TwoBrain Marketing Episode 2: Jeff Jucha

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 Two Brain Marketing Episode 2: Jeff Jucha

 

Today we are joined by Jeff Jucha, owner of West Little Rock CrossFit. Jeff is an amazing CrossFit owner and contributor to the Two Brain family. After suffering from a life changing car accident in 2004, Jeff changed his life and began eating healthier and working out on a regular basis. This shift in mindset has allowed Jeff to develop a tremendous CrossFit business where he prides himself on helping others make meaningful change in their lives. Today we learn about Jeff’s start with CrossFit, his gym in Arkansas, and how Two Brain has impacted the growth of his business. 

 

Don’t Forget about the 2019 Two Brain Summit, June 8-9 in Chicago! This year we have some amazing topics and guests for both yourself and your coaches. Click hereto register and sign up now!

 

Contact Jeff:

jeff@westlittlerockcrossfit.com

http://westlittlerockcrossfit.com/

https://twitter.com/wlr_crossfit

 

Timeline:

1:00 – Introduction to Jeff Jucha

4:05 – The humble beginnings of starting a CrossFit gym in a garage

10:43 – Signing up with Two Brain and bringing change to the gym.

13:04 – How has Two Brain changed your gym since joining?

17:48 – Selling more than just a workout at CrossFit

23:01 – The difficulty of wearing all the hats within your business

25:05 – The Two Brain philosophy for using paid ads

33:18 – How mentorship helped Jeff build his business and led him to success

36:35 – How to contact Jeff


 Announcer:                            00:02                       Welcome everyone to TwoBrain radio. It is our mission at TwoBrain to provide 1 million entrepreneurs the freedom to live the life that they choose. Join us every week as we discover the very best practices to achieve perfect day and move you closer to wealth.

Mateo Lopez:                        00:26                       Welcome to The TwoBrain Marketing podcast. I’m your host Teo Lopez. This is our first time using these fancy mics and these fancy headphones. But for those new who are tuning in, I’m one of the digital market mentors at TwoBrain Business. Thanks for listening. This is our weekly dose of digital marketing magic. Every week we’re going to go over marketing campaign strategies, useful tips and updates to keep you in the loop on the ever changing landscape of advertising on the Internet for Your Business. And we just want to make sure you stay ahead of the curve so your business can continue to grow. And today we’ve got a special guest, Jeff Jucha over, uh, over in West Little Rock, Arkansas, or Kansas.

Mateo Lopez:                        01:09                       All right. I know Kansas is Kansas, Arkansas, Arkansas. We spell it funny and then, uh, yeah, so we’re going to learn a little bit more about Jeff, his gym and kind of how it’s changed since working with, TwoBrain and, and, uh, using some of the strategies we’ve, we teach. So Jeff, who are you, where are you from? What’s Your Biz? I already said it all. I already said West Little Rock rock CrossFit, but yeah. How, how long have you guys been open?

Jeff Jucha:                               01:38                       So we’ve been open since May of 2012. Uh, if you, that we’ve been affiliated since actually April 30th of 2012 and before that actually was doing cross fit out of a, a Globo gym that I was the manager of, which was interesting time because people would go tell me they were going to go complain to the manager, but I was the manager. Oh. Like they’d be like, I’m going to go. And I’m like, okay. And then I go run upstairs and get behind the desk. Like, what was your role? You can play the again. Uh, so yeah, that didn’t last very long. Uh, sort out in my garage at January, affiliated in April. Uh, so coming up at a, this may will be seven years.

Mateo Lopez:                        02:15                       Wait, what were they complaining about that you are slamming? Slamming barbells?

Jeff Jucha:                               02:19                       No, that I would take all the barbells and uh, cause I mean it’s a 20,000 square foot gym. So naturally it has like three barbells and um, yeah we would take them, cause we had to do stuff. I brought my own bumper plates, which were like, I don’t know if you remember, they were like the right multicolored ones that had like nothing on, like they didn’t, you’d have the weights on them. You just had to guess kind of. Yeah. So like I brought my own, would put them on a truck and bring them in every time like 11 o’clock, just turn out to be a bunch of dudes and like two girls at one point. It just working out like three times a week doing CrossFit. And uh, you know, we thought we thought like doing tire flips was CrossFit. So we had like, of course anyone want to give us a tire, you couldn’t fit it in the door. It was a cluster

Mateo Lopez:                        03:02                       you were running across a class in a Globo gym?

