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
Essential Insights on Studio Growth Strategies
Are you struggling to decide between hiring a marketing agency or an in-house director for your fitness studio? This episode addresses the critical choices studio owners face as they navigate their growth stages. We unpack the effective strategies that can propel your business forward while ensuring sustainable practices.
Start with understanding your marketing needs. Identify what has been working for you and where improvements can be made; it’s all about assessing your current strategies. We address how important it is to analyze conversion rates and tailor marketing efforts to your studio's unique audience and stage.
Later in the episode, we dive into the major considerations between an agency and an in-house marketing director. With distinct advantages and costs associated with both pathways, we help clarify which route might suit your business's current situation. Should you rely on an agency's diverse skill set or the dedicated insight of a director who understands your brand deeply? Our discussion provides key insights to help you make that critical decision.
This episode is packed with actionable tips, including the importance of allocating a marketing budget and recognizing when to pivot strategies. We encourage listeners to share their experiences with agencies or directors in the comments, fostering a community of learning and support. Join us for an enlightening conversation that promises to equip studio owners with the tools and strategies needed for meaningful growth. If you find our insights valuable, please subscribe and leave a review to help others discover this essential resource!
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://creatitive.com/fit-to-grit-cast/
I don't like social media ads. I think they're useless for smaller companies. To be honest, unless you're an online store or an e-commerce brand, it's not very cost-effective. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Gym Break Cast, where we talk to those visionaries and implementers that are looking to just learn those visionary strategies through their normal day in the gym. So today I want to talk about a subject that I think is something that happens to a lot of studio owners, especially in those of stage two or stage three of their development. It's around the time when they're looking to expand.
Speaker 0:This podcast will also help you beginners that may be opening a third location, or you were a manager of one, looking to build and operate your own studio and are not really good at understanding the ideas of when to hire the right team, when to push certain people in place, understanding those four different elements of business growth. But how do you take those four elements of business growth and implement them in the right times? And, because we're all about branding and marketing here, I like to push everything towards that direction and help people understand the differences of strategy and implementation when it comes to marketing, getting leads, getting business, building a sustainable lead flow and or when to allocate towards Facebook, etc. Et cetera, et cetera. So today I want to talk about agency versus director, when you need to start leveling up and either moving to the agency and or director model and really the differences between the two, because I see a lot of common mistakes where people go out and they, for instance, hire a marketing director, thinking that they're going to be the ones to do all the marketing work, when in reality they're a director, they direct, they either hire and or hire other agencies, and there is different stages that studios, in particular, if it be a franchise model and you're in the corporate realm, or your own, three to seven locations, one to two locations, or you're just opening, you know, a single location. So let's kind of talk through some of these today.
Speaker 0:So I'm going to start off by talking about understanding your needs. I think this is a big one I get when we get a lot of prospects that come into the door. I think that a lot of prospects think that they need a certain type of marketing when in reality, they don't even know what they want. How can you need something if you don't understand what you want, right? Or vice versa. They come in thinking. I had a prospect come in today with a studio that first thing they went to was we need social media marketing. They just opened their first location. Until we dove through and understood a little bit more about the model and the size they were, I wasn't able to give them a correct idea of the type and or spend that they should at least start with or understanding.
Speaker 0:And so understanding your needs is, first and foremost, the most important. To start off, let's look at your current marketing activities and their effectiveness. I think this is a huge one, especially for people that are within that 250K, if you're still a business owner and you haven't really gotten out of the grind of hiring a manager and or starting to hire those directors yet. Why do I say this? Because if you can kind of understand who you are as a person, understand if you're marketing because you want to be seen and heard and be the best dang studio in the country, or if you're about the community and I think that there's nothing wrong with being the best We'll just go business in general on this talk in the world and having that large vision, but you need to start a little bit smaller when it comes to your marketplace and who you're marketing to. So when we sit down, for instance, the first couple things we'll ask is what is working right now? I'm not gonna come in and try to reinvent the wheel if you already found something, taking the time to understand how to utilize it effectively.
Speaker 0:For where you're at, is there a time and place to have different forms of marketing channels? Yes, for where you're at, is there a time and place to have different forms of marketing channels? Yes, there always is. Things in the past still work, things now still work. But I would say, first and foremost, the first thing that you have to really think about is where are you getting your highest conversion rate? What about your retention rate? If you sit down and look at two models, for instance, and just to keep it simple, warm versus cold, do you have a whole bunch of your trainers? And or have you hired sales reps which is honestly a waste of time, especially for a smaller gym to call all the people in your local market hoping that you're going to get a 10% or a 20% conversion rate? You're going to be spending all this cost per we'll say employee or cost per lead if you're doing ads from a cold approach versus if you're getting a whole bunch of walk-ins and advocacy from your existing members.
