A lot of people, when getting into entrepreneurship, have an expectation of finding happiness or some kind of fulfillment that will result from running a business. Do they ever find happiness or feel fulfilled? It depends… As we have observed in other episodes, entrepreneurship is a self-development journey disguised as a business. To experience growth in your business, you have to up-level yourself. This process of self-development is not easy. It’s painful and uncomfortable but necessary. Embr...
Aug 10, 2022•25 min•Ep. 153
In this episode, Rick interviews Dan Park, VP of sales for InBody, an advanced device that measures body composition through bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA). It's a quick, noninvasive, accurate body composition analyzer providing a detailed breakdown of your weight in terms of muscle, fat, and water. Dan explains the technology behind the InBody, how they have scaled in both the medical and fitness space, and what's next for the company. Hear why and how Alloy incorporates the InBody into...
Aug 03, 2022•37 min•Ep. 152
One of the questions we get from candidates looking into buying an Alloy franchise is who is our ideal candidate. As an investor in the Alloy franchise, you don't have to service revenue. You can find an operator who will run the facility. But you must coach and motivate them to do this job effectively. There is nothing like a totally absentee owner in any business. So for our potential candidates, the question is whether you can find the right talent needed to effectively run an Alloy. And as R...
Jul 27, 2022•26 min•Ep. 151
We live in an increasingly digital age where everything we do has a digital touch, and fitness is no exception. To succeed in the fitness business, you must continually improve the customer experience and keep your clients engaged even when they are not inside your facility. Personal training apps are great at achieving this. But the thing with software and apps is that it would be futile to build your own as some gym owners think they can. Mainly because you are not in the software business, an...
Jul 20, 2022•36 min•Ep. 150
In this episode, Rick Mayo is interviewed by Dr. Kevin Christie of Modern Chiropractic Marketing on the importance of strategic branding and how to go about it. What comes to mind first when you think about all the great brands you interact with? I bet it’s the customer experience. Building a brand is more than just designing a logo and a color scheme. It’s about creating an emotional connection through every customer interaction. The secret that all great brands have understood is the ‘job of t...
Jul 13, 2022•37 min•Ep. 149
Time to Value (TTV) is a business concept that measures the time between when a customer purchases a product/service and when they start actually deriving value from it. The shorter this period, the better the perception of customer experience and the longer they stay. This is perhaps the most critical metric in the fitness industry when it comes to client longevity and retention. As a fitness entrepreneur, you should be working to decrease Time to Value to the shortest window of time possible t...
Jul 06, 2022•24 min•Ep. 148
Alloy Personal Training CEO Rick Mayo recently spoke at the FitPro Growth Summit in Nashville. While there, he met Amanda Hanquist of FIT CFO. She is a Financial Expert who helps health and fitness entrepreneurs with the financial side of running their businesses. In this packed episode, Rick and Amanda explore a wide range of topics in the fitness entrepreneurship space. In over 30 years of running a fitness business, Rick has gathered a wealth of knowledge that you’ll surely find valuable. Tun...
Jun 29, 2022•42 min•Ep. 147
In this episode, Matt and Rick discuss what really makes small group personal training "personal." Spoiler alert- it goes beyond exercise technique and great workouts. The lens that you have to put on as a business and as a trainer if you are to truly deliver personal training in a small group setting is treating each person as an individual. Each person in front of you is unique in what they need from you as a business or trainer. Finding out what they need and helping them is what personal tra...
Jun 22, 2022•18 min•Ep. 146
In this episode, Rick speaks with Abbie Kohler and Brian Morley of Resuscitech, a mobile CPR, AED, and First Aid certification/education solution. They are the only company providing CPR training and certification through a mobile phone. For a long time, CPR training had not caught up with the technological revolution of recent years. Abbie and her fellow co-founder, Greg, decided to leverage technology to bring CPR training and certification to the 21st century. The market has received this wel...
Jun 15, 2022•32 min•Ep. 145
As entrepreneurs, we can often be guilty of overcomplicating our businesses by adding layers of complexity that don't necessarily move the needle forward. In this episode, Rick and Matt talk about keeping it simple. This is easy to say but difficult to implement, especially in the fitness industry. But as data shows, businesses that manage to keep it simple and provide a consistent customer experience always win. You don't even have to be the best, but you have to consistently deliver to your cl...
