Massive Client Headcount: How Top Gyms Attract and Retain Members

And it's the same with your gym. Getting more clients will usually help, but there are other factors to consider if you really wanna make your gym fit. One of those is retention. One of those is average revenue per client. You can't just get a lot of clients paying a low price and expect to be successful not in a coaching gym.

And that's what makes these numbers even more spectacular, is that not only are these gyms working with three, 400 clients up to, as you're going to hear over 700 clients, but these gyms would be profitable with far fewer clients. And so every client who comes in is not a solution to a problem. They're icing on the cake.

They're creating more opportunities for more staff because they had a plan to be profitable at 150 clients. Now that they're working with a multiple of that, they are super profitable, they're expanding their influence and they're creating more opportunities for staff and coaches. You gotta have a plan. You can't just say, oh, if I get more clients, I'll solve all my problems. Sometimes more clients creates problems.

Now that said, I'm enormously proud of this list. Maybe more proud than ever before. Number one, you're going hear a lot of international diversity. You know, people get on the call with me and they say, Hey Chris, like I'm in this different market. I'm in this special snowflake. I've got this unique situation. I'm in southern America, I'm in Eastern Europe, I'm in New Zealand. Everything is different here.

And while the truth is that every gym is different, no two gyms are exactly the same. The principles that we teach at Two Brain Work, because they're business principles that'll work for every single gym. And then we pair you one-on-one with a mentor to tailor those principles to your specific situation.

Hey, a lot of the times if we get over our own misperceptions, like my market can't afford that, we'll actually grow a better business. And you know, it's less usually an issue of geography than it is of your own internal blockages. So let's, let's get at it here. These are gym owners who have largely solved a lot of those internal blockages. And so we're gonna start with number 10.

Uh , the 10th ranked gym for most clients in Tube Brain this month comes from the United Kingdom. They had 363 members. Number nine also comes from the UK with 426 members. Now what, what's a member? Well, it's somebody that's paying you a recurring membership. They're not working off a punch card, you know, they're not showing up and dropping in for a week while they're on vacation.

These are like the recurring memberships that are gonna be happening this month and next month and next month. And number eight is from the Netherlands. They have 430 members, amazing number six and seventh, we've got a tie. Uh, there's a gym in the US and a gym in Germany, each with 431 paying members. Fifth place is Denmark with 451. Fourth place is also from Denmark with 482.

Third place is Canada representing 543 paying members. Second place is Chile with 716. You've seen them at the top of the leaderboard many times in the past. And first place is Denmark was 741. The first thing I'd like to point out is like the international flavor here.

A lot of these people, I , I mean they're obviously from seven different countries here, but a lot of them came in thinking like, I don't know if this is gonna work in my market. The truth is that principles work in every market. And then we tailor those principles one-on-one for you with a mentor. So what are the principles that we're teaching that these gyms are benefiting from?

Well, number one, we teach them all four marketing funnels. You know, we teach them how to use paid ads. We teach them how to set up a referral funnel. We teach them how to use social media effectively. And of course we teach them how to use content effectively.

While each of those four funnels is going to have different strengths, depending on the strength of the owner, the strength of the market and stuff, everybody should be doing all four of those. And once they've got those funnels, they should be working to get better and better at them all the time. But just getting clients in the door is not the most important thing.

Keeping those clients is really the key to having large client head counts in your gym. And I'm gonna read you some quotes from these leaders in a moment. So first, congratulations to all of our leaders. Amazing work. This is incredible. You're truly setting the bar for everybody else.

While there is sometimes a bit of a correlation between what the price of the, the service is and the client headcount that you wind up with. You don't get more clients by lowering rates and you don't lower rates to get more clients. Lower rates is not a marketing tactic. It doesn't improve retention, it doesn't reduce barrier to entry.

When you've got a gym with over 700 members in any country in the world, you know that low rates is not the answer. It's it's not telling you the whole story, okay? So even gyms , uh, that we talk to who have very client, high client headcounts, and they're really selling access, like their primary service is 24 7.

They come to Tub Brain because they're adding a no sweat intro process because they want to keep those clients around the big access clubs. The studios like Planet Fitness for example, their biggest challenge is not getting people in the door for 30 bucks a month or 20 or 19 or three months free. Their biggest challenge is keeping those people.

And these clubs struggle long term , not because they can't get people to sign up for their ridiculously low offers, but because they can't keep those people. When you bring somebody in for 19 bucks a month, that person probably won't show up. They don't have enough invested to actually , uh, you know, show up and do the workouts, but they'll also be lured away by somebody offering 15 bucks a month.

Those businesses that have people drawn in by low prices also have a churn problem, which means they have a collections problem, which means they have a staff problem because they're not keeping people around consistently enough to make any progress, and they don't have a margin big enough to actually pay their staff. So these low priced offers just to chase client headcount is a mistake.

And when, when these clubs are coming into two brainin , I I promise you, they're trying to build a gym like yours, they're trying to add more coaching services that will increase retention, increase client value. If you are running a club and you've got 500 members already, a small increase in a RM like $5 a month has a massive effect on your bottom line.

