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5 Myths That Keep Gym Owners Stuck Under $30K (Pt. 5) · Gym Business Coach Podcast

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You are listening to the built-to-grow podcast delivering the knowledge in all things, fitness, business.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: We help jimrollers win, hear your hosts, ten lions, and Randy Axton.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: All right, welcome back to the built-girl podcast from your host Tim Lines join again in studio by Randy Inkston was on the people are gonna be able to like spell it out.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, buddy.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: All right, so
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: wrap it up our series man or our five myths on that keep Jim owner stuck below $30,000 a month in recurring revenue.
• 0:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know guys we kind of used this $30,000 a month number because that is what we've seen at least with the gyms that we've worked with talk with in the industry.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: That seems to be a line in the sand where you can start getting ahead.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like once you're past $30,000 a month, you're kind of out of survival.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: The bills are getting paid, at least the majority of them are.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you're ready to move into a little bit more of growth mode versus survival.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's the ultimate goals.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've got to get you over the $30,000 a month.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one of the myths that we're seeing, at least with the prospects we're talking to is sessions being sold still, which is not sure why how we're here in 2025 into 26 that people would still package up their sessions and sell them.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: This comes from the old one on one training models of the 80s and 90s, really the 90s and 2000s.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was, you know, by five sessions for X, 10 for Y, you know, 20 to price rate.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Their price would go down the more you bought.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was just kind of like this weird thing that trainers did.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the consumers got conditioned to it.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, you run out of your sessions and it's time to renew the sessions.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you have to have another sales conversation.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's a big lump sum.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, while I understand hey, it's pretty cool pick up three, four, five thousand dollars chunk at one time, it kind of helps.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: What you're really doing there is selling time.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're selling the service as a chunk of time versus the result.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Results take time of course, but how can you honestly tell somebody in a sales consultation if you just give me 10 sessions I'll get you there.
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you really don't know the answer.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: We need months and years and, you know, etc.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that's that's really what's being positioned still in some gyms as we're selling sessions and we gotta get away from that.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: We want to get into a recurring model, a long-term whether or not it's a month a month week to week, year to year.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not sessions.
• 2:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Correct.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and the big thing here, I think, is where the business is, you, you, you want to shift the focus to being able to deliver the service, not have to think about the sale all the time.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think the problem is when you're in these session packages, you have to, you have to resell that client consistently.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's at always top of mind.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not just moving them from that seat.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, remember, now you can go deliver info fill on that.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, it changes kind of your daily thought process as to like what you attack your business with, you know sales is always top of mind.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've always been held bent on monthly recurring revenue, I think, to the point where you kind of laid it out in the beginning, you know, you hit the 30K or at least have your base operating expenses covered by your monthly recurring clarity sets in.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you can actually just focus on training and getting the result of the client.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: and not have to resell them all of the time to meet a little bit more transactional than relational.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you're not moving them into the relationship where it's like, oh, cool, now you know your member of our facility, let's just go do what we're supposed to do.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: On some levels, selling sessions may even be a little easier in some cases, because they're they're signing up for X amount of work out.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's it's very,
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, it's a package.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a start and end date.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Usually there's some expiration.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I've seen some gyms that don't expire of sessions and they're servicing people three years down the road is kind of weird.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: But
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I guess step one of these put some damn expiration in terms of around your sessions if you're not going to be willing to change out of sessions.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Make sure that they expire.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: You got to use them by x well, and it goes to the result to you know what I mean.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: We know that a client that's visiting our gym on a regular cadence is going to get the result and if somebody's not showing up and they're just pushing out those sessions consistently and whether they're sitting on them for you know,
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: you can't deliver that result in your own, you're putting yourself at risk if you're not delivering a result to that client that client's going to have the choice to go somewhere else.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I had Jim once, it wasn't that long ago.
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: We went and visited it.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a Jim that was doing huge numbers and after we kind of pulled it, pulled the curtain back and understood what they were doing, they were selling some massive like.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: They did credits, but like, you know, 100 credits and you can use a credit for this and two credits for that and nutrition was this and stretch was that and when you really took a look at it, some of these folks weren't going to finish those credits for three years two to three years and you're collecting this money today.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: and potentially be servicing this person for three years without any additional revenue now.
