How to industry sign banking california word fast
change is happening faster than ever before bringing new challenges new knowledge and new opportunities online personal training connected exercise devices and new micro gym franchises are now in the market and their popularity is growing rapidly each brings new market awareness to the value of coached fitness but each also competes with small owner/operator micro gyms any of the three elements above could be a huge opportunity or any of them could be the end this week I'll share insights into the industry data that matters to you I'll talk about what we know what others know and how it affects your business I'm going to organize these recommendations by key topics first what knowledge can you trust I'll talk about that today second how you should position yourself for 2020 now what should your brand be and I'll talk about that tomorrow third how can you leverage these new tools in the fitness world I'll talk about that on Wednesday fourth I'll talk about the disappearing middle why breakeven gyms are folding my interview with economist Allison Schrager author of an economist walks into a brothel on Thursday and 5th I'll talk about what should your gym evolve to be on Saturday now some of these videos or these recordings and these posts are going to be long and that's because they're important as you're building your annual plan for 2020 you'll need to have a really clear vision of what operational excellence will look like a year from now if you don't write an annual plan or you don't know how to write one get to the growth stage of our mentorship program fast start with the incubator first but get to growth in early 2020 most gym owners won't go through this entire video read the entire post listen to the entire podcast the best ones will you can be sure that and before I get into it let's talk about where our information comes from first I have the fortuitous viewpoint of someone who's been commenting on the fitness industry for over ten years starting with don't by ascom I've written every single day about best practices ideas and new technologies but I've also shared what doesn't work I hate the online experts who sell untested ideas to gym owners in my book that's really close to fraud similarly I don't like the trolls who attack data based knowledge just to get a share of the spotlight so it's important to understand where our knowledge comes from over the years we've taken close to 3,000 free calls with gym owners these calls last for an hour I need the first 1,500 by myself they cost us tens of thousands of dollars in phone bills and way more in time spent we've also spent tens of thousands of hours on calls mentoring gym owners we average around two hundred and seventy call hours on the phone every single week we track every story we follow every gym we know where the real problems are and we know what gyms have done to overcome them that's where our qualitative data comes from real live conversations one-on-one with real live gym owners like you second we spent years building a quantitative tracking dashboard just over two years ago I told the story of the industry's need for objective measurable data to prove what's working and what's not working what has potential to work and what has stopped working three years ago I was having breakfast with some higher-ups and some friends across with HQ we were sitting outside this cafe in Santa Cruz California I asked how many CrossFit gyms were owned by women I had this idea that the number was higher than the US average for small businesses but the short answer from my friends was we don't know I asked how many members the average box had and I got the same answer I got asked what the average lifespan of a gym was and then the same thing happened I said someone should be measuring this stuff and I got agreement then I got dead air so I decided to do it myself I decided that with my position and resources it was more than an opportunity was my responsibility to track Fitness Gym Health so after hundreds of thousands of dollars been trying to get an accurate measurement of gym health we finally got a working system the - brain dashboard - clear I don't sell our dashboard but spending that money and time allows us to figure out what's actually working for gym owners what's really doing well who's really doing well and ultimately what's true we get daily data from a large sample size we get real numbers we get the truth and we get it every single day so we've done it the tubing dashboard is running and collecting data from 800 gym owners every single day we have bedrock data now we can build on that here's why we don't trust surveys several companies in the fitness industry attempt to publish an annual survey of gym owners most of them ask us for help or like to comment on the survey after it's been published but we don't believe survey data is trustworthy for a few reasons first respondents are biased by definition so you get over reporting from the best and the worst gyms second most surveys are ill-defined so questions can't possibly provide an accurate measurement and third a combination of confusing software and confusing language means that most gym owners can't provide their actual numbers last year an accountant fred and this guy's brilliant told me that he couldn't even figure out the numbers required by an industry-leading survey and I don't know anybody else who's going to spend hours trying to figure it out than him most of us would just guess the value of