Speaker 0:I've seen a good stat to look off of. This is all of the prospects we have talked to every single one. It's around the same thing. They do challenges. They have a very low conversion rate. I can't give an exact amount because it varies, but usually 10 to 20%. They usually stay for three months because they're really only there to get the free session and they test out the gym. They're testers. They haven't built trust yet.
Speaker 0:So you need to kind of learn what's gonna be the most effective for you with where you're at. You don't need to be seen by everyone. You just need to figure out what is working and kind of go with it and then allocate your budget for marketing effectively. Too many studios don't market at all. I mean, we just had a CPA on our podcast that works directly with here in the Arizona area and she told us that out of all of her clients, the biggest mistake that all of them make is they don't allocate money for budget. I get it. You have lots of employees, you're a brick and mortar, but a lot of other gyms and studios have done it too. So can you Figure out what's the most effective budget. 40% towards your employees. Yes, it's gonna be hard for a while. Some of them are gonna be doing more than one job, but those are going to be the ones that you know want to stay around for the long haul. And to get back on subject, get that 10%, utilize it effectively so that you can market effectively, understand really your internal resources and your expertise.
Speaker 0:The difference between an agency who usually are large-scale implementers, depending on the type that you get, which means they'll implement a lot of marketing strategies or if they're niche, let's say for what we do with Jim Mark, they're going to come in and they're going to say we have seen this work multiple times. It's going to be a little bit different because of who you are, but it's still going to somewhat work and we want you to. We're going to implement this. There's no strategy there. Same with if you go to a CRM. If you go to a CRM, they are going to give you some operational systems in place, but they're not going to give you the strategies. They're going to say, hey, we've seen this work, you need to tweak these. So understand, are you going to come in? Are you going to do strategy yourself. Are you just going to have the agency implement all of the stuff or are you going to kind of want them for both? If you want them for both, then you're going to need to hire them for strategy. I'm sorry.
Speaker 0:Creative thinking is by far probably one of the most important things, especially as you get bigger as a studio that you're going to need to evolve. I mean that's visionary right there. That's the visionary mindset. You're going to need someone to do all the work that you think is hard. I mean that you think is easy, but it's really actually hard. The last thing that you need to kind of do when you try to understand your needs is the short-term versus long-term marketing goals. And to put this frank into two subjects you know we have a lot of prospects that come in that want 100 leads. Tomorrow they need 300 members. They're in desperate mode. Something's wrong in their studio, which is fine, that happens. Or they're looking at long-term vision and success, are they looking to have sustainability so they can project into the future. I mean that's what real business owners do. So look at both of those and in marketing it should be a very similar perspective.
Speaker 0:Back to the two things that I was mentioning. You have your short term could be Facebook ads, cold calling, cold outreach, something to get a certain amount of people into the door fast. And then you have your warm marketing side. This is brand awareness. So I look at it more. So on, are you going at it from the perspective of sales? Are you going at the perspective of brand Brand awareness? Are you looking to grow steadily and surely or bring some sustainability? That takes a very long time when prospects come into the door.
Speaker 0:For us, you know we focus very heavily on brand and brand recognition and brand trust and all of the aspects behind all that. From a warm marketing approach. That's going to take time. I mean, we do it for a living. So I've done it early because I can, because I have the team and I'm good at it, but you're going to probably not want to start that perspective until you're probably it. Why? Because it costs time and money. Look at Alex Hermosi, for instance. He said in one of his recent videos you know, I mean this isn't when he did gym or when he did gym launch, but he now spends $70,000 a month on outside resources to build his brand awareness because he knows how effective it can be, Not saying you have to spend that.
Speaker 0:There's no way you can unless you're corporation, but you still have the opportunity to look at that and say, hey, this is going to take time. This is what makes business great is the fact that if everyone could do this tomorrow, there would be. Everyone would be in business. So look at those short term goals. Long term goals Maybe you need to do a direct mail piece, do some sales. Maybe you're still in validation mode. That is a short term goal. Let's get 30 members in by the end of the year, just so we can bring a little bit of sustainability and start bringing in profit so I can hire my next person. You're kind of in profit mode at that point. Or are we in long term? Are we always going to set aside a budget, knowing that, hey, this is going to grow surely, but slowly? And look at those goals.
