Gym Business Coach Podcast

If you find yourself in a position where revenues in your gym business have stagnated month over month and year after year, something has to change. You probably need a paid ads strategy to force growth. As Tim and Randy have said many times in this podcast, you need multiple poles in the water to catch fitness clients in the marketplace. Paid advertising, without a doubt, is the only predictable...

Reoccurring monthly revenue is one of the best things about a fitness business, especially when you build it up to a number much higher than your base operating expenses. When you are at this point, your life changes. You don’t have to worry about covering upcoming expenses. You just focus on growth. This is actually the ethos of the Business Accelerator Coaching Program for Gym Owners. Unfortunat...

There are some gym owners out there who still think that there is some kind of magic marketing hook or photo that will bring them all these high-quality clients, and they'll end up making a lot of money. That's the wrong way to think about it. We are well past that type of homerun marketing that worked many years ago. These types of marketing campaigns might lead to a high volume of leads...

We've all experienced a situation where a prospect books a consultation at the gym and fails to show up. As frustrating as that can be, it's important to interrogate the reasons why some people just dont show up. Forgot about the flimsy reasons you might have heard…. some will even say they forgot the appointment. Tim and Randy believe the main reason why they don't show up is a loss o...

There are several reasons why you might not be charging enough for your services in your gym business. But the primary reason is that clients can't differentiate what you offer from your competition, so they just go to the cheapest. Your deliverable in your gym must look, smell and feel different from the others if you are to charge enough for your services. And always remember, we are not sel...

Today we hit a very proud milestone for the podcast. We are at episode 400. We are grateful for all gym owners who tune in twice a week to listen to Tim and Randy as they help you win this fitness business game. Thank you for all the feedback, reviews, and social media posts. We appreciate you. To celebrate this milestone, we polled members in the Business Talk with Fitness Professionals Facebook...

Someone recently asked in our Business Talk with Fitness Professionals Group how a gym owner can tell if their service is good enough. The premise of this question comes from the fact that we all get those comments/complaints/suggestions from our clients on what we should do to improve our service. In some cases, these comments are helpful as they help us deliver a better experience. But in some c...

One of the biggest reasons why clients cancel their gym memberships is change. Clients generally don’t like change. It doesn’t matter if the change is positive; some people will always complain about it and leave. Here at our gym, we recently undertook a major remodel where we changed everything. Unfortunately, this led to a massive loss of clients. The good thing is some clients were coming back...

You must have heard of the AI writing tool that has taken the internet by storm. ChatGPT is an interesting tool that gym owners can leverage to create all manner of content for their business. You can use it for website content, blog posts, emails, sales copy, meal plans, and all client communications. Granted, there is no perfect AI tool, but ChatGPT is damn close. It will do all the heavy liftin...

A new generation of workers is entering the job market, and as gym owners, we need to be prepared on how best to work with them. Gen Z is unlike any other generation we have had before. They are even different from the millennials. The reality is that they are with us now in the workforce, and we better understand what drives them. This generation grew up with full access to the internet, screens,...

In the fitness business space, there are 3 types of training concepts. You can either have one-on-one personal training, semi-private personal training, or large group training/class-based concept. Most gyms are running the large group concepts, but as we have talked about numerous times in this podcast, the semi-private model is better for different reasons. One of these reasons is that you can p...

There are two trains of thought on the best way to sell gym/personal training memberships. On the one hand, some people believe in collecting as much money as possible, even if it means giving a discount on the memberships. On the other hand, we have the recurring subscription model where you have some money coming in from your base memberships every month. In our considered opinion, the recurring...

It’s that time of the year when many gym owners are planning and setting goals for the year ahead. You probably did the same thing last year and hit some goals and missed others. The question is, where do you want to see yourself at the end of 2023? Having interacted with thousands of gym owners in our coaching programs, the No. 1 reason why many are unlikely to achieve the goals they set for them...

January is an interesting month for many gym businesses. There’s this misconception that we have a rush on new clients coming into our facilities, but in reality, we are just recovering the numbers we lost over December. For many typical gyms, the February numbers mirror those they had in November. As for the New Year resolution crowd, we all know that most of them don’t stick long enough. If you...

As a gym owner, you took on considerable risk when you decided to open a gym. Hopefully, the risk paid off, and now you are reaping the rewards in the form of profits. Now what? Do you go buying toys with this profit, or do you use them in a way that serves you long term? In this episode, Tim and Randy share some tips on how you can invest your profits to grow and multiply your wealth. The first p...

2022 was a recovery year for the fitness industry from all the effects of the COVID pandemic and the shutdowns we all had to endure the previous years. Unfortunately, around 30% of brick-and-mortar gyms didn’t make it.   So, what does 2023 hold for our industry? Tim and Randy have some predictions for the new year, and going by previous predictions, most of these will not be off the mark. The grea...

In this episode, we go through some data from a state of the fitness industry report that gives an interesting insight into how gyms and gym owners are faring in this industry. Some of the statistics in this report are scary, but some opportunities become apparent when you read through the report. More than 10,600 gyms globally offered data for this report. Most of these were CrossFit-style class-...

We are coming to the start of the new year, and it’s that time when many gym owners are inundated with whiz-bang marketing campaigns that promise to bring in hundreds of new members to their businesses. But Tim and Randy believe that this is the wrong way to go about it. Focusing on these marketing campaigns that bring in an influx of new clients is just a recipe for chaos. Instead, we recommend t...

When it comes to a fitness business, it's not rocket science; the path is simple if you just follow the math. Unfortunately, many gym owners we come across tend to have an emotional attachment to their business which hinders their decision-making. A case in point is a gym owner in our Iron Circle who doesn't want to increase the rates of old members who are on much lower rates than newer m...

For the longest time, fitness marketing has only targeted a small population segment. This small segment lives at the top of the fitness awareness triangle. You can think of it as the warm traffic that readily responds to a fitness ad and is likely to change gym membership from one gym to another fairly frequently. At the bottom of the fitness awareness triangle is the vast population who don’t ev...

Quality leads are, without a doubt, the lifeline of a successful fitness business. No gym owner can ever claim to have a 100% retention rate, which means we need leads to have the desired membership at any time. The question then is, how much money are you paying for your leads? In this episode, Tim and Randy share a powerful strategy we use here and with our coaching clients. With this strategy,...

Today on the show, Tim and Randy have the pleasure of interviewing Shawn Hanquist, a financial advisor and founder of FIT CFO. Shawn works with gym owners and online fitness coaches to help them understand their P&L numbers, balance sheet, and all those other financial  numbers. As a gym owner, the only way to measure the health of your business is through financial reports. Yet, for some reas...

One common mistake gym owners make in the business is trying to create roles to fit in people rather than fulfilling roles. A case in point is something we hear a lot; a gym owner is approached by someone like a nutritionist or a dietician who wants to partner with the business. The gym owner now goes out of their way to create this role. This happens with other services as well. We all know that...

In our many interactions with gym owners through our coaching programs, there’s one theme we keep seeing repeating over and over. When things get a bit tough in the business, many gym owners find themselves going back to the comfort zone of the training floor. This is what they love and have done for years before they decided to become an entrepreneur. Nobody can begrudge you from doing what you l...

I don't know about your area, but there seem to be more gyms opening at a rate we've not seen before. Gym after gym popping up and grand openings all around. What does this mean for current gym owners? It means we've got to up our game to beat the increased competition. And the only to do so is by leaning on the experience clients get in your business. Everybody is offering fitness, bu...