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
Let Your Clients Sell for You
Struggling to grow your fitness studio despite investing in expensive lead generation tactics? You're not alone. Many studio owners find themselves trapped in a cycle of diminishing returns from traditional marketing—paying for ads, making cold calls, and running endless promotions with little sustainable momentum to show for it.
The solution isn't finding the next marketing trick; it's leveraging what you already have. Your existing clients represent an untapped growth engine waiting to be activated. In this candid episode, I share my personal journey of discovering how a structured referral system transformed my business after experiencing the frustration of inconsistent growth and client churn.
At the heart of a successful referral strategy lies a systematic approach that combines review generation with incentivized referrals. By implementing a three-month checkpoint that requests reviews and encourages referrals with meaningful rewards, you create a dual-purpose system that builds your online reputation while generating high-quality leads. These tools need not be complicated—simple email and text automations can drive significant results when implemented consistently.
The beauty of referrals extends beyond just acquiring new clients. Referred members arrive with pre-established trust, shortening your sales cycle dramatically. They typically match the values of your existing community, improving retention and creating a more cohesive studio culture. And perhaps most importantly, this approach concentrates your growth within your critical 3-5 mile service radius, creating neighborhood momentum that becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to disrupt. Ready to transform your existing clients into your studio's secret weapon for sustainable growth?
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You hire a sales team. They're getting you all these leads, making all these phone calls, they're doing a lot of cold calling around your local area and you're getting no traction, no momentum, there's no growth. You know the truth be told. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Fitch a Grit cast. I'm your host, Zach Coleman, and as we continue down this foundational series, we're gonna talk about something that's near and dear to my heart because I went through a very similar situation and that's utilizing your existing clients as your referrals, allowing them to be your secret weapon towards your studio's growth. What you're trying to achieve, what you're trying to grow within the studio environment, no matter what stage you're at, and so we're going to dive in. We're going to talk about, and so we're going to dive in. We're going to talk about that. Today, we're going to talk about referrals and how they can be your secret to success. Imagine this You've probably heard about it from a lot of other companies, other marketing agencies you hire a sales team, 24-7. 24-7 sales team. They're getting you all these leads, or they're making all these phone calls or doing a lot of cold calling around your local area, and you're getting no traction or you're having zero to little sales within the studio. There's no momentum, there's no growth, zero friction, so to say. You know the truth be told you already have your existing engine of client growth within your own studio and that is your existing clients. I once knew a CEO, you know he was doing all these, all this advertising, all these other assets he was trying to. He was trying to grow and he wasn't really building momentum. He had one or two periods within the growth of what he was doing that he actually lost a whole bunch of clients due to. You know, crap happens Like back five years ago, you know, last year, with the election there caused a lot of buyers, fatigue and all that fun stuff. And once he lost those clients he didn't really have a machine. He had to, like, turn back on Facebook. He had to turn back on other things send out emails, do new challenges, spend more money trying to build again, build again, build again.
Speaker 0:I'm going to tell you something here. Who is that client that I was referring to? Funny enough, it was me. That's why this is so near and dear to my heart, because, you know, three to four years ago I was going through this situation no fault of my own, because I just didn't know.
Speaker 0:You know everyone out there talks about you have to get away from referrals, you have to move away from this stuff. But I'll be realistic with you. Even I'll be the first marketer to tell you that referrals are still a sustainable growth model in today's society. So here's the frustration I hear most people have with referrals and I'm going to try to bat these with you and come up with solutions as we talk through today's society. So here's the frustration I hear most people have with referrals and I'm going to try to bat these with you and come up with solutions as we talk through today's episode.
