gym owners now, our top ones, are taking home $20,000 in their bank accounts. Now this is net owner earnings. So, it could be salary, dividends or any combination of whatever the tax code allows in certain countries, but the numbers are legit, and they are verified. My guest today is one of our net owner benefit leaders. Her name is Saara Snellman, and she owns CrossFit Kreis 9 in Zurich, Switzerland. Now I didn’t say that properly. Say it for me please.
Saara Snellman (01:07):
That was perfect, Mike. CrossFit Kreis 9.
Mike Warkentin (01:09):
OK, that’s not bad. I’m going to ask you to share your secrets today. Are you ready to do it?
Saara Snellman (01:13):
I am ready.
Mike Warkentin (01:14):
OK, so here’s the thing. Back in the day, I started a gym in like 2011; we all thought we were going to be able to get hundreds and hundreds of members and have these giant gyms and these giant warehouses. I wasn’t able to do it, but you’ve done it. You’ve capped your membership at 340 members, and most of your revenue is coming from group classes. So, I have to know: How have you succeeded here when so many affiliate owners have failed?
Saara Snellman (01:36):
Basically, I think it comes down to two things. The first one is that if you are a 100-member gym with a goal of growing to 300 members, you need to make all the decisions keeping this in mind from day one. So, everything you do, you do using the filter: Will this work with 300 members? You need to have your systems, your operating procedures, and your gym rules all reflecting that goal. Second, when you actually are a 300-plus-member gym, you need to be able to serve them the same way as you were serving your 100 members. So again, it comes down to the same things: your SOPs, your procedures, and also when you are a 300-plus-member gym, you need the manpower to do all the tasks and the roles that are not only coaching but the running so that you have the time to run your business and not just running around.
Mike Warkentin (02:43):
Yeah, I mean, right away you pointed out exactly the mistakes that I made. I made the decisions based on the number of members that I had and “How do I manage this number of members?” I never said, “How would I put the stuff in place to build the 300?” and consequently, I could never get over. I think we capped it at 220 or something like that, and it was more than I can manage. The second mistake that I made that you highlighted, I didn’t have standard operating procedures. We tried to do that as I started working with Two-Brain, we got that in place, but I didn’t have that originally, and I coached way too much, and I didn’t build my business. But you’ve gone the exact opposite way. So, did you sit down originally and say, “I want to have a 300 member gym”?
Saara Snellman (03:20):
I don’t remember, to be honest. We’ve been open a while, but we always had the capacity space-wise and, yeah, capacity to go there.
Mike Warkentin (03:30):
OK. So we’re going to talk a little bit later on, and we’re going to get into some of the details of how you’re retaining members and acquiring them and all this stuff because it’s a huge number that so many businesses can’t do it, and I can tell just by looking at your numbers that you’re obviously a good business owner because you have the systems and structures in place to retain and keep and build to those numbers. Whereas many of us got to like 150, and then we fell to 130, then 170, then 140, and it was always back and forth. So, we’ll talk about that, but I want to know a little bit—first give me some business details. Like how much space do you have, staff members—like what do you sell besides group classes, and who are you looking for? What’s your avatar?
Saara Snellman (04:04):
So our main gym is 490 square meters, and we have a smaller space, which is about 100 square meters. We are a small staff, so we are only eight people, of which six are coaches or in combined roles—coaching and something else. 90% of our revenue comes from group classes. So, we also offer PT and nutrition coaching, but those are rather small things. And our avatar client is a highly educated, busy professional, and we actually have a really, really cool niche, which we call the “daddy men.” So, for some reason we are able to make fathers of small children happy, and that’s what we are doing.
Mike Warkentin (04:52):
Wow, OK. Now did you decide to target the “daddy men,” or did they come to you and then you just labeled it and done more of them?
Saara Snellman (04:58):
No, no. I think it grew with the time. So, some of the members actually became fathers while members with us, but quite a lot of people who walk in through our doors these days are these people.
Mike Warkentin (05:15):
OK. So, when you started to realize that you had this group of people and that was your avatar, did you start to make changes to your offerings to serve them better and to acquire people like that?
Saara Snellman (05:25):
I think we streamlined a bit.
Mike Warkentin (05:27):
You cut out the stuff that you didn’t need.
