The Fit to Grit Cast
Fit to Grit is an audio/video/newsletter hybrid featuring in-depth conversations with leadership within the athletic space. Guests range from top executives within the athletic space to professionals in adjacent industries with a proven track record of success working in the athletic industry.
We explore visionary ideas and practical strategies driving the industry forward, covering areas such as marketing, finance, branding, equipment, product development, biz dev, and more. Join us as we share actionable insights and real-world experiences while embodying the "fit to grit" spirit.
The Fit to Grit Cast
The Key to Sustainable Marketing Success
Struggling to balance the urgent with the essential in your gym's marketing strategy? Discover how to master the art of balancing short-term wins with long-term growth in this enlightening episode of the Gym Break Cast. We unravel the complex relationship between chasing immediate results and securing sustainable success by exploring the pitfalls of short-term gratification. Learn why understanding your operational expenses and marketing budgets can mean the difference between fleeting success and a thriving fitness franchise.
Do you find yourself chasing quick fixes, only to feel stuck in a cycle of desperation? This episode guides you through the validation phase of a gym business, explaining how to set meaningful short-term goals that support your long-term vision. We offer actionable strategies for increasing client numbers in the early stages and progressing toward sustainable development. By sharing real-world examples, we illustrate how these early wins can fuel your reinvestment into operations and marketing, ultimately driving your gym toward lasting success.
Lowering churn rates is more than just a numbers game; it's about understanding your members and their needs. We dig into the intricacies of reducing churn from 10% to 5% using targeted marketing strategies like referral programs and email campaigns. But that's not all—we also invite you to explore your gym's unique value, pondering how to balance service volume and value to align with your business objectives. Tune in to transform your fitness business with visionary ideas that empower you to succeed in the ever-evolving fitness industry.
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://creatitive.com/fit-to-grit-cast/
When you're in the mindset of instant gratification and or desperation, you take risky moves and you follow those marketing tactics that are going to lead to inevitable failure. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Gym Break cast, where we go through all those awesome visionary ideas that come to us while we go through our daily gym break. I want to kind of talk over something that I've been thinking about the last day. As you know, yesterday we talked a lot about the difference between agencies and marketing directors, what is the best time for you to hire, and something that I talk very heavily within that cast is we talk a lot about the different types of needs when you need a marketing director, when you need an agency to work with. And today I kind of want to dive a little bit more into one of the topics that, like I said, I was thinking about quite heavily last night, which is really defining your short-term goals compared to your long-term goals, and we're going to kind of push this in much more of marketing. We're going to talk about marketing and branding and how those really signify during different growth phases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Throughout this cast, I'm really hoping that you'll gain a deeper understanding and start to prioritize what it really means to have short-term goals and or satisfaction versus those long-term growth goals that start to build a much more consistent growth and help you build your boutique studio, whether you're you know one, two, three, seven, franchise marketing director, whatever you are how this can kind of help you take that next level, depending on what you're doing or you're trying to grow. And I really want to take away three main points when it comes to utilizing your short-term goals versus your long-term goals, in reality, you do need both. You do need your short-term goals, you do need your long-term goals, you do need your short-term goals, you do need your long-term goals.
Speaker 1:And I think that the problem that I see arise quite often is what I kind of said a little bit earlier I hinted at it which is a lot of people look at those short-term goals and they're really striving for instant gratification. What do I mean by this? Well, let's say you're a gym owner and we're just going to pick a number here. Let's say you're making 350K a year and or you're a director and you're, you know, work with the multiple locations and you're trying to get your numbers up. You're trying to get your membership numbers up Shortterm goal, looking at the top line revenue. Right, you're probably going to put yourself in a position where and what I hear all the time and I'll just use an example of what I hear from a lot of prospects, which kind of grinds my gears just a little bit, because it, to me, showcases quite fast this prospect has no idea how to run a business or how to grow a business. And being in marketing, it's even harder because, if you remember what we talked about yesterday about operational expenses and utilizing marketing budget, you need to really have your operations. I'm not going to say 100%, because operations are never 100%, but you need to have a clear understanding of your budget. And so that short-term gratification comes in. And I hear a lot of the prospects that come into the door say something along the lines of we need 100 leads fast.