Speaker 0:You know most business thinks referrals will just happen. They think, oh, it's unsustainable. It really depends on if someone wants to give me business, someone wants to bring people in. I'm not going to push that on my prospects or my clients. And that's funny enough what you'll hear a lot of other agencies say to you too, like, oh, you need to move away from referrals, it's unsustainable, it's not going to grow you. But I'll tell you that the largest brands focus on the strength of their referrals. It's part of their brand advocacy, of their referrals. It's part of their brand advocacy, and if you can create an ecosystem and something around this type of subject matter, then, yeah, you'll be able to start building a sustainable lead flow. And so let's kind of go into some solutions that you can do to kind of start turning your existing clients into your advocates. You want to basically build this systematic type brand advocacy within your studio, and why this is so important in today's day and age is because, with everything with AI and studios becoming so personal for people, they want a lot more human interaction, and so you need to find ways to interact that AI and the system but still have that human touch, so that you're not spending all of your time, energy and budget on doing cold calls and trying to get people in through random Facebook gimmicks online. Because I think we all know, when you give the free challenges, you give the free situation, all that does is lead to low retention rate, and or you're spending countless amounts of more dollars trying to hit the next one and the next one and the next one. And so let's talk about a solution.
Speaker 0:How do you build a structured reward system for your studio? Well, there's a plethora of tools out there you can utilize. You know there's, let's say, go high level. For instance, you have a lot of these funnels, right? We actually partner with LoyalSnap and so if you want to hear more about that, definitely give us an email. We can talk to you about how we can integrate that into your system. But on a beginning level, you really just need to build a system for rewards. So this is the way I like to look at it Kill two birds with one stone. If you're going to build advocacy, you need to show that trust and that trustworthy. And it seems simple enough, but through reviews, reviews are going to do multiple things for you. Reviews are one, going to build that trust for new clients. Two, they're going to move you up in the search rankings pretty dang fast if you do it correctly. And three, it can also be used as a momentum driver towards bringing in people of value that value the same value as you value within your studio, very similar to how the clients you already have. So you need to build that reward type advocacy.
Speaker 0:The way I like to promote this and the strategy that I really like to use is I like to set up an automation for about three months after is within the studio. So what we like to do is we like to go in and say, hey, we're going to do the normal situations. You know the advertisement whatever you're using for pre-sale type advertisements and we're going to bring people into the ego system, or how you bring them in. You have a funnel set up so that once they're about a member for about 90 days, then you hit them with a reward. Right, you basically go in and you do what I call I like to call. I'm not going to say double whammy, but you utilize the review type system to incentivize the award, right? So you go hey, great to have you. You've hit your three months here. I'm glad you're doing a great job. We really love that. We're helping you achieve your goals here at our studio.
Speaker 0:So let's start off by we'd love a review from you and if you're able to give a review, if you're able to give us a review and refer one of your friends to the studio, we'll give you one month for free. So instead of you just being like, hey, refer a friend, you give one for free. You're. Then you're getting a review first, which does those things I told you about earlier, but then it also pushes them to remember in their head oh yeah, like this is why I love the studio so much, because they're writing the review for you, push you at top of mind, and then they know how to tell a friend. And then three, best case scenario is you know, they tell a friend, they show the friend a review, right, their friend goes online, sees the other reviews. And this is how you could start building a very simple system to start building advocacy within your studio and then you can start, you know, with very little efforts, start building those reviews to one.
Speaker 0:Like I said, get more, get more search results, get higher in the search results. Now, there's more to it than that from an uh, an online search perspective, but that's the very basic. That's what we tell our our clients is. A main KPI that they need to track is is how do we get you reviews in and create a client referring system so that they can start getting rewards for that advocacy? And so, second, here is another solution you can really talk about is how do you give clients tools Like, what kind of tools can you give?
Speaker 0:It's something very common in the marketing industry, for instance, especially right now. You probably, very overwhelmingly, you get this tool kind of fatigue. There's so many different things out there, you lies. We're very big on. We develop our websites for our clients because we've seen the gym management softwares trying to do the SEO, the advertising, the marketing, the branding and just not being good at it because they're a SaaS company. So we partner with a lot of them, not because we say they're bad there's nothing wrong with them but you're going to want to find a system that works best for you and you don't want to necessarily have to redevelop the wheel with your brand and your website every simple time, right? So you want to be able to find those tools that you can have as touch points for your clients.
