SPEAKER_00: 0:00

What's up, everybody? Hope you're having a good week or you had a good week. And I have had a monster couple weeks. And what I wanted to do today is just share some some highlights from the last couple weeks. And I, you know, as much as I do these podcasts and write books and do other stuff, I'm like deep in the trenches of actually coaching gym owners. Like I'm I'm doing this stuff too. And I'm, you know, running my own gym. I don't really have a lot of I only do that one day a week. So I can't say that's that much. But a funny story, I was walking through the gym once, and I just usually walk in and walk right to the back to go to my office. And uh there was a lady like doing a deadlift, and it was a good-looking deadlift. And I was like, nice deadlift, that's like looking solid. And she like looked at me all weird, and I walked by her so she couldn't see me, but I could still like hear her. And she goes to one of our trainers, she goes, Who is that guy? And I was like, I don't know if that's bad or good, but she didn't know who I was. Anyway. But yeah, so it's been like a monster couple weeks. It started with a full day of consulting I did for a gym in California. Then I did another day of consulting with a gym in Orlando, then I had my CEO mastermind in town, which is 11 gyms from all over the country. Then the next week I had another 11 gyms, my second CEO group coming into town. And so I've had, I mean, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, like eight full days of consulting gyms in the last 16 days. So I'm a little tired. But it's great. You know, I really enjoy it. I love doing it. I learn a lot. I learned so much from doing these things. And today I want to just share some of the things that that I learned. Some of the things that are things that I've taught people months ago, years ago, that they repeated back, you know, and said, This, I you said to do this, and this worked, and those are great. But other ones are just things that I hear other people are doing. And, you know, I was like, that's a really damn good idea. And so like after doing this, yeah, I'm closing in on a I'm closing in on close to a decade of full, of pretty much full-time coaching. But I've been coaching for over a decade, coaching Jeffs. Like the first couple years I did, it was like nothing crazy. But anyway, so this is this is some of the takeaways I've had from this last eight days of consulting. And this came from one of the meetings where they uh this was our year end meeting. It's just it's a start to the year, but in the January meeting, we always kind of recap how the year went. And one of the pushes last year, not 2025, but 2024 was a tougher year on retention. I think people struggled, and it was a goal of a lot of my guys to improve that number. And some of them, none of them were horrible, right? There were some that, you know, were in the in the sixes and the even the fives, right? Which isn't horrible. You don't want to be any higher than that. But they were in the sixes and the fives, and I basically told them what what would happen to your business if you improved your attrition just by one percent? Like you went from five percent to four percent, or you know, six percent to five percent. You you get the point, right? And it's funny when you do the math, if you just for over a 12-month calendar year on average, improve your your retention rate or your attrition, however you want to say it, by 1%, it's absolutely astronomical. And I don't have the the numbers in front of me of what this one guy reported, but he was reporting like the year stats. And like, yep, he like went from 5% to 4%, and this was the difference, you know, from that. And it was it was absolutely massive. And the cool thing is that it probably does not take a lot of resources and time and energy and effort to improve your attrition rate by 1%. It probably will just take a few strategic things to do, and that will make it happen. So, one, what I would do is I would run the numbers, like if your retention rate was on average 5%, and just for those listening at home that don't know how to calculate it, it's basically if you have a hundred members and on average you lose about five clients a month. So, say over the calendar year, if you have a hundred members, over the calendar year you lost sixty members, that would mean you're at a five percent attrition rate, which again isn't horrible, but it's you know, it's crazy. If you think about it, that's 60 people gone. But so do the math on it, like 5% to 4%, how much better would your would your business be? And the and the cool thing is it it it eases the tension and the pressure on the marketing and the sales. It's like one of the reasons why some people have to be really, really good at marketing sales is they suck at retention and they just need to keep overloading a leaking bucket. And you know, my vote is always, and I'm a marketing guy, my vote is always, hey, let's lock in the retention, lock it in really strong. And then you don't spend as much money on marketing, you don't have to work as hard in marketing, you still got to do it, you still got to do marketing. But at the end of the day, you're going to exhaust yourself and your bank account if you have to outpace a bad retention rate. And so some of the things that were reported to improve retention, uh, one of them was get this. We're gonna talk to our clients on a regular basis outside of the sessions. And a few people chimed in, and this was cool. Like they had different strategies of how they did it. One had a really tough time with like, they don't show up to meetings. I try to book a like a goal meeting with them, you know, once a quarter and they never do it. And so this guy started to just grab them after the session. And they had a spreadsheet of all their clients, and their goal was once a quarter, you need to grab a client, and instead of doing the finisher, they take them in the office and get a goal down or check in them and ask them two questions or whatever it is, right? That was one way they did it. Another people were having success with grabbing getting people on the phone. They weren't having success with getting people to come and do a sit-down meeting, but they're having success with just like 15-minute phone calls. We're like, all right, we're just gonna call. And we our goal is to get X amount of our clients, like 60 to 70 percent of our clients, to do a 15-minute goal setting session once a quarter. And