Speaker 1: 0:01

All right guys, welcome to the final episode of Long Island Gym Tours. I believe this is episode one, two, three, four, five, five and I'm on the way home back to New Jersey from Long Island. If you missed the first several episodes, I was hired by the great Anthony Bevilacqua, a member of my mastermind for several years, to come and do a consulting day up in Long Island and since I had so many clients in Long Island gyms in the SPF Mastermind, I decided to do a day where I visited all the gyms and hung out and talked shop for a few minutes and then moved to the next one very quickly. So I am done. I am on the way home. I visited five gyms yesterday and had my consulting day with AB and now I am stuck in gridlock on the way home back to New Jersey from Long Island. So that is my situation.

Speaker 1: 1:00

But I ended my tour yesterday at the great TJ Lopez, who was the SPF Gym Owner of the Year Award back in March and is just a phenomenal gym owner, phenomenal guy and I got to visit his gym, which was bumping. I got there around 5 o'clock. They had a middle school session cranking, they had a high school session going, they had adult program going, they had physical therapy happening, there was consultations going on and a lot going on at AMP, and it was really cool to hang out with TJ and got to see some insight of his squad and what he's been doing to lead his team and everything like that. But he's built up a really, really good group of people and I'm super proud of him. Phenomenal, one of the best gyms in the country, for sure. So congrats to you, tj, not only for the SPF Gym Owner of the Year, which had the belt that he won, as the owner proudly displayed in his office but just done a phenomenal job of growing a great business. And so that led us to a wonderful dinner. A anthony bevilacqua met us and we had a really, really great steak dinner out on some very fancy, ritzy restaurant that tj took us to. So it was a wonderful meal. And then the next day, I which was today I got to spend a full day at AB's gym. Now AB, it runs AB Fitness in Long Island.

Speaker 1: 2:29

Three different locations and again, the story behind AB is that he has been a client of mine, I think since 2018. He worked at Gold's Gym for many years. Left Gold's Gym started training clients in his garage, literally got a space, just took his clients from his garage, went to his first space and then two months later came to one of my seminars and he's been with me ever since. I've been with him since his birth. When he came for me, he was doing all one-on-one sessions. I helped him install the small group model and he went from training one-on-one clients for 30 minutes to small group clients for 30 minutes and very, very quickly scaled his first gym and made a ton more money. That earned him the SPF Gym Owner of the Year award as well back in 2018 and earned the nickname Cash Room because he was making so much freaking profit that I basically said, hey, there's got to be another room that you bolt on to this gym to hold all the cash. So he earned the nickname Cash Room.

Speaker 1: 3:39

But a phenomenal guy, phenomenal gym owner, and since that time he has scaled now to three locations and one of the things he wanted to do was kind of set the plan for the future of what's next for AB Fitness. He wanted me to come up and watch the session, see what was going on, see what tweaks we can make, go over the vision and the future for it and really just overall help him with things like becoming a better leader, becoming a better business owner and everything like that. So we spent a full day. I spent a full day with AB and it was a great day I really enjoyed. I got to meet his wife, I got to meet his sister who works at the gym really good people.

Speaker 1: 4:23

But the day started with me going to the gym and what AB wanted me to do is watch the sessions. I kind of just stood there and watched and I was able to interact with some of the clients. I interacted with the staff and you know, what they wanted from me was to say how do we make this better? How do we make this better? And that's that's all. That's saying lot coming from a guy that's got three locations, that's doing really well, that's making a lot of money. To have a guy like me come in and say, hey, I don't care about my feelings, I only care about getting better. What do we need to do to get better? And so I kind of was watching and I saw a few things that could get better.

Speaker 1: 5:05

And now one of the first things was they do the model always needs to fit the market. The model always needs to fit the market and one of their market is women. Like, most of the people coming through the door were women between 50 and 65 years old it was. They did a very good job of bringing the same type of clientele and it wasn't like there's one high school kid here, there's a mom here, there's a dad here. It was almost like all women in their fifties I would say forties, fifties and sixties, right. And so they do 30 minute sessions, which from a financial standpoint, is really really good and from a time standpoint for the client it's really really good. So there's lots of benefits but there's only so much time to get people a good workout and a good sweat and give them that feeling that they are getting that workout. And that is a real thing. I think that sometimes gyms mislead that like, oh, you don't have to sweat and burn for it to be a good workout, and I think that's kind of almost a little BS. But people want to come to the workout and feel like they worked out.

