Chris Cooper (00:01):
What gyms get the most new clients every month, and, even more importantly, how do they do it? I’m Chris Cooper, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And every month we produce leaderboards from the top 800 gyms in the world. These are the gyms that are in the Two-Brain Business mentorship program, where we track everybody’s metrics every single month. That allows us to do a few things to help you and them. So after we identify who the top are in each category, we produce these leaderboards. Now these leaderboards tell us who’s doing the best. So it’s a great target for the other gym owners to hit. It’s great incentive to show them what’s possible, but it also tells us who’s doing things a little bit better. And then we take those top people at each leaderboard and we say, “Hey, what are you doing that’s a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit different than everybody else?”
Chris Cooper (00:54):
And then we share what they’re doing. We put them on our podcast, I’m sure you’ve heard them before. We talk to them in our Office Hours in our private Facebook group. We interview them and we say, “What exactly are you doing?” And sometimes if they’ve got a new process that’s better, we buy that process from them. And so we build courses around what the best in the world are doing for our Two-Brain Business mentorship program. And that’s why the program just keeps getting better and better and better as people build on the basics, add new things, and then we level everybody up. So if you want to find more information and support, and you just want to be in our free group, that’s fine. Until you’re ready for mentorship, just head to gymownersunited.com to join a free group with thousands of the world’s top fitness entrepreneurs.
Chris Cooper (01:41):
This month in our leaderboards, which I’m gonna reveal to you very shortly here, we’re focused on three metrics: set rate, show rate, and close rate. These are the way that we measure how well somebody’s marketing and sales processes are doing. And we call these the “marketing metrics.” Set rate, just as a quick introduction, is how many people come onto your website and book an appointment to come in and talk to you—a No Sweat Intro. Show rate is how many of those people who booked actually show up and have that conversation with you. And close rate is how many people of all the ones who showed up actually bought. Now knowing those three numbers lets us find the weak links in your marketing and sales funnel and give you homework to make you better. But today I want to talk about who the best in the world are.
Chris Cooper (02:28):
And then this week in our blog, we’re gonna talk about what they’re doing differently. But I’ll give you some tips as we go along. Here we go. Let’s start with set rate. Which gyms had the most appointments set around the world? I’m looking at this list, which we publish on our blog. The names are blurred out for the public. But if you’re in the Two-Brain Business mentorship program, you would see who these people are, and you could reach out to them and talk to ’em and ask ’em for advice. “Hey, can you give me some advice on what you did for your Facebook ads?” The reason I bring up Facebook ads is I’m looking at the No. 2 gym here, with 34 No Sweat Intro appointment set. That’s more than one a day all month long in December 2022. And I know that this owner has been going really, really deep on dialing in his Facebook ads because he quickly figured out exactly who his best clients are.
Chris Cooper (03:15):
They all had a few things in common, and so he targeted other people just like them with Facebook ads. And he practiced this. And over the last few months, he’s been getting better and better and better at it. And it’s resulted in 34 No Sweat Intro appointments booked and second place on our December 2022 leaderboard. If I look at the person who got 46, that’s like 1.5 people coming in saying “I’m interested in your gym. Tell me about it.” And they’re ready to pay. That person I know uses a wide variety of marketing to get that. He’s good online. He’s good at really sharing a lot of client stories, but he has a really broad mix of things that he’s good at. So what he does is he’ll get pretty good at, let’s say Instagram himself, and then he’ll pass that over to a staff person who’s really passionate about Instagram, and that’s what they’ll do.
Chris Cooper (04:08):
And then he’ll start getting really good at and focusing on referrals. I know because I spoke with this person a few months ago in person. I just love spending time with this guy. He’s so positive. He’s on the West Coast, and he was really focused at that time on referrals, dialing in his goal reviews and getting referrals from his current clients. Of course, when you get a lot of referrals, those are also very warm leads, and so they translate much more often into clients, and they boost your close rate, too. Looking at these others, it’s really awesome. Just as an aside here: You’ll see the Two-Brain principles working around the world. On this leaderboard, the top six are all in the States. And then we’ve got a gym in Sweden. We’ve got a gym in the U.K.
