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
Avoid This Scaling Mistake Fitness Studios Always Make
Ready to take your fitness studio to the next level? Before you sign that lease for a second location, pause and listen. The journey from running a single successful studio to managing multiple thriving locations isn't just about ambition—it demands strategy, systems, and perfect timing.
Countless studio owners fall into the trap of premature expansion, typically around the $250K annual revenue mark. The results? Stretched resources, marketing inefficiencies, and the transformation of passionate fitness entrepreneurs into overwhelmed project managers juggling operations and marketing with diminishing returns. With industry profit margins hovering around 10%, strategic growth becomes not just preferable but essential.
This episode walks you through the three critical foundations for sustainable studio scaling. First, identify your ideal members by analyzing who stays longest and advocates most passionately for your business. Build detailed avatars including demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns. Second, evaluate your marketing channels not just for cost-effectiveness but for scalability—will that billboard campaign or content strategy become more valuable with multiple locations? Finally, transform these insights into a consistent brand experience and systematic growth plan that MindBody research shows helps 30% of studios grow faster.
Whether you're approaching that expansion threshold or simply planning for future growth, this framework will help you build a fitness business that scales without sacrificing quality or draining your passion. Subscribe for more strategic insights that make the difference between simply surviving and truly thriving in the competitive fitness industry.
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://creatitive.com/fit-to-grit-cast/
you know, chasing every possible opportunity that you know comes in the door it feels chaotic.
Speaker 0:You're running all these resources, your operations, what type of trainers to bring in to effectively work with?
Speaker 0:Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Fit to Grit cast. I'm your host, zach Coleman, and as we continue to go through our foundational series and we talk about some of those beginning steps studio owners can take, I want to talk about a challenge I see a lot of studio owners go through, which is scaling. So if you are a studio owner, that kind of in that idea of, hey, we want to either sell or scale this studio in the future, this is the right episode for you. We're going to kind of go into the appropriate time to scale, how you should scale and some of the smaller tactics that you can kind of look into to kind of start leading yourself in to the next, you know, portion of the growth of your studio. You know I see one of the biggest challenges of most of these studio owners out there is they just have a challenge really understanding how to scale effectively, not just from an operations direction, but this is kind of a marketing cast in general, right, so how to effectively scale their marketing? When is it the right time to scale their marketing? When is it the right time to start putting more money to certain things, things of that time and they get so frustrated they become basically a glorified project manager and they're messing with all these different things, have their hand in operations, have their hand in a marketing. A lot of restraint there, but this tends to be one of the biggest challenge, especially because in the studio environment, you know you're only looking at about a 10% profit margin every year, and so we're going to dive into that today.
Speaker 0:You know, when I was at the very first stages of my business I don't know if you know much about me, if this is your first cast or not I own Jim Mark. Jim Mark helps make marketing simple for smaller studios from the 250 to a million dollar range, and we help boost them through building a sustainable lead flow. But we also have our branding agency, which is more suited for studios that are looking to scale in a much higher level. So we've had that for about I've had created it for about 10 years now, as we've continued to learn and grow and do all that from the marketing side, working with plethora of different studios a plethora of different other athletic driven companies. I realized when I first started and I want this to really sit on you guys, because this happens very similar in the studio space, just from a different market you know, chasing every possible opportunity that you know comes in the door and it feels chaotic. You're running all these resources, you're confused about who to market, how to market your operations, what type of trainers to bring in to effectively work with certain types of audiences, how your workout plans are going to know you don't really have any systems or procedures around that stuff and it just becomes chaotic. But what I've learned is once I started shifting towards one allowing myself and the company to grow knowing that, hey, I want to grow this company, I know it's going to cost more time and money right now and shift that. But once I started structuring a much more growth strategy within my agency, I started to clarify more of my goals, my ideal clients and, most importantly, my branding message, and things slowly started to improve, started to structure more. We started to be able to give certain types of responsibilities to certain types of people. We knew that the marketing messages and the stuff that we were providing out there was hitting the right audience. And so the three points I kind of want to go over today and we're going to start off with you know what is the first thing that you really need to understand as you're learning to grow.