Jeff Jucha:                               03:05                       Yeah, pretty much. They wouldn’t, uh, the owner wouldn’t want me to call it that. That’s what you had done? Yeah, I mean, I had a background in athletics and training swimmers and training runners and I just, I looked at this, I saw it first time you ever did it, a guy came in memorial day weekend, did Murph by himself and I saw him doing pull ups and push ups and squats with no weight. And I was like, oh, he’s this guy. He’s like wasting these squats with no barbell. And um, he was warming up, so I was like, Hey, what are you doing? He had a crossfit shirt and uh, I jumped in with him. It did it. Yeah, I was about 185 pounds and like no body fat and yeah, that, that was a, I did it for about an hour and a half and I took a nap and then I woke up and finish the workout. So it took me almost two hours to do it. Yeah.

Mateo Lopez:                        03:48                       Oh my gosh.

Jeff Jucha:                               03:50                       Yeah. So my first, my first WOD was Murph and then I was like, well that was, that was terrible and I felt like dying. So naturally I got to do that again. Yeah. And here we are. So yeah, we moved from there to my garage and then eventually to our current facility.

Mateo Lopez:                        04:03                       Tell me a little bit about, cause I never experienced that, but starting in the garage and leveling, leveling out, how did you first get your, your first group of no, cause there are some people still, you know, trying to get involved and starting in their garage. Start a personal training business is out of the garage. How did you get started from in your garage? How do you get your first few clients and then how did you decide to make the shift and an upgrade to a, to an actual space?

Jeff Jucha:                               04:28                       Yeah, so when I started I was already at a gym here and it was like, it was a change am I was already the manager I had worked from, I’d worked there for almost four and a half, five years from cleaning equipment to selling memberships to personal training. So eventually being the staff manager and in running the majority of it up until the point where they moved, which was like closed down and open up to different name. And you know, I already had, I was lucky I already had like a good base of personal training clients and as many people know, like that’s a higher ticket thing that I grew into membership. So I was able to sustain myself with my personal training clients and I had just started taking them to my garage as soon as it looked like that place wasn’t gonna be around much longer.

Jeff Jucha:                               05:10                       And so my garage, it was very, very minimal. I didn’t even have, like Matt said, I think I like put down some cheap, astro turf from Home Depot because you know, it made it look like a field and uh, which really backfired because my dogs are good in there and left the turds. Yeah. So the turf only lasted like a couple of weeks and it was like, that’s not sanitary. So I took that out. But you know, just to have some Kettlebells, dumbbells, I eventually would add a bar. Bell had my bumper plates for a while. You’re just doing like ground to overheads and farmer carries with them cause they didn’t have ours. And um, so I took my personal training clients there through the day ahead about five clients and three that I could sustain my income pretty well. And I, I basically offloaded all my hours at the gym outside of management stuff to everyone else and I kind of locked myself in, you know, my Home Office whenever I wasn’t turning a client and I just made myself write out a business plan for a CrossFit gym and go into the garage is if I could go back and start all over again, I’d go right back to the garage because it’s the lowest overhead I was already.

Jeff Jucha:                               06:12                       I already had a mortgage and they’ll lower your overhead. The more staying power that you have in the more craziness that you can deal with the more ups and downs. So that was how I kind of got started into it. I just took my PT clients into there. And then in the mornings I started, uh, having a morning class and an evening class around five 30. And I let people come in. It was free to start off with like, Hey, let me teach you some stuff. Friends, families, neighbors, anybody who kind of gets reversed. And it just taught CrossFit stuff. And we worked out as a group in the morning and the evening. And thankfully I had a really long driveway cause that, that exploded over the course of about two and a half months. And we had the cops called on us a few times from making noise.

Mateo Lopez:                        06:55                       Oh Wow. So you just got friends of friends and people referred and that was it.

Jeff Jucha:                               06:59                       Yeah, it was. It was all, it was all word of mouth. I think I, I had a Facebook page, but I think I maybe got on it twice. But it was, it was really word of mouth. And people come in and liking it and enjoying it and then just bringing their friends. And it’s, it’s really what a lot of the TwoBrain stuff is with affinity. You know, people having their, their social circle that they’re, they’re close with and they’re like, I want to bring this person to experience what I’ve experienced. And that’s really how we started. And then we moved to here after about almost four months. It was a lot of people is a really hot day. I had a two car garage, not big enough to sustain all the people we had at this point.

Jeff Jucha:                               07:35                       I think it had like four barbells and they’re all out in the driveway. And you had, it was on a hill so you had to like put plates center to stop and rolling. Yeah. Right. I probably should have had some better insurance back then. Yeah, two girls came in and it was interesting how it like happened. I wish I could find them and thank them. I got to look him up on Facebook and they came in and they had gone to work that day, came by to work out in the evening with us and they didn’t have like all their stuff with them to like change and get, you know, done up or or get done down, kind of get out of work clothes and stuff. And uh, it didn’t have like their, their makeup or lotion or anything or a deodorant was the key factor that was missing here.