that improved attrition. One of the one of the ones that that some of them just did a really better job, uh, much a really better job, a much better job of tracking attendance. Just like that was the one thing they started to do. The one thing I forget who this was, but one of the guys just was like, hey, I just started tracking attendance really well, and I was on top of that. And again, for some of you, you're like rolling your eyes, like, really, Vince, that's it? That's what you're telling me today. But there are people, not there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that do not track attendance. Like, you do not know if someone's coming in three times a week and they're paying for three times a week. How many times did they actually come? If all I here's think about what I promise you if someone signs up for 12 times a month and on average they're coming 11 and then 10 and then 9 and 8 and then 7, all of a sudden they're gonna look up and be like, why am I paying all this money for this gym and I'm not using it? So it will happen eventually. So it's important that when you see a trend and a pattern, that you do something about it. And so tracking attendance will help you see that. I'll I'll tell you, you know, one of the biggest ones for us. So we had a massive at my gym, we had a massive improvement in in attrition this year. Uh is i I I I couldn't say it's massive. It was 2%. So we went from 4% to 2%, believe it or not. And we made one shift. We replaced a B player trainer with an A player trainer. We had a guy who was not horrible, he wasn't killing us, but he was just abusive B player. He was he was good, not great. And instead of and we went from having three A players and one B player to four A players. And that made all the difference. There was nothing else we changed. We were already tracking attendants, we were already doing reach outs, we were already doing all this stuff, right? So we didn't need to do any of that, but it was literally just and I and I believe that's it. I really believe that is the big shift in your business is understanding and knowing that it's driven by the people that you put out on the floor. That is it. Your success is dependent upon the people you put on the floor. The better they are, the better your retention will be. The more referrals you'll get. It is what it is. And after 20 years in this business, I've never been more convinced of anything else than that. You put better horses on the floor, you're gonna have a really solid retention, right? All right, so that was number one. Number two, I purchased a 100, no, 100, 200, a 200-pound kettlebell. And now you may be thinking, like, why would you buy a 200-pound kettlebell? That's a stupid, that's a waste of money. You know, they're gonna use it, you're gonna use it once a quarter, whatever. There's a really good book called Talk Triggers. This came up in one of our meetings. But there's a really good book called Talk Triggers, and it's all about what are the things that you can orchestrate in your business that people will talk about. And the example is from the Double Tree Hotel, and I have a lot of experience with the Double Tree Hotel because when I played football at Temple, that's where we used to stay. We'd always stay at Double Tree's. And there was one thing that would happen when we would get to the Double Tree, and that was we would all start, stop at the front desk on their way up to our rooms, and we would get a bag of warm cookies. Chocolate chip, absolutely delicious, right? And Oline and they would go grab one, go to the room, come back down, grab another one. That's what O line would do. But that's what they're known for. They're known for the cookies. If you go talk, if you hear, if you ask them about double trigger, you're like, oh, great cookies. You're not saying, oh, great beds. They're not saying, oh, great lobby. They're not saying, oh, great coffee in the morning. They're saying great cookies. And that's called a talk trigger. And you can create these talk triggers in your business, right? And one of the so I bought that 200-pound kettlebell to be a talk trigger. Why? Because think of a mom that is 45 years old, that never had a strength background, never really lifted weights before, and she trains at your gym, and all of a sudden you help her get really strong. And yeah, she's doing trap bar, and let's just say she does the trap bar deadlift, and she does 200 pounds of the trap bar. Okay, fine, great. You know, she goes and she tells her friends about it. But then the 200-pound kettlebell is like, it's like a sight. Its thing is so freaking big. And everyone that's her friend knows what a kettlebell is. And most of the people that she goes out to dinner with or goes out to drinks with, they probably go to these dumb gyms where they're waving around five-pound kettlebells or 26-pound kettlebells. They're doing swings with the 26, right? And here this lady is deadlifting. This one lady, we got a video of her deadlifting the 200 pound kettlebell for like 20 reps. Maybe it was 10. It was between 10 and 20. That's a story, right? And then we put it on social and it was like went everywhere, and everyone's like, holy shit. How did you lift that thing off off the ground? Not once, but 20 times, 10 times maybe. It gets every time I tell the story, it's gonna go up 10. So it's it was 30 times. It was 30 times she lifted it. But you get the point, it was like, it's something to talk about. The even the trainers in my gym, they were like, nah, I don't think we're gonna use it that much. I was like, get it, buy it now. I bought it to be a talk trigger. I bought it to drive word of mouth, I bought it to drive referrals. So people start talking about the things that they're doing at your gym. You can create all kinds of stuff like that. You don't have to buy a 200-pound kettle for this. You can do something else. I don't know what it is. Read the book Talk Trigger and check it out. But we talked about that a lot. That was a really, really important point. Third one, this is interesting. You don't hear me talk a lot about the you hear me talk about a lot about the business side, and sometimes people forget I have a decent vast knowledge of of training and running sessions and just training in general, right? I have a pretty good grasp on the whole thing, right? I've trained thousands and thousands of sessions myself. And one of the things that started to happen for us in COVID, and and this this happened