How to Take Your Gym From Good to Great

Some of these are gonna be familiar to you, but I'm gonna translate them into the gym world and show you exactly what you've gotta do. So let's start with what great gyms have in common. After working with over 2000 gyms worldwide, we've learned that a great gym can uh , have 30 clients. It can have 300 clients, it can have no staff, or it could have 15 staff.

It could be in a dingy warehouse, or it could be in this like pristine spa, right? What great gyms do have in common though, is not the client headcount. It's not really their location, it's that they all get clients the results that the client wants, that they create a third place for their clients to go, which is like a place other than work or home.

And that where the client just kinda like wants to go as often as possible. Great gyms create good careers for their staff, and great gyms pay their owners more than the owner would make if they were working for somebody else at another gym. So every gym is different in its own way, even though we've worked with 2000, none have been the same, but the Great Gym has at least three things in common, okay?

And today I'm gonna break down those three areas of commonality, and we're actually gonna start with the niche. So let's go here. I'm gonna help you find your niche and identify it, and that's gonna actually like increase the greatness of your gym and help you build all these other things too. So the first exercise we're gonna do here is actually identify who your niche is.

A lot of gyms who are struggling to get from good to great really don't have a clear concept of this. They just think, well, we're for everybody and like, we're gonna try and attract anybody in our town who wants to work out. But the reality is that the gyms who niche down, who know who their target audience is and who they can serve, they get their clients better results.

They create a place that their clients really love to go. They create better opportunities for their staff, and they create better income for their owners. And they do that by niching down instead of trying to just please everybody. So here's how you do it. To find your niche, you've gotta first think about your area of passion, okay? Like what are you most fired up about? You know, I love cycling.

So for me, my area of passion might be cycling for you. Your area of passion might be CrossFit. That was mine for like a decade. Uh , before that I was a powerlifter. So my area of passion might've been powerlifting. Okay? So you, you wanna put down your area of passion, whether it's yoga, pilates, CrossFit, bootcamp, strength and conditioning, hit whatever you wanna do, put that in your area of passion, okay?

Because I'll tell you like we say that the method matters less than the model, and that's very true. But the reality is that if you wanna be great, your passion will show and your clients will know. Next, you wanna ask yourself, what can I be the best in town at? Okay? Now Collins in his book would talk about like Best in the world, but he's talking about massive companies.

We're talking about running gyms in your hometown. And so you wanna ask yourself like, what can I actually be the best at? Now in a lot of cases, this might be something where you have no other competition. You might be the best at training people for hockey. You might be the best at training people for weight loss. You might be the best at training people for CrossFit competition.

Or you might be the best at training golfers or cyclists or whatever that is. You wanna determine a place where you know that you can actually be the best. The last thing you wanna do is be like the second best CrossFit gym in town, because there's a massive delta between the best and the second best.

In fact, if you're the second best CrossFit gym in town and your clients don't differentiate you any other way, you're really providing kind of like a staircase to the best CrossFit gym in town because your clients will, best clients will ascend to them. And then third, you've gotta look at like, where do the economics make sense?

So maybe you can be like the best gym in town, but you can't also be the cheapest gym in town. If you're the best access gym in town, then the economics have to work , uh, to make sure that you can get new equipment and stuff.

If you're the best CrossFit gym in town, then you have to be charging more than the other CrossFit gyms so that you can pay for the coaches and the staff and the, or yeah, the other staff and the equipment and the space, all that stuff, right? The economics have to work.

So to figure out if the economics work, what you want to take is actually clients, and you want to divide that into revenue to create average revenue per member. That's a r m , okay ? You need to make sure that your a r m works, no matter if you're running a group CrossFit model, a group yoga, Pilates model, whatever, one-on-one training, semi-private is this metric that has to work for you.

It's not head count , it's not even retention. It's average revenue per member that you get per month, okay? That niche is really gonna be defined by the thing that you're passionate about, the thing that you can comfortably say that you are the best in town at. And also, like one of the economics drive, for example, you might be passionate about CrossFit.

