Why Fitness Studios Grow Faster With Strategic Partnerships

Are you trying to do it all yourself in your fitness studio? That approach might actually be holding you back. 

The most successful studio owners leverage strategic partnerships to accelerate growth, build trust, and expand their reach without diluting their core offerings. Drawing from personal experience, I share how attempting to "do it all" left my business isolated and stagnant—until I discovered the power of strategic collaboration.

This episode dives deep into building partnerships that truly work. We explore how to identify complementary businesses that align with your values but offer different services, creating win-win scenarios for both parties. You'll learn specific strategies for joint memberships and promotions that can help studios grow their client base up to 40% faster than those operating in isolation.

Your trainers aren't just employees—they're potentially your most powerful brand ambassadors. I share practical approaches for incentivizing trainers to naturally connect new members with your studio through relationship-building rather than transactional selling. We also examine how product partnerships can enhance your services when approached thoughtfully instead of simply white-labeling generic items.

The fitness industry thrives on community, and strategic partnerships allow you to offer comprehensive solutions to clients while staying focused on what you do best. Whether you're struggling to grow or looking to take your established studio to new heights, these partnership strategies provide a sustainable approach to expansion without sacrificing quality or burning out. 

Ready to stop going it alone? Listen now, then subscribe to the Fitcha Grit Cast for more insights on building a thriving fitness business. Share your own partnership experiences in the comments—which collaborations have driven the most growth for your studio?

Chapters

• 0:00 Missing Growth Through Isolation
• 3:20 Identifying Complementary Business Partners
• 4:44 Leveraging Internal Trainers as Advocates
• 5:55 Joint Promotions With Non-Competitors
• 7:18 Building Community Through Strategic Events
• 10:30 Accelerating Growth Through Partnerships

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

studio owners, you often focus onward, you miss some of these potential partnership opportunities and without that strategic sort of collaboration, your studio starts to miss out on opportunities for growth and visibility. Ah, welcome everyone to another episode of the 50 Grid Cast. I'm your host, zach Coleman. Ignore the franticare, but today I want to kind of get into this. I want to kind of get into this pretty deep strategic partnerships and how you, as a fitness owner, can start growing a lot more rapidly by expanding your network and really push your studio to the next level. We're going to talk about three key points here today. We're going to identify, you know, some complimentary businesses that can. You know non-vertical competitors that can really help you as you help them to really grow your studio. You know non vertical competitors that can really help you as you help them to really grow your studio. You know, and some sort of effective strategies that you can utilize internally how can you leverage your existing trainers, your existing culture, to really define strategic partnerships to grow your studio more effectively, and how you can really leverage some other types of joint promotions and or events to expand your visibility and your reach to help you make it to the next level. You know, as studio owners, you know you often focus onward. You know you miss some of these potential partnership opportunities and without that strategic sort of collaboration your studio starts to miss out on opportunities for growth and visibility. You know, early on in my business, you know, trying to learn what we did best, trying to grow and being in much more of that transactional type growth pattern, I wasn't one that dismissed this. You know I was very much in the same kind of realm. You know we did it all, we said we're going to do it all and what ended up happening? We kind of isolated ourselves and we had an opportunity for a great partnership. We tended to say, hey, we like to do that ourselves because we have a potential to make more profits by doing this ourselves. But what really ends up happening in that case is you really end up not selling anyone, so you make nothing, or you do something really half as good as you probably could some of your core services and you tend to just lose a client anyway or a member anyway. So you know, going through this whole stage, I started to realize how important strategic partnerships were to the growth of not just me but in the way we got out of the valley of death, but also you and your studio and how you can really start growing much more rapidly.

Speaker 0: 2:28

You know, if you haven't already you know, on one of our previous videos, building clarity in your own expertise, we gave you a download opportunities versus luck. That could be a great download for you to utilize. You can view the video up here if you'd like to get an idea of how that could really work in this environment, or you can download it down in the comment section down below. We're going to kind of utilize that a little bit here today. I think that it's a great opportunity for you to utilize something like that for what we're talking through today, to kind of help guide you as you kind of build your expertise out and what makes your studio unique and how you can start framing possible strategic partners non vertical or even possibly vertical you know, maybe that studio down the street right and how you can leverage each other and start to build more profitability for your studios. So first up on this list, we're going to talk about identifying some complimentary businesses and possibly even influencers.

Speaker 0: 3:27

You know clients that could be your advocates that may have a large trainer. They may not be If they're not a personal trainer within your studio environment. There's nothing wrong with doing some sort of strategy where, once you find some of these individuals within your studio, that you give them some sort of promotional kickback, leverage certain types of collateral that you sell, maybe some of free classes, maybe a more in-depth look, something that can help them really help start to define some free social media exposure. You know you can give them some sort of kickback, you can give them a free membership, even if it comes down to them bringing a particular set of people to come visit your studio. When it comes to internally, your trainers should be eventually your personal brand for your studio. You are, overall, the personal brand of the whole studio. You are the one that it's your story, it's your studio.

