Behind Gym Doors | A Fitness Business Podcast

Stop guessing your gym marketing budget. Mike Arce walks through the exact formula: CAC x Sales Target = what you should spend. Some owners set their gym marketing budget at 10% of revenue. Others spend whatever is left in the bank. Both start in the wrong place. The better move is to pick the result you want first, then work out what it costs to get there. The formula is two numbers: your custome...

Amy charges $49 a month at her Omaha fitness studio. Mike shows her live why to raise prices, who to charge more, and how to sell it. Amy opened Bounce Culture Fitness in Omaha in March 2025. She has 120 members and does about $9,768 a month in revenue. The average boutique fitness studio in America charges $164 a month. At that same gym membership pricing, Amy's same 120 members would be worth cl...

CrossFit Elkhorn keeps gym churn under 4% with 233 members. Here's the weekly scorecard, class standard, and coach scoring system behind it. The average CrossFit gym churns members far faster than that. Trevor Baxter has run CrossFit Elkhorn in Omaha, Nebraska for 12 years, and his gym churn rate sits at 3.85% for the year, which means his average member stays close to 29 months. Mike visited the...

Stephanie Swanson's boutique fitness studio growth story starts with a simple problem: she did not know her own numbers. Stephanie owns Oxygen Yoga and Fitness in Burlington, Ontario, and just opened a second location in Alder Shot, already at 50 pre-sales in under two weeks. In her first 60 days working with GSD Gyms, her revenue grew 15%, hitting close to $73,000 in a single month. In this episo...

This is part of how we help gym owners build ad systems like Joel's. See the plan here: https://100kplan.com   Joel Holland never ran a gym ad in 14 years. He used AI to build his first campaign. $3 cost per lead. 84 leads in 10 days. Here's how.   This gym Facebook ads using AI breakdown starts with Joel Holland, who runs 902 Athletics, a 17,000 square foot CrossFit and commercial gym in a 9,000...

Matt charges $600 a month, keeps under 2% churn, and earns $30K per member. Here's his exact gym sales and referral system. This gym membership sales case study starts with the math. The average gym member in America is worth $1,400 over their lifetime. Matt's average member is worth $30,000. Same math, completely different numbers: under 2% monthly churn, more than 50 months of average retention,...

Mike coaches a struggling Pilates studio owner on phone sales live: avatar building, referral strategy, and a real walk-in prospect. This pilates studio sales coaching session picks up where Part 1 left off. In Part 1, Mike walked through Jess Landar's churn, lifetime value, and pricing. In Part 2, they build her customer avatar, run a full gym sales role play on her actual phone script, and desig...

Struggling pilates studio owner goes viral asking for help -- Mike Arce coaches her live on numbers, retention, ads, and pricing. Jess Landar runs a struggling pilates studio in Auckland, New Zealand. She posted on Instagram that she needed help, so Mike reached out and turned it into a live gym business audit. This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Her studio peaked at $15,000 NZD a month and had d...

Fixing gym Facebook ads conversion tracking is part of how we get studios to $100K a month. Your ads manager sees fifty leads on one ad and six on another, calls the fifty-lead ad the winner, and kills the other one before ever checking what happened next. That is the blind spot behind most gym ad optimization strategy decisions. When your CRM and your Meta ads manager never talk past the lead sta...

Want to see how we help gyms get to $100K a month? Here's the plan the best gym owners are following right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMPx7b3_LOA Your ad agency did not lose you that member. Something else did, and it happened long before the ad ever ran. Paid ads get blamed for problems they did not cause. A great ad still fails if your Google reviews look shaky, if leads sit for hours...

Curious what it actually looks like to build with us? Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMPx7b3_LOA Mike found a competitor a mile and a half from one of his gyms. She has no idea he is watching. Studying competitors sounds like copying. It is actually the fastest way to find out where you already win and nobody else has noticed. One studio in this breakdown has 458 five star reviews, an...

Curious what it actually looks like to build with AI instead of just talking about it? Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMPx7b3_LOA   856 members. Under 3 percent churn most months. One hire changed how this gym runs everything.   Everyone assumes AI adoption means fewer people on payroll. Dave Rafuse spent more, not less, because the tool only pays off when someone builds it into the b...

Want to see how we help gyms get to $100K a month? Here's the plan the best gym owners are following right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMPx7b3_LOA Your ads aren't failing because of your audience. They're failing because of nine fixable mistakes most gym owners don't even know they're making. And the agencies running those ads may not be telling you. You are probably paying your agency to...