in some of the gyms that they were talking about, is during COVID, what we had to do is we have to spread out a lot, right? We had to like big six feet apart, and then there's tape in the floor, and there's like, oh, everyone's got their own stations. And the thing that pissed me off the most was when some magazine posted like these people training inside these plastic cages. It was just the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was, it was in COVID, it was so out of control. It was awful, right? But I think a lot of people got used to that, and a lot of people never went back. And the problem with that is well, at the time we had to do it, it doesn't bode for a great experience and for people to get coaching. When you're coaching a small group, your job as that small group coach is to go from person to person and get as many touch points on each person in the session as possible. To get your hands on them, to get your to coach them, to correct them, to motivate them, to yell at them, whatever that you need to do. But if all of a sudden someone's in a session with you and there's six people in the session, and you went the whole session and barely said two words to one of the person because the gym they were all spread out all over the gym, they're gonna be like, for after a while, why am I here? Why don't I just go do this on my own? And that's honestly, I'll give you one of the reasons why I went away from individualized programs. I went away from individualized programs because a lot of people were coming in and they had their own program and they would kind of get in a groove and they get going. And then we would get caught up with someone over here, and after a while, someone was like, people, a couple people quit and they were like, Yeah, I feel like I can just do this on my own. If I just get a program, I'm good. And we're like, wait a minute, like the whole purpose is to have a coach, the whole purpose of this. And so that's why we went away from it because we want everyone to get the coaching, right? And so a lot one of the people came up with a problem and they were like, I feel like everything is really spread out, and some people are complaining, they're not getting coach. And the the recommendation was get them tight, get them close together, right? And then what you may need to do is arrange the gym like into a pod, like arrange the equipment so all of it is in the same spot, and that you can get to the squat rack quickly, you can get to the dumbbell rack over there, and everyone can be effectively trained in a smaller area. It's kind of like what Plummer always talked about was like a gym within a gym. Now, if you just have one pod for six people, that's fine. But understand is that the goal of coaching in a small group environment, which is what many people do that follow me, is for everyone to feel like they got a personalized workout. And if they never get coached and no one ever says anything to them, or you're yelling at them across the room because you're so far away from them, eventually that's going to impact their feel of how their experience is like. Keep everyone close, keep everyone tight, you know, and and and let that coach make that coach's job easier to be able to get to people. That was so that was one of the things we talked about. I thought was interesting. We talked a lot about follow-up, and we always do. We talk about sales and what what are the basics of sales, right? You want to get speed to lead, you want to get to the leads as fast as you can and do all that jazz and things like that, right? And you gotta text, send them a text message, and you gotta call them, and you gotta do all this. And one of the the guys got up there and he was having a real trouble with uh is lead conversion, right? Getting in touch with the leads and getting the leads in for consults. And they had all this manual stuff. They have all these like automated texts and automated emails, and I'm not saying you shouldn't have that, but it was all automated. And my favorite quote of the year, and I think it was this year or last year, is a an ounce of personalization is worth a pound of automation. And I think it it it bows true. And I'll and I'll tell you, I'll tell you, tell you a quick story that that really makes this true. So when I have the CEO meetings, I we always use a flip chart. And a lot of times I would bring my own flip chart because they would charge me like an arm and a leg. And I forgot the flip chart. And so I go to them and they bring in a flip chart and they're like, yep, it's gonna be like 200 bucks a day for the flip chart. I'm like, really? I was like 200 bucks a day. I was like, I've been renting these rooms for like seven years. Like, you're really gonna charge me two, four hundred dollars for a flip chart? And they're like, Yep, that's the price. And I was like, whatever. And I paid it. Right? About an hour later, if some guy pops his head in and he was like, hey man, I know you've been coming here a long time. Don't worry about the flip chart, it's on me. And I was like, Ma man, that's awesome. The next day I went home and I wrote him a handwritten card, thank you note, basically saying, Thanks so much, man. I super appreciate it. The next week I had another group. Normally I would always have to ask for the flip chart, but the flip chart was already in the room. They came in again and said, Oh yeah, we just want to let you know that we comped your flip chart again. Think about that. If I don't write that note, I'm probably paying for the flip chart the next time, right? Because I didn't show, I didn't show enough appreciation. But also I didn't even have to ask for it. It was already in the room just because I wrote that handwritten note. So when you're in the follow-up process and even getting someone to show up for a console, like what about like recording a video? It takes 30 seconds to record a video of yourself talking and saying, hey man, super excited you're coming in for the console. Like, I'm really excited to meet with you, we're gonna sit down, blah, blah, blah. And send them a 30 second to a minute video, like, what are the chances that they're not more likely to come? And that's not guaranteed, right? There's plenty of people that have not showed up after they've gotten a video message, right? But what are the chances that if you take, put that one low, that ounce, a little ounce of personalization into your sales follow up and then honestly into your business too?