Speaker 1: 6:06

We went through this back in the heyday of GFP, where we were playing physical therapist and we got so into corrective exercise. We started babying our clients so much and we ended up doing an hour of corrective with them and they didn't work out. And after a while people started leaving and we're like, wait, what are we doing here? We're playing physical therapy. We're not even training these people. We got to train them, we got to push them, we got to train hard. They came to us to help us get fit and get strong and lose weight. Like we can't baby these people to the point where they're not even getting a training effect from it.

Speaker 1: 6:42

And so I, from that mistake that we made, I created a thing called the seven keys to a great session, and basically it was seven things that our trainers need to do to make it a great session, and one of the ones was this check this out Do no harm, which was stolen from Mike Boyle. Do no harm, but make them use two towels. Do no harm, but make them use two towels. That means we train them intelligently, we use the right exercises, we use the right cueings, we train our staff really well, we find good people, we do everything we possibly can to not do any harm to the client. We do everything we possibly can to not do any harm to the client, but we make them use two towels, we make them work. And two towels was a coin of.

Speaker 1: 7:31

I used to have this guy I forget his name now a while ago. He used to always go through two towels in the workout and he would always come to me and say two towel workout, vince, and that means he was sopping wet and sweating like crazy. And that's what we want. We want people to sweat. And I'm not saying just, you know, run people in the ground and be stupid and just make people sweat, for the case of sweating, but I am saying can we make them sweat and make them burn and make them feel like they're getting a really good workout and get them strong and make it intelligent? And I do believe good training is both. I do believe good training is both. I do believe good training is both. And so that's one of the things I saw and I was looking at it and I was like I have happened to believe there are some people that come to the gym and leave after two months and they leave because they didn't feel like they were going to work out, and some of that could have been their training age. Some of that could have been maybe they had injuries they're working on. Some of that could have been the programming and things like that, but at the end of the day, what I needed was they needed to get more creative with the programming to be able to step up the intensity to make these people feel like they were getting after it.

Speaker 1: 8:42

One of the pieces of advice I gave was a group warmup right. And so they were just coming in and they were starting their program and doing it right away and I said do a group warmup, do something where they get everyone together for five minutes, move them through some mobility, move them to get them bumping, get them sweating and then get them going. That's going to set the tone for the rest of the workout. Remember, they only have 20, 30 minutes, so we got to do that in five minutes. Now, the second thing I did they have room because they trained one on six right. They had room and they only had about a thousand square feet, but they had room to put two assault bikes and two you know skiers right. And what I said was at the end of the workout, do some kind of finisher right Go from. They're on the hour, so it's on the half hour. So 6 to 6.30, we trained, and then at 6.30, you let them go and on their own they do some kind of a finisher 30 seconds on the bike, get them huffing and puffing, get them sweating, and then to let them leave feeling like they actually really got after it and worked out, and it doesn't take a long time to get that, to make that happen.

Speaker 1: 9:45

But the product is really important. You can't have a good business if you don't have a good product, and that was one of the things AB wanted me to look at was the product and how can make it better. Now, the product. The hard part for me was it was already good. He's already doing well. These were just things that I saw and little tweaks that I saw that I think could have made it actually even better. There was other things that I did, but it was very helpful for me to start the day with him to watch the things that were going on, to talk to his staff, to look at the things that they were looking at, to really see the type of clientele that we were working with and everything like that. So that was kind of the first part of the day.

Speaker 1: 10:24

I spent about two hours at the gym and then we cruised back to AB's house really beautiful home that he's living in Tons of dogs everywhere. His wife was there. She works at the house, so she was there and hung out with us, got us a cup of coffee and fed us. Really well, it was beautiful and so, yeah, it was. It was a really, really awesome day and some of the things that we got into during the other day was the vision.