But more than anything else, it has a massive effect on your ability to help people. So when, when access gyms, gyms that are selling 24 7 access come into two brainin , what they're doing is they're looking to build a coaching program.

When coaching gyms come into two brainin , which is, you know, 900 plus of our thousand gyms, what they're trying to do is really establish the value of their coaching program, learn to charge what they're worth, learn to keep people around, learn to sell a high value service, which is, you know, what they should be selling anyway. What is stopping gyms from reaching these numbers?

I , I'm gonna address that personally because, you know, our, our company is now mentored well over 2,500 gyms worldwide. And I'll tell you, there are common denominators that are stopping you from growing most gyms, and you might find yourself in this category, they'll hit a certain number and then they'll stop there and they'll sink back down.

So that number might be 80 clients, it might be a hundred clients, it might be 120, it might be 150. Those are the really common spots. And if you look at the state of the industry data, you'll see that that number for most gyms is around 123 clients. They hit that number, they sink back down, they hit that number, they sink back down, maybe they exceed the number and then they sink back down.

And the problem if this is you, is not marketing. The problem is that there's a reason you're not keeping people. And that problem is probably systems. You know, you , you're not delivering a consistently really good experience. You might have one coach who's a nine out of 10 and four coaches who are, you know, threes and fours out of 10.

And so people who can't come to that best coach or like they can't experience your best service, they're gone. You know, you are as strong as your weakest link really applies here. The second is, you don't have a plan for onboarding. You're not talking to people one-on-one, you're not prescribing the best path for them. You're not giving them a proper onboarding process.

Instead you're doing maybe a free trial and then throwing them into group classes and saying, I will fix your problem. I mean, that's really like throwing an old junker on the assembly line and saying, we'll fix its problem. As it moves down the line, you're actually better off to start with a new car and, you know, start from a , a solid foundation with people and then train them up to be sports cars from there.

You know , uh, just tweaking little things. So that means you need an on-ramp process. You also need to map out a client's first 90 days. There's other things that you can do to retain clients too, including, you know , surprisingly asking them for referrals because if they bring in their spouse, their best friend, their coworker , they're more likely to stick around themselves too.

So , uh, there's different strategies that you need to use. You need to have a sales process, you need to have a marketing process. Of course, you need to have solid systemized operational processes. You need to have a retention strategy. You also need to have a coach Ascension model. Your coaches need to know that they're gonna have a career with you. If they don't see the future, then they're just punching the clock.

They're just showing up, doing it again, doing it again. They're on repeat. It's this industrial model where it, you know, they just show up and they , they do their time and they're gone at one minute past the hour, like they're mentally turned off if they're not out the door already.

So you have to have these systems built and these are the some of the first systems that we build into brain , and then we work to optimize them from there. So my suggestion here is you build these systems, you get to 150 members, and now what you've got is a , a solid machine, and you can push that machine harder, you can feed more people into the machine because you know that they're gonna stay.

You can hire more people to work on the machine because you know that they can ascend a higher levels and actually make a good career with you. And you know that you can take your hands off the machine because the machine can run itself. And that's what's really important here. So let's get to the quotes from these leaders, but I want you to understand that they built the machine first and then they added clients.

Just adding more clients will not fix the machine. The first quote that I want you to hear from one of these top 10 gyms is that this number is standard. So they're not seeing a , a big influx of 40 new people in January, you know, or like all coming from one marketing campaign. They on average will gain seven or eight clients a month, and they will on average lose one or two a month.

Now the average in the gym industry is to gain about five and lose about three every month. So what these gyms are doing is they're not growing at a dramatically faster rate than you are. What they're doing is they're growing at an incrementally faster rate. They're getting one or two more clients than you are a month, and they're losing one or two fewer than you are a month.

You know, you're gaining five and losing three, they're gaining seven and losing two, but over 12 months, I mean, that's a difference of 50 clients. And that's how these results are compounding. It's not like they've found some marketing silver bullet, they brought in 50 people through one challenge and then they've kept those people forever. That's not how this goes.

It's these marginal differences of gaining one more client a month than you are. Two more clients a month losing one fewer client a month than you are losing two fewer clients a month than you are. And that compounding over time. The second thing from these top 10 gyms that you're gonna find really interesting is that they're pretty selective about who their clients are.

So while their service might be for anyone, it's not for everyone. And you might think like with 700 clients, they're taking anybody, right? They've got the competitive athlete, they've got the, the 85-year-old, and that's great, but this gym is actually very selective about who it takes.

They know their niche, they know their strength, they know who they want, and they know for whom they're not a good fit and who they should refer out to somebody else. What's interesting here is the mindset of the owner is not get everybody, I can put everybody else outta business. This owner actually refers people to other gyms all the time, and it's that growth mindset that helps them get the right people in.

And when you've got the right people, they pay what the service is worth and they stick around because they find commonality with the other right people. So they're fairly selective about it. And, and what they said when I talked to them last week was we actually just lost some members that didn't align with our core values.

