TwoBrain Marketing Episode 1: Sherman Merricks

It's been a great run. You know, I've been with two brain for awhile. No for awhile. And excited about this. A little podcast right here to talk about some cool things that you guys have in store.

And like I said, we started off small in my garage, you know, I was working a job and training in the afternoon and all of that type of stuff. But we came, my wife and I, we sort of came to a turning point when my wife, she became pregnant with our second child, which is our daughter. And we had to make a decision, right? If she was going to go back to work or what was going to happen.

And honestly, my wife, she made quote unquote the money back then, but I just couldn't imagine staying on that track of going to work at eight and nine and stand there all day doing office work and going home every day at five or six being miserable. So we decided that we're going to, you know, start the gym in the garage and that's what we did. So basically once she came home for maternity leave, I was like, Hey, now's the time we had to go all in and I quit my job as well.

So young couple, no income, two kids. But that was sort of a blessing in and of itself because a failure really wasn't an option. Right. We did not have a choice why there was no, there was no one that would, you know, give us money and things like that. So that really lit a fire up under me, of course. And my wife as well. And we've been, you know, we've been blessed ever since. We've been growing and learning and that type of stuff.

And I've always known, you know, I've always had mentors, whether that personally, professionally. So when I got into this, I actually had another, um, I was working with another company, we'll call it a mentorship. Um, I was working with another company because I've always known I needed help. So I've always been doing something. And then I met Coop at a, uh, met Coop at, some type of seminar or something. He came down to Florida and my wife and I, you know, we sort of clicked in.

We'd been with TwoBrain ever since.

So I would coach the 6:00 AM you know, and then, you know, we coached throughout the day and then at night after the last class I would have to stay back and mop the floor with the mop. I remember that. Just thinking about it makes me sort of cringe a, I can't believe that I did that or you know, I probably did it for about a year, two years, probably like two years because I've been there for sure. That's sort of one thing that we still behind.

You don't have an a clean gym and you know, clean bathroom, all that stuff. And Man, just doing that on top of everything else would just make the day's so long. So I was basically just in survival mode for years.. Just trying to grow the business and the little down time that I had to make sure that, you know, people were coming in, payments going through, trying to gain new members.

I'm able to really just looking back now, it was just like, it was really just a mess, but you do what you have to do and you know, to get things done. But like I said, I was looking for something different. Actually one of my, one of the guys that I know, he's like, hey, you should come down to my gym. So a seminar, uh, this Guy Chris Cooper has come in and I think you will like him. So I'm like, yeah, I don't have anything to lose. I'm always trying to learn something.

And so we went to that seminar and you know, listening to some of the things that Chris was saying really resonated. My wife and I, we did not want to be tied to the gym 24-7, you know, we wanted to grow the right way. Just not, you know, say we have 200 members, but we can't make money. We can't feed our kids. We can't save for retirement. All of that stuff. And Chris was talking about that stuff, um, way back then.

And then since then, you know, like I said to Barry for awhile and now to where we are today, you know, sort of fast forward, I want to bore you too much. But you know, now I don't coach any classes, and I'm , you know, not needed in the day to day. Um, however I am still president, my gym, you know, I think it's cool for people to sort of do what works for them. You know, I really don't have a preference to be totally removed from my gym, not in the gym ever most days.

But I know some guys, they frigging don't do anything with their gym. You know, someone, a mentor, they don't do anything. Someone else is running it. And I have,, you know, I have a general manager and all of that stuff, operation director and I have all of that, but I still like to be involved in the gym, hang around in the community some and stuff like that. But man, my life is so different now.

You know, like, you know, like I love to travel my family and I, so we, you know, we travel probably four or five weeks a year and all that type of stuff and you know, the gym runs just fine without me. Um, and that's really a testament to the years of hard work and learning and growing and trying to, you know, get this thing to where I want to be. That's sort of where I am today.

And so tell me a little bit about, tell me a little bit about your experience trying to grow some of your programs. We're going to talk about the paid advertising strategies that you've been able to implement with two brain marketing. But I want to first hear more about, you know, your, you're super charismatic guy, you're great on camera. How are, you know, before really pushing heavily with paid advertising, how would you grow your programs? How would you market at your gym?

If you guys don't know what organic quote unquote stuff we were talking about is, you know, a lot of, some of the programs I run, I don't, I don't run any paid advertising and we still have great turnout and stuff like that and great signups. But one of the biggest keys to my success has been, you know, keeping an email list and really continuing to put out content for people that can really benefit them. Not just when I'm trying to get them to sign up for something. Right.