Chris Cooper (04:53):
No. 9 is from the states, and No. 10 is also from the U.K. What’s interesting though, just to bring up some international pride, is that when we get to show rate and close rate, those are gonna change a little bit. So while gyms in the States are great at getting No Sweat Intros booked—which I’m so happy to see after a couple years of lockdown; this surge is really hitting right now—I also want to see how many of those people show up for their appointment and how many actually sign up. What you’ll find, though, overall is that if you’re booking people in for a No Sweat Intro, you’re more likely to actually get them in the gym and actually sign up for your high-value service than if you’re just offering a free trial. Alright, let’s move to show rate. So out of all these people who booked an appointment to come in and talk to you about your service, and they said, “I’m interested. I’m ready. Let’s go Tuesday at 3 o’clock.” How many of those people actually showed up? Well, on the leaderboard, the gym with the most shows was 33. Now we report numbers instead of percentages. And here’s why. Earlier I told you that when we find out which gyms are the best in each category, we go out and we interview them and we say, “What are you doing?” And we get their tips, and we share ’em with you, and we put them in our curriculum. If we were just sharing percentages on these leaderboards, those numbers would be skewed. Somebody who got like one person to come in, book an appointment, show up and sign up would have a hundred percent across the board, and they would win and we would learn less. What I wanna do is deal with whole numbers here, integers, and I want to talk to the people who got the most.
Chris Cooper (06:31):
Now the people who got the most appointments set might not also be the same people who signed the most people up, but I’ll get to why—knowing those three numbers together is important—in a minute, and I’ll tell you how you can use those numbers to improve your business, too. So in this case, the top show gym was actually the same gym that had the most appointment set. Makes sense. After them, the orders changed a few times, and people had like 32 appointments show up, 31 appointments show up, 27, 21 appointments showing up—like you’re still getting one person every single day of the week that you’re open sitting down with you saying, “I’m interested. Convince me to buy,” or, “Don’t give me a reason to quit, and take my money.” Imagine in your gym if you had one person every single day sitting down with you for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, telling you their goals and listening to why they should work with you.
Chris Cooper (07:27):
I mean, how much better would your gym be? These are amazing. So I’m looking at the Top 10 for December. By the way, we didn’t have super-secret challenge in December. We didn’t do anything special. December, a lot of people will say, is like the slowest month of the year for signups. We’ve got a gym here. I’m reporting 46 NSIs booked. 33 of those actually showed up in the slowest month of the year, and they’re getting one person like every five hours that they’re open coming in and doing a sales appointment. Amazing. When I go down though, I see Sweden starting to rise, U.K. starting to rise. It’s really awesome to see that Two-Brain principles are working around the world to build these gyms up, get them more clients, and get those clients to join and save their lives. Now, if I look at the close rate, these are the people who actually had signed up for the gym and started their fitness journey.
Chris Cooper (08:21):
Man, I am so excited for them. I can remember I was in like the 12th grade when I found fitness and started working out. But I can remember how much my life changed in one month. I’m so excited for these people. And so when I look, what I see on this leaderboard is that at our top gym, 28 people signed up that month. Now these are not 28 people signing up for like a six-week challenge. They’re not 28 people signing up for a free trial. They’re not signing up for like a one-week trial package or like five sessions. They’re signing up to change their lives. Like, they are buying either a membership or something priced even higher. And since Two-Brain gyms believe strongly in an onboarding process, you can be sure that every single one of these people bought something that was worth $300 to $1,200, depending on what the coach recommended for their specific needs.
Chris Cooper (09:16):
Now we call that the Prescriptive Model. And here’s why it’s important. 28 people came in. They found what they were looking for online. They booked an appointment through the website, they showed up for the appointment, and they said, “I’m in. Take my money. Here it is. Change my life, save my fitness, restore my health, bring back my youth, make me feel better about myself and my body, make my body work better, increase my lifespan, give me more time with my grandkids and more time with my own kids, let me bend down and pick stuff up, let me take off my shirt at the beach without embarrassment, let me show up at a party where they’re going on a hike and not feel like I’ve gotta make an excuse about my bum knee and stay behind, let me participate in life, let me be an avid pursuant of this short life that we have.”