Speaker 0:Now let's talk about the pros and cons going with an agency versus hiring a marketing director. An agency is you probably won't realize this they are cost effective. You bring in a marketing director, for instance. I wouldn't even recommend it until you're at least three to seven locations probably making at least you know. I'd say maybe once you got to around 1.5 to 2 million a year, you could start thinking about a marketing director. Probably starting, you're probably going to look at someone. Most marketing directors are going to be within 100 to 200k a year mark. A director of pros will stay directly in your business. They'll understand it. They'll have a deep understanding of the brand. They will learn, they will dedicate their focus strictly to you. They will help with the long-term strategy and development, potentially have leadership and team building activities for other people around them.
Speaker 0:Cons, like I said, directors are going to cost a lot more money and they're limited on their specialization because their main focus is leadership and growing the one brand. They're not out there doing social media ads, doing organic, doing all the things that agencies have to keep up with on a normal basis. Now, when you look at agency, like I said, they're cost effective. They have sometimes specialized skills. They're diverse in their perspectives, so it's nice to talk to them, especially when they're someone that is a certain type of agency, like maybe a branding agency for instance.
Speaker 0:It's not necessarily specialized in just gyms, because they understand what other kinds of strategies you can do. You can't control them as much. That's a con Like I'm an agency, I'm not your employee. I'm going to come in and I'm going to actually help you do certain things and give you positive and negative news on a common basis. That's what you're paying for. Telling you what's working and what's not. Help with that potential, that communication gap between you and some of your employees. Maybe help delegate certain things to your employees.
Speaker 0:Now is there a time and place for both of these? Yes, if you're a corporation and what I mean by corporation is you're a franchise gym that possibly has 30 to 100 locations it's best to diversify your agencies because it's less risk. If you're a smaller agency, let's say I mean an agency. If you're a smaller studio, let's say three to seven locations you're probably looking at yes, you're still going to diversify, you're going to cost more, but you're trusting people that do certain things well. Now, if you're looking at under that, you have one location, maybe two, maybe three, you can get away with having a full service agency. I mean two that complement each other. But don't be upset if there's an agency that purposely says, hey, we don't focus on this, we focus on this. It's okay to have multiple agencies that work together, trust that they can be compatible with each other.
Speaker 0:Now, if they come in and the agency's like we don't work well with other people, we want to do everything, it kind of varies. It depends on what you're working on. You don't want two people working on, you know, social media ads, for instance, but you could have someone like ourselves that, hey, we're a branding agency, we'll do creative, we do visionary type stuff, we work with leadership, we do a lot of Google type advertisement because we see that being very effective in the gym environment, but we have partners that do social media ads. Why? Because I don't like social media ads. I think they're useless for smaller companies. To be honest, unless you're an online store or an e-commerce brand or you're basically running 100 locations, it's not very cost effective. Does it work for validation stage? Yes, like, if you want to do challenges, you want to just throw out $500 to get people in the door, get them interested in a funnel. Yes, it works at the very beginning, but there's a point when the cost per click is going to be too high. But that's besides the point. These are the two differences between the both.
Speaker 0:So if you're at the point where you're hiring a director or you have an agency and you think it's cost effective to say, hey, I'm just going to hire someone in-house to do all this stuff. You're greatly wrong. It doesn't work that way. You bring someone in-house. They better damn well be a director, because if they're not, they're going to have no idea how to do blogging, seo, content writing, copywriting, the visuals and the graphic design, how to scope and quote. If they're looking at vendors for you, printers, like all that stuff. You need an agency with that type of stuff.
Speaker 0:There is going to come a time when you want to hire someone in-house to turn things, turn things over, and a good agency owner will help with a cost effective on that. I'll give you an example. We had a large fitness brand come to us and say we want you to hire reporters all around the country. That would have costed them millions to do. They wanted to pay like $50,000 a month, which you think is a lot, but in reality, hiring 50 people in every state to do reporting, it's going to cost more than $50,000 a month. I'm going to be spending at least $200,000, need 200, and that's just to break even. But they were bringing their PPC in-house. Right, ppc should take no more than one person. So they're cost-effectiveness. So an agency owner should be able to tell you hey, maybe it's better that you hire us for your ad management and then you hire the reporters because you have more direct control over how you can grow that team and the values and the payment structure, all that stuff.
Speaker 0:Now let's say you're in the premise of making a decision Do you hire someone in-house or do you need an agency? Let's just talk about do you need an agency? And I'm not even going to say agency, I'm going to say consultant. Here let's flip the switch and say consultant. Good consultants could also implement, but they could have partners that do it as well. I know a few in the industry that do that. I'm more than willing to give a shout out to them if anyone's interested.
