HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY IN YOUR GYM HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY IN YOUR GYM. The question everyone needs the answer to. So, how do you make more money?
Before we get into that, I want to take you back through a little story from before I opened Pulse. I met a gym owner, Brian Mullens, who was a police officer, and he also owned an Anytime Marketing Fitness Gym. I saw him working and just having what I thought was his side hustle. Like, this is so cool, he’s never there, his gym is rocking, really he was also the only gym in town so it was perfect. He made it look so simple. So, fast forward a few years, and construction takes a dive, and I got laid off. 100 employees down to three. I was one of those 97. At this point, I already had plans to open up the gym, which was intended to be my ‘side hustle’. This lay off forced me to go all in. Originally, I wanted to follow the Anytime Fitness model like Brian. I wanted to have key fob access, self-service model. At the time I considered franchising an Anytime Fitness, but unfortunately, the territory was completely owned. So, Pulse Fitness was born following their model instead. For more detail click here
At the time, there was a huge independent trainer community, so I rented the space out to some trainers. They would pay me rent, and train clients. I didn’t really care about the training revenue they were getting, because I was going to get 1,400 members, of course! (spoiler, that did not happen.)
NOW ABOUT THREE MONTHS INTO THE BUSINESS, I KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG. Each one of the trainers brought in like 10-12 clients. We signed up a ton of new clients, about 300 very early into opening the facility so I didn’t think too much about it at first because I thought we were doing well. I thought we were doing well until started really looking at my numbers. So, we’re now three months into the business, and I started to notice that they were all driving nicer cars than I was. Flaunting their massive $5,000-$10,000 paid-in-full personal training checks. I’m thinking, there’s something wrong here. They’re using my equipment, my space, I have to clean up, I have to cover all of the expenses, and they’re making more money than me.
I REALIZED PRETTY QUICKLY HERE THAT I NEEDED TO MAKE A CHANGE. That’s when I shifted to a training model. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t pretty, and it certainly didn’t go as I thought it would. The whole point of this is that if I were just so in love with my model and was so stuck on it, I would be out of business. Now, this is the point in my career when I got introduced to a gentleman named Rick Mayo. He had a great training model, all the trainers worked for the company, and was doing 7 figures in 08 – which is something very few training facilities were doing this kind of revenue at that point. So, I flew out to meet Rick, and he basically made me clear out all of my equipment. All of it. He didn’t care that I just bought it. That I still owed money on it. He left me with some dumbbells and a few cable machines. The best advice he could ever give me was, “THE BEST PIECE OF EQUIPMENT YOU CAN HAVE IS SPACE. YOU NEED SPACE TO TRAIN CLIENTS.”
We changed Pulse Fitness from a general access gym to a training facility. I got rid of all of the independent coaches and hired my own team. Everything was supposed to be great right?
IT WAS TERRIFYING. I LOST ALMOST ALL OF MY CLIENTS OVERNIGHT. Now, you can either increase your memberships by volume, or you increase the average transaction amount, or to increase the frequency of your purchases per client. I took the second route. It was a HUGE change, and it was terrifying, but it was exactly what I needed to propel my business to the next level. Here we are 10 years later – still standing, and running a 7-figure facility that only takes 4 hours a week of my time. If I was closed minded, I would absolutely be out of business today. Business isn’t always about what you want, or what you think is the best. It’s about what IS best for your business. I didn’t see it in my own gym at first, and most gym owners can see their own problems within their business as well. Which is why we’ve introduced our Private Client Coaching program. I want to be able to help 500 gym owners this year build their business to grow, and sometimes that takes an outside perspective.
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