Speaker 0:Now, one thing I don't want you to do, first and foremost, is, if you have one studio, when you're in, about the 250k a year mark is, I don't want you to think that it's time to open a new location. You're usually not ready yet. I've seen it time and time again. They're really more in a stage of getting marketing to what. You're getting your marketing to work starting areas for members, and work at it that way first. Or, if you already have a bigger facility really just starting to work on okay, how do we cut out the types of people that have low retention, low churn, and start to focus on much more quality, much more of the people? So, first and foremost, that's when you can sit down and start looking at your ideal clients. This works very well for any market.
Speaker 0:In the studio, you're more of a B2C right, so business to consumer, you have a smaller package. It's not like you're selling houses to residential right, or it's not like you're selling a large branding project to, or marketing campaign to, a SaaS company who has a $20 million evaluation, right? You're $250 a year, right? $250, $500. So, first off is that ideal customer, trying to figure out who that ideal customer is. Now, trying to figure out that you're definitely going to have more than one. I'm not saying you're not in the value game.
Speaker 0:So what you're really going to want to kind of do is you're going to kind of want to take a look at all of the existing members you already have and I want you to start looking at them and kind of building an understanding of which are the ones that have been here the longest, which are the people that are very well advocate to our, our studio, and actually start building your profiles around them. You know a lot of key demographics that can help you with that. Just to kind of get a baseline is gender, age, what, what their uh, what their income is. You may not necessarily be able to ask their income, but you can ask, you know, possibly have an idea of what they do and start building, start building avatars, base off of that basic information, even some of their psychological counterparts, some of their hobbies, and this one's going to be great for the studio environment, because you're going to kind of see some of the workouts and some of the hobbies that they do, that that have athletic all the way you know down to you know if they have kids, if they're married, if they're not married, because then you're going to be able to, if they're a student, because if you're able to figure this stuff out. So that's first and foremost. I want you to sit down and I want you to look at all of your members and first, first and foremost, weed out. Weed out all the people that are kind of new and just kind of start seeing the people. Like, if I had a studio full of this many of my ideal members, this is what they would look like, and then you can start getting into our next section here. So the next section here once you kind of have your ideal target down, then you're going to want to kind of work with understanding.
Speaker 0:All right, we've done marketing. We do Facebook ads. Maybe we do Instagram ads. We do organic. We do Facebook ads. Maybe we do Instagram ads. We do organic. We have our trainers. We have our trainers sell and get reviews.
Speaker 0:You do SEO. You do PPC. Those are some of the four basics. Maybe you do content marketing. Those are like five of the big digital markets. And then you have local stuff, right.
Speaker 0:You do billboards.
Speaker 0:Do you print ads? Do you do direct mail? Do you go door to door and kind of look at all those and say, all right, let's look at all the stuff that we're doing right now and figure out all. Challenges are in there too, but I look at that as challenges is basically the same thing as a print ad. It's just a campaign. But you want to look at all these things and you want to say, all right, which are the things that are working? What are the things that are working? And this is now you thinking strategically. You could sit down and look at your numbers and say, hey, and also, I don't want you to think in terms of what are you paying the least to get the most? That sounds like a good premise to start, so that you can spend less on marketing, but I will say that once you expand, maybe that service could come with a lot more, and or that marketing could come with a lot. For instance, running Facebook ads for six locations versus one. Doing a blog post for six locations will have more effect than will have one. So I actually say the opposite Don't do blogging unless you have more than one location. Or is a billboard working? How are you tracking that? How is that working? So I want you to start looking at that stuff and what's working.
Speaker 0:The first thing when it comes to marketing especially when you're in that realm of 250 to, let's say, 500k a year you're just doing everything and seeing what's working, seeing what's sticking. You're just trying everything. Now it's time if you need to build a system. And so how do you build really a marketing system? And a lot of that will come down to your brand. Now is possibly the time you can take your target audience and you can say, hey, what message really aligns with them? How do we start to build visuals? How do we start to build that feeling, those offers, those types of offers, types of memberships, types of services. If you have amenities, what types of amenities are going to fit best? And you start looking at all this stuff combined and then you start building consistency around it. You start building consistency around all of this stuff. I'm always a big component of.
