Speaker 1: 0:01

What's up guys, welcome to another episode of business secrets for gym owners. I am your uncle, vinny, and back after a mini hiatus not too long, but a mini one and I've been busy selling a company and I sold my marketing agency, kiss Marketing. We closed on that business on Monday. I sold to a company called Gym Member Machine, which my friend GR Hoff owns, and I'm really excited about the venture. I'm really excited that the team stayed intact and GR took on the entire team over at Kiss Marketing and basically just acquired the company for me and is now going to make it better, and so it's a great. It's a win-win for everybody. I'm super excited about it, I'm super happy and, yeah, it's.

Speaker 1: 0:56

This podcast is not about the details of that. I probably will do. I have a full, deep dive of the whole thing, not doing much right now for several reasons, but today I wanted to share with you a cool business idea that came from it, and so, obviously, when you sell a company, you have lawyers involved, and so we were going back and forth with what we call the suits for quite some time and you get close with these people, and so my lawyer. When we got done, we closed, um, I think we signed, I don't know whatever, but recently and right when we closed I I said, hey, thanks for everything, super appreciate everything. I'd like to offer you to come and train for free at my gym for a month. And she was like really, and I'm like, yeah, no problems on me, try it for a month. And she's like right in the perfect target market of my gym and she was like super happy and super grateful and super excited and she came in. This was like last week. She came in today, actually, as I record this, she came in today, did her consult with Mike and she's starting on Tuesday and she's super happy and she'll do the first month for free on me, but likely she'll sign up and it's a win for her, it's a win for me in terms of getting a new customer and it was great.

Speaker 1: 2:19

But it made me start to think about these types of people in our lives. It made me start to think about these types of people in our lives. I'm going to read you a list of people that you have in your life Lawyer, insurance agent, dentist, doctor, accountant, electrician, plumber, teacher or tutor, accountant, landlord, postman, general contractor, financial advisor, owner of your cleaning company. I could go on for a lot longer and at the end of the day, all of these people are in our lives right now. And it's funny as I look at this list because I just read off the list right and as I look at this list, almost just read off the list right, and as I look at this list, almost every one of the ones and I didn't pull this from past clients. But I think back.

Speaker 1: 3:15

I've been in business for 18 years and I think back to this list and it's like almost everyone I named has been a customer of mine over the years. My lawyer in the past has been a customer. My insurance agent is a current customer right now. I've had my dentist in the past become a customer. We had my doctor. He's not, he wasn't my doctor, but he was an orthopedic surgeon trained with us for many years. My accountant was a client for a long time. My electrician is a current client right now. My plumber was a current customer at one point. We have had teachers in the past, my landlord and my old gym was a customer. The postman was never a customer but was someone I actually helped. I've had general contractors become clients. My financial advisor was a client, right, and this is over 17 years, so some have stayed clients for years. Some have come and gone, but at the end of the day, I was thinking about this and I'm like holy shit, there's a lot of it's like it reads like a BNI meeting, right, if you think about it and like we already have these people in our life.

Speaker 1: 4:14

You, if you're listening to this, and you own a gym, you probably have an insurance agent. You probably have a dentist. Hopefully you definitely have an accountant. You have an electrician. If you have an electrical problem at your gym, who do you call to come do that? And a lot of times, when we're in business long enough, we start developing relationships with these people. Now, this is an interesting list, right, because if you go back and if you wrote down the list, these are all like, especially if they own the company, these are all people that are doing pretty well.

Speaker 1: 4:47

A lawyer makes a pretty good chunk of money. Insurance agents do well. Dentists do well, doing pretty well. A lawyer makes a pretty good chunk of money. Insurance agents do well. Dentists do well. Doctors do well. Accountants do well. If we train adults, these are all people that we can get into our champs and become customers. And the other part is, too, it's like they become. You become closer with them because you see them more, because it's all about proximity. If you see someone more and so, then all of a sudden the relationship gets better. Then all of a sudden, when you need something from your lawyer, it's a little easier to get because you have more of a personal relationship because they're a customer of yours.