Speaker 0:Another good example and a good tool that you guys could use is Edge, and this is a tool that we have also partnered with, but you can reach out to us if you have any questions on that. We have promos going out for both LoyalSnap and Edge is more of an employee retention type model, right? So what it does is it gets your trainers to be incentivized to get reviews because they're the personal brands within your studio. So what that does is it does a couple of things as well. It still is an automated system that they ask for reviews. It sends the reviews and then it does auto replies and auto responses to these reviews. You have to go in and probably SEO it a little bit. Overall, what it does is incentivize the trainers and it puts their name in the review type system.
Speaker 0:So now you have the ability to start utilizing E or authority-based content, because what ends up happening? What ends up happening is people like I want to work with this particular trainer, I want to work with this, and without you tarnishing the brand from a sales perspective, you can utilize the trainers within that aspect, being like oh, I want to work with this trainer, but I don't know their schedule. Or I want to talk to them, but you still need the front desk to talk, to talk to people, right? So there's a plethora of different tools, but, to put it it short, I would just have a funneling type system. Um, find a funneling type system that can interact from email and text message for these particular people. Like I said, I think loyal snap is a perfect example of something that you can utilize.
Speaker 0:And then you want to just build a uh, and back to my last point, you want to just start build once you start building that community out and you're bringing in like-minded members that value your services. Uh, the referral should seem kind of natural, not transactional, right, you could still set this thing up and ask for a review after three months. But you can go back to what I was saying earlier and ask your trainers to be like hey, after class, like have a conversation with someone and just ask them for a review. This stuff compounds quite fast and that's how you can start building a system. You can start saying having all of your trainers focus on one thing, or everyone within the location to focus on one thing, and that is let's see how many reviews we can all get a month, and that is a kind of our KPI, knowing that the more reviews you get, the higher you're gonna be in search, which means the higher you're gonna get leads and or referrals coming in.
Speaker 0:What are the benefits of focusing on this method of advocacy? Well, to put it frankly, you're a brick and mortar. If you have one location, if you have two, if you have three, it doesn't matter. Each one of your locations has about a three to five mile radius, maybe 10, depending where your audience and your members are going to be living, and so you can compound that pretty fast. It's really not that hard to build momentum within a 10-mile radius.
Speaker 0:See, the problem that most come in is they I'm not going to say they think too big, but they think too broad within their market, and so they end up spreading themselves thin. You're not a marketing agency like me. You don't have to reach out to 200 and you don't have to have 250 touch points sent out a week just to hit the whole United States. Right, you can focus on a small area. But what it does is you start to increase your lead quality because you're building brand trust and brand awareness, which is something you can not necessarily track unless you're tracking through reviews. This also lowers your ad spend. Brand trust and brand awareness, which is something you cannot necessarily track unless you're tracking through reviews, this also lowers your ad spend.
Speaker 0:So if you're doing a strategy like we do within our sustainable model, where we have two types of marketing working together so that you can build trust and two you can build, you know just, if one's not working correctly, the other one will take over. You don't want to have all your eggs in one basket, right? So it will lower your ad spend because people will start clicking on the more natural stuff and the organic stuff, but you won't be spending as much on your ad spend and, honestly, referrals are just a faster sales cycle. You don't have to sell as much. Go back to the cold calling and calling somebody 24 hours a day right, when you're doing that. Know the cold calling and calling somebody 24 hours a day right, when you're doing that. You are reaching out and you have to build trust. People don't like that. It's a cold approach. You have to build a relationship. You have to get on multiple calls with them. Cold calling is great if you're selling a large volume type scenario because you're already going to have a three month sales cycle.
