Gym Business Coach Podcast

One of the biggest challenges in the fitness industry is keeping staff long-term. The latest stats show that the career length of a personal trainer is less than one year. Historically, we’ve had a very high turnover as an industry which is a pain for a lot of gym owners. In fact, the fitness industry has the highest turnover of all industries. There are many theories advanced as to why trainers g...

As this year comes to a close, we have one question for you; did you achieve what you set out to achieve at the beginning of the year in your business? If you didn't, take a hard look at yourself because, at the end of the day, if you don't do anything, nothing will ever change. As gym owners, we sometimes hold our clients to a higher standard than we normally hold ourselves. If our client...

How easy is it for your clients to do business with you? Are they facing friction at any point in their journey? Most business owners don’t understand where potential customers and even existing ones struggle while doing business with them. In this episode, Tim and Randy are talking about inefficiencies in business and how they impact profitability. In the case of a gym owner, you should constantl...

We have talked many times in this podcast about the numerous benefits of the semi-private fitness training model. We believe in this model and have made a full transition in our training facility. We have also helped a lot of gym owners transition through our coaching program. In this episode, Zach and Tim discuss how we transitioned over the years to where we are now. Zach has been the Fitness Di...

How do I run semi-private training for six clients and not have all six doing the same thing? This is the question many gym owners ask. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it actually is. Why? Because many gym owners don't have a system and structure in place, and they are just leaving their coaches to decide what to do. That scenario makes gym owners vulnerable because if a coach is not real...

Ask any gym owner about the least favorite part of their job, and you'll likely find quite a few of them talk about hiring team members. It has always been a challenge in our industry, but the past couple of years have been tough. In this episode, Tim and Randy are joined by Karen Broadwater. She's the president of Iron Tribe Fitness, with 31 locations, and she's also a member of the I...

If you want to run a successful fitness business, you have to know your numbers. If you don’t know the numbers, then you don’t have a business. As a matter of fact, this is one of the major differences we see in our coaching program between successful gym owners and those who struggle. In this episode, Tim and Randy break down some of the numbers you should know and explain why. You don’t have to...

We are in the process of rebranding our gym, Pulse Fitness, into Legacy Personal Training. We've invested $500,000 into this rebrand with repainting, flooring, equipment, and lighting. It's just a brand-new facility. While we were able to raise most of this capital out of pocket, we also had an ingenious way that you should hear about. We've not heard of any other fitness facility doin...

Today, we have a question for you… Why on earth do we in the fitness industry feel like we have to give away some of our services for free in order to attract clients? I mean, scroll through your social media feed and notice that all fitness ads have something promised for free. It might be a free week, free consultation, free sessions, etc. There’s always something in there for free. This rarely...

As a fitness entrepreneur, you will likely suffer from a lack of motivation at some point in your journey. It is common, especially when everything is going well and there seems to be a lack of excitement or challenges to solve. That’s when the fun fades, and we start feeling tired of what we do. One of the ways to stay moving when you don’t have the motivation is to remember your why. If you have...

To succeed in a gym business, you need to nail four systems: Attraction – Marketing Systems Conversion - Sales systems Delivery systems Ascension systems In today’s episode, Tim and Randy give you an overview of the ascension system, where you get somebody from never hearing about you to buying your highest ticket offer. This is a big part of our coaching program, where we help gym owners create a...

When was the last time you celebrated achieving a milestone in your gym? Let me take a guess… You’ve probably never even thought about it. If you are like the average gym owner we see in our various programs, you don’t even know when you hit a significant milestone. I, too, was unaware of this when I started out in the industry. Part of the reason why people in the fitness industry hesitate to cel...

In the fitness industry, we generally don't talk a lot about attrition. It's common to hear people talk about how they signed on an X amount of members but rarely will you ever hear about the cancelations. Yet, this is a huge reality in our industry. There is no single gym that has 0% attrition. No matter how good your service is, some clients will always leave for reasons beyond your cont...

$1 Million in revenue is a big milestone in the fitness industry and, indeed, for many small businesses. It’s an important number that perhaps indicates the business is thriving and destined for even greater things. For most gym owners, this is an elusive number that seems to be far away.  In this episode, Tim and Randy demystify the math behind achieving $1 million in reoccurring revenue. It’s no...

When somebody walks into a Burger King, they will give their order among all the options available. The staff there just take the order and deliver what the customer wants. In fitness, this shouldn’t be the case at all. We are not order takers; rather, we are the experts who should be guiding our clients on what’s best for them. When clients walk in for a starting point session or a sales consulta...

Large group training, boot camp, and class-based fitness is a large red ocean, and the only way to compete in a red ocean is through price. This post we recently put up in our Business Talk with Fitness Professionals elicited a lot of debate. Some people felt it was inaccurate because they have done large group training for a long time and find it okay. But the point is, in class-based fitness or...

Black Friday is around the corner, and as usual, we want you to sell as much as possible this year. This is a time when people are conditioned to buy and are on the lookout for offers. They are ready to spend money, and you just have to give them a compelling offer. The thing with Black Friday is that you can’t wait for long; you need to start preparing early. You’ve got to get your email lists re...

Three years ago, in episode 50 of this podcast, we warned gym owners about the damage caused by the 6-Week Challenge type of marketing. We outlined the great damage it caused to a fitness business and why it wasn’t worth it. It then came as a surprise to us when on a call with a gym owner heard that this type of thing is still going around, and some people are falling for it.  Upon further inquiry...

Fitness is one of the few industries where most people are so close-minded they don't want to share anything with one another. Maybe the inherently competitive nature of the industry makes gym owners wrongly believe that sharing knowledge with one another will somehow be disadvantageous. We know this because we have also been there with this abundance vs. scarcity mindset. But, once we learned...

Ask any gym owner what they’d want for their gym right now…. a vast majority of them would say more clients. But at the same time, one of the hardest things most owners have a hard time conceptualizing is how to make their gyms different from all others in the marketplace. This is important because, in the eyes of the consumer, if all gyms look the same and seem to offer the same service, they’ll...

Brick-and-mortar gyms continue to face increasing competition from online and other fitness business models. But we have one giant advantage over all these other options that we should be exploiting to blow the competition away. The need for human-to-human interaction will never go away. We offer our clients this interaction and the great experience that comes with it. Unfortunately, gyms never fu...

There are those times in business or life, in general, we feel like everything is going great. We tend to pull our feet off the gas, soak in the feeling, and coast through these times. But we always advise gym owners that whenever they have a winning strategy, whenever your marketing is doing well and you are hitting those sales targets, it's time to press on the gas. This builds momentum, and...

In this episode, Tim and Randy give you a sneak peek at what happens during our coaching calls with gym owners. We help many gym owners in our coaching program with various problems they face in their businesses and help them win. Among the most frequent issues we hear include how gym owners can remove themselves from the day-to-day of running their business. In this call, a gym owner couple wante...

We live in an age where you can reach out to anybody in an instant. Some of these people have the knowledge and information you want to solve a problem. But do you just reach out to them and ask them for it as many people do? We don’t think so.  The expectation that somebody would stop what they are doing to help you is wrong. People are busy, and their time is valuable. The easiest way to get som...

Last month had 5 Mondays, a great opportunity for businesses that run a weekly billing cycle to collect more revenue than in other months. But this can prove challenging if you run a weekly or biweekly payroll schedule. In some months, you can easily find P&L reading negative due to higher-than-normal expenses. The solution to this problem is surprisingly simple. It lies in fixing your base op...