Speaker 1: 5:26

My accountant was a client for a long time. His wife was a client for a long time. His kids were clients of mine. I can call my accountant right now at 3 am and he'd do whatever I need. So it's not just about getting them in as customers, but getting what you need, and then vice versa, right, and then vice versa. And then there's also the process of barter. Right, you could barter. I don't do this anymore, but when I first started my business, I didn't have any accounting fees at all because I bartered with my accountant. For many years I did not have any electrical bills because I bartered with my electrician, and so you could also use the whole barter system in this. That works well for both sides.

Speaker 1: 6:12

So think of all these people, right? They're already in our lives, either personally or professionally right, because this works both ways with personally too Like you could think about. So I'll give you an example. So we have someone that comes to our house to groom our dogs and she pulls up at the truck and she comes in, brings the dogs Like that's a person I could offer a free month or two. So all of these people are already in our lives. They live or work locally. And my lawyer, the one that came in, she does not live locally. She lives about 30 minutes away. She would be outside of the drive time of a normal client, a normal customer, so if I was so, my ad on Facebook would never get to her. Okay, but her office is seven minutes from my gym, so she lives 30, but she works seven, and so she could come before work, she could come after work because her office is so close, right, and so a lot of these people live or work locally. Especially if you're doing local business your financial advisor you might have a local office, right.

Speaker 1: 7:22

As I said, these people make a decent living. There's a current, existing relationship that you already have with them, so it makes it easy to ask. And here's the thing these types of people typically have access to a lot of other people. My electrician knows a ton of people, my landlord is super connected. My lawyer has been in this town for a long time. So you almost got to think about like this list of professional people in your life and start with the very specific people that you work with right, the already specific people that you work with and make them an offer, give them a free month to come into your gym.

Speaker 1: 8:01

And this does a couple things right. The first thing it does is it helps solidify the relationship. You see them more, there's proximity. And the second thing is you get a new customer. But what this does, this kind of opens your mind to a whole slew of joint ventures.

Speaker 1: 8:19

And so here's what came out of this the lawyer that I asked to come train at my gym. She told me right. When I asked her, she said it's funny you say that because our entire office is all consolidating and we're moving to one town over from you, which is seven minutes from your gym. And so what she just told me was there's going to be four different offices all around New Jersey that are all relocating to one office, so it's not going to be 250 people in one building, all seven minutes from my gym, right. And so now, all of a sudden, what it did just opened an opportunity to do a joint venture with this law firm, and you could start to think about all these different professional practices law firms, insurance agents, dentists. It doesn't even have to be yours, it could be doing joint ventures with these types of people and even just reaching out. I have a whole cold email thing I did to lawyers, where I would send an email out to all local lawyers with an offer to come to the gym, all right. And so you now have all these different opportunities.

Speaker 1: 9:33

So you got to just start thinking about and here's the thing this idea didn't come. I just it happened, right. I didn't really think of it, I just said, hey, monica's, she's a perfect fit for my gym. She's like, all right, let's. I just used her name, I shouldn't have done that, but she's a perfect fit for my gym and let's just offer to train for free and see if it works. And let's just offer to train for free and see if it works, and if it's, great, great. If it doesn't, no worries, but it just it's spurred this idea so, which I now pass to you and you can take it and you can run with it. So go to your lawyer, go to your accountant, go to your this, go to that, whatever it is, and hopefully it creates better relationships, hopefully it creates new customers, hopefully it creates more referrals. And it's another good way to think and use the local business.

Speaker 1: 10:21

I think sometimes you guys try to be these internet marketers right when you want to just run Facebook ads and you want to do the thing and I'm all about it. I run Facebook ads but at the end of the day I also realized we're a local business and a local company and man, there's so many resources right at our disposal to help us with that man. Hopefully that idea helps you. I think it will Just take it and run with it. Just start asking people to come in for a free month for your gym. Let them try the gym out and then see what happens from there. I promise you you'll probably get at least one people to say yeah, and then maybe some of those people end up becoming customers. So there you go. All right, that's it for today.