Saara Snellman (05:28):
For instance, we were running an advanced class four days a week. Now, it’s still there one day a week, but we realized that that was not serving our main audience, and we streamlined and cut some of the offer we had, and now we are better in line with the avatar clients’ needs.
Mike Warkentin (05:51):
Yeah. I went the other way. I added programs and added programs and thought I would acquire more and more clients because I was giving them everything from yoga to fitness to this to that to the other. And it fractured our offering, and people didn’t know what was going on. And we had like classes of two people here and two there and whatever. In your space, what is an average group class? How many people are in there?
Saara Snellman (06:09):
So, we run the classes up to 14 people with one coach and up to 24 with two coaches.
Mike Warkentin (06:16):
Wow. It’s so cool to talk to someone—because this was the goal for so many CrossFit affiliates, but very few of us ever were able to do it consistently. I had one class where I had 15 or 17 people in it. It was my five o’clock class. The rest of my classes had twos and fours. So it didn’t work out that well. PT: Do any of your members do group and PT, or is it a very strict dividing line between group classes and personal training clients?
Saara Snellman (06:43):
So, we have some personal training clients who only do personal training. That’s the minority, and the majority of the personal training clients do group classes, and they do PTs for certain goals to achieve whatever it is: a pull up, a muscle up, handstand walk, Olympic lifting—usually has something to do with the skill. They are wanting to get faster to their goal, and that’s the majority of those PTs that we offer. And on-ramp, obviously, we do the foundation program and the foundation training as PTs, and that’s what we’ve been doing for nine years already.
Mike Warkentin (07:22):
So listeners, this is a great way—even if you run a group model, all of your group clients would be served by one PT session a month just to help them accomplish a specific goal or to brush up on some technique. It’s called a hybrid membership in a lot of different places, and it’s very high value, right? If you think about your group rate, tack on one personal training session per month, all of a sudden, you’ve got a pretty great rate, and your clients are getting better service. So, that’s an interesting thing for you to think about, even if you focus on a group model. Saara, your group memberships, what’s the approximate rate? Even if it’s in euros.
Saara Snellman (07:54):
Mid-range, four weeks would be, yeah, 205 Euros. Well, we talk about Swiss francs, but that’s OK.
Mike Warkentin (08:03):
I’m sorry. Pardon me. Yeah.
Saara Snellman (08:04):
That’s close to Euros, so let’s say $220.
Mike Warkentin (08:08):
OK. So, that’s a great rate. And then what’s a PT session cost generally?
Saara Snellman (08:12):
150.
Mike Warkentin (08:14):
So, there you go. So, if you think about and you know in your—you know, listeners wherever your gym is, you can think about your rate and your other rate for PT, add them together once a month, and that’s a pretty great average revenue per member, which equals a pretty great revenue total, which then equals a great net owner benefit total. So, let’s move into that, and let’s talk a little bit about your net owner benefit. How has that number changed over time? But for me it started at zero, and it stayed pretty close to zero until Two-Brain to help me get it above that. How has your number changed?
Saara Snellman (08:43):
So, we opened our doors in June 2015. We were profitable from the beginning. I was taking salary pretty fast. I think at month six or so, the net owner benefit was steady or steadily small until the pandemic. We got through the pandemic pretty nicely, but after the pandemic, things got kind of hard. So, once we opened the doors after the second lockdown, things were not picking up as fast as they should. Obviously, we had a lot to make up for, so I was chasing my tail for a year maybe and then joined Two-Brain in June 2022. And it’s been steady growth ever since. But make no mistake, it’s been steady growth for the gym and for the coaches as well.
Mike Warkentin (09:41):
And see that’s an important thing, and whenever I speak to gym owners at your level and they have great net order benefit levels, they always mention staff wages because they’re trying to create careers for staff, not just part-time jobs. And I’m going to—I’ll say this, and you tell me if I’m wrong: It seems as though in these gyms where the owner’s making a lot of money and the revenue is high, that career-oriented staff members are a huge part of it. Do you agree with that?
Saara Snellman (10:04):
100%. 100%. So, we’ve moved from part-time coaches to full-time coaches and career coaches, and it’s made all the difference.
Mike Warkentin (10:14):
It seems to, and that’s not to say you can’t have part-time coaches. My gym, I had a lot of part-time coaches, and many of them were excellent. And lots of gyms do exist on that. But I do speak to a lot of top gym owners, and one of the things they’re always concerned about is creating great careers to retain long-term coaches for now years. And some of them will be 10 or 14 years or something like that. How long has your longest serving coach been there?