Speaker 1:Now, when is a short-term gratification like a short-term goal? Now, when is a short-term gratification like a short-term goal? Well, if you were just launching a gym, and hopefully you prepared, you created a business plan, you looked at your area, you understand the market that you're working with, you strategically picked a location, blah, blah, blah. But if you haven't, that's where this urgency comes into play. And so, when you're in the mindset of instant gratification and or desperation, you take risky moves and you follow those marketing tactics that are going to lead to inevitable failure. You know business. If business was easy, we'd all be able to grow these overnight. I'm hoping these podcasts and these future videos at least somewhat help you a little bit gain clarity in the direction and the ideas that you're going.
Speaker 1:But back to short-term goals versus short-term instant gratification, right? So, looking at short-term goals, why it's different than having short-term gratification? Well, sometimes you're going to be put in a place where you are going to have to have urgency. You're going to have to go out there and say, hey, we need 50 new clients today, we need to fill this classroom by the end of the week. We need to fill, we need to, you know, double our membership within the next month. And those short-term goals are going to be something that may be needed for particular stages of gyms.
Speaker 1:Let me give you a good example of how a short-term goal like this can really benefit a gym and how it's not really just instant gratification. Well, let's say you're new. Let's say you're new. Let's say you don't have that much money to spend. Let's say that you are, what I would like to say, stage one of gym ownership, which is, you know, anywhere from zero to 250k a year, and that range is just a little bit, but it's that stage for a reason, right Within the brick and mortar setting, you're going to be in a situation where you're pre-launch or you are validating your services. Just because you have a business plan doesn't necessarily mean the audience is going to be justified to that. So look at it as a learning experience. So let's say that you are 250.
Speaker 1:I consider that validation phase. You're still kind of figuring out the members. You're still trying to just hire, you know, probably 1099 trainers. You probably don't have many staff on board to help with admin or operations because you just don't have many staff on board to help with admin or operations, because you just don't have the budget to do it. That's why validation phase is so great and why, back to what I was talking about yesterday with social media ads, why that's a good time for you to do social media ads, why it's a good time for you to test the waters. Are you going to have a 50% close rate? That would be a justification of a short-term goal. You probably are going to bring in a thousand people. You're going to do a crap load of challenges, try to get people in the door, try to start building up that reputation. You're going to have lots of errors, lots of trial and error, lots of changes still, but you need to validate your pricing, you need to validate your services, and the only way you can do that 100% is by testing the market. And so the reason 250K a year is a good mark for studios of any size to really start testing that is because it helps them kind of start to make it to the next level.
Speaker 1:This is actually where a lot of people get stuck. A lot of studios get stuck in the validation phase. It's because they think validation phase, they're just stuck in it, they can't make any more money because they're not validating their services and their market and they're not being able to push forward. I mean, I have a very similar situation within the marketing industry as well, but it happens for everyone at different price points, more so than in different industries. But there's always a validation phase. And so I actually tell prospects that come to us they're like we need a new brand identity, we need to build culture, we need to develop leadership. We need to create a great web presence with SEO and or Google advertisement. Well, you could still validate your services with this stuff, but that's much more of a long-term goal.
Speaker 1:Now, getting back to what I was talking about, you need to find your sweet spot right. Your short-term goals are going to be how can we do discounts? You're probably going to have a lot of inconsistent branding, inconsistent methods when it comes to your messaging, when it comes to your systems, because really, you're just testing a whole bunch of stuff out. And the reason people get stuck in this situation because they continue to have short term goals. They don't have a long term vision, align with where they want to take it and they don't really adapt to the evolution of how the business is going to evolve within different stages of their development. A sweet spot is kind of having both right. So you kind of start looking at around the 250 mark.