Speaker 0: 4:32

But I don't want you to block away from taking the values that you pertain when you hire and allowing some of your additional trainers, depending on the service that you provide, to build that legacy alongside of you. Have them be your advocates, have them be your selling perspectives. You don't necessarily need to hire a whole bunch of sales reps to make these phone calls or bring more members in right. So leveraging your internal trainers is a great way for you to build possible partner, especially if they train on the side. Embrace that. You know most studios kind of just hire 1099 trainers to come in and they pay them $100, you know a session, or $50 a session depending on what type of studio you are. And my suggestion is, for group classes and for even individual, that you leverage them to get you reviews. Leverage them and you give them some sort of kickback. Or you leverage them internally to promote the studio. The more you bring people in, give them a little kickback on every time a new membership signs or every time a situation, but make it less so of a sales opportunity and more of a connection opportunity. And embrace the trainers that don't wanna open their own studio to leverage them to bring in members.

Speaker 0: 5:49

Now, when it comes to complimentary businesses, this is something that a lot of people get wrong when it comes to businesses. They look at additional gyms in their area or studios in their area and they kind of get to a point where they're like, oh, we're against them, but if you're offering personal training and they're offering Pilates, for instance, instead of you trying to bring on Pilates, like I said at the beginning, when you don't really have the expertise or maybe the space to do so. Maybe there's a joint collaboration you can do there. From a marketing perspective, you can do a joint partnership If they're selling, let's say perspective, you can do a joint partnership If they're selling. Let's say, a $200 package and you're selling a $200 package for your group classes, maybe you do it at 300. And you each take a kickback of 150 for those joint memberships and then if they ever quit one, then your original membership gets put into place. That way you can start leveraging and building a community and knowing that, hey, it's the power of two, it's the power of three. But you don't have to necessarily buy a new brick and mortar to bring on new services or upgrade your new services. And that's a good way to leverage other business owners in your area that you may be able to build a relationship, especially if they have similar values as you. So we've already kind of talked about effective strategies on that last one with the joint partnership and promotions.

Speaker 0: 7:08

But let's talk about some other things here. You have the ability to bring on products quite early on, and I see a lot of studios making this mistake quite early is they start to brand off of other brands. It's called white labeling, first and foremost. You know you may take a shirt, you may take a product, put your logo on it. Those are promotional items. Honestly, no one uses that. People hate that stuff, man. They usually just use it to clean their car, you know so, especially when it's cheap cotton or it's something cheap.

Speaker 0: 7:41

So my real suggestion here is you want to find promotional items that really effectively interact with your studio. For instance, if you're a boxing gym, then of course you sell boxing gloves right, sell the products of that company and then allow some sort of promotional collaboration between the both of you and allow yourself to separate yourself enough, but show that partnership. So there's trust, and what I mean by that is if someone's going to buy a boxing glove and it's made by a certain company that you rely on and you trust to make these boxing gloves, then they're going to be the person that's buying. Those may be like oh I know this gym uses them, so let's utilize them. You see this a lot in the sports realm, for instance, from a sponsorship opportunity you see, like Nike with shoes, adidas with shoes for, like, football players and baseball players and things of that nature, instead of them just branding their own on the shoe for the team. They have a joint collaboration because this helps both companies right, and those are something that build a lot more trust and it's something that really needs to be heavily introduced into the studio environment so that people have a much better trust factor and you're building this ecosystem of trust right.

Speaker 0: 8:58

So how do you start leveraging joint promotions and expanding visibility in client reach? Now you're going to have the ability and I've talked about this before especially if you're a smaller studio and you haven't hit that first valley depth, you're still in transactional phase and you're kind of moving to a community driven approach you're going to want to start leveraging local clients, community events. There's nothing wrong with you taking another studio or another non vertical competitor that you're partnered with and saying, hey, let's do a joint spot here and let's do a joint one, you save money on that. But two, it helps give a client again more trust from a local community perspective. You can even find local events that are a little bit more niche towards what you do and maybe speak at those events and or come up with a deal where maybe you can do a speaking opportunity at your gym or you can do some sort of consulting at your gym for certain things, based off of if it's a trainer right. And so those are three ways you can really start building much more strategic partnerships and ways that you can start to grow faster.

Speaker 0: 10:04

Now, if you want to learn more about how you can start to build your studio culture and your values around your trainers so you can start building better retention and loyalty, why don't you watch the video up here in the in the comment section on how to build that studio culture that boosts retention? It's a it's a pretty good podcast that I did with a studio owner that just that sold his studio for one to three million, you know, a couple of years ago and built it all off of community. So go ahead, take a look at that partnership type approach in the building of their studio. Actually grow their client base upwards of 40% faster, mostly due to that trust right. Then those that are working alone and isolating. I mean, look back at my story. Once we started working on strategic partners, there was more trust built within the environment and people trusted us more because we worked with these already trusted partnerships, right Overall.

Speaker 0: 11:05

Just really kind of think about embracing some of those strategic partnerships so that you can rapidly accelerate your studio's growth, providing you with a much more sustainable visibility right. You'll get new members, you'll build better community credibility and you'll also start providing yourself with a much more sustainable set of lead flow coming through that works alongside some of your other marketing approaches. Again, I'm Zach, this is the Fitch, a Grit cast, and if you haven't already subscribed to the channel, go down, leave a comment, let us know. Have you ever had a strategic partner and, if you have, which one seemed to be the most beneficial towards the growth of your studio? Again, zach Coleman, stay gritty.