Jeff Jucha:                               08:17                       It was a really hot, it was a small garage and it smelled cause they’re, cause everyone’s just sweating really bad and it was like, Woo, what are you guys and uh, my name is Katie and it came right up me was like, well we are not, it was us. We forgot. But this is a great point. If she was a business development advisor, which is interesting, he’s like, we are not coming back here until you make t
his a real thing. So like find a real place and make a real gym. And that was kind of the boost that I needed. You know, I didn’t believe as much as myself back then. And so to have someone else tell you and they kind of, they’re a business development person, this is what they do. And they’re like, you’re a good enough go do left that weekend, drove around everywhere and found this place that I’m at now.

Jeff Jucha:                               08:59                       And uh, I got leased it out. I convinced the guy to do, I was 22 so they didn’t have any credit and I didn’t have any like business history and I was like, yeah, I want to put a gym in this big building that you have for storage and like you had horses in or whatever. And uh, and he’s like a really nice guy that just had property, had a building, it’s not a commercial landlord guy. And then he was like really opposed to it at first and I just stayed on him like all weekend long. I started calling him Thursday, I met him Friday called him Friday evening, called him Saturday morning and evening. And I finally convinced him to do it for me and he would charge me one third of the payment on our first month, two thirds on the second month, and then full payment on the third month.

Jeff Jucha:                               09:39                       And My promise to him and was like, look, I’ll know in three months if this is gonna work or not and you’re not out anything, I’ll clean up your building and everything. And then from there, you know, put me on the lease because it’ll take me three months to figure it out. But I’ll, I’ll, I don’t really know to tell you other than I’ll make it happen and I’m here in front of you, so trust me, I’ll make it happen. You know, he liked that I was like a young guy, I guess I reminded him of himself a little bit and he was like, yeah, I’ll give this kid a shot. And it’s been great ever since. We haven’t had to move and we’re looking at hopefully behind the property soon. So it just kinda comes down to numbers. But I think that’s the whole story.

Mateo Lopez:                        10:11                       That’s amazing. And it’s amazing because you actually got your first taste of business mentorship there to that lunch, that client of yours, basically you need to do this and this is how you need to do this or else or else basically

Jeff Jucha:                               10:25                       the, the key was a action. Yeah, just I would daydream and get in the clouds and, and I would talk about like what I would do if I had like a big gym and how it’d be different and like it was just daydreaming. So you know, dream in the clouds but work in the dirt. Right. So he was like, go work in the dirt.

Mateo Lopez:                        10:41                       And when, when did you decide to sign up with TwoBrain and actual pre and pursue some more, uh, more business mentorship. Really?

Mateo Lopez:                        10:49                       Yeah. Uh, I think I signed up at the, I signed up at the end of 2016 and I think my first phone call was actually with Chris and I had gotten to, I had really gone through some ups and downs in my personal life and you know, it really, I’d kind of fallen into like this depression state and I wasn’t familiar with it. It was, it was really new to me and it was just the fact thing that business in a really negative way. And I just, I wasn’t operating at the level that I was when I started it and grew it. And for a while we just kind of, we stayed really stagnant and then, you know, I kind of got myself out of a funk a little bit and started listening to like TwoBrain podcast and like how to like get yourself out of this and you know, talking to people and getting outside of my own head got some of that energy back.

Jeff Jucha:                               11:36                       And over the course of about four months or so, grew the gym a good bit, grew the feelings of, of goodness in here and friendship and connectedness and everything felt really good for a little bit. And like I kind of had the spark and at the time, but things are going really bad. I actually, you know, to to I have a really vulnerable and you know, to not play it down anyway. I didn’t even have a home. I was sleeping at the gym and like lost a whole Lotta everything that my life looked like at that time. And so of course of about a year was that, and I was thinking the gym for a year, but like for a few months I was, and over the course of a few months got my stuff together. I got a house dog and car like, hey, things are good. And I remember this, uh, the way I think Chris maybe put it one time like I was, things are going well and it’s, I feel like someone’s like up in the clouds with an anvil just waiting to drop it on me.