unknown: 19:59

Like,

SPEAKER_00: 20:00

You're doing reactivation. Okay, fine. You're sending a reactivation email every quarter. Okay, great. Yeah, do that. But what about the phone call? Pick up the phone and call the guy that's not been in for a year and just be like, dude, let's go. Come on, man. You got to get back into the gym, bro. Let's go. What about that phone call? It doesn't take you that much longer than you know sending the automated stuff. And again, I'm not saying automation is bad. You should be using it, should be doing it. But at the end of the day, like we're belly-to-belly human businesses. Like we gotta get some of this stuff, get out there a little bit. I remember like I think I sold a$25,000 annual package after reaching out to a guy when, you know, instead of sending an automated thing, I just literally texted him. I was like, hey, dude, you know, it's been a while since you've been in. Let's go, let's get you back into the gym. He's like, dude, I've been so struggling. He was he was having a lot of personal problems and stuff. I can't believe you called me at this time in my life. This is exactly what I needed. Let's go. I'm in. And he signed up for like a year for 25K. Like he's like, yeah, I want the works. I want everything. I was like, he's like, I need this, right? It's all it didn't wouldn't probably happen if I didn't send that text. You know, so like think about that. Like, start getting more manual, start doing more manual things in your sales and your reactivations, and even especially in your like community stuff and joint ventures and things like that. You know, if you think you send a blanket email to a bunch of businesses to try and work with them, that that's gonna do anything. Like, no, just like walk over there and shake their freaking hand. Like walk into their business. This is Joe Hash, he talks about this all the time. He's just like, hey, whoa, what a concept. Walk over and shake their hand and introduce yourself. Yeah, that's number four, I think. I don't know. I'm just gonna keep going here. The next one was ask your clients for feedback. So you can do this through surveys, which is fine. And I think it's a good idea to do like a net promoter score or something like that, maybe once a quarter or once every six months. But also ask your past clients for feedback.

unknown: 22:19

Right?