Jun 08, 2022•22 min•Ep. 144
Kanter's law states that everything looks infinitely harder when you are in the middle. It was coined by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at the Harvard Law School. In this episode, we discuss this law through the lens of franchising. Just every new thing, when buying a franchise, you'll be very excited about the idea of starting a new project. On the other end, a great exit is something all entrepreneurs look forward to. However, there will be lots of lumps and bumps in the middle. There will ...
Jun 01, 2022•17 min•Ep. 143
Did you know that Alloy Personal Training Franchise has an industry-leading retention rate? This is our claim to fame and a powerful reason people buy our franchise because they can actually run a fitness business, not a marketing business with fitness on the side like some gyms do. But our customers don't just stick around longer than in any other fitness facility for no reason…. In this episode, Rick and Matt explore the 3 techniques we use to keep them. These are simple strategies that other ...
May 25, 2022•33 min•Ep. 142
The word 'sales' is sometimes viewed as a dirty word in the fitness industry. Some trainers don't even want anything to do with it, they just want to help people get in better shape. You can be the best trainer, but you don't have any clients without sales. You must first sell to find people to help. In this episode, Matt and Rick take you through the Alloy Personal Training Franchise sales process. This is a well-scripted sales process that we run to great success. The key highlight of our sale...
May 18, 2022•23 min•Ep. 141
We have previously discussed some cool phrases and techniques to close a sale, but did you know you might be screwing up your sale process unknowingly through some simple mistakes. In this episode, Rick and Matt go through the common mistakes they see people make in the fitness industry as they try to close a sale. You won’t believe how small these mistakes are, yet they mess up your sales process in a big way. We also explain the easy fixes you should apply to ensure you're closing those sales....
May 11, 2022•21 min•Ep. 140
At some point, successful entrepreneurs often wonder if they should franchise their business. But as any franchisor will tell you, this is a completely different business from your current business. It offers different challenges and opportunities to grow and help others along the way. But how do you know if you should go down this route, and if so, what do you need? Having successfully operated a fitness business for more than 30 years, licensing over 2000 clubs worldwide, and recently getting ...
May 04, 2022•30 min•Ep. 139
Meetings suck…..right? I bet you’ve sat in a long, tedious meeting where this thought crossed your mind. But the fact is only sucky meetings suck. For a gym owner, meetings are an excellent opportunity to get the team together to convey ideas, remind the team of the important things and the bigger picture, celebrate clients' successes, hold each other accountable, etc. Meetings are an important part of driving the culture you want in your business. But to run a productive meeting, you and the wh...
Apr 27, 2022•30 min•Ep. 138
Having been in business for more than 30 years and powered thousands of clubs worldwide, the Alloy Personal Training concept is a proven fitness and business model. This is the background upon which the franchise was built. The concept and systems were tested over and over again in a white label format before the eventual rollout of the franchising model. In this episode, Rick explains the reasons why Alloy got into franchising and how the concept came into life. One of the reasons that make All...
Apr 20, 2022•31 min•Ep. 137
With our franchising business gathering pace and lots of people from different backgrounds coming in, we thought we could set out the expectations that an entrepreneur should have when getting into business. There is no better person to do this than Rick, having been in entrepreneurship for more than 30 years. Rick admits that he didn’t have the right lens for his fitness business initially. He just happened to be at the right place at the right time. It took a hiccup to realize that he needed s...
Apr 13, 2022•27 min•Ep. 136
A presale is a marketing strategy to sell as many memberships as possible before opening your new gym. Here at Alloy Personal Training Franchise, we have a strong presales playbook that sees our franchisees open with close to full capacity memberships. This is very important from the investor standpoint to open cash-flow positive. Return on Investment (ROI) is much faster, which is what we want. From an operator standpoint, a strong presale means that the focus will straightaway be on servicing ...
Apr 06, 2022•34 min•Ep. 135
Arguably, the most important aspect of our jobs is closing sales. Yet many people in the fitness space either don’t know how to do it or don’t want to appear salesy. This shouldn’t be the case at all. In this episode, Rick and Matt go through the top sales closing techniques we deploy here at Alloy Personal Training Fitness Franchise to great effect. These techniques will convert you from a nervous, sales-averse person to a confident salesperson capable of closing any sale in a friendly, nice wa...