Saara Snellman (10:37):
That is a good question. I would say it’s a couple of years right now. So, we’ve had this change from part-time coaches to full-time coaches, and that’s been a full circle.
Mike Warkentin (10:52):
OK. So, that’s interesting. So, let’s dig into it. You talk to me: 2022, you hire a mentor, and you start changing things because you were struggling a little bit out in the post-pandemic period. What were some of the big things that you did that noticeably made a difference and started moving your numbers up?
Saara Snellman (11:07):
We had some gaps in the membership types. That was definitely the first one, so tying up those gaps in between those times where people are traveling and saying, “I will cancel my membership” and this and that. We started offering travel workouts and restructuring the memberships a little bit since our capacity is the same 365 days a year. So that was one of the big things. The second thing was obviously the changes in staff or hiring the right people for the right seats. These people, they love what they do, they do it well and it is their primary job. And that’s where I think the biggest gap is between full-timers and part-timers because those part- timers live off something else, and that something else comes first, which is understandable, but doesn’t serve our audience the best possible way.
Mike Warkentin (12:08):
So did you have—before 2022, did you have structures and systems and standard operating procedures that needed to be improved, or did you not have them at all at that point?
Saara Snellman (12:17):
We had some, but most of them lived in my head as per usual.
Mike Warkentin (12:21):
Yep. Yeah, I had the exact same problem. I thought I had them, but no one knew them.
Saara Snellman (12:27):
Yeah, yeah.
Mike Warkentin (12:27):
Was that one of the first things you did with the mentor? Was that laying that stuff out?
Saara Snellman (12:31):
Definitely. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah.
Mike Warkentin (12:33):
What happened when you did?
Saara Snellman (12:35)
I started having more time to work on the business instead of in the business automatically. And I stopped doing the work for my coaches. I was not the one who always said, “I’ll do that. I’ll take care of that. I’ll take that off of your list of things.” So, they started sharing, I started sharing with them, and they started sharing with me on a new level.
Mike Warkentin (13:04):
It makes a huge, huge difference. And that was the biggest lesson for me was that I do not have to do every single thing. The toilets need to be cleaned, but I don’t need to clean them. And if I hire someone to do that, I can then use that time to make more money to pay for the cost of the cleaner and generate more revenue for the gym. So, tell me some of the stuff: When you got all these procedures out of your head and you gave them to your coaches and you didn’t have to work in the business and you started working on it, what did you start doing, and how did it affect your revenue?
Saara Snellman (13:31):
Creating more systems and writing more SOPs and obviously working on the content of blog posts and Instagram and all that kind of organic marketing that usually gets done if it gets done when everything else is done.
Mike Warkentin (13:50):
Yeah. So, you were able to prioritize marketing, important stuff that was an afterthought for most gym owners who focused on coaching, right?
Saara Snellman (13:57):
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And also dedicating time for the coaches. So, mentoring them actually being the leader. And that has made a huge, huge difference.
Mike Warkentin (14:08):
So, are standard operating procedures, is that the backbone of your business, would you say? Or is it something else?
Saara Snellman (14:13):
At the moment? Yes. Finally.
Mike Warkentin (14:14):
Yeah, and that’s funny because again, I speak to so many gym owners about this, and every single one who’s on our leaderboards talks about their standard operating procedures. Every single one. It’s never happened where someone’s like, “Ah, I make a ton of money, and I just do it on the seat of my pants.” It doesn’t work like that anymore. That might’ve been the case maybe 10 years ago, but now in a saturated market with tons of coaching gyms, it’s standard operating procedures. And so, listeners, you’re out there and you’re thinking, “What can I do to get closer to the levels that our top gym owners are at?” start systemizing your business. And if you do that, you will definitely make steps towards the metrics that you want. It happens every single time. I’ll ask you this: What’s your net owner benefit strategy? And again, it might be different in Switzerland because all tax codes are different around the world. Some gym owners just take a straight wage and are employees of the business; others are owners and take dividends. What kind of stuff do you do?
Saara Snellman (15:06):
Well, this will be the shortest answer ever. It’s salary and certain work-related costs as mentoring fees. That’s it.