SPEAKER_00: 22:20

So let's say some let's say you're trying to figure out, let's say you're you're you're getting some churn, right? And let's say you really want to get to the bottom of why someone's leaving or why people are leaving, right? Do you really think in the cancel form they're telling you the truth? What are they telling you? Well, that's a money thing. You guys are great, but I just don't have the time right now. They never tell you the real story. And my idea is always waiting about two to three months when they're gone. And then getting them on the phone and really asking them for their help. They're like, hey, I need your favorite, I don't should be straight with me, and just be like, just tell me why you left. Like, what was the thing? What happened? Like to just like be straight with me. You'll learn so much. And it's far enough away that they're not, they haven't been there and they're not. And you really gotta, it's a lot of it is in the way you ask them. But you you really gotta, you know, be like, hey, I need your help. I need you to help me out here. I want honest, brutal feedback. I'm a big guy, I can take it, I'm good. And you're gonna get a lot of really good insights. You're gonna get a lot of really good insights from that. So the combo of surveys, you know, getting feedback from your members, I think is really, really important. But then getting feedback from past members is why people are leaving is a really, really good thing. Last one is when something is working, double down on it. Let's say you have an email that goes out and it gets re it gets a lot of opens or a lot of clicks or a lot of people reply. How about this? Send it again. That's right. Yeah. Send it again. So if you send it on Monday, send that hang send that big bad boy on Tuesday. Just send it back out. Or if you want to wait six months and send it again, or three months, or one month, it doesn't matter. My point is this you're doing things that are working. Reuse it. If you have an ad that's working, keep it going. Don't get bored with the ad. Just keep it going. Find a way to make it better, put more money into it. Ride it out, keep going. We we don't we I don't know why we do this. We find things that we find winners that works, and then we get bored and we stop doing it. It's like, no, when you find stuff that works, make sure you don't bury it, reuse it. It goes for your emails, it goes for ads, it goes for campaigns, like whatever. Like we had a we had one guy, like he had done one bring a friend day a month for a year, 12 of them. I was like, on average, how many customers do you get from a bring a friend day? And he said, two. I was like, you've done this every month. And he's like, yes, and every month you've gotten on average two. And he's like, Yes. I was like, do not stop doing that. Think about that. That's 20. It doesn't cost anything to get those clients. But we run a bring a friend day, and all of a sudden, oh, I only got one person. Well, if you do that every month, you get 12 people. What's the lifetime value of a customer? For most of you, it's four grand, five grand, six grand. It's just like why? Like, so like one is like when stuff works, just keep going, keep doing it. When you get an email that hits, send it again and save it and send it for later. I and here's the thing, dude. I'm not just preaching that this I I'm preaching to myself right now. I do the I do this all the time. It's just what we do. But a lot of times we need to be reminded of the dumb stuff we do and be like, hey, if I could do that less, that'd be better. So find stuff that's working, bookmark it, and then do it again. What I would what I see your homework is find the last 10 emails that you sent that had the best click rate or the best response rate. Open rate's fine, but it doesn't do as much for you as a click-through rate or a response rate.