Speaker 1: 10:52

You know well how many of these do we want to do, and the original vision was five. And here's the thing At the end of the day, sometimes you just got to do the math to help you make a decision right, and we did the math on all right. If I scale to five gems around, this is what each one is going to do roughly in profitability. This is the typical multiple right of ebida, which is how you sell a business. It's a multiple of ebida. So basically you know it's either two gyms or usually two to four times ebida and we looked at the numbers like if you created five of these and with a multiple, we use three just as a midpoint right in multiple ebida and at five gyms, I, yeah, you can decide to sell these five gyms. There's multiple. Sorry, I'm in the tunnel, that's why you hear all that background noise. Apologize, I am driving, so that's why you're hearing all this noise.

Speaker 1: 11:55

But, and so, like, we looked at the numbers, like this is what you're going to make, and I was like how do you feel about that? Better, right, Really good. And he saw it so. So we kind of settled on you know, 10 locations, right, so that's like pushing towards that. We kind of busted through five and just made the 10, because sometimes you just got to do the math and like it wasn't exciting for him to do that. And again the the point was not him selling, it wasn't even. We weren't even sure that we were going to sell, because sometimes it's a great, smart thing to just run a really good business and, you know, make a lot of money and profit from it. But you always want to be in a position that if you want to sell, that you can, right, and so you know that's kind of the vision that we worked on.

Speaker 1: 12:44

And you know, the cool thing was he told me that he, after he we, made some really interesting tweaks to his business in the last year. One of them was he had three locations, but he did not have a lead person at each one. So the first thing that we did and this really improved attrition was we put a point person at each location. It's called a facility leader, right, and that was the first thing. The second thing we did to improve his attrition was we got really really good at tracking attendance and they put attendance reports together. They were following up with customers every you know time that they didn't show up and they got really really good at that as well. So those are two things they did, and he dropped his attrition rate by 3% just from those movements.

Speaker 1: 13:26

I was really I was looking over the numbers with him and I was really, really proud of that. We made those decisions back in December. Sorry, I just need a sip of water. We made those decisions back in December and now it's just not oh, one month of improved attrition it was. Now we're seven months into the year with seven straight months of improved average attrition rate by 3% went from nine to 6%. So it's like really really solid and very, very happy to see that. I'd love to see it down one more percent, get that thing to five and 4%, which I think he can, and we went over some things that I think he could do to do that as well. I do believe the things that I the second level of getting that attrition from like six to like five or four is that final, those final few things that I went over with him is taking some tweaks and changes to the programming I think will improve attrition greatly. So, really, really excited about him and his vision in the future.

Speaker 1: 14:30

He did a phenomenal job of asking questions and this is like I think it's so important as a business owner to be able to put your ego aside If you're already successful, to be able to put your ego aside and ask for more help to get better and better and better. And that's what I love about AB. He's just like. He doesn't be like oh man, I'm not doing good, I don't need help. He's like no, rip this apart, I can take it, tell me what I need to do, tell me what I need to do to get better. And the cool thing about it, he's a fast action taker. He goes and he does it. So we talked about a lot of that.

Speaker 1: 15:04

I looked over his scoreboard. He was asking me what about his key performance indicators? I looked it over. Everything looks good. He's pretty much followed what we teach in SPF Mastermind. But he was tracking leads. He was tracking booked consults. He was tracking showed consults. He was tracking how many closed consults, how many consultations he closed the usage he was tracking. The one thing he did have that I changed was he had holds and cancels in the same tab and I said separate those out from those two things. So anyone that freezes their membership and anyone that holds. I told them to just separate the two, even though they're both are lost revenue and you should be tracking both of those because a hold is lost revenue. So you do want to track that because if that creeps up too high, then that's going to drop your revenue and all of a sudden you're not going to be like, well, how do I? You know, where is that coming from? Right? So we talked about the scoreboard.