Jeff Jucha:                               12:27                       Like when something’s gonna go wrong and I’ve been following Chris and stuff since 321Go. I think I’d even met Chris on Facebook back in like the before TwoBrain Day. And so I don’t want this to stop. I don’t want this to keep going and I can’t do the same thing I did before and expect it to be in a different, so I’m just going to call this guy and so call Chris, this is right I think TwoBrain had been around for a little bit like as it’s as it’s a, as it currently is now. And so I didn’t really know what to expect because it was still a little new to me and talked with Chris for like 30 minutes and he just, the best thing was that he listened and he cared about what I wanted and it wasn’t just like here’s how you’ve got to make a whole bunch of money cause that that wasn’t it for me.

Jeff Jucha:                               13:09                       I was like, it’s the whole package. Like it’s going to be a great life. And then what other people have a great life because I was here and he’s like, so this, this got a couple of one time problems. Okay, yeah, we can work on that. Let’s go ahead and start you in the incubator. I was like in,and I scratched up as much money as I could that I could do and have made the payment. Yeah. From there I just started. So that was a few years ago and uh, yeah, that was how we started with TwoBrain.

Mateo Lopez:
                13:32                       Wow, that’s amazing. So now that you’re, you, you, you’ve gone through this evolution and some ups and downs. How has your business changed? I guess pre, I know you said you kind of were in a funk, you got out of it a little bit and that’s when you felt like you could take on this, this new, this new journey with TwoBrain. So how has your business changed since joining?

Jeff Jucha:                               13:55                       Yeah, so I was wearing tons. I was wearing almost every hat when it came to roles in the gym. So I was the, I was the head coach. I would substitute for anyone else who couldn’t coach, which it was kind of a trade for a membership coaching style back then, which doesn’t give you a whole lot of buy in from staff at times. As that led to me subbing a whole lot. Yeah, I was the cleaner, it was the janitor, I was the marketing, I was the sales, I was everything. And since I was so spread apart, I wasn’t really great at any one thing because I couldn’t focus really well and I couldn’t. I couldn’t figure it out what I was good at and where I needed to be in like what role I would be successful. And so it definitely not in the ownership role because I was doing all these other things.

Jeff Jucha:                               14:40                       We’re working in the business and before TwoBrain, I really worked hard to get to where I was level again, but I wasn’t working on a way to sustain that in a way to get out of all of these roles and grow to grow the business so that it could support itself and that staff could support themselves in here as well. So that everything was organized and that I wouldn’t be overworked. So before TwoBrain, you know, I w I wouldn’t even say we were profitable. I say we were breaking even sometimes like a good amount of the time we weren’t. And then we had like a little bouts of, you know, breaking even and then after TwoBrain uh, everything became really sustainable and geared towards, you know, how will this work long term or does this really put us in six months, one year even further down the road.

Jeff Jucha:                               15:24                       And how is that sustainable for you and all of your staff and you know, working on the real problems at hand, which was it’s not I’m, I’m in this position because I didn’t do things right the first time. It was, I’m in this position because I wasn’t ever thinking about how do we stay out of this position? It’s what I’m always working hard. So you and I still work hard every day. I mean, it never stops. I just focused on what I’m good at now and I’m not, you know, I’m not doing all of the, the admin work for example. I’m terrible at that. So we have, uh, a manager, when you look at all these roles now we have people who do our sales and marketing and we have staff members who do that. We have people who do personal training sessions, we have people who do coaching group classes, we have a manager who handles a lot of the backend. And then I’m in the leadership role where it comes to a lot of the support for those actual roles. So then we also have financial as well to help keep track of where are we now, where do we want to be when it comes to further down the road, what are we doing with the income to make sure it’s sustaining this model that works. So beforehand, no model after two brain model model that works. Everyone’s happier.

Mateo Lopez:                        16:34                       And why do you think the, so yeah. And that means I get the transformation. I went through a similar one, but for people listening, you know, so before you were wearing all the hats, you didn’t have a lot of time, you were breaking even. And then after, I guess now you’re saying you, you wear one hat, which is growing the business and developing your staff and your profitable basically now too.

Jeff Jucha:                               16:56                       Yeah. Yeah. The Gym’s profitable. The staff can, I mean they can choose, you know, we want them to work on what’s, what’s going to help them get to their perfect day. And so if they want to have a full time career here at, they’re able to do that. I have two guys now that actually are, if they’re full time here, it’s all they do and they do really well for themselves. They work as much as they like on the things that they like. It’s the same for me. I don’t coach unless I want to. Should I do so I still coach once in a while and I feel like it’s important to know what I’m asking of coaches and what I’m asking a personal trainers too. So I kind of stay in that a little bit and I don’t, I don’t let myself get too far removed to where we lose like that empathy, um, and that ability to connect with each other. But you know, at this point it’s now I work almost purely on CEO stuff and you know, supporting everyone else and mentoring the staff so that they can, you can so that they can build the best experience in their perfect day here with us.

