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All right. Welcome to another episode. Excited about this one, and also really excited about what's coming up around the corner if you're listening to this in the middle of February. Gimpranos is around the corner. And Gimpranos is our three-day marketing super conference where once a year we do a big event down in Orlando, Florida. And we theme it out. The last year's theme was the World Wrestling Federation. This year's theme, Go in Jersey. Sopranos, one of my favorite shows, but it's going to be the Gym Pranos. So there'll be some shenanigans. There'll be some fun stuff that will be happening. But really at the end of the day, we're going to be learning a ton about growing a great gym and got some great speakers coming. G.R. Hoff from Jim Ember Machine, Thomas Plummer, the legend, Mike Waldron, the guru of finance and numbers. So it's going to be a sick event. The link is in the show notes if you need more info and you want to attend. It's getting late, so you better get a better get a move on it. You can also attend virtually as well. So if you want to attend in person, you better move. If you want to attend virtually, you just reach out, go just go through that link and let us know. Today I want to talk about capacity. Okay. And I think it's a really, really important concept that a lot of people miss. Here's a couple examples, right? So I went, took my family to this restaurant called Medieval Times. And Medieval Times is it's been around for a really long time, but it's a very interesting business, and you should look into it. It's like it's a dinner and it's an event. It's like in this big theater, and then there's a dinner and it's a show. Basically, you're watching a show while you're eating dinner. And it's like people on horses and guys fighting and stuff like that. And it's like medieval times, right? It's like if you ever saw the movie The Cable Guy, they talk about it in there. But I'm looking around, and my and poor Vanessa, right? Like when I go to these things with the kids, my mind is, yeah, I'm trying to watch and be engaged, but my mind is on business. I'm just like thinking about, oh my God, like, look at all these people and look at all these upsells and look at all these opportunities. And the one thing I noticed, not one empty seat. Not one. Now, this is like a$60 to$70 ticket. This is not like a dinner that's like, this is maybe even more than that, I think. So I'm doing the math, and there's like a thousand seats in the arena, sixty to seventy dollars a ticket, upsells out the wazoo, upgrade opportunities, like Disney-esque type style stuff, right? But I couldn't get over not one empty seat. It's like thousands of seats. It was, I believe it was a Friday night. So yeah, so usually things. But one of the things that they do at Medieval Times is they pretty much sell out every show, their thing. They want to know it costs them a shit ton of money to put on one of these shows. And so it costs them the same amount of money to have to put on a show, whether there's 500 seats or whether there's a thousand seats. The only difference is how much actually they make. They still got to pay the guy that's riding the white horse the same amount, whether there's 500 people in the audience or a thousand people in the audience. And so we as a business really need to pay attention to this, right? And we don't, and not enough. Another example is the hotel industry. The hotel industry actually has a metric not necessarily on occupancy, but on vacancy. So they will take, and it's a very morbid way of looking at business, but but they look at not 300 rooms filled. Let's say a hotel is 400 rooms. They don't look at 300 rooms filled, they look at 100 rooms not rented or not sold. And they basically, that is a metric of how much loss. Meaning the capacity and potential for that business was 400, and they only did 300, and they lost 100 times whatever the room rate was. And I don't think gyms really do this. Well, my gyms in SBF do. I mean, because this is one of we have five numbers that we track on a regular basis weekly, right? We track leads, we track trials or consultations, we track new members, we track lost members, and then we track capacity. We look at capacity, we want to look at that number because we want to know one, are the people that are paying showing up, right? Two, we want to look at where are we losing money? Where do we have a session that has six people, that has two people, that has one person, that has no people. And what do we need to do to change that? Because that's honestly like if if all of a sudden you have a capacity of six people per session and every session is filled, you're gonna be making a lot of money. Barring you're not doing something stupid with payroll or something like that, you're gonna be making a lot of money. And if you have two people in a session, you're not gonna be making a lot of money. It's real simple. And so this is like the first thing you need to do is you need to look at it. You need to track it. And ideally, you have you track it against the goal. We can't just like track it, we have to track it against what success looks like. This is a big mistake in scoreboard in general. A big mistake is like you track numbers, but there's no comparison. So you all right, we got 10 leads. All right, fine. Is that good or bad? I don't know. And what you need is you need a weekly goal. And a good weekly goal for a small group gym is 83%. Right? That's kind of what I like to see. Okay, 83 is a weird number, but essentially what 83% means is five out of six. And what that means is on average, if I take all my sessions, if we're averaging five out of six, we are winning big.