Mar 30, 2022•22 min•Ep. 134
You’ve probably given some thought to the idea of having an executive assistant to get some tasks off your plate but wondered how to go about it or who to hire. As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed by tasks that really don’t move the needle forward in your business in a meaningful way. That’s where an executive assistant comes in. They help you as a leader/CEO of your company to better manage your time and concentrate only on the tasks that need your attention. In short, th...
Mar 24, 2022•41 min•Ep. 133
The fitness industry continues to grow as society emphasizes healthy living, especially coming out of the worst public health crisis we’ve had in decades. A fitness career is uniquely rewarding as you genuinely get to help people attain their health and fitness goals. But to many coaches and personal trainers, the career in this industry trajectory isn’t clear. In this episode, Matt describes his journey from part-time trainer to VP of Programming for thousands of clubs worldwide. Rick and Matt ...
Mar 16, 2022•29 min•Ep. 132
Like all other industries, the fitness industry is trying to adjust to the post-pandemic world. An interesting phenomenon taking place over the last couple of months across all industries is the great resignation. Some people might prefer to call it the great reshuffle. The pandemic has managed to pierce the veil of security that people thought they had in their careers. Employees across all cadres are changing jobs, careers, and even exiting the workplace. One effect we are seeing in our fitnes...
Mar 09, 2022•44 min•Ep. 131
In this week’s episode, Matt asks Rick about the 3 habits that will make you a better leader and entrepreneur. Having been in entrepreneurship and business leadership for 3 decades, Rick shares the 3 most important habits that will make you successful. As a gym owner, you’ll be juggling a lot of things at the same time, both small and big things. Most of your time will be spent reacting to other people’s needs. You need to be purposeful about what you do every day. The sum of purposeful things d...
Mar 02, 2022•15 min•Ep. 130
One of the reasons the Alloy fitness concept is unique is that it targets a customer avatar under-served in the current fitness market. This customer is looking for accountability and specificity, which the Alloy brand promises and delivers. The Alloy brand has over 30 years of experience with small group and individual personal training. Coming out of Covid, many people understand that fitness plays a big part in their health. The right fitness concepts, like the Alloy personal training fitness...
Feb 23, 2022•59 min•Ep. 129
When you run a small business like a fitness facility, you are likely juggling many things. It's easy to forget some marketing stuff or remember at the last minute leading to half-baked marketing promotions. All this is solved by having a marketing calendar. It outlines what needs to be done the whole year, when, and by whom. From an organizational perspective, it helps keep everything running smoothly. More importantly, it helps drive engagement and retention for your fitness business. We have ...
Feb 16, 2022•20 min•Ep. 128
In this episode, Rick explains why the Alloy concept is very different from everything else in the market. Most of the fitness concepts in the market are class-based. On the other end of the spectrum, there is one on one personal training, which is expensive. The Alloy concept is based on attracting the customer avatar who wants the accountability of one on one personal training but gives them a better value proposition by training six people at once. Alloy systems and processes help keep the br...
Feb 09, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 127
In this episode, Matt and Rick discuss how to drive more revenue in your personal training business through ancillary sales and retention strategies. In a personal training model, your customers essentially pay you to hold them accountable as they work towards their goals. With this in mind, there are some solution-based sales that you should be selling to them in addition to the training sessions. Anything that helps them in their fitness journey and speaks to their goals is a good source of ad...
Feb 02, 2022•22 min•Ep. 126
Many people in the fitness industry often wonder how you can systematize personal training and make it scalable. But to be successful and help more people, you have to have systems and processes dialed in. Like many fitness businesses, Rick certainly didn’t have systems in place early on in his business. A couple of incidences he discusses in this episode almost brought everything down. But looking back, this was the turning point that led to the success of the Alloy Personal Training Franchise....
Jan 26, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 125
So you want to open and operate a gym but don’t know where to start… you are in the right place. Whether you are a trainer, someone who wants to change their career, or looking to start a gym as a side business, a fitness business can be quite rewarding when done right. In this episode, Alloy Personal Training CEO is interviewed by Quinn Mitchell on what it takes to operate a successful gym and the current state of the fitness industry. Rick is a fitness industry veteran, having started personal...
Jan 19, 2022•55 min•Ep. 124