Mateo Lopez:                        17:48                       Shifting gears a little bit because now you have this, uh, this well oiled machine, this business that’s running itself. In your words, what, what would you say? What is it? What is it that you sell and how do you sell it?

Jeff Jucha:                               18:00                       So we sell, you know, our values are if you see them on our, or gym’s logo, which is getting redesigned, like this is our old one, like real workouts for a results that’s from like 2012 and it’s grown over the years that it’s not about working out anymore. Like what we sell it, we call it sweat, small repeat, which is you’re going to come in, you’re going to have a great workout, but you’re really going to enjoy it and you’re going to repeat it because like you have the accountability of all of your peers in the group class. You have the coaches as well and you have people doing it professionally. So sweat smaller repeats. How we kind of package that can we look at it as staff. But our goal is to sell you the is we sell a transformation to living a better life through health and exercise and I have a whole lot of fun doing it. That’s it.

Mateo Lopez:                        18:47
     How do you market this to people?

Jeff Jucha:                               18:49                       So when we look at with marketing or do you mean as how on how we like put it in like our our texts and our website or like how do we bring people into the gym?

Mateo Lopez:                        19:00                       Both. I want to hear about those things.

Jeff Jucha:                               19:02                       Got It. So with, with the website, with our social media, all of our blog posts, with our videos, the key is consistency. Like almost everything else. It’s, we consistently make sure that our values are really clear. And like even in our update show podcast that we do, we’ve been doing it for the open, giving it to our members. That’s been really popular, really fun. We have a TV in the background as a picture of uh, one of our younger coaches and he’s like giving a fist bump to one of our members and she’s like 66 and was just like completely change their life and they’re both smiling and they’re both having a great time. That’s important. And then grab a little bit, we have our logo, but underneath it and really big white and red, we say sweat, smile, repeat and smiles emphasized. That’s important when you look at our competitions and any materials we release.

Jeff Jucha:                               19:49                       We talked about if you want to come have a great day, but a lot of memories with people that you care about doing the sport that you love, this is a competition for you. Like we say it like that, that we don’t say come over podium with a whole bunch of cash. Right? So when you look at the rest of it, we pushed that people are here having fun, people are engaging, other people, people are smiling. So it’s kind of the, the out. It’s the opposite of what you see in a regular gym. And that’s what we want to have more of. So that’s what we push out to people as well. We want to push out what we wanted to bring in and that’s the sweat, smell, repeat philosophy that we have. So when it comes to messaging, that’s what we do when it comes to marketing and onboarding people.

Jeff Jucha:                               20:29                       We used to do what a lot of crossfits did, which is, you know, come try free class. And then we kind of grew out of that a little bit and coached into a couple of, do a foundations group class. It starts at these times on these days you got to make it and if he can’t, well I guess we lose you as a client. So it was kind of how that worked. And now, especially since TwoBrain, we do, all of our onramping has done one on one and we give people, you know, what’s best for them. First is we sit and talk to you. What’s important to you, why is that important? And we back build a plan to get you there. And based off of what we’ve learned and gotten your, your history, uh, learned a lot about you, then we recommend where we would start.

Jeff Jucha:                               21:08                       So we go one on one with everybody almost every time. And sometimes it doesn’t even mean group class afterwards, it just means personal training or sometimes it’s just nutrition. Uh, we just do the right thing for that person, the best way to help them. And that’s how we onboard them. So all of our marketing is kind of done on Face book. And nurtureto learn, you know, how we can help you. And then we go from there. So all of our members know from us as coaches and you guys have anybody who’s interested in, here’s a link. There’s actually a, you know, we share a whole lot of stuff too. . And um, we do that through, we’ve done it through Facebook, paid ads before, but still the majority of people that we have come in has been through people who’ve been really happy with us and they want to share what they’ve experienced.

Mateo Lopez:                        21:51                       You mentioned you have some people on your staff who take the lead on, on this process. So let’s say someone sees this messaging, sees all your stuff, this looks like a really fun place to go work out. They find your website, whether it’s through a paid ad or whether a friend told them about it, they inquire what happens.

Jeff Jucha:                               22:07                       Yeah.