Speaker 1:Hey, how can we have a long term vision? What is the vision? Where do we want to take this studio In five years? You can think big. You can say I want three to seven locations. Don't think too big, because then it's going to be unattainable, which will lead us to our next thing. But I want to kind of give you examples, just cut short down, depending on what stage you're at in the development of your studio. So some examples of short term goals. You know, like I said earlier, you're trying to fill a class this week. You're trying to just bring on members so that you can bring on some income, so you could start putting more money towards the growth of the gym if it be operations, finance, leadership, branding, marketing initiatives and then you have your long-term goals.
Speaker 1:Something that I'm very big on is, even if you have a long-term vision of open seven locations, you have this whole community around you. Depending on the size and the location you open this studio at, you have a plethora of 1 to 10 million people that you may be able to work with. So a long-term vision would be increasing brand awareness in your local community, starting to build a much more loyal customer base, advocacy, working on client retention. Those are long-term goals. So when you put that in the plethora of marketing and branding, you have to take that into consideration as well. What is my short-term goal? We need to bring on 50 members tomorrow. I'm not going to say tomorrow we need to fill this type of class in the next we'll say month, most likely.
Speaker 1:What I recommend in that case is you probably would do some social media ads. Hit as many people as possible, it doesn't matter the audience. Hit as many people. You're probably going to have a low conversion rate, a low opt-in rate. Your retention's probably not going to be the best, but at least you'll bring in income to help kind of do that.
Speaker 1:Next hire, focus on those operations, focus on that really long-term marketing initiative. Long-term example would be maybe you very similar to a workshop from my perspective and speaking and going out, you do a training session. And speaking and going out, you do a training session. You do a large training session that's free. That may not necessarily build any clientele. You don't do any sort of gimmicky offers. But some other good examples are from a marketing perspective, is SEO war marketing? So look at it from that perspective cold marketing versus war marketing.
Speaker 1:When you're hitting people, you're hitting people. It's a numbers game. You're hitting the wall with. You're hitting people. It's a numbers game. You're hitting the wall with. You're throwing the paint on the wall until something sticks. You do need to do that when you're at the very beginning of your location to bring members in.
Speaker 1:But there comes a time when a sustainable type model it can go hand in hand or it can go after the fact You're probably going to have less members. You're going to go through a value of death period within the business, which I will say we'll talk about on a different video but you start focusing on much more attention. How do we increase retention? And that's a long-term goal, right, because how are you going to see those numbers? Until you start bringing the data in on your people and saying what's working and what's not. If your members aren't getting satisfied, you need to start collecting data to see why, so you can improve. And that's when the long-term marketing initiatives actually have bigger bang for their buck, because you can get to a point where you're like oh, we know that we get 10 reviews or, most likely through the statistics, one of those people that give us a review are probably going to refer one friend or two friends that match our values, and so you start seeing some of those low, what you would consider like tasks to be much more suitable for the long term growth of your studio. So there is a way you can balance both and we kind of just talked about it a little bit here.
Speaker 1:You need to set realistic expectations and measure your goals for both timeframes. What's your 10-year goal? What's your five-year goal? What's your one-year goal? Knowing that your 10-year goal is gonna be a little bit more vague could shift, could change, depending on where you're at in your personal vision and your personal evolution. That's another topic for another day as well. I personally use the BHAG method Big, very Audacious Goal. It's an EOS type system which works very well for marketing directors and for business owners that are looking to understand operations and push operations a little bit better. So think about it in that term. How do you come up with those goals? And think about it in that terminology. You may have a business developer help you. I mean marketing directors can have their own BHAGs, your leadership, your general manager, around the same vision. You should start having leadership, having their own goals and what they're trying to achieve and, at the end of the day, the goals are going to be the things that you can start attaching KPIs to.