Speaker 0:But you guys are memberships. You guys sell membership, even if it's $1,000 membership, which I've had a couple of studios come to us that do have do those packages. But you're in the middle ground. You're not a value play and you're not a volume play. You're kind of in the middle. So $200 a month membership isn't unreasonable in today's society, especially for people that are looking for a niche type of environment. And so you know, if you have your audience set down effectively, you can start really focusing on that faster sales cycle. And because they're advocates and they already have the experience given to them by an existing member. You're weeding away that uncertainty pretty dang fast because the knowledge was built by the friend and brand reputation really grows. It's like the secret thing that grows brand reputation. It grows like organically.
Speaker 0:Another story I'm going to tell you. This is a pretty funny one. We had a client once, a gym, one of the studios we had. He was roughly around 600k, 600k a year and we were building them pretty organically. Funny enough, it's one of his competitors that was about two, three miles away when it ended up going out of business. He called us and he actually wanted to cancel. Because he's like I don't know if you guys are doing much effort here like, uh, in regards to um, building that brand reputation and doing the organic stuff, because now this other studio down the street that was three to four miles away ended up closing down and now 90% of their clients came to us and yes, there's a part of that that was natural, but that is organic, right? I told them.
Speaker 0:I'm like, do you think they would have really called you if they didn't find you on Google or had a friend that already came to your gym? So you have to think about that kind of stuff. And so those are. Those are unspoken brand reputation type systems that are just momentum building from other existing situations. Let's say he wasn't doing any marketing and these people came in. And that have happened, yes, but in all natural, if he wasn't, if he didn't have that brand reputation already starting to build up, he didn't have that organic presence, that trust wouldn't have been there and he probably wouldn't have gotten 90% from this closed down gym. He may have got 10, 20, and the rest may have spurted and done other things or gone to other studios.
Speaker 0:So this is something, right away, that I want you guys to really think about. And so, just to close out today, so you guys have some actionable type situations that you guys can kind of focus on. You want to build a structured referral system that rewards advocacy, so you can start off by getting a review and use the reward of giving discounted membership fees or getting a product that you have in-house Products are a whole other story, but use something like that to build advocacy for the length of time that these people are hitting the gym, hitting the studio and the retention. Right, you're three months in. We really appreciate you. You know this is awesome that you've stayed this long.
Speaker 0:Here's a if you could give us a Google review to show how we've helped you stick it out this far. And you know, just to add an extra compliment, if you end up bringing in a client, if you're bringing up one of your friends, we'll give them a free session or we'll give you a free month if they sign up. We love for you to bring in more people that value the same things you value, and so do something like that. And so you have a three month, and then what you could do is you can set up the funnel, for if they don't reply and leave a review, you can have it be for you can do another email or text message. I would probably do both in six months and then and then a year. So three, six and not in a year. And if they do leave a review, all you have to do is say something along the lines of hey, six month end, congratulations. We really appreciate you sticking around with us. If you haven't already left a review, leave one here If you have. Appreciate it, the offer still stands If you bring a friend in.
Speaker 0:If you wanna add some urgency to it. You can say something along the lines of this reward is only given for the next 15 days. Already, you can see how that could start piling up pretty fast, especially if you already have 30 members, 30 or more members, at your studio. You can go from 30 to you know 60 pretty dang fast. If one friend refers to people to is tools, remember to use the right tools. Does it always have to be online tools? No, you can have personal tools too. Always recommend possibly having someone on staff that could actually call in person for that first email and actually say something along the lines of we really appreciate you if you give us a review, blah, blah, blah, blah, just to build that connection in that community. There's also tools out there where you can start incentivizing trainers, like I said, to have them start to be the advocates of your studio.
Speaker 0:And three your brand reputation. Your brand reputation is going to be something that's going to grow organically over time and this is going to be what really grows the studio. Facebook ads are going to work. Seo is going to work. Anything can work if you put your time into it. But you really have to sit down and think about that brand reputation, something that we've really been working on heavily in our studio as of late because we've really been thinking about how it's going to make such a huge impact. You know again, my name is Zach Fit2Grit cast. I appreciate you guys all jumping on today and go have that, go have that gym break, go get some visionary time, if you're not already doing it while you're listening to this. So you have a good one and we'll talk soon.