Speaker 1: 16:03

One of the things he started to. You know what we started to talk about was leadership. He wanted me to help him, you know, become a better leader. We talked a lot about that and one of the things that he needed to start getting good at was running meetings and at our last CEO mastermind I taught him a meeting structure called a level 10 meeting, which I learned from Mark O'Donnell over at EOS. But I basically taught him a weekly meeting structure for how he should lead his facility leaders, and he says he's made great improvements there. But the one thing he was struggling with was how to run a quarterly off-site meeting where you kind of go off-site of the gym and then you start to do the planning for the next quarter. And so one of the things I did was I went through a structure with him on how to run a quarterly offsite for his team and I've done many of these myself, you know, hosted it for four gyms, but also I've had many consultants run these with me, so I kind of know these like the back of my hand. But the main thing you're trying to do with these quarterly offsites and actually I have a YouTube video coming out soon. Check that out on YouTube. That explains a lot of this.

Speaker 1: 17:22

But what you want to do is a quarterly offsite. The first thing you do is you want to review vision, review goals. You want to make sure that you're clear on where you're going and you're clear on the outcomes that you're trying to achieve. The next thing you're going to do is you're going to review what actually happened. So what are the key data points? What was the churn rate? What was how many new clients did we add? Is there certain issues that need to be, you know, addressed and solved from a data perspective? Did we dip in profitability this quarter? So we basically do a full data review, that, with the squad and with the team, we'll do an org chart. We always do org chart where we look at the people on the team, we look at who's in the right, who are the right people in the right seats. We will do set goals. We will set review sorry, review goals from the past quarter and then set goals for the upcoming quarter and then the rest of the time is just left for solving big key issues, solving problems that we can, on an offsite, have time to discuss.

Speaker 1: 18:22

A lot of times when you're in a weekly meeting, you know you have an hour to do it and then you got to get back to people, got to get back to training sessions and doing things, and sometimes you don't have time to get deep into issues. That you need to get to. A quarterly offsite where you book a full day enables you to get that right amount of time to be able to put towards important issues and things like that. So I found that they're really, really important for clarity for the owner, they're really important for communication to the staff and I think one of the biggest things that you know, the biggest knocks on a lot of owners is they're just bad communicators and I think a good meeting pulse really helps. Here's a good a good meeting pulse helps bad communicators. So if you're a bad communicator and you're like kind of hold things in your head and you don't like to tell people things, like a meeting structure allows you just to kind of help communicate everything because you're kind of almost it's almost forced communication. So that was a really that was a really eyeopening thing for him.

Speaker 1: 19:22

So we talked about the scoreboard, we talked about his vision, we talked about the leadership meetings, we talked about his product and everything like that and we talked about a whole bunch of other stuff. We went into his Facebook ads and I reviewed his ads and his return on spend and he seemed very frustrated with Facebook and I started looking at the numbers and we just went month by month. I was like, all right, give me June. And he was like all right. And I was like, pull up June. And he's like, all right, I was like, how much did you spend? And he's like, all right, I was like, how much did you spend? And he told me what we spent. I was like, all right, how many new customers did you get? And he told me what it was. And I was like, all right, what's the lifetime value of a customer? And basically I basically showed him that when he was fresh, he didn't really look as deep into the numbers as he needed to, and so what I did was I said, all right, you got X. You spent X amount of dollars. You got X amount of clients. The lifetime value of those clients is X. The return was. It was a massive return.

Speaker 1: 20:17

I was like do this every month, Don't ever stop. You don't need to ever spend less. In fact, you could probably spend more. But essentially, like a lot of times people get frustrated because they feel like I'm not getting enough from Facebook. I'm not getting enough from Facebook. But when you look at the real data, a lot of times you actually are. Now you do get there. Sometimes you aren't. So you do got to look at the real data.

Speaker 1: 20:39

But the second thing I talked about with him was I thought I'm talking too fast, sorry, there's something about being in New York city traffic that makes me talk fast, I guess. But the second thing that I told him was but the second thing that I told him was let's just say you get 100 leads from Facebook and 10 of them become customers. Well, first of all, that's amazing 10% of your Facebook leads became customers, especially at his lifetime value. That's like amazing. It's around what it was right. No-transcript. Those 90 leads aren't dead leads. Those 90 leads go onto a follow-up process. Those 90 leads go onto an email, and he's been emailing his list three days a week and he told me he was getting customers from his emails and I was like well, where do you think those emails came from? It's like they probably came from Facebook, and they probably came from the Facebook leads that you thought were dead leads that actually just didn't convert yet.