Speaker 1:Let's prioritize here. Let's pick an easy one for you. Let's talk through both. I'm going to go through and I'm going to give tips and I'm going to do a short-term BHAG versus a long-term BHAG, let's say by the end of the year? Well, let's say this by your 10-year goal, and let's keep it simple. With a 10-year goal, let's say you're not trying to open 100 locations, let's keep it to one location. Just to kind of keep the numbers simple for you guys. Let's say that you want 100 members by the end of the year. Now let's just go off the say it's 12 months.
Speaker 1:Your theme would probably be something along the lines of actually you know, I'm going to change this up a little bit, that one's a little too easy. Let's say we want to lower churn rate. This is going to be one that's going to be a little bit more tricky. So I'm going to enjoy doing this one off the top of my head and see if I can come up with something here for you guys. Let's say you want to lower your churn rate, or you can also call it retention rate if you want to go high numbers here. But you can say lower your churn rate from 10 to 5% Huge numbers, by the way. That's a huge goal to get, especially if you already have, you know, depending on how many locations, depending on how many things you have. But let's just say we have one location, like I said. So you want to lower your churn rate from 10 to 5%. So how do you set a long, that's your long term goal.
Speaker 1:Now we're going to set quarterly themed objectives. They're going to be around that. And because I goal Now we're going to set quarterly themed objectives, they're going to be around that. And because I'm in marketing, we're going to talk about it in a marketing and branding perspective. First quarter short term goal maybe it's defining your audience. That could be, that could be a three month goal where you define audience.
Speaker 1:So how are you going to define audience? Well, first and foremost, you can go through and you can start separating out your members, seeing the classes that are working, the classes that are not. You can start seeing how long these people stay on as membership, how many classes they're taking, how much they hit the top, how much they pay you a year and really how long these people are staying with you. First and foremost, and look at those retention numbers. Now you can separate out the ones that have lower retention from higher retention and start putting those people into a pool that have higher retention and think to yourself OK, let's look at these numbers. What type of people are they? Create kind of custom profiles around those types of people. This could also add on to a much higher goal.
Speaker 1:Is you want to, you know, build brand awareness, because retention is very much based around brand awareness. So you could, first off, by defining your audience internally, having your audience hand in hand. If you're a starting out gym, that's going to be very difficult for you. You can have an example of the types of people you want to work with, unless you've owned a gym before or a studio before. Let's just say this is for people that are looking to just lower a much higher churn rate.
Speaker 1:So, first off, you're going to look at those numbers. You're going to figure out, okay, what's really working here and what's not between these ones. I wouldn't necessarily say cut out the memberships for the ones that don't, but then that's when you can go back and say, all right, that's my first quarter. We're going to just figure it out Operationally. We're going to go through. We're going to figure out, okay, how many people are staying longest, are on that lower churn rate perspective, and what's working for them. How do they come in. Start looking about how those people came into your ecosystem versus the people that did not. There's going to be a lot of similarities, but you're going to be able to pinpoint some of the key objectives there from that.
Speaker 1:So from there you can come up with a marketing strategy, for instance, and say, all right, let's say, for example, you look at at that and you're like, okay, we now have this many. Let's just say, we have 400 members that are under, that are staying longer, right? So now you say, huh, we want to attract those types of people into those same types of classes. This is how you can start positioning yourself too. This is a good way to get the groundwork rolling, to start the positioning game. You start, you know, taking those 400 members and you say, all right, why are they staying? Maybe they're the ones that are hitting email campaigns better. Or you want to take those other 200 and you want to make them part of the 400, which, let's say, 200 of your members are leaving quite fast. So you could go about this in two different ways. You can try to say, all right, my first quarter BHAG is figuring out our target audience. Then you're going to have little things in there. Separate out your audiences, figure out the churn rate, separate them into two categories and then your next quarter goal could be all right, we want to take those audiences and we now want to create rocks or create pebbles whatever you like to call them internal goals from that top goal. We want to start marketing to, we'll say, the 200 ones more effectively and positioning to get them part of the 400.