And it's been a hard transition, but it looks like we're at a good spot right now, and we're growing because our best clients are bringing in their friends faster than ever before. Ah , so it feels like they're taking a step backward by being strict with their rules and their core values, but they're actually setting themselves up for faster growth in the future, right?

They're giving themself this gift in the future, and they're growing faster than almost any gym in the world. So that's a good lesson for you, is you don't want everybody, you don't have to have this scarcity mindset of like, I'm gonna be the only gym left in town. I need to get every client, I need to keep every client. I can't let clients go to these other gyms.

Instead, you need to say, I want to be true to our best clients, the best fits for us, and I'm gonna actually send other people to other gyms or encourage them to find something else because I will grow faster if I do that. It's like pruning the apple tree. I wrote about this in one of my books.

It sucks to cut branches off a tree, but if you cut off the branches that aren't producing as well, the other branches will flourish, grow faster and produce better fruit. Okay, the next tip is a really simple one. So this owner drills into his coaches, people should leave happier than when they came and focusing as a two brain gym. We're focusing on leveling up our coaches and our prices.

So this is really interesting because a lot of gyms will focus hard on making their coaches better. They'll pay for certifications, they'll bring in expert speakers, they'll sign their coaches up for courses, send them to seminars, whatever, and then they never raise their rates. And what can even happen is they, they get these clients in the worst cases who have these grandfather rates, right?

Like they signed up 10 years ago, they're paying for what the service used to be 10 years ago. The service is 10 times better now, but that's not what these old, older members are paying for, you know, and , and in that case, again, it's, it's the owner being stuck in this story that people are gonna leave, but they're not paying for the new level of service that they're getting.

And so what's interesting about this owner's mindset is that they're focusing on increasing client value by increasing coaching value. And they're not forgetting that as that coaching value goes up, they raise their rates. Of course, the service is getting better, they charge more for the service. The next gym said, we've been focusing on retention, improving our churn rate for the whole year.

Now, this gym was in the top 10 before, but now they're in the top three gyms in the world and they stop talking about marketing This year they kept their four funnels going, but their focus has been on retention. In fact, one of the gyms in the top 10 recently took their, their staff out to this offsite for a day.

You know, they went to this like ski resort and they hung out, they booked a conference room and they took a free guide that we publish called the Five Pillars of Retention. You can get that@gymownersunited.com. They made a copy for every person on their staff, and they went through each of the five pillars. They said, we don't need different ideas for retention. We need to get better at these five things.

These are the five things that actually matter. And that's what they did for the whole day. They worked on retention, they put that plan in place and wouldn't you know it, they're keeping people longer. And as that happens, those people compound and your audience grows. Most people don't have a marketing problem. They have a retention problem. They're pouring water into a leaking bucket.

And the gym owners that focus on plugging that bucket and just basically keeping the tap on, they're the ones that grow. They fill their bucket, they, they make it onto these top 10 leaderboards. The next one also said they're focusing on retention, but they're doing it a different, slightly different way.

So they said, we've been changing our approach to the business over the last couple of years implementing all of the two brain stuff. So key here. They're not just learning something and moving on to the next thing. They are learning from two brain and then focusing on that and getting better and better and better at the strategies. Because when you work with principles, that's what happens.

That's the pursuit of virtuosity. You don't skip from trying one thing to trying the next thing. You try one thing, you measure the result, and when it works, you get better at it and better at it and better at it. This person continued by saying, we got a CS M1 in each location. We've changed our focus to retention. We've been trying to define our avatar better, and we've been moving to higher value services.

Again, they're not going broader. They're going narrower and deeper into their audience. And, you know, every single person on this leaderboard said, we follow exactly what our two brand mentor tells us. Just like the clients in your gym , the clients who do the best at your program are the ones who do your program best.

They're not doing your program one day a week and then, you know, trying to figure out a running program that they read from Runners World on Mondays and then going to their aquas class on Wednesdays.

While that will produce a base level of fitness, don't get me wrong, they will never achieve their higher level goals if they're flittering around and trying different things and never really fully committing to your coaching. The best clients at your gym are the ones who do exactly what you tell them and really don't do anything else. They, they're not looking for bonuses, they're not getting distracted.

It's the same with business mentorship. The people who follow the instructions of their mentor to the T and say, how can I get better at this? Instead of, what's the next thing? These are the ones who get the best results. That's why when I do these leaderboard shows, sometimes they can sound repetitive.

And the reason that I don't just look for new hot tips to give you is because the secret is not to find a new retention strategy. The secret is to get better at the retention strategies that actually work. That's how you grow your gym. That's how you make the leaderboard. That's how you have real meaningful impact in your communities. And get to over 700 clients. I'm Chris Cooper. This has Run a profitable gym.

We're gonna be talking about this in our free public group called gym owners united.com. All week. There are almost 10,000 gyms in that group. Now. You can jump in. It's free, and it's just part of our mission to help gym owners succeed. We've been publishing free stuff for well over a decade.

Most people say that our free stuff is more valuable than any paid stuff they can find anywhere else, anything that's generated by AI that you can find online and you can just take it for free and grow your gym. I hope to see you in gym owners united.com. Thank you for your service.