Jeff Jucha:                               22:08                       So their information will come to us and as soon as we get their information, we want to have their, their name, their email address and their phone number so we can of course contact him. And if one of those things is wrong, we can try email. If the phone’s wrong with the email doesn’t work, we could try the phone. And we basically go through a lead nurture process, which is just the point is to get them in the door so that we can learn is this a good fit and how can we help you? And that’s it’s, it’s always one step at a time. We don’t have the goal of selling them anything. We don’t have the goal of, you know, giving them a, a whole plan over the phone. The goals like just get in so we can learn about you and a that looks like phone calls. It’s just the same way we learned it to brand marketing, which is to make sure we’re calling them regularly when we get them on the phone. Lord a little bit. Yeah, I think it would be great. We have some time. What would be good for you? We meet them, they come in, they do it and I sweat intro and then from there we learn how we can help them and we recommend the best thing for him and go from there.

Mateo Lopez:                        23:02                       And before when it was just you trying to do all this, what were your results? Like when you, it was just you wearing all the hats and now that you have a dedicated staff member to follow up with people and handle this process, how has that been different?

Jeff Jucha:                               23:19                       Yeah, so when it was just me, I’m sure a lot of people who have been in this place before can identify it was people would walk through your door in the middle of your coaching a class and there’s no one to help and you’re like, I’ll be right with you. And later on if they’re still around, maybe you can go talk to him a little bit. Yeah, come try a class or I know that’s how it started. And then with group Intro we kind of changed it into, someone would come in and I had a clipboard, it’s just a blank sheet of paper, was like, Hey, what comes in? Write their name and their email and I’ll get back to him and like, we’d still miss that stuff. So I’m fine. But now, you know, we have a, we have a process, we have the roles and tasks associated with this stuff and we don’t have to, we don’t have to load up our coaches with this extra work that they may or may not have signed on for.

Jeff Jucha:                               24:05                       They can be great at coaching and they could work great at coaching and the person in charge of lead nurture stuff can’t be great at lead nurture. So it’s pretty much, we’re in a place now to where like our, our gyms at a place, it’s a really great capacity for us and it will take more personal training people on board. But before it was, you know, we may grow a little bit at a time and we’ll lose some and we’ll grow some and lose some gross on. But with having a, an actual, you know, like a well oiled machine and roles and tasks written out, it’s a, we’re at a point now where we, we have everything turned off. We have to keep the ads turned off most of the time cause we don’t, we don’t have that capacity I any further, which has kind of led us to now we’re having another location open up within this month and then we’re planning a third one actually a little bit further away as well to help you know with a bit more capacity here. How can we ever spike keep pushing our mission as sweat, smile, repeat and we got to grow.

Mateo Lopez:                        24:56                       I didn’t know. Yeah.

Jeff Jucha:                               25:00                       Yeah. That’s my bright spots bro.

Jeff Jucha:                               25:05                       That’s amazing man. Congrats. I’m excited for you. So tell me a little bit about that. Using paid ads in your experience using some of the strategies we teach in in the marketing section of the incubator program, what was your experience and maybe tell us some of the other things you use paid ads for that maybe some people might not think right away to use them for.

Jeff Jucha:                               25:25                       Yeah, so when we went through it was a, it was your job actually walking me through everything. I really enjoyed the process. I love learning new stuff at any point. Like even if it’s about something I don’t have a ton of interest in, that’s new to me. I’m interested. So I got to learn a whole bunch. I was really interested in the content. The videos were all great and the best part was they’re all short and I could get off of a lesson and go set something up and I could like test it. Um, so when we started doing, I got through the incubator course for two brain marketing, set my ads up. You helped me out a little bit. I think we had like a issue with audiences. It was really a Facebook issue and there’s no way I could have fixed that. But she like made a call cause like they’ll talk to, you know, big money Mateo and he had it fixed really fast.

Jeff Jucha:                               26:10                       And the most important thing that, that I don’t think I was prepared for was the amount of people who were actually interested in what we were putting up. And we got a whole lot of leads. And I was overwhelmed because at the time it was just me. And that was where we started getting to. Okay. I remember when they talked about roles and tasks, you should have someone do this stuff about two weeks into having to ask, turned on with you guys. I realized how just how important that was because I didn’t have enough time in the day to make the calls and I’ll sit down at have time today in the day to answer the calls too. So having someone dedicated to be at the phone to be able to pick up, to be able to call, to be able to actually do something with the influx of interest and people who want your service as was really important.

Jeff Jucha:                               26:53                       So you gotta you Kinda gotta be ready for that. And I didn’t really prepare for it the best right away, but it got me to move and prepare really well, uh, as I was starting in that first month. So that was my first experience with paid ads. And I think our ad cost was, you know, per lead. It was somewhere around like six or $7 per lead. And you know, if we’d get them in the door, it’s almost, it’s basically like, here’s how we can help you. It’s not a pushy sales process. So if they came in the door most of the time they signed up. So it was a very huge return on investment.