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Again, back to the old, we'll put that into a drip account argument, you know, maybe, no you won't.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: You won't do it.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: You'll never do it.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've never seen that anybody put their lump sum paid and falls into a drip account and drip them into their, you know, like like they were a membership.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're at risk, I mean, good on you for picking up a of $70,000 payment, you know, in one time, I mean, it's kind of unheard of, it's very unique and, you know, awesome, but at the same time, like, yeah, there's a lot of risk there, so.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, I don't know what side of the fence I'm on with that.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's interesting, at least having recurring revenue as your global base, maybe 80, 20, and selling these giant packages to kind of icing on the top wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but just being at risk of having to serve as somebody for three, even maybe in four years, some cases selling these gigantic packages.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's that, but at the end of the day, like listen, you're going to have a consultation with a client.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're going to have to have a conversation around the result you're planning on getting over an X amount of time.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's much more transparent and not transactional.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you tell them, hey, we need you any three days a week for the next six months.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sure, if you did the math and I don't know, do the math 12 times say 72 sessions, we can do 72 sessions.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of the same thing, but it's you're selling at one time and it's just going into a recurring revenue model, where it's like they're remembered now and you're going to service them at X amount of sessions per week, wherever the frequency is, for us it's unlimited, but many gyms do two or even three times a week.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And some even do two to three times a week if they listen to us at all.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a pretty cool way to do it.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: But
• 7:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: at the end of the day you're working with a client over a longer period of time we're not looking in and or counting sessions and we're not having to resign and resell every time a client runs out of that tin pack right so it's a different way to look at it and one of the things too is like you know we always up at the relief of the lifestyle client right to us the lifestyle client has almost a moving goalpost.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know they they accomplish their first let's say they want to lose weight when they first start with us they get there right cool now we shift focus we realign their goal to something else
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: if it's, when somebody's with you for that period of time and you've pre-range that term, I think it's easier to have that conversation than it is somebody who used up their sessions lost the weight and now you have to kind of, or did it, it was a reward.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: There you go, or didn't get the result.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then now you're at risk of losing that client entirely because you have to resell them into another package, you know, I would much rather work with somebody knowing that they're, you know, under our,
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, in our business, part of our membership and be able to just service them for whatever goal that they have as opposed to having to realign that transaction with the new goal at the same time.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Any time you give an opportunity for them to think about their options elsewhere, you put yourself at risk.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: and they're running out or there's there's there are no more obligation to come maybe though just but you know what i i'm not gonna do my last five sessions disappear and you can never get a hold of it again that's another thing they're not on it but they're not on any kind of recurring or an agreement or terms it's that they ten sessions they dropped the the cash and
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: you everybody knows that's listening that's ever done sessions you've got people that's you still owe seven sessions from four years ago like are they going to come back as they're turns around that and then when they do leave and they give up there's really no conversation they don't have to come in because they've already paid there's no the transactions fulfill lots of reasons not to do it I understand
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: the dopamine hit, or the nice cash flow cushion, or whatever you want to call it, or the ease of selling a 10 pack versus a annual program.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it'll bite you again.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're all about, again, flagging the grant, recurring revenue, build it up as high as you can, get it well above your base operating expenses.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then if you want to throw a paid and full or a session pack or something here and there, because you got that special situation when the clients travel in all the time,
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: By all means do it, but don't run and sell that first Have it as an icing on the top or a back pocket deal if you have to if if somebody's just gonna walk out if they don't do sessions and by all means Sure figure that out.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Don't let them walk away Make it work, but at the end of the day guys That's one of the reasons that's keeping you stuck under 30 thousand dollars a month and be carrying revenue That's that's again.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's where we want to get you to you guys if you need help
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: With anything, we got a springboard program, gymbusinesscoach.com is going to be the URL for that.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: You don't want to go check that out.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've got a group coaching program that people are, it was rocking this week.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's some like 20 something people on there, gym owners at all different levels, guys.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you're looking at switch over to semi-private, if you're doing semi-private, you want to do a better, you want to market, better sell, better, deliver, better than you need to be in this program, guys.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hopefully that helps you guys, and until next time, keep changing lives.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll see you on the next show.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Alright, thanks for listening to another episode of the built-grilled podcast.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you want more help growing your business, join our free Facebook group, Profit Accelerator, helping training gyms grow to $30,000 a month and beyond.
• 10:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'd love to see you there, go check out the show notes for the link, and keep building something great, and we'll see you in the next episode.