Speaker 1: 11:01

I just want to give you a real quick one, that kind of popped into my head. I will be coming back and giving the full details on KISS Marketing, but I'm super excited that Jim Ember Machine is going to be taking over the reins and taking over all the accounts, and what I'm going to be doing is focusing on the mastermind, focusing on the SPF mastermind, focusing on my gym, and I'm super excited. Whenever you take something away, you get a lot of spacing your mind back, and it's funny because just in the past five days I've been doing this, I've written 15,000 words in my new book coming up and I'm going to get this thing out like in light speed just because I've been gifted some space in my mind to be able to get going. So I'm super excited. The book is going to be geared towards gyms that are doing below 25K, so it's basically gyms doing 5 to 25K and the goal is to get them to 35 to 50K. That's what I'm trying to do in the book is for you to be able to read the book, have your gym viewing below 25K and then give you the tools that you need to be able to get to 35 to 50K.

Speaker 1: 12:15

And what I'm going to be doing in the book I'm also going to be transcribing interviews that I'm doing. So I picked three guys that I'm going to be doing deep dive interviews with, and these three guys have both. All three have absolutely crushed it right. They started with me. I think they all started under 10K. I think one started at seven, one started zero, it wasn't even open and the other one started at 8k. So they all started like below 10k. They all have gone past 50k and they've done it in around a year, I think one one guy did it probably in less than a year. One guy took probably probably about 18 months, but like literally 8K to 50K in a year pretty different business, right. And so what I did is I'm going to be doing these deep dive interviews with these guys and then transcribing the interviews and putting that in the book on top of it, and what that's going to do is that's going to be like all right, yeah, I'm teaching you these ways to go from under 25K to 35 to 50 and beyond, but I'm not just like talking shit, right. I'm not just saying, hey, here's what to do and do this and do that. No, I'm just I'm showing you how I did it with these guys. And that's the other thing too. It's not just me that did it. I did do it, but I did it shit two decades ago, right 2008,. Nine when I started, right. So I haven't gone from zero to 25K. I have done that in other companies, but in my gym I haven't. But these guys are pretty recent, right, and they did it based on the advice that I gave them. I told them exactly what they needed to do it. They went out and did it and now they're in a really good spot.

Speaker 1: 14:00

This book is going to be coming out soon. I'm super excited for it. I'll keep you guys posted on the release of that and, yeah, it's gonna be great. So if you're a gym owner and you're doing under 25K, definitely be on the lookout, because that's a great resource for you to read. It's going to be a short book. It's going to be probably 15,000 words of my writing and then the transcription interviews. We'll probably add and make it around a 20,000 word book. So it's probably going to be a 45 to 60 minute read. So it'd be pretty short, but I think you'll get the points of it from there. So hopefully this was helpful and I do want to let you know, based on my last podcast, we've launched our new accelerator program, which this is.

Speaker 1: 14:46

Oh man, I'm super excited about this. This is where we're doing what I outlined in the book and we're doing it over the course of a 60 day coaching program. So we already have 14 gyms in the pilot program, which is going swimmingly well, and we're taking on about four four new gyms a month. So we're doing this slowly because we want to make sure we get it right. We're taking on four gyms a month. So if you're doing so, this is for gyms doing that are under 25K, that want to get to 35 to 50. If you're under 25K and you're interested in being one of the four that we pick each month, there's a link in the show notes and there's like a form to fill out. Just fill out the form and then we'll basically see where you're at and make sure that's the right fit for you right now. So Jim's doing under 25 K, want to scale to 35 to 50 and beyond. That is the link in the show notes for you and hopefully we can help you out to do that. Super excited about that program as well.

Speaker 1: 15:46

Lots flying around, lots going on. I got to get back to my day, but hopefully that tip was helpful. Go and call your lawyer, call your insurance agent, call your dentist and invite them for a month for free and hopefully this makes you some money. All right, guys, I'll talk to you soon. Peace.