You might be the best CrossFit coach in town, getting people the best CrossFit results in town. But if your a r m is too low, that niche is not gonna work for you. Like, you know, you're just not gonna be able to make a living. Remember what the great gyms do, right? They get the clients the results that they want, okay? Check. They also make careers for staff.

If your a r m is too low, it doesn't matter how many clients you have, you're not gonna make great careers for your staff. You're also gonna have high turn . You're not gonna be able to make a great and owner bene net owner benefit for you, the owner. And that's what great gyms do. So the economics have to work no matter what you're doing. Let's take this a different way.

Let's say that you're personal training gym, okay? So you've got like a really high a r m, maybe you're even the best personal trainer in town, and maybe that's what you're really passionate about, is delivering one-on-one training to people. Okay? That's great. So your

And most gyms running just a group model, their a r m is way too low for them to successfully build a great gym because the niche that they have just isn't paying them enough. So it's, you know, you , you're missing one here, you're dividing by two , a lower number, okay? So great gyms have these three things in common. Their founder and their staff has a clear passion for what they're doing.

They're the best in town at exactly what they're doing, or maybe the only one in town. And the economics work, I wanna give you an example here. So in my town , uh, there's a phy phys ed teacher who trains hockey players in the summer, and he's the only guy that focuses just on hockey and he just runs it out of his garage. He makes about 40 grand a year doing this because he only focuses on hockey.

And so the hockey players think, well, if I'm serious, I need to go to this guy's garage. And he's been doing it for a decade. He is the best in town at training hockey players, and he's put people into the N H L or help them get there anyway. And so the N H L players, when they come back, they come back to this guy's gym. And so the junior players, they see the N H L guys at this gym.

They want to go there too, right? He's creating this kind of like third space. Now. He doesn't have any staff, he does it all himself because he is super passionate about it. And that really shows. So he's got the passion, he's got the best in town and the economics work because when you niche down, you can actually charge more for your service specialists charge more than generalists.

And so niching down actually increases client value. Think about like, you need to buy brain surgery, whatever that is, and money is not an object. And you're looking for the best person in the world. You're probably thinking already like, well, the best person is gonna charge the most, right? But in a lot of micro gyms, that's not what happens.

You, you work really hard to become like the best coach, provide the best gym , and then you base your pricing on what everybody else is doing. You can't do that. The economics have to work. So the first step in going from good to great is to identify that niche.

Now, if you're coming into this, you own a gym, you don't know how to identify that niche, I'm gonna give you an exercise right now to show you how to do that, okay ? This is really simple and you can work with your mentor to get deeper on this if you want to. Okay? So if you've already got a gym, you're like, ah , how do I niche down?

I , I've got, you know, people who want weight loss, I got people who wanna touch their toes. I got people who wanna compete at CrossFit. Like, how do I define who my best client is and focus on them? Well, you're gonna make two lists. The first list are people who pay you the most money. This should be easy.

You open up what kilo push presses implant or whatever that is, and you print off like what people are paying you. And then you just rank your top 10. So top you know, Dave, Kim , whatever, Larry, okay ? And you just kind of go down that list in order.

And the next thing that you do is you just close your eyes for a moment and think about the clients who feed you energy, who light you up when they show up, they, they come to your classes or your appointments, you look forward to seeing them. They show up with batteries included. They raise the energy of everybody else that's in the gym, okay? And you want to put their names here. One of my favorites is Boo.

And then you got Lucy, and then you got Kim, and then you got Derek . Oh yeah, these are my , like my favorite four. So now what I want you to do is I want you to look at both lists here and say like, who are the names who appear on both lists? Well, Kim does, you know, so Kim is one of my ideal clients. Kim is my niche.

And then what you wanna do after that is you wanna say like, you know, you take all the ones that you, you circled here. So let's just for the sake of argument, say that there's more than one. Let's put Derek on both sides too . Maybe Derek pays you money.

It's gonna be really easy for you to identify that a lot of the people who light you up are also the same people who pay you money, not because they pay you money, it's, they just have that in common. And you'll see why that's important in a moment. So then what you wanna do is you wanna say like, okay, what do Kim and Derek have in common and what their commonalities are actually gonna define your niche.