unknown: 26:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 26:15

You want people engaged. Just opening the email is fine, but you want people engaged, engaging with your content. All right. Uh same thing for a social post. Like if you have a social post that hits, like send that social post again. Post that video again. No one's gonna like put you in jail for that. And then yeah, make those, put those in a folder and then you know, regularly resend those from there. So those are my takeaways. Hopefully, some of those nuggets were a little bit helpful. And today, as hopefully you've come to the end with me, what I would like to do is tell you about gympranos. Okay, gympranos is a seminar that you need to be at. It is my three-day, and I'm not reading this, it is my three-day marketing super conference for gym owners. I'm very excited about this event. I lose sleep every night thinking about all the shenanigans we're gonna do. And again, yes, it's a playoff the show, Sopranos, called Gimpranos, and we are going to be doing gym business, Tony Soprano style. So you're gonna learn a lot. You're gonna learn about a lot about leadership, you're gonna learn a lot about price, you're gonna learn a lot about power, you're gonna learn a lot about team, you're gonna learn a lot about marketing and selling, finance, money, all of that. We're gonna we're gonna cover it all. It's three full days, and you're gonna get inside a room with uh other gym owners that are kicking ass and taking names and some of them aren't kicking ass and taking names, some of them are struggling like you, and that's fine too. You're gonna learn, you know, from both, right? But I mean, what an unbelievable environment and situation to put yourself in about a bunch of other gym owners that are excited about life, excited about gym ownership, want to grow, want to get better, want to have fun, right? And what a cool environment to put yourself in this February 27th and 28th and March 1st in Orlando, Florida. It is our flagship event of the year. Uh, it is for our current members in SPF Mastermind, but we always allow people to purchase guest passes. And right now, as you're listening, if you're listening to this at the time it's released, a guest pass is not expensive at all. It's actually very, very cheap. I make it cheap because I want to create a cool opportunity for you to get in this kind of environment, to see what we're doing, to see the things that are we have going on, to learn the things that you need to learn to grow your business in 2026. It is going to be a killer, pun intended. It is going to be a killer event. I will be speaking live. Mike Waldron, my finance guru for gym owners, will be speaking live. You want to know your numbers better, you got to be in the room for this. Thomas Plummer, the legend, the godfather of fitness business will be speaking live. GR Hoff will be speaking live from Gym Ember Machine. Joe Hashe, the legend he is, will be speaking on leadership. It's going to be a game-changing speech talk. Carly Fernald, our queen of community marketing, will be speaking live. This is a really cool topic, too, what she's talking about. It's all about building an ambassador program for your gym. Ben Stocks, who works for me in marketing full-time, will be speaking live and we'll be talking about how to maximize your social media marketing and your email marketing. He is a legend and a wizard in those situations. It is, I mean, there's more, just going off the top of my head. Uh we have the Gym Owner of the Year Award, where the top three gyms in my community will be getting up on stage and spilling all of your their secrets. So you're not going to learn just from people like me and Joe and Tom Plummer, but you're going to learn from the boots on the ground, the people that are doing this stuff all day long. And, you know, here's the thing. It's like, I'm not trying to brag, but I built a really great community of human beings. Like these are good people that you want to be around. These aren't a bunch of weirdos. These are family guys. These are people that are committed to growing. They're committed to changing lives. And you know, I couldn't be prouder of this community that we built. So I really, really hope that you consider coming. There's a link in the show notes that has the page for all the info. Don't drink milk while you're reading the page because some of the copy is pretty funny because it's got the sopranos theme to the copy. There's a really cool picture of me at the top of the landing page. There's a really, really cool video. You gotta watch this video on the landing page. You gotta watch this video. Please watch the video on the landing page. But if the link is in the show notes, I believe also you can go to just gympranos.com. That's g-y-mpr.com. And I think it takes you there as well. But the link is also in the show notes. And you just opt in. You don't buy a ticket on the page, but just opt in. My team will reach out. We'll get you we'll get you a ticket. But if you're listening to this around the time this podcast is released, there's the lowest possible ticket price that you could get. And after you know, a few days after this, it's going up a big time. So could not but could not be more excited for Jim Pranos. Please, please come. Please at least click that link and read about the event. But not only are we going to have a lot of fun, you're going to learn a ton, you're going to get around motivated people. And the last thing we'll do, and I didn't mention this before, but the last thing we'll do is the last day, we do a 90-day roadmap. And that's why I do a workshop format where I lead you down the path of how to create a business plan for the next 90 days. And this is this is a really, really important exercise for you. So you're going to leave with clarity, you're going to leave with confidence, and you're going to leave with more belief in yourself that you can make this gym thing really, really successful. I appreciate you listening. Thank you for giving me this opportunity and this platform to share insights with you. And live events are just a massive extension of all of this stuff. And getting in a room with great people is a really powerful thing to do. So I hope you I really hope if you're listening to this still at 34 or 35 minutes in that you click that link in the show notes or go to jimpranos.com and you join us at the event. Appreciate you all so much. Thank you.