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Right?

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We're probably not going to be medieval times and fill every seat, right? And understand that more than 83%, while good for your wallet, will start to show up in challenges and problems. And so while I think you can go over it, I think you just have to be aware of the risks of that, right? The risks of clients complaining so much that they're not able to get into a session and then end up canceling, or possibly your trainers just getting overloaded and and maybe you know there just being operational issues from that, right? So while it's good for your wallet, it also can pose problems. So that's why I think there's a sweet spot of this five out of six. And again, if it's I think 80% is like just a good nutmetric, right? If you do four people on average, there's three out of four. If you do eight people, which I don't suggest, seven out of eight, right? So almost like you know, think of one empty spot as the ability to grow, right? And the ability for people to move around a little bit. I think that's a really good, healthy way to look at it. So the first thing you need to do is you need to track it. You need to set a track, you need to set a goal. What is your goal? And maybe it's around 80%. That's kind of what it probably should be. Maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower, but around there. And then the second thing you need to do is you need to track it weekly. Like, what are you tracking this number? Do you even know? And I've got to tell you what, if you have issues and you can't find this number, then you have a software problem. But you have a you have a you have an operational issue, which it needs to be fixed immediately. I mean, we we had this issue with Mind Body, and we had Mind Body for many years, and we had no idea if any of this hell was going on. We didn't even know how many clients we had, we didn't know like what our capacity was, we didn't know anything because our our software was such a mess from all the years of buildup that we we tried to fix it many times, and it just we couldn't fix it. And so we just got a new software. And so it's possible what you need to do. Now that's a big ask for you. The ideal goal is that you know you know this number, you know what this is. And then so you have your goal for what it is, you have a weekly tracker of it, meaning whether you're it's a you know, weekly meeting or if you're on your own, you just gotta look at it, you gotta have the discipline to look at it. And you know, then what do you need to do if it's off, right? If it's you know on point, you great, keep riding the wave, keep going, keep growing. And maybe if it gets crazy over, you add a couple sessions. Okay? But if it's under, you have to look at it and see what do we need to do. And I will say this it's the this is an important distinction. It is on average. So I wouldn't freak out if you have one session that has three out of six. Okay, because if on average you're a five out of six, that means that that session maybe just never filled. I know that R6 a.m. is always gonna have more people than R11 a.m. It's just it's probably never going to catch up because just more people want to train at that time. It's just like a popular time. Peak times are a real thing, right? That doesn't mean I can't add more to the 11, but it just means that I'm not gonna go crazy if it's not, if the average is good. Now, if the average is two to three, now I'm like, okay, what do we need to do? Now, the first thing you can do, which is not my first priority, but some people just have too many sessions. Some people just, you know, they got you know 30 clients and they got 50 sessions a week in training. It's like it's too many. What you're doing is you're setting up a situation for bad energy. I really do think that's like you're, you know, yeah, you think that, oh, if there's only two people in a session, they're gonna get a good experience. And I I have found the opposite. I have found that when the sessions are busy and bustling, and we have five out of six and six out of six, and the energy is humping, it's good. That's better for your business. It's better for you, and it's better for the clients. But when you walk in and it's just like, we have two people, and then this is kind of us sometimes at our night sessions. Like, we are not busy in the evening at my gym. We're crushing it in the morning. And the evening is I walk in sometimes at like our 7:30 session, and there's like two people, and it's like, this kind of sucks. The energy kind of sucks. Now, my business is because we're so heavy in the morning, we are at the average we want to be, so I'm I'm not upset about it. But understand that two out of three or two out of six is not a great thing, it's not good for energy, and you want to change that. So sometimes it is