So some of the things that I really implemented, you know, like I enjoy going live, right? I enjoy being on being on camera. I'm comfortable in front of the camera. So we try to get on it, interact with people as much as possible if I'm being honest. You know, we've gotten away from that a little bit just because paid advertising is so good.

But it's funny that we're doing this little interview right now because we're actually running a a weight loss program here soon and I'm only doing, you know, for the most part, organic marketing. And like I said, we've just, we've only been marketing it for about not even a week and we already have like three sign ups already and we're going to promote it for like six weeks. So our goal is to get, you know, 25-30 sign ups at the price.

We were asking and I think a lot of gyms could benefit from really understanding how to utilize the, how to utilize the organic market in. Because when you can put the organic marketing with paid marketing, then you have a recipe for success that's hard to match.

I'm going to talk about, you know, she just said, what type of foods should I eat at night? Or what's the latest I should eat at night? It's basic stuff.

You know, one thing I will say about the live videos, they're sort of better when you can sort of announced them because it's not, and I don't want to say better to just have a little more interaction when you can announce them because the people that want to watch them, they will actually get on at that time and they'll interact with you as opposed to when you just jump on a live. Like I do a lot of times, uh, you know, I won't have a lot of interaction while I'm on there.

So I sorta just me talking into my phone, out of the camera. But people will pop on and then people will go back and watch it and then questions and comments that come up. But honestly, I just talk about anything that could be beneficial to my future clients. Right. I'm a potential client.

Is that correct?

I'm going to talk about that tomorrow at 5:00 PM and then the day of you post it again and I like to post everything from my, from my personal page as well. So I'll post it from, I'll post it from the business page, then I'll share it on my personal page. Of course, I'm asking, you know my members to share it. I'm, you know, my wife is going to share it.

A coach is going to share it because I think for the most part, we as gym owners, we don't like asking people to do stuff, but if we don't ask them, they're not going to do it. But if we ask them, most will do it. So you know, all of my members would tell you I don't have an issue with asking them to do anything. Right? Like Hey, oh we're going to be running this program. Tell your friend posted on your page, Hey posted on your page again. Right?

Because a, that's how you read people that cause the people that want to get in shape man. Like that's the thing. It's not really about crossfit and barbells and all that. If you are talking about a solution to their problems, people are going to come in and to talk to you. Right. So I think it's hard to come back to your question if you have to be sharing it across a lot of different avenues on social media, but you need more than just you sharing it.

You need your coaches, you need your clients in that type of thing right there. Okay, cool. So what you'll do is you'll basically say, hey, we got this thing we're going to run with your people in your, in your captive audience know first your clients and then they share it. Help get the word out and then you know, you have a little bit of time to collect some. Yeah. Get some, some anticipation going in and people looking forward to see what you're going to have to say.

You know, one of the biggest things is, you know, like used to it, like I consider myself fairly good on camera, but there's still a piece of me that gets sort of hesitant when I get, when I get ready to make a video or something, I'm like, man, no one wants the feed is, well, how am I going to look? You know, how's it going to? But really once you get on, if you're really, you know, genuinely trying to help people, it's going to turn out fine. Right.

It doesn't mean the video is going to be perfect or anything like that, but it's going to help to someone and that's all, you know, if I'd get on and speak to one person at a time, that's totally fine. I was one person that I helped, you know.

I wasn't even trying to really get people to sign up. I'm just trying to get more traffic to my page. And like we talked about, most of my programs were selling out with only organic marketing. So I wasn't too concerned about honestly paid advertising until you and John, you know, I watched some of you guys stepping out, hey, these guys are killing it. I need to really look at this. You know, if I can grow my business like these guys have.

So, you know, I jumped on TwoBrain Marketing and now it's like, it's a different, it's just a totally different animal as far as the, the number of leads coming in, uh, the way that we have to deal with them and all of that stuff. So beforehand there was not a lot of, there was not a lot of paid advertising going.

Like I said, I would really only boost a post and then until I sign up with, to bring in marketing, now it's just a lot of work has to be done right to really see the benefits of it, you know?

So from a business perspective for us doesn't make sense for us to target males. So all of our ads are sorta catered toward my ideal client, right? It's going to be that way. Females aged 26 to 60 or so, right? So all of our service is speaking to weight loss, getting lean, that type of thing and our front end offer is really to get people in the door. It's a 90 day challenge and that's what we were talking about to get people in.