an industry survey isn't the data it's the analysis unfortunately any analysis built on skewed data is automatically irrelevant this year we published two specific and objective reports on gym management software and coaching software now you can download either one of those from our website if you click the link below so what is the real data show though that's what we're after here the data shows that the best gyms are becoming very profitable faster than ever before and the worst gyms are failing faster than ever before so what makes a gym fall into that best or worst category well it has very little to do with the quality of coaching not anymore a decade ago quality coaches stood out but now social media has really leveled the playing field and better instruction like the CrossFit l1 seminar has raised the standard for everybody there are still some mediocre coaches around but there are a few dangerous coaches around they just don't survive the media the best gyms have the best systems the most professional staff and a close personal relationship with each client I'll talk more about that next the gyms in the middle though are really in trouble if you're selling group Fitness CrossFit hits bootcamp whatever you're competing against commodity brands five years ago this wasn't a big threat but now it is you can't run on low margins like Orangetheory or berries can when prices drop you can't stay on the roller coaster you just don't have the reserves to do it so I'll talk about this on our podcast with our with The Economist's on Thursday but if your gym is really great at offering group training and that's all then you're facing downward price pressure and some very lean times in the next two years the 2019 trends we saw and what they mean for your gym first marketing trends six-week challenges remain popular a retention sucks people are attracted to six-week challenges and the ads that they see them in on Facebook these are novel and exciting there's a clear end point they align well with what clients see on TV like Biggest Loser type stuff however the things that make six week challenges attractive also make them very poor for retaining clients so our solution was to use what works in the ads six-week challenges in a way that improves long-term retention we do personal six-week challenges in our gyms and the end of the first challenge leads to the start of the second personal challenge this keeps the process exciting keeps our clients ascending and keeps them around there are still the old bait-and-switch tactics out there sign up for this free thing pay here we'll give you your money back at the end if you complete it and jump through a whole bunch of impossible hoops o start we're keeping the money those are crippling gyms nearly 40% of the gym owners who booked a free call with our team in 2019 have had a horrible experience with this marketing tactic now they have cray turn raise their best clients are gone and they're no further ahead they're probably burned out and more broke than they ever were when they started if you're in that position start by getting our free retention guide with step-by-step instructions here money back guarantee just kidding it's free you need to produce content now more than ever the spotlight is also swinging back toward long-term media production even Facebook Inc now recommends building long-form content to build trust we've been calling this authority for over a decade it takes a while to gain momentum absolutely but producing content regularly works it's worked for my gym for 14 years and for me as a coach for three years before that an authority compound I now publish less media for my gym than ever but we still benefit from SEO and from word of mouth and from backlinks from all those years so here's how it shakes out if you have a bunch of people who would like to try your bootcamp or hit class or CrossFit program but haven't signed up yet Facebook marketing will push them over the edge if they're already closed they'll come in but if your systems aren't excellent or if you don't have a plan to retain them after their first challenge ends you'll never see them again but if you regularly produce videos and blog posts to help your community you'll retain people longer and have higher trust when they do come in so you need both if you're a CrossFit affiliate you lost your content engine when HQ essentially shut down its media department at the beginning of 2019 and of 2018 many are just starting to notice the effects but that effect compounds if you're not telling your story and your clients stories and answering questions to serve your local community no one is retention is money literally great books like never lose a customer again and atomic habits were money in the bank for gym owners in 2019 our data shows that the average gym owner could make an extra $40,000 per year just by keeping the average client three months longer that means learning how to keep people longer is a great use of your time there's a ton of research money flowing into addiction right now specifically product addiction we know how the brain becomes hooked on stuff and we can use that power for good instead of for evil many people actually are doing this we teach the 100 day journey in the incubator and yeah it does tie into personal six-week challenges so that's a great start long term you need more than pub crawls in the open to keep people around and you can download our retention guide for free by clicking the link below this competition you might