Speaker 0:Like people think that logo is just arts and crafts, but I'll tell you this right now, if you're calling yourselves Diamond Resort Gym, I am pretty sure at first glance people are going to think that you're more luxury because you're talking diamond. That's a, that's a first exposure of, of your brand. So you want to make sure that the brand and all his aspects, one, are effective around that target audience, or multiple target audiences uh, effectively. And then you kind of take that and then you say, hey, let's build consistency, that when we do start expanding we have a clear marketing message with what's working. You're not going to find everything that's working right now. You're going to have to pivot change all the time in this industry but just start finding those things right now that you think that, hey, this is a good direction for me.
Speaker 0:And then, of course, once you start building your expansion, once you're at like 850, you're hitting operations down and that's in sync with the brand and you want to start looking at expansion and really building out what's working. That's when you can look a little bit deeper into other marketing directions. But again, just to be, just to be clear, figure out your target audience first, base it, base it off of the demo and the psychological of your best, your ideal members that are in the location right now, even down to what offers they're buying, and build some guidelines and consistency around the type of studio environment slash message that we want to get across to that audience. And then really you just build a kind of just build a strategic plan around that. You know you may look at yourself and say, hey, now is the time that we want to start looking at expansion, now that you have all these numbers down. Now you can build a metric for growth. You'll understand how many members you bring in based off of time of year, type of advertisement, slash organic metrics that you're doing. Um, you'll have those numbers down, you'll have a pretty common number so you can turn it off on grow it. That's the goal, right. So that's the next step. Create a plan around that consistency.
Speaker 0:But you have to build that consistency first. You have to build it, you have to make sure it's working. It's a lot like building a workout for yourself or for an individual and testing the waters with it first to see if it works. You make some shifts, you make some changes and maybe you go heavier, you go lighter, you add more cardio, you change workouts a little bit, you work on form and you do that type of stuff sets you work on all that stuff after the first few months. It's a very similar concept when it comes to business and brand development. So that's probably number three there. So you know there was a study done by MindBody that states that about 30% of fitness studios grow faster when they kind of take on this strategic approach and plan out, based off of where they're at, the things that they should work on.
Speaker 0:So I highly recommend you going through this and so just kind of to clear things up for the day and kind of give you an idea so you can go back and find the correct spot in this video to work through it. You know, one, I want you to clearly define your audience. Two, I want you to maintain brand consistency amongst and develop a system, revamp a system for that marketing and possibly in the future operations. Um. And then three, I want you to kind of build a strategic plan. You kind of now see what's working, you see what's not working, how do we scale this, how do we not scale this? And you can either work with a marketing team or eventually bring in a director of marketing if you're like, let's say, three to seven plus locations, and that consistency needs much more management. But again, that's it for today's video.
Speaker 0:I really do appreciate all of you coming on and continuing to listen to the Fit to Grit cast and as we continue to move forward with, you know, our pivot towards working towards studio owners and the types of people we're talking to, we really just came to a place I came to a place in the business myself where things had to change.
Speaker 0:You know I loved working with professional athletes as you may know, we did that with creative but we really needed to hone in and I needed to connect with the people that I can connect with, which turned out to be studio owners, fitness studio owners, because the gym is what helped me grow, it's where I found my community, it's where I met my wife, it's, you know, what got me through some of my hard times and it even is where I go today to work on my personal health and my anxiety, and so it was definitely a pivot that I felt really worked and resonated with me. And so, you know, like and subscribe this video. I'd love for you to like sort of share it, share it with someone and just get out there, as I'd like to, you know, get this in front of, is you know these videos in front of as many people as possible within the studio space. Again, you know this is the Fit your Grit cast. I'm your host, zach Coleman, and I hope you all have a gritty day.