Now, here's one of the biggest sorta fallacies that I've seen with people new to running Facebook ads. We run the 90 day challenge, get them in the door, listen to what they want, and then we make the best recommendation based on their goals, not on what ad brought them in. Right? So yes, they've seen the 90 day challenge ads on Facebook. That's what has them sitting in front of me.

But me or my, one of my coaches, whoever is doing the no sweat intro has to sit down with them and we see this person really needs one on one personal training. That's what we're going to recommend to them. We're not going to recommend, oh you should do this group challenge, when that's not going to get them the best results possible. Cause at the end of the day we don't. We want them to be super successful cause if they're super successful then we're super successful,

It's sold before we even let them see our scheduling software and what availability you have. We're going to capture their info. Once they go there, now they're going to pick a time that works for them. They're going to self schedule. They don't have to call us. Uh, they don't have to come in or anything until their time. Once they enter their, their appointment time, that's when we start working.

Right now we have two options here because they may enter their info and not see what time that works for them. And a lot of times people won't book anything because they don't see a time that works for them. And then that's when we'll reach out to them within two or three minutes and say, Hey, we saw that you want more info about the 90 day challenge. Do you need any help scheduling your appointment, right,? If they say yes, we'll, you know, we'll help them through that.

A lot of times people, a lot of people just trying to get the price, you know, first thing they say, oh, well how much is it first? You know, we will give prices over the phone. Um, but we want a little bit more information before we just give out the price because we like to know more about this person. Right? It could be $1,200 a month to come here if this is someone that very deconditioned, they can't go to a group class. They need personal training four times a week.

Okay. But we don't make those type of decisions over, the phone. So we're trying to get them to come in. Right. But if someone perceives, absolutely give a price range.

She scheduling, she's rescheduling if they had issues and all that stuff. So, um, so I'm totally hands off of that. Right. I'm not doing really anything with the software. She scheduling, communicating with the coaches, making sure everyone's on the same page. Awesome. And so someone books an appointment, what happens once they begin an appointment? We're going to, so they could only book an appointment, I want to say three days out, three days out.

So, um, in that time, we're going to email them a couple times. We're also going to text message them the night, the day before, right? So Mateo, if you had appointment with us on what's today, Tuesday, whatever, Wednesday, Wednesday, an appointment with us on Friday, right? Tomorrow you will receive a text message from us saying, now in the meantime, while you're receiving this, you're still going to be receiving emails from us as well. It's all right.

Just talking about the value that we're going to be adding and the No Sweat Intro, right? Um, you may meet our team and stuff like that. So once they go through that, they're gonna receive a text message the day before if we don't hear back from them to confirm, because we ask them to confirm because I don't want my coaches showing up if no one is going to be here. So we basically asked them to confirm, uh, you know, we send him a message, blah, blah, blah, blah. Look forward to seeing you.

Please confirm that you will be attending this appointment. And if they don't confirm, we will reach out again the day of the appointment via phone call or text messages. Again, sometimes people just miss it or they get busy and they forget, but we want to make sure that we stay on top of them. And you know, this has been sort of new to us. Paid Advertising, um, you know, like, you know, Mateo, like it's a numbers game.

So just because someone books an appointment doesn't mean they're showing, right? So we need to make sure that we're following up and really doing everything we can do to get them to show up and you know, the numbers, you know, everyone's not showing up and then we basically work it from there. If they don't show up, they're going to go into a different funnel and we're going to continue to nurture them forever until they tell us, leave us alone, or they come in for a no sweat intro. Right.

I think that's the biggest piece that I was missing prior to TwoBrain Marketing was the continual followup. Right? Like, if someone came in, I had a Google sheet back in the day and I will follow up for a month or two because you know, whenever I get low on clients. So I didn't look at that Google sheet. Oh yeah, that lady came last month. Let me follow up with her. But six months later I was following up with no one. Right. Uh, I was following up with no one.

I wasn't going back to, you know, I wanted to go in right in July, look at the people in February and following up with them, they were thought to just lost leads. So now we have a system and all of that. I have someone in charge of all that and we just follow up with them consistently until they tell us no. Right. Like our software is managing all of that person's in charge of the software.

Um, and you know, one of the things that I've seen over the last six months is, you know, really keeping up with the data and stuff. There's, there's, there's probably 25-30% of people that come into our funnel and just sit in there. They don't respond to any emails. They'll open them, but three months later