Mateo Lopez:                        27:27                       And something you did that I thought was amazing was you took some of the, some of the strategies and some of the, some of the templates and you started to sell out some of your competitions. Tell me a little bit about that.

Jeff Jucha:                               27:39                       Yeah, so I’ve run competitions since 2012 like, you know, we started in April and I saw like one competition here in the Capitol city and I was like, oh, this is awesome. We’re doing one at no idea what I was doing. I was like, we’re just going to do one cause I said so and we did in December and since it had been running them and it always did. Uh, it had always been a a process of, hey announced, we’re going to announce, we’re going to run it. Like, hey remember we’re going to run it on this day and then wait for people to sign up. Kind of give him a link to sign up and hope that people spread it. And then basically like a few people will sign up over the course of however much time you gave for them to do. So maybe like a month or no, a few, e
ven worse a few weeks.

Jeff Jucha:                               28:25                       And then all towards the very last cutoff date. Like we got an order shirts by this day for everybody. So it’s our cutoff day. Everybody would sign up and it’s that can, that can be stressful. So I was thinking, you know, we have teams of four and some competitions we’ve had in the past, we’ve had teams of two and I always had emails from people who signed up, like just the team captains. So if we had 20 teams of four the athletes, we still only had 20 email addresses and I didn’t even think to use email marketing to them at that point. But once I had gone through the TwoBrain marketing incubator, it’s like, you know, it’s really important to market to the right person and the person most likely to sign up with us again and also most likely to like come here and have a great time and like our competitions, which is about having a great time with your friends or people who have come here and already done that.

Jeff Jucha:                               29:15                       So I marketed the first one I set up a little funnel and I like, I honestly just copied the exact like challenge funnel that you guys taught me and I changed the color and I put a different video in and I think like at the bottom it’s still said like six week women’s challenge for my competition. So like that was, that was just how simple it was. And I sent out an email to all of our past athletes I had in our mail chimp list. Hey, we’re going to be running this and go to this page and I set it up to where they can just sign up on that page and that’s this way that it had to give me every email address for their team. And so if you have a team of four, and I think that time that we did it, we have like 30 I think we had like 32 teams sign up and it for athletes were like 120 plus people had a great competition and it was definitely sold out.

Jeff Jucha:                               30:00                       Having something nice to send them to that collected all their information was great. The backend of that on the backside of that page was once they put their information in, they went into an email automation of here’s some things to bring for your of it to make sure you have a great time, here’s the link to change your athletes out if you need to stop anything. And it was just keeping contact with them. And I think having that contact really kept them in the know and kept them on track with or we kept in front of them really well and they would tell their friends about it. So we also send out like workout video demonstrations, which we shot on an iPhone with me and another member. There were very basic things but they went along way. So that first one worked really well. The second one we’ve got a bit even more clever about it and we went to, here’s the page you can’t sign up yet, but if you want to know the WODs and be the first to know, good, put your info in here and then we can work with it directly to that person again, along with the, you know, 120 plus people that came last time and you think about oil only takes one person to put together a team.

Jeff Jucha:                               31:04                       So out of 120 people, I only need to have a fourth of them actually be interested in this. So it went out to them, it went up to the people who were interested. And then once we open the gates where people to register for sold out and so we opened up another heat and then that filled out. We continue this process where you do the exact same way. We just had our Valentine’s Day competition and we had 42 teams and that one and that was we sold out like 72 hours. It’s all down another heat. We opened it up another heat again, sold that heat out and then it’s just like with the paid ads that we do at crossfit or in crossfit and Facebook are going to have to turn them off. What we’ve done in here is, you know we did pay to have done at first, but afterwards we just start straight to email and stuck to our list of returning athletes and we are at cost is basically zero now, but I still use the same system that TwoBrain marketing taught. I just use it email instead of actually putting it on Facebook.

Mateo Lopez:                        31:58                       I love that. Yeah. You’ve built up a large enough audience that now you’re just able to have a big enough pool so when you’re ready to reengage them with this offer that you have. I Dunno how often, once a quarter or whatever, I don’t know what you, yes.

Jeff Jucha:                               32:11                       So we, we did do them once per quarter. They’ve gotten fairly big and they’re, they’re bigger operations now that my staff run. I actually competed in our last one, so I don’t, I didn’t do any of it, but I taught them over the two competitions what to do. It’s like, here’s how to run it here. You’re going to run about half of it and I’m going to help you. And then like, you guys are fully running this one. Oh by the way, I just registered so I can’t help you anymore. So like there was, it was like, you know, if you want to take the island, burn your boats. So I was like, okay, I literally can’t do anything because it’s a conflict of interest. I’m a competitor. And um, yeah. So it just step by step grouped into that place. But yeah, definitely having a big pool. And taking advantage of people who have already experienced your service. I mean, we weren’t, I stopped marketing to just anybody who would look and just like, Hey, you like our gym. You liked the experience you had last time. Why don’t you come do the next one? And it works so much better. It’s just like our Facebook ads. We usually, we’ve got a little more open for a little bit and then turn them off.