Mike Warkentin (15:13):
There you go. So, that’s an easy one. And there are lots of different ways that you can do this stuff. When we talk about net owner benefit, one of the things we think about is: What other things besides wages do owners get? And sometimes it’s like a vehicle; the gym pays for a vehicle, or the gym pays for cell phone costs or internet costs or other things like that. Maybe a home office. Check with your accountant if you don’t know what’s allowed in your country. But if you do have an accountant who’s clever, that person can tell you, “You can write this off; you can take this benefit,” and that all comes into it. But of course, the big numbers usually are wages, which is salary or dividends or something like that. How did mentorship—we talked about a little bit—how did mentorship really help you start moving this number up? Because a lot of us—like I didn’t pay myself anything, and it took a mentor to say, “Dude, you need to start paying yourself something.” How did mentorship help your number move?
Saara Snellman (15:58):
This is going to be a long one. I can talk about it for hours.
Mike Warkentin (16:02):
That’s OK. This is the secret.
Saara Snellman (16:03):
This is huge. So, I know that it’s different for different business owners. I was a seasoned business owner when I started my journey with the mentor. My dream was financially healthy or at least financially stable. So, and I had the free time that many people or many business owners are lacking. I had the free time from the beginning. For me, the biggest change has been in between my ears. So, the mindset, and the mentor has just played a huge role in it. She has guided me to solve my problems permanently instead of just patching things up. She has also not let me dwell in my so-called problems, but led me into hard conversations and hard decisions to solve those issues once and for all. And I mean the whole curriculum is there. Two-Brain Business gives you everything you need from emails, whatnot, SOPs, but the one-on-one mentorship, that’s what makes the difference. So, my mentor has been my decision-making filter. My parents sometimes when I needed it. But that’s what makes all the difference.
Mike Warkentin (17:31):
Who’s your mentor?
Saara Snellman (17:33):
Lisa Palmer was my mentor in Growth.
Mike Warkentin (17:35):
Very nice. She’s wonderful, yeah. And so, the question, I guess, is if we had just given you this giant pile of resources because there’s so many resources that are out there and just said, “Do this,” would it have worked, or you said it was the one-on-one mentorship that was critical. Why is that?
Saara Snellman (17:49):
Well, of course it works if you are so good at decision making and everything that you don’t get overwhelmed, the information is there. But if that was the case, if it worked alone, nobody would need nutrition coaches. Nobody would need personal trainers. Nobody would need any kind of coaches because all of the information is out there and available. You need that one person saying, “Do that now. Do that first. Once you’ve taken care of this, we’ll move on to this, this.”
Mike Warkentin (18:21):
And so even though you were a seasoned business owner, you still needed that guidance for someone to say, “Hey, let’s do this right now and then move on.”
Saara Snellman (18:28):
Yeah. I personally needed someone to tell me, “Leave it, move on.” Not necessarily what, but just, “Stop dwelling in your issues. Just get it done.”
Mike Warkentin (18:40):
What did you do before? What did you do as a business owner before the gym?
Saara Snellman (18:44):
We have another business. So, we have a small retail company as well. We sell sports gear or apparel. But I was working in the forest industry, so that’s what I studied, forest economics, and that’s what I was doing.
Mike Warkentin (19:01):
OK. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there that think, “I can do it myself,” and I guarantee there’s someone listening who’s on that fence of like, “Ah, I’ll just figure it out. I don’t need a mentor.” What would you say to that person?
Saara Snellman (19:11):
Do you want to get where you are going faster, and do you want to be sure that you get where you want to be? It’s that simple. I’ve made all those mistakes everybody talks about except the one that I never treated my gym as a small gym. That was the one that carried us until 2022.
Mike Warkentin (19:33):
I’m going to ask you this one. And it’s not a net owner benefit question, but I know that you can’t generate a lot of revenue and owner benefit without retaining members. In a 340-member gym. How do you retain people?
Saara Snellman (19:46):
These days, really well, first of all. So, we have about 10 people leaving every month, and five of those will return. So those 10 who leave are replaced by 10 new ones, of which five are returning customers.
Mike Warkentin (20:06):
OK. That’s a huge stat. So, you actually know how many people are leaving, and then you actually know that five of your customers are, we’ll call them “boomerangs.” They’re coming back that have been there before, and they’re coming back to you. Yeah. So that means you only have to five find new clients per month to maintain your membership.