Speaker 1:What are the 400s doing that the 200s aren't? Maybe the 400s came through friends or referrals, right? So maybe you start taking those 200 and you say, hey, we want to create a referral program where we allow these people to have one year free if they bring two people. Because now what's happening is you're turning a friend of theirs into one of those 400 and you're keeping them on for a year when they were gonna leave in two months anyway. You're now keeping them on for a year as the friends come in to become part of that 400. So you can create a referral partner program.
Speaker 1:You can do that in plethora of ways. You can create an email campaign, say, hey, we're gonna create an email campaign. Say, hey, we're going to create an email campaign where we start working through these 200 people to start helping them. Maybe get a year of free membership, bring in a couple of referrals, there's a whole campaign. You can do around that. You can do email blasts, you can do different touch points where you call them, et cetera, et cetera. Or you can double dip and you can say hey, they've only been here two months. Maybe that's when we need to get them with a review before they leave, after the three months or after the four months. So then you get a review from them, positive review, which could build advocacy for your marketing efforts and your long-term goals, while you're still focusing on the short-term goal of satisfying these members. So that's how you would come up with a short-term goal.
Speaker 1:And maybe that's number two. Maybe you say, hey, simple as creating a referral program and implementing it to these 200 members that are the certain audience, and then the next quarter, and then your next quarter, maybe it's creating. Then it's like, hey, let's create email specific content for these 200 and these 400 so that we can start keeping them engaged longer. Maybe it's oh, maybe we need to create some online content so that we can. Once you start figuring out why they're leaving, you can kind of say, oh, how can we keep them engaged longer outside of the studio as well, and so that's how you start building that. But then that also starts leaning into your long-term goal. You'll that's how you start building that, but then that also starts leaning into your long-term goal.
Speaker 1:You'll start seeing that you're cutting out members. You're getting new members that really match that same type of mythology of the 400 that were retained. They're having that lower churn rate, and that's how you come up with a long-term goal, or a long-term BHAG. Now why do you call it a BHAG? Well, a BHAG is a big, hard, dairy, audacious goal. So you may not get 100, you may not lower it to five, you may lower it to six or you may lower it to seven, but seven's better than keeping it at 10, right, and so look at it as the win. And now you have a system that you can now take and say next time this comes into a situation, we can push on this a little faster, we can do this again. Maybe we do this once a year and it's no longer really a goal, a year-long goal, but maybe it's a standard procedure that now you start separating those out and you start doing that on a normal basis with your manager or whoever you start to hire to take care of that type of stuff. But that's kind of how you know short-term goals and long-term goals can kind of play into effect with each other. There's different kinds of systems that you can look at for long-term goals compared to short-term goals.
Speaker 1:And again, I highly recommend that you don't get too caught up in the instant gratification. There's so much danger that can be revolved around giving a plethora of discounts or starting to build a lot of inconsistency with your brand and what you're trying to do and what you're trying to achieve. For instance, if you say, hey, we need to bring 100 members and we're a $300 a month studio, but you're gonna discount it and basically give for $50 a month just to bring 100 members and we're a $300 a month studio, but you're gonna discount it and basically give for $50 a month just to bring more members in, you're not just messing up your offers, but you're now having other people go wait, you paid $50 and I paid 300? So I could find a loophole cancel, go to 50, or I can find something out there that's also valued at that. That's not here.
Speaker 1:Remember, you're working with you're kind of in the middle ground here which we can talk about. You know, maybe on tomorrow's episode, volume versus value, what is your goal of your location? There's new studios popping up all the time that have offers because they have all these different types of services, but that's another story for another day. I'd like to thank you all for jumping on and listening to this episode of the Gym Break Cast, where we sit there and talk about those visionary ideas that we come up with during our normal daily gym break. Again, zach, and I hope you guys all have a good day.