Speaker 1: 21:44

And so I think a lot of people get frustrated with their Facebook ads. It's like, no, your Facebook ads are also a beefier upper. That's a terrible, sorry. A build up your email list and you know I'm an email guy, I love email, and I believe that one of the best ways to do it is to you know, run Facebook ads to get a bunch of leads on Facebook. You're going to get some right away and then you're going to get some down the road. You know responding to your emails and things like that. So it's a really powerful thing just to look deeper into the number.

Speaker 1: 22:17

So that was one of the things that we did and I think it was a big eye-opener for him and he's going to go back into and spend more time on. He runs his own ads, which is cool, but spend more time on making sure it's good and the other things. He's like well, what do I? The other questions? He asked me was a great question. He's like well, what do I need to be doing?

Speaker 1: 22:40

I feel like sometimes, when I'm in this position where I have three facilities and I have three facility leaders, sometimes I just get impatient. I want to go, just do stuff. I want to just go make things happen and do stuff and the, the, the. Really the issue is he's got to stay in his lane. Now he owns the marketing so he can go do stuff from a marketing standpoint. So I told him go write an email, go create a new video for your Facebook ads. Go build a new key relationship in the community. Go do things that the marketer and the business owner should be doing, but don't go and do things that the facility leaders and the people running the company should be doing Just because you're impatient. What you really should be doing is leading them to be able to get the job done. So at some point you need to show some patience and instead of being like, how am I going to do this, how am I going to get this done? How am I going to push this? It's like now, who do I need to lead? Who do I need to call? Who do I need to manage to be able to get this actually done? So we kind of had that conversation about it, which was, I think, really helpful for him.

Speaker 1: 23:40

But it was a great day. I really love AB. He's the man and he showed me his gym in his basement. He's got a really cool gym in his basement and we just had a great time and I had a great day. So I am still locked in gridlock coming home from New York City, but it was worth every minute of it. I really got to hang with some good people, some great business owners and very, very exciting time for me to be up here in Long Island.

Speaker 1: 24:08

So that is the end of the journey. I'm going to close it out here. That's five podcasts down. Shoot, am I going to exit here? I don't think so. That's five podcasts down and hopefully one of these is helpful. I do. I know I take some of them. I was like stuck in traffic and probably wasn't my best work, but I apologize. But I did want to try and get you some real time stuff of the things that I was discussing with gym owners and everything like that. So hopefully some of the he took away a couple nuggets from these different episodes of me yakking in between driving in traffic in the middle of Long Island. But to all the people I visited, I'm proud of you. Great job. You guys did amazing and super, super excited about all you in the group.

Speaker 1: 24:54

If you are listening to this and you would like to book a consulting day or are interested in getting coaching with me or are interested in the mastermind, just go ahead and shoot me an email. It's my private email, vince, at gabrielfitnesscom, and I'll have Leo put the link in the show notes for you guys. But yeah, if you're interested. If you want to hire me for a consulting day, I'm probably. Here's the thing I'm probably not going to come to your gym.

Speaker 1: 25:24

I did this for AB. He's been a client for a really long time. It is a lot of time for me to do it and now he paid handsomely for it to do it. But at the end of the day I only have so much time, so I'm recording this podcast telling you I'm going all around Long Island and stuff like that. It's unlikely I'm going to come to your gym, especially if you haven't been a client for a long time or anything like that. But I do have people come to my gym a lot. I am booked until 2026. So I have no more time for the rest of the year, but I do like to fill the calendar in 2026 early. So if you are interested in doing a consulting day or interested in getting some coaching in the SPF mastermind, shoot me an email. It's just me. It goes right to me, vince, at gabrielfitnesscom, and hopefully these episodes were helpful and I'll see you on the next one, peace.