Saara Snellman (20:21):
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why we have currently a waiting list for new customers.
Mike Warkentin (20:27):
A waiting list? That’s just going to make so many gym owners jealous, hearing you’ve got a waiting list. So, OK, I’m going to dig into this. I didn’t tell you I was going to ask about this stuff, but I’m going to—I have to ask because this is such an important topic.
Saara Snellman (20:35):
Yeah. It’s fine. It’s fine.
Mike Warkentin (20:38):
How do you get your former clients back? What do you do specifically to get those five people back every month?
Saara Snellman (20:43):
I think what we’ve been concentrating on in the last years is that when people leave, we want to make them feel good about leaving. It’s not that they are betraying us; we don’t own them. They are not ours to keep. So, when they leave, they should feel that they are welcome back anytime.
Mike Warkentin (21:05):
So, they leave with a hug when they go out the door.
Saara Snellman (21:07):
Hopefully. Yeah. Or more than one hug. Also, when they come back, they will for sure know that they are welcome back, and we’ve been basically waiting for them to return.
Mike Warkentin (21:22):
How do you stay in touch with them?
Saara Snellman (21:23):
Sometimes we do; sometimes we don’t. That’s not something we have systemized. It is more about letting them actually know that, “Hey, when you’re ready, we are here. You know where to find us. We are here for you.” Why do so little people leave? This has been the trend since last summer that people are actually not leaving. We have systems in place to keep in touch. We do the goal reviews, we know about them, and having those full-time coaches, in my personal opinion, is the key because every single coach coaches hundreds of classes a year. So, the person who coaches the least coaches eight classes 48 weeks a year. So, they know their members without it being fully systemized. They actually know that Lisa here has a bad knee, and Saara here has a bad shoulder, and David just got his first baby. So, we do know them sometimes better than they know themselves.
Mike Warkentin (22:35):
Yeah. Do you think that your waiting list has a retention effect? Meaning like, if I leave your gym, I might not get back in. Does that have an effect?
Saara Snellman (22:44):
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. For the members we have now, it has that effect. But for the new ones, no. Though sometimes people, before they reach out to a gym, they’ve been thinking about it for a long, long time. And when they finally pick up the phone, and they get a “no” from us, it’s not a great feeling. So yeah. It works to some extent.
Mike Warkentin (23:11):
I just think that’s so incredible because you wouldn’t want to leave.
Saara Snellman (23:14):
Yeah, hopefully.
Mike Warkentin (23:15):
You know, I can’t get back in. I can’t leave; I can’t give up my spot. So, that’s a great thing. And then, so I’m going to guess—I’ll just throw this out: So, when you need to replace those five people, do you just go to your waiting list?
Saara Snellman (23:28):
Yes, that’s what we do. We reach out.
Mike Warkentin (23:30):
Do you market at all? Do you have any marketing costs?
Saara Snellman (23:32):
No, we don’t do paid marketing. Oh, except we’ve done a little bit of paid marketing for “Babies and Barbells,” our only specialty class that we do for moms because we are so big on dads. So that keeps the moms coming. But that’s—nothing else. No paid marketing whatsoever.
Mike Warkentin (23:55):
Wow. So, 340 members with a waiting list; you only lose 10 per month. Replace five with former members; you replace the other five by just hitting your waiting list. That sounds like a dream.
Saara Snellman (24:06):
It is; it is.
Mike Warkentin (24:07):
Wow. I’m going to dig in, before we close out here, into the retention because that is just such an incredible number. Do you have a client success manager, or is that duty delegated to various other staff members?
Saara Snellman (24:19):
Yes, we have a client success manager.
Mike Warkentin (24:21):
OK. Would you mind telling listeners what that person does? Because your numbers are incredible, and they should understand why this is the case.
Saara Snellman (24:28):
That person is the liaison between us and the members. So, when somebody doesn’t show up to the gym for a while, she reaches out; she sends birthday cards. She’s also responsible for event planning because that’s what she loves doing. And she has some ops tasks as well. But basically, she makes sure that the coaches are up to date on what’s going on with the members: Who’s new, who left, why they left, are they maybe coming back? Should we reach out later? And so on.