Well, both are married, not to each other, but to other people. Both have like professional jobs, you know, she's an attorney, he's a dental hygienist or something like that. So professional jobs, both have kids, different ages, but they both have kids, both have to commute to work, okay ? Et cetera . Both struggle with nutrition, both , uh, lack flexibility when they come in here.

Both have a busier time of year at work. Whatever that is, you wanna list those commonalities and that is actually going to be your niche. Your niche is really the sum of these commonalities, okay ? That is the problem that you can solve better than anybody else in town. And that focusing on that is what is gonna make your gym great. Okay?

So in the next little span here, what I'm gonna do is talk about the next thing that makes gyms great when you're moving your gym from good to great. One of the missing elements is discipline. And we're not talking about the discipline of like working out really hard or getting up at 4:00 AM and taking a picture of your watch.

Like Jocko, we're talking about the discipline of working within a framework with freedom and responsibility. So I'm gonna break down exactly what that means for you here. So Jocko willing says that discipline equals freedom. And what he means really is consistency. If he's gonna work out every day at 4:00 AM and if you follow him on Instagram, you'll see the picture of his watch every day.

It's because that consistency actually creates freedom for the rest of his day. He doesn't have to think about, when am I gonna work out tomorrow? He knows at 4:00 AM is gonna be a workout. Well, in your gym discipline also equals freedom because consistency is more important than anything else. And I'm gonna give you an example here.

Let's say that you are an an amazing coach. Everybody loves coming to your classes. You are a 10 out of 10 coach. And then let's say you can't coach every class, you gotta hire somebody. And, and the night coaches , they mean well, but they're a five outta 10. Soon. What happens is, people who come at night, and they've also experienced your coaching, they'll say, Hey, when are you coaching?

Or they'll start to judge the nighttime class, like, ah , it's not as good. Your gym is only as good as its weakest length . And so if you've got coaches on your bench who are a five out of 10, if you don't answer the phone when it rings, if your gym is kind of clean, then that's the level that you can rise to, right?

You don't rise to the level of your marketing, you fall to the level of your systems and your systems are what give your gym consistency. So consistency for me means freedom and responsibility within a framework. I'm gonna show you exactly what that means right now . And in our blog today, I've got some instructions on exactly how to start building these frameworks.

So let's say that we start off with like the perfect class. Uh , think about your your best class in the gym, and I want you to write down step by step what should happen. Okay? So step one starts precisely on time. Step two, maybe there's like three minutes of banter, okay? Step three, it's about a 12 minute warmup, okay?

And then step four is you get out the equipment that you're gonna be using for the lift, okay? And step five is like 15 minutes of strength or skill. This just flows naturally to me because I've done it so many times. Your first time through it won't be this easy, but basically what I'm showing you here is you're giving your staff a , a framework.

And if they've got a framework to follow, then you know that they're gonna deliver the ultimate outcome at the end, which is like finish on time with happy people who love being there , uh, and have progressed toward their goal, okay? On time, on goal, happy. Now what you haven't done is given your staff a script. You , you haven't said, like, okay, start your watch. Now read this. Here's the cue card.

You know, you've given your staff a framework, they've got some freedom within that framework. You know, maybe they're allowed to make up their own warmup if they want to. We used to do this, now we actually give 'em the warmup. But maybe you let them do that the way that they teach the strength, you know, maybe that's up to them. So that's the freedom that's allowed within the framework.

However, the framework also comes with responsibility. And that responsibility is you will start on time and you'll start precisely on time and you will spend 12 minutes on the warmup, right? And you will finish on time. And your responsibility is actually for finishing on time, for , um, getting clients closer to the goals that they want and finishing happy. Those are the three outcomes that you need.

So when you create this culture of discipline, what you're actually creating here is guidelines, right? The framework and the responsibility to adhere to the framework. The next step though is to bring accountability in, because responsibility is sometimes internalized by people and sometimes not. So you have to create responsibility externally. And you do that by evaluating.