Here's the plan the best gym owners are following right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMPx7b3_LOA The gyms winning with AI right now are not using it to write emails. They built a machine learning algorithm that predicts who's about to cancel. They fired their ad agency and their bookkeeper. They have an AI employee living in Slack that nobody on the team can tell isn't human. Pav spent 20...

🔥 Fire Your Ad Agency — LIVE Workshop for Gym Owners — June 16th, 1pm PT Learn why most gym ad agencies are costing you more than they're making you — and what to do instead. Limited seats.  Register → GSDlive.com —————————————————— You're spending money on ads. The targeting is right. The creative is solid. And the leads still aren't coming in the way they should. It's not the ad. It's what happ...

🔥 Fire Your Ad Agency — LIVE Workshop for Gym Owners — June 16th, 1pm PT Learn why most gym ad agencies are costing you more than they're making you — and what to do instead. Limited seats. Register → GSDlive.com —————————————————— Two gyms. Same city. Both doing $1 million a year. One sells for $1.2 million. The other can't find a buyer. Same revenue. Completely different outcomes. Most gym owne...

🔥 Fire Your Ad Agency — LIVE Workshop for Gym Owners — June 16th, 1pm PT Learn why most gym ad agencies are costing you more than they're making you — and what to do instead.  Limited seats. Register → GSDlive.com —————————————————— Your pricing sheet is losing you sales every single day. Not your staff. Not your pitch. Your sheet. And the fix takes less than an hour. Most gym owners build their...

🔥 Fire Your Ad Agency — LIVE Workshop for Gym Owners — June 16th, 1pm PT Learn why most gym ad agencies are costing you more than they're making you, and what to do instead. Limited seats. Register → GSDlive.com —————————————————— Your gym's Instagram is probably growing the wrong audience. The more you post, the worse it gets. The likes feel good but the results don't lie. Most gym owners have b...

🔥 Fire Your Ad Agency — LIVE Workshop for Gym Owners — June 16th, 1pm PT Learn why most gym ad agencies are costing you more than they're making you — and what to do instead. Limited seats. Register → GSDlive.com —————————————————— Right now, some gym owners are waking up to leads already followed up, books already closed, ads already optimized, and payroll already processed. They didn't hire mor...

🔥 Fire Your Ad Agency — LIVE Workshop for Gym Owners — June 16th, 1pm PT Learn why most gym ad agencies are costing you more than they're making you — and what to do instead. Limited seats. Register → GSDlive.com —————————————————— 80% of gyms are making at least half of these mistakes. And the brutal part? They're subtle. You won't catch them on your own. But once you see them, you can't unsee t...

🚨 LIVE AI Workshop for Gym Owners — April 30th, 2pm PT / 5pm ET Learn how to use A.I. to get more leads and members at your gym — without being a tech person. Limited seats. Register → GSDlive.com —————————————————— Think about your team right now. If someone quit today and you felt relieved — that's a C player. If someone quit and you panicked — that's an A player. Most gym owners already know w...

🚨 LIVE AI Workshop for Gym Owners — April 30th, 2pm PT / 5pm ET Learn how to use A.I. to get more leads and members at your gym — without being a tech person. Limited seats. Register → GSDlive.com —————————————————— Most gyms are leaking money. They just don't know where. And the reason isn't bad marketing or a weak sales team. It's that most gym owners are working on the wrong things, while the...

🚨 LIVE AI Workshop for Gym Owners — April 30th, 2pm PT / 5pm ET Learn how to use A.I. to get more leads and members at your gym — without being a tech person. Limited seats. Register → GSDlive.com —————————————————— Most gym owners think the sale happens at the close. It doesn't. By the time you're showing the pricing sheet, it's already done — or it's already lost. In this episode, Mike Arce sit...

Your gym staff isn't bad at sales. You just never gave them what they actually need to close. In this episode, Mike Arce breaks down the CPT Sales Machine — the 3-part framework behind the gyms GSD works with that consistently hit 80%+ close rates , even as they raise prices. Here's the hard truth most gym owners miss: you're great at sales because you have conviction no employee will ever natural...

You just lost another sale. The lead came in, they seemed interested, and then you got hit with one of these ... "let me think about it," "it's a little out of my budget," "I need to talk to my spouse." So you did what most people do. You went to YouTube, practiced your rebuttals, maybe bought a book on closing. And the next lead sat down...and you got the exact same objections. Here's what nobody...