Mike Warkentin (25:06):
How many hours does a week or month—pardon me—does she spend on retention duties? Is that full-time?
Saara Snellman (25:11):
I’m not going to tell you the number because she’s so efficient. She’s the most efficient person like on earth. So, her numbers are not relevant for anyone else.
Mike Warkentin (25:23):
That’s fair. It’s not about the time; it’s about the results. So, that’s really—I love that you said that because if you said like six hours, people would think, “Oh, I only need six hours.” And it’s not that; it’s probably about—
Saara Snellman (25:32):
I would need three times the amount of time she needs.
Mike Warkentin (25:36):
So, you’ve got an excellent staff member. I’m going to ask you this specific one too. You said you reach out to clients when they haven’t shown up. How long does it take for someone to notice that a client hasn’t been around?
Saara Snellman (25:45):
It depends what we are looking for. So, there is no standard answer to this. We have members who are on different patterns, and for some we know that they are traveling, and they are doing this and that, so this once again comes down to not only the systems, but how well do you know your clients?
Mike Warkentin (26:02):
OK. So, but you do notice when someone’s not around for a bit, you’re like, “Oh, he was traveling. No, that’s cool. He was doing his workouts in Berlin” or whatever. “That person has no excuse. And we know that, and we contact.”
Saara Snellman (26:15):
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Warkentin (26:16):
OK. Do you give gifts to your clients? Does this client success manager give them gifts or celebrate them in any way?
Saara Snellman (26:20):
Sometimes. Sometimes.
Mike Warkentin (26:23):
OK. The reason I dig into this is because retention is just, like in a 340-member gym, you would expect—there are gyms that have that many members that bleed out like 50 people a month. And then that creates this marketing problem and a huge marketing expense. And you’re constantly replacing people, and they’re blowing out the back door faster than you can get them in the front door, and you spend all your time marketing and spinning plates and no time actually satisfying clients. And it gets worse and worse and worse. And all of a sudden, those gyms collapse, and you’ve done the exact opposite where you have a waiting list and are just feeding people in. So, I’ll ask you this; I’ll put you on the spot. I want you to be like Lisa for a minute and be a mentor: Gym owners are out there, and they’re saying, “How would I possibly take some steps in this direction?” Again, we’re talking about net owner benefit, but I’ll just put you on the spot and say: What would you recommend to a gym owner out there today to make their business just a little bit better and move in the direction where you are?
Saara Snellman (27:14):
Well, concentrating on the members who are in the gym. Those are the members that don’t cost you any extra money. And the time you invest in them, you will save later in the marketing cost, and the time as well you put in marketing. Even if we are not talking about Swiss francs or dollars or paid marketing, but what does it take you to get a new member in? So that would be—and the second advice is: As soon as you can get staff to help you out with the retention tools and things, get those people in because—
Mike Warkentin (27:54):
And I’m—oh, go ahead. Finish that off.
Saara Snellman (27:55):
I cannot manage 340 customers on my own, even if I was working day and night, 52 weeks a year. It’s just not possible. And if you are a bigger gym and your whole staff is just coaches and you and maybe a cleaning person, no, it’s not going to work.
Mike Warkentin (28:16):
And I’ll just suggest that the reason that you’re able to rely on your staff is because you’ve taken the business out of your head and put it into a playbook and you can actually say, “Hey, great staff member, here’s your list. Can you crush this?” And your staff members are like, “Yes, boss.” And it’s done. And then you can do the other stuff. So those three things, I think, are going to be—like, if any gym owner listening takes any steps on those things, I think we’re moving in the right direction. What do you think?
Saara Snellman (28:38):
Definitely, definitely.
Mike Warkentin (28:40):
Thank you for sharing this with me. I have never—I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a CrossFit affiliate owner who’s had this level of success and retention, like this number of members and this great retention. So, I really appreciate your insight into this. Thanks for sharing your time with us.
Saara Snellman (28:54):
Thank you, Mike. It was my honor.
Mike Warkentin (28:56):
We’ll have you back. I think you’ll be on the leaderboard again for some of our other metrics. That was Saara Snellman. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” This is where the world’s best gym owners tell you exactly how they’re doing it so that you can have the same success. Please subscribe for more episodes on your way out. And if you’re on YouTube, I would love if you’d hit that “like” button for us. And now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.
Chris Cooper (29:15):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today.