not know about so how many gym owners are eyeballing the big chains or other local hip gyms they should really be looking at the fastest-growing sector of coaching which is online workouts tied to equipment now you and I know it's not the same thing as the coaching we provide but in the clients mind they're still paying for coaching peloton is the most popular example but if you haven't heard of Swift trainer Road the sufferfest Strava I'll spare you the whole list then you're missing the elephant in the room most treadmill manufacturers are positioning their equipment as part of the program instead of as a mere product for a one-time purchase most blood testing companies realize they can sell a coaching program or a diet on the back end and make more money many supplement companies are now getting their workout plans and unlocking them when you buy the protein powder or whatever so on Wednesday I'll write about how to literally turn all of this around and get these ideas working for you but if you want to read more about why these technologies are so addictive and see some cool screenshots you can read don't fear the cyber which I wrote almost exactly a year ago today and there's a link below coaching is about soft skills the industry has always been dominated by tactical coaching courses and weekend seminars like here's how to coach the snatch better or here's how to apply the zone diet but education on the soft skills how to greet people how to keep them around how to tailor a group workout to the individual how to speak in front of people has always been sorely lacking in 2019 the most remarkable shift in business thought leadership is that the soft skills are the real skills they're what matter that means coaches should be excellent at speaking in public they should be warm and encouraging and focus on getting the client to come back tomorrow the old coaches who loudly show I ain't here to be no cheerleader are mostly gone most of the great cheerleaders are still around Josh Martin one of our gifted to rain mentors has built an amazing program for developing coaches he starts with the skills they'll need to deliver a program any program one-on-one then he teaches them how to deliver a program to a group then he teaches them how to program one-on-one and then how to program for a group using data instead of novelty it's brilliant it's simple and it's backed by an insurance underwriter I've put all my coaches through the first two degrees of Josh's program Josh is method agnostic so you can use CrossFit or bootcamp or any other tool to train people Pilates bar yoga I think every coach should start with this gyms need to be better at selling if you've followed our blog you've probably noticed an uptick in posts and videos about selling because this is where most gym owners fail I wrote help first to provide the philosophy and strategy of selling as helping but after going through a mountain of data we realized that we need to publish tactics scripts and support so we've got our YouTube channel now and we've got a huge blog series on building a sales engine and you can get that by clicking the link below in short the data that we looked at went like this gym owner is you know good at closing warm leaves friends of clients always want to sign up when they visit for the first time but their visits are too infrequent and the referral rate is way through passive most of us just wait around instead of taking control of referrals then the gym owner starts marketing new leads start coming in first leads are warm you know the gym owner doesn't sign up everyone but he or she signs up a ton of people then the gym owner continues marketing because hey it's working right the leaves get colder and a lower percentage sign up and the gym owner starts noticing a lot of no-shows and cancellations and because the gym owner is not good at sales their conversion rate starts to drop to usually like 10 to 30 percent we can help by boosting conversion rates then by improving show rates for appointments then by improving set rates for leads coming from ads basically we walk up the funnel from the bottom and fix everything as we go we actually rebuilt the incubator in 2019 to accomplish this better finally the flywheel must be round or the massive pile of data we've identified six areas where gyms must improve when a gym owner fixes one of these areas that's awesome his or her business flywheel turns a couple of degrees but if one area is lacking the wheel goes flat mail the owner can push and push with the wheel won't turn so here's my series on building an unstoppable business with links for YouTube and for the blog down below now in the incubator we round out that flywheel with proven systems and tactics and then in growth phase we push the six handles on your wheel to make it turn faster and faster and grow your business these are the six levers that you can push to grow and data supports this theory any coaching program any book any strategy that doesn't take all six handles into account will just create a flat tire for you to sum it all up the future is bright as 2019 ends I'm more excited than ever I think first-time entrepreneurs can make an amazing living in the fitness industry I don't thi
k fitness entrepreneurs have to become slimy bait and switch marketers I don't think they have to sell Shady supplements to make a decent income these are all new opportunities I think they can do all the right things for all the right people for all the right reasons and still become wealthy