Mateo Lopez:                        33:07                       I love that. Yeah. It’s really just getting a repeat buyer from someone who’s already, who’s already engaged, like you said with your service is, is definitely an easier sell than going to a stranger. So that’s amazing. So you’ve gone through this journey you’ve experienced a lot in, in a short amount of time, you know, starting from the gym, getting the new gym or starting from your garage, getting the new space, going through a funk, getting out of it, growing even more with some of the paid advertising strategies. And now getting to this point where you’re opening new new facilities and potentially, uh, you know, becoming a TwoBrain mentor yourself, what do you think has been the key to your success so far?

Jeff Jucha:                               33:48                       Cause if you track it back to the garage, I mean I could even track it back further to when I was training clients in the Globo Gym. I don’t think that I would have, I don’t think I would have taken advantage of that little spark of entrepreneurial ism had I not had people with a voice. You can do it. And from there it was a voice of go do it with my garage. And um, from there it was, you can keep doing this and you can do it better. Let me show you how, and it was the like the, let me show you how and being held accountable and having somebody to bounce ideas off of and for them to take, you know, your five big ideas and go like, let’s leave those for, for another time. But this one right here is going to put you in a much better position.

Jeff Jucha:                               34:31                       It just even a month in a two months, in three months if you will, if you will. Only work on this one instead of spreading yourself thin. So mentorship was the the key shift there and you know following the right people and surrounding yourself with the right people. So it’s kind of you think back to the whole, ” you’re the sum of five people that you surround yourself with” and something I’ve, I’ve kind of talked with other professionals about and I’m in for some other professionals of red here is when they were setting their rates and setting their prices and they come in and most most of the time, just like how I originally thought I was going to set my prices, what’s everyone else charging? Let’s do five bucks less, which was not the way to go because like they have their own model and you go from my model and that has nothing to do with what I want in my life.

Jeff Jucha:                               35:17                       So going with the whole approach of surround yourself with five, look at also like who are you following in business as well? Who are you getting your ideas from? Who are you bouncing ideas off of and if you’re just following other gyms on Facebook, it’s a little that’s quite a bit different than following some of the best business owners and some of the, some of the most entrepreneurs and authors and systems people or around and also people who just have a really good touch on what it’s like to run a gym and to do it successfully and sustainably. So I made sure after, I think after my first call with Chris, I’m no, I’m no longer gonna follow, follow gyms that I think look impressive or have great athletes for that reason. Like I might, I may follow athletes on Instagram, but I want to follow the gyms who have been around for a long time. It had been really successful, have changed a lot of lives. And or I mean like do you think about like the last post of 10 year affiliates? Like I’m following a lot of those guys now. Did they like where do I want to be? What’s my perfect day look like? It’s, it’s, I want to be more like these things. So I surround myself with those and uh, that started with mentorship.

Mateo Lopez:                        36:24                       Amazing. Yeah. I think that’s really the key. One of the key differences about the incubator and TwoBrain is the mentorship piece. I think that’s the really unique part about what we do. So Jeff, thanks for hopping on today. If people want to talk to you more, where can they find you? No one wants to sign up for this amazing competition.

Mateo Lopez:                        36:45                       So they all have to hop a flight on a Bald Eagle. Look down here to Little rock, Arkansas because that’s uh, our airport is, you know, it’s got purchase instead of implanting runways or you can send me a message via carrier pigeon. No, actually you can just email me can also, um, you can also always go to our website as well. Check out anything we have. We have a blog. I’m really big on publishing content. Our Instagram’s got plenty. Our Facebook is done there. Reach us through those two and a on our website blog. We’ve got over a thousand posts with all kinds of stuff on there. It’s really helpful for gym owners to which you can always just reach out to me and I’m happy to talk.

Mateo Lopez:                        37:23                       We might have you on again just to talk about content marketing and how you do that. Oh, man. Yeah. All right man. Well, thanks so much and uh, talk to you later.

Mateo Lopez:                        37:33                       See you guys. As always, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We greatly appreciate you and everyone that has subscribed to us. If you haven’t done that, please make sure you do drop a light to that episode. Share with a friend, and if you haven’t already, please write us a review and rate us on how, what you think. If you hated it and let us know if you loved it even better.

 

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