Chris Cooper (10:06):
This top gym had 28 of those people last month, you can do this, too. And if I’m going down the list, like the 10th– and ninth-place gyms on the list had 15 new clients in December 2022. I mean, if you had 15 new clients join your gym last month, what kind of difference would that make for your business? What kind of difference would that make for your life? We know what kind of difference that would make for their lives. What would 15 more clients do for you? How would that help you employ your staff and give them more benefits? How would it help you be able to afford a brighter space, better cleaning, more coaching knowledge, and give a better experience to all the clients that you currently have? Like, that’s why this stuff is important. The numbers are indicators of success, but the success is what changes lives, including yours and your family’s.
Chris Cooper (10:59):
So when I’m looking at these, yes, there’s diagnostic value. I can figure out how to improve a gym when I’ve got all three of these metrics, but more than anything else, what I’m looking for are opportunities to bring more people into the gyms and keep them long enough to change their lives. Okay? So congratulations to all our winners. Like having 46 people say “I want a book an appointment to talk to you” is amazing. Having 33 of those people actually show up? Incredible because I know at least half of the ones that didn’t will come later. They just, you know, they couldn’t make it. It was December, you know, they had stuff going on. Maybe they waited for January. Having, you know, this was a different gym, but having 28 people sign up for your service in December is incredible. And it says a lot about you and the trust that people have in you to change their lives.
Chris Cooper (11:48):
Now let’s talk about how I look at these three numbers together and how you can use these leaders as more than just inspiration, as a diagnostic tool to fix your business. When I’m helping at gyms, I start often by looking at the numbers because the numbers point the way. I’ll give you an example here. Let’s say that you had 10 people book appointments this month. Your set rate is 10, but only three of those people showed up. Your show rate is 30%. Out of all three, all three bought. Perfect. Your close rate is a hundred percent. Three out of three people who showed up actually signed up. Well, that tells me you’ve got a massive opportunity to do lead nurture. Lead nurture means from the time they booked that appointment to actually sitting down and showing up in front of you, you can improve that.
Chris Cooper (12:37):
And if you spend next month improving it, we know your close rate is good. So if you improve that by one person, you bring in four out of 10 instead of three out of 10, that is worth at least $300 to you because you sign up everybody who comes in. Conversely, if you’ve got a high set rate, let’s say that you have 10 appointments set this month and a high show rate—you’re in a small town and everybody knows everybody. Everybody’s too scared to not show up and they don’t wanna waste your time—and 10 outta 10 show up. But only three actually sign up. So 10 people book appointments, and 10 people show up for the appointments. If only three sign up, we’ve got a problem that’s in your sales process. Now all these problems are solvable. We can help you with lead nurture, we can help you capture leads, and we can help you book more appointments, get more people to show up for those appointments and close more appointments.
Chris Cooper (13:29):
Tools like Kilo can help you have those appointments booked and also continue the conversation with the people who don’t book the appointments but who come on your websites. There’s no such thing as a lead-generating website. There are good websites that capture leads and move them down the funnel from setting an appointment to showing up for the appointment, and then they set you up to close the appointment. But knowing these metrics means that you know what to do to fix your gym. If you’re not tracking these metrics, you might be saying, “I don’t know. Should I try Facebook marketing?” Or worse, you might be saying Facebook ads don’t work when really your website doesn’t get people to set appointments. Your lead-nurture process doesn’t get those people to sign up, and your sales process isn’t good enough to convince them to join. It’s nothing to do with Facebook. Zuckerberg’s doing his job. You aren’t doing yours at one of those steps. But the beautiful part about reporting these numbers, especially to a mentor, is that you’ve got an objective expert saying, “Here’s how we can fix things for you right now today.” Just as you’re saying those things to your clients. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Thanks so much for paying attention. If you want to learn more about set rate, show rate and close rate, see the leaderboards, ask questions or get inspiration, please join Gym Owners United on Facebook, or just go to gymownersunited.com, and it’ll zip you right to the right group. I’d love to see you there and talk to you more in person.