Speaker 0:But what are some key indicators that you need to hire someone to help you market? Well, first and foremost, if you have zero budget allocated to marketing, you're not ready to hire a marketing agency. If you have 0%, I want you to go back and look how you can get 10% budget back in to your gym. Most likely, you don't have a marketing issue at that point. You have an operations issue. You either are too inflated or you're not hiring properly.
Speaker 0:Now signs that you're ready for a marketing director. If you're a $10 million plus studio brand, I'd say it's time to hire a director. If you have more than, let's say, five locations, let's just go seven. Keep it with the programmer. It's going to be different for everyone, but a true sign here is that you have too many locations for an agency to work on on their own. They need someone on the inside to talk to on a normal basis. Can these two work hand in hand? Yes, in fact. You may, like I said, have a director working with multiple agencies at that time. And that goes to making the decision.
Speaker 0:What about the hybrid approach? Do you need to hire people in-house and have an in-house expert team and hire an agency? I love this model. Why? Because me liking to work with leadership on a constant basis. They get busy with the motivating team, with hiring, with working out strategy with the agency, but then they get too busy to look over numbers or to go over results, and so sometimes you need a marketing executive or a marketing assistant just to come in and be someone that works with your agency, so that the communication can go back and forth and you can continue to have good, solid communication back and forth. I think communication is the biggest thing that's needed when it comes to any type of model, when it comes to working with an agency.
Speaker 0:Now, I'm going to try to leave these off with one tip that you can kind of do right now, at the end of these podcasts. I think it's going to be nice just to kind of give you a little bit of an idea on maybe a tip or two that you can take away from this. I mean, I could come on here and I could be like oh, go to our website and hire us. Well, you can do that. You don't need me to tell you to do that. If you want to, you know, look a little bit more on what we do, how we do it. Then, yeah, head over to our website. I'll throw them all and always will be in the bio. But for now I'm going to try to stick it to just some tips for you guys, and I'm going to start off by, you know, an actionable step that you can take right now and I kind of brought it up earlier as a business owner or as a director, that you can or even a manager you may be a manager in this situation as well, that you can go.
Speaker 0:If you are at a point where you need to bring more members in, but you don't feel like you have the adequate spend to do so, you need to change the norm. The norm is zero marketing spend, right? Let's see how we can gorilla our way through this. Well, there are gonna be some things you still need to gorilla the way through, but you also need to effectively market. Every business needs to market. Sit down and go. Okay, how do I budget this effectively? How much spend do I have? And if you can't sit down with the owner I mean if you have an owner you know this is off subject here, but if you have an owner that's just taking, you know, 50% of the profits and you're basically running the thing, then I'm sorry that they're not a good owner. They shouldn't be taking 50%, they should be taking 20 at max. And you need to figure out how you can squeeze in that 10%. Something to do with your employees, your trainers I do have a nice referral if you ever need someone to come in and help you, a consultant to come in and help you with your team allocation and hiring and values and all that fun stuff, especially for pre-launch. You can always hit me up. I have a referral for you. I'll give them your information. For now, I think that's a good first step Because, like I said earlier, if you have zero spend, you're going to have to look at how are you going to allocate.
Speaker 0:It's an operation issue, right? How are you going to allocate 10%? Well, it's an operation issue. Either some people need to get paid less or you need to figure out how to transfer 1099 to W-2s or vice versa. Maybe you have too many people in and you need to simplify your offerings so that you can have less people working for you. Maybe you just raise your prices. So there's a lot of things to go off of there that you can start off with today. But to start, see how much money, if you have 10% to actually allocate to marketing. That's a common number for brick and mortars. It's not effective for everyone, but it's a good number to start and I like to hear from the listeners. And it's a good number to start and I like to hear from the listeners.
Speaker 0:It's probably going to take a while for these individual podcasts to start becoming mainstream, so I'm probably not going to get anything on here, but if you do hear this and you do listen to this, can you tell me a time within your experience as a studio owner when was the last time you really took a chance on an agency?
Speaker 0:Or, let's do this when was the last time that you worked with an agency and how did that go? How did it go working with that agency? I'd like to you know, I have a feeling I'm going to hear a lot of nightmare stories here, so I could hear some good ones too, but there's a lot out there and there's lots to say about that, and so the reason I bring this up is because I want to see where this goes. And so if you I'll say it again when was the last time you worked with an agency or consultant and how did you feel about it? How did it go?
Speaker 0:No worries, give them a shout out in the comments If they became. They're really good. Give them a shout out, give them, give them some love. And I think that's it for today's episode of the Gym Break cast, where we talk to all those gym owners and directors looking to find that visionary time. You know, that operation, something they can kind of think about those great ideas within their normal gym break. Again, I'm Zach and I'll talk to you guys next time.