So in this example, the perfect class framework, what you would do is you would show up and you'd have a stopwatch and you would observe the class, and then you would rate the coach on a scale of like one to 10, where perfect completion of this framework is a 10, and you know, a five gets you fired or whatever. Then what you would do is you would call a meeting one-on-one with this coach.

We call that a career roadmap . You deliver this evaluation to 'em , say, here's where you can improve. And then you say, here's what will happen if you do improve. Okay? So the the second thing that great gyms have that good gyms don't is they have this culture of discipline. It's not just a matter of we wanna get our level four certification, we all wanna get our black belt. Like that's personal discipline.

Business discipline means that you're operating with excellence consistently, and you're only as excellent as your least consistent part. Now look, this comes, this is true for all of your ops. It's not just the coaching. If you don't respond to your leads who are texting you and asking you questions quickly, sorry, like your gym is not great. If your sales office is dirty or you got sticky shoes in there, I'm sorry.

You can't become great if your bathrooms are not clean on time. Sorry, if you're not evaluating your programming and updating it, I'm sorry, you , you won't have a great gym until you do that. You have to be consistent in everything. Alright ? The third thing that great gyms have that good gyms don't, is they focus on momentum. So I wrote this book, the Simple Six, to talk about the power of incremental gains. Okay?

Now, you might've heard this as like the 1% rule or something else, but basically the , the best gyms in the world, they don't have like one specific marketing plan, right? Like one six week Facebook ads challenge is not gonna make you the best gym in the world. What they do have is momentum. That means that they're doing one thing every day to grow their business. I'm gonna tell you how to do that.

And also like how this momentum thing works. Now in his book, good to Great Jim Collins refers to pushing the flywheel. And in my book the Simple six, I wanted to break that down and make it actionable by Jim owners. So I kind of drew the flywheel and what it means, each little cog on the flywheel here, or you could call it a handle if you want, is one metric in your gym.

These are the six key metrics that you have to track and improve in your gym to become great. That's average revenue per member . A r m length of engagement, leg effective hourly rate . You have to be doing valuable things with your time. Head is headcount. How many clients you have, r o i is the return that you're getting on your investments, like in your space, your equipment and your staff.

Staff and net owner benefit is how much the gym pays you. You have to be constantly improving all these things. And that is way more important than finding like the one magic bullet that's gonna fix everything for you. So let's start off with a quick little exercise here.

What I want you to do is just set a timer for two minutes, and I want you to think of all the ways that you can increase , uh, average revenue per member. Okay? So here's a hint, raise your prices, okay? But there's other ways too . You can switch to biweekly billing. You can , uh, pass on credit card fees to the client.

You can sell t-shirts, you can sell supplements, you can , um, you know, put more clients on personal training, whatever, set up timer for two minutes and like build out your list. Okay? I'm gonna pick biweekly billing for our example. Now. And again, like there are so many things that we teach in two brand that will help people boost their a r m. This is just a snapshot of our toolkit.

It's even been updated since here. Like I know that we're missing a couple of really awesome upgrades right here. But you can do all this stuff to boost your a r m . The next step though is you're gonna focus on doing that action. Okay? So let me ask you, if this is you, you get up early 5:00 AM you're thinking about the gym, you're listening to podcasts, maybe this one on the way to the gym.

You get to the gym, by the time you look up again, it's nine at night. You've been there for 16 hours. You head home, you're listening to a podcast, you're thinking about the gym. You spent an hour with your wife and then you think, did my gym actually grow today? And it didn't. You were busy, but you didn't actually grow the gym. And , and that happened to me for like 700 days in a row.

The key to success and building momentum is at the end of the day, you gotta be able to look back and say, what was the one thing that I did today that actually grew my gym? And just asking that question either will help you sleep or it will prioritize what you need to do the next day. So I'm gonna tell you what you need to do the next day.