possible that you have too many sessions on the calendar and you may need to make an adjustment. Ideally, what I want you to do is get more people. Right? That that's really what you want to do. I had a guy come in for a consulting day the other day. He was training athletes. He had the capacity to train 80 kids with how many sessions he had. He was getting 30. And so I said, all right, we could have shrunk it down, okay, but instead what we did was we put a plan together. We put a plan together to get to 80 because he was not doing a great job of specific time-based marketing to fill the block, right? He did it in blocks of sessions. It was like a winter block, a spring block, right? And he didn't have a really good systematized marketing plan to get there. And so I say, all right, the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna have a plan that as soon as we're eight weeks out, meaning eight weeks ahead of the start of the block, we're starting to market it. We're not gonna wait till two weeks before. At eight weeks, we're starting. And the first thing that's gonna go out is a special offer to the people in the current program to renew, to keep going. And it's only to them, and it only goes to them as direct language, and there's a link that they can pay for it. They don't have to have a come in for a console. They just do it. Here's the link. You get priority, and then a week later we put it out to all the past customers, and then a week later we open it up to the full list, and it's like this thing, it's a it's a it's a boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know, this is this is how we're promoting this thing, and then we get our joint ventures involved, and then we have our Facebook ads running and our newspaper ads, but there is a plan to get X number of athletes if we have a capacity for 100. We are putting a plan together to get 100. Now, does it always happen every time? No. But a lot of times it does. Most of the time it does. And so that's what we did with him on his consulting day. We put together this plan of like, how do we get to 80? Because, hey, the difference between it's costing us the same amount of money to train 30 kids versus 80 kids. The difference is only 50 times 800, which is$40,000 a quarter. We can increase his profitability by$40,000 simply by paying attention to capacity and then having a plan to be able to fill that capacity. Okay, I've gone over of what I want to talk about. I'm going to be talking about more of this. This is a really important topic. It's important that you know your numbers, it's important that you are tracking the right things, but it's important that you know what to do to raise your capacity to train more people without increasing the costs that it takes to do that. It's one of my sections on, I think it's my third talk at Gimpranos, where I will be talking about how to maximize the capacity at your gym and going much deeper into what I'm talking about here. So hopefully this gave you a little bit of insight, a little bit of help. And hey, why don't you come to Gimpranos? You should come. It's going to be amazing. Three days hanging around with gym owners, hanging around some big thinkers and people that are doing great work. Like what else, like, where else would you should you rather be? Like spending three days with inspiring, motivating people that all want to grow their business, that will share the things that they're doing with you. You'll get ideas to market your gym, you'll get ideas to drive retention, you'll get ideas to track your numbers better, you'll find out what's working now, right? Because that's what we always do. We find the guys that are kicking ass and we put them on stage and we're like, this is what's working right now. These are the referral strategies that are working right now. This is the event stuff that's working right now. And it's good, it'll be good for you to be there. You can either join us virtually or you can join us in person. I hope it's in person. But it's important to get outside the four walls of your business. Flights to Orlando are not expensive. And you know, we don't the hotel we're staying in is not crazy, right? So it's well, it's not a huge cost to get down there. But man, what it possibly could do for your business is big. The links in the show notes has all the details on the event. We're gonna be talking a lot more about stuff like this before. I'm super excited about it. It's gonna be so much fun too. Have a little fun too in your life. Come on. Get out of your gym. Leave your gym for a weekend. Come on, you can do it. All right, tell the part time trainer to take on the sessions and get your butt down to Jim Pranos. It's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be amazing. So hopefully this was helpful. I'll see you in the next one. Click the link in the show notes for all the info on Jim Pranos and talk to you soon. Peace.