You're gonna take this list that you've made for a r m and you're gonna make a similar list for each of the metrics that I spelled out above, okay ? Length of engagement event is retention. E h r is like higher value work. Headcount is increasing the number of clients you have, r o i is auditing your expenses and improving them. Net owner benefit is paying yourself. And what you're gonna do now is map these out.

So for the next 30 days, you're going to improve each of these metrics just a little bit. You're gonna build some momentum. You're not gonna make a giant leap. Like you're not gonna double your rates or anything like that. The first thing that you're gonna do is look at a r m. Okay ?

So tomorrow, when you get up, before you do anything else, you're going to pick one way to increase your a r m. So I'm gonna look at my list and maybe I've got a dozen things on my list, but the easiest thing actually seems to be , uh, biweekly billing. Okay ? I'm gonna move my clients to biweekly billing, okay?

So tomorrow morning at 5:00 AM when I get up, I , I make my coffee, I walk down to the basement and I say, how do I move to monthly billing or biweekly billing from monthly? Monthly? Well, you can do some research on the internet, figure it out. Our clients in two brainin have like a step-by-step , uh, plan to do this, including like a script to share with their clients.

So if you're in two brainin , all you gotta do is copy that script, put it into your email, get it set to send out, you know , start with new clients if you want to, and then move to everybody. Talk to your mentor about when to do it, et cetera. But this is a job that you can do, if not finished on Monday, you can have this finished by Tuesday, okay ? And you've done one thing to grow your business that day.

The next day, or as soon as you've finished this, you move on to your leg tactic. And so you might have like a whole bunch of things that improve retention listed, right? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Well, you're gonna pick the easiest, fastest one, and you're gonna say, okay, yeah , that's the one that I'm gonna do. And you're gonna start working on that. And every morning you're going to work on that thing until it's done.

And then when that thing is done, you're going to move on to your e H R tactic. How can I spend my time better? Maybe I could hire a cleaner. So the next morning you're going to start off by writing the, the checklist for a cleaner. Then you're gonna post a job ad for the cleaner. And again, like two brain clients have all of this, but if you're not in two brain yet, you can, you can create these things, okay?

Yourself or sign up for two brand and just get them. So then, you know, you've got like all these E H R tasks and okay, well it's gonna take me Thursday and Friday to write the cleaning checklist and then post a job ad. Good. Don't do anything else until that's done. And then move on to head count . Okay?

Now you've got a list of 12 ways that you can increase head count , pick the easiest, fastest way and just do that until it's done. This is how you create momentum. And I'll tell you something, the , the best gyms in the world, the , the gyms that go from good to great, they have long ago abandon the idea that they're gonna find like one marketing silver bullet.

And instead they have embraced the concept of momentum every day. They do one thing to grow their business. Here's the advice that I give most people for me. I'm not great at context switching. It exhausts me. So by the time I'm at the gym, it's too late to do any work that's gonna grow that gym.

What I have to do is get up and I get up at five 30, go downstairs with a cup of coffee, and I have 45 minutes before I have to leave the house. And that 45 minutes is spent doing one thing to grow my gym. That one thing might be a blog post, right? It, it might be like some of the examples I gave here, setting up biweekly billing or you know , hiring a cleaner, posting a job ad.

But I'm gonna do one thing because at the end of the day when I look back and say, what was the thing that I did that grew my business today, aha , it was posting that job ad for the cleaner, or it was, you know , writing the cleaning checklist or it was writing that one blog post with chat G P T or whatever that was, if I can look back on the day and say, I did one thing to grow my business today, then

I've got something really important. I've got momentum.

We've produced over 43 millionaires now. And I promise you the key to making these great gyms is not I'm gonna hire an ad agency, right? The key is really what I've talked about in this show. It's , you've gotta have a couple things. You've gotta have your niche, you've gotta have discipline, the business discipline, and you've also gotta have momentum, okay ? Niche, discipline, momentum.

That combination is absolutely unstoppable. This is run a profitable gym . If you want to hear more about this stuff, you can go to gym owners united.com. That's a free Facebook group where you can share your tips and strategies for building momentum, discipline, and your niche, and you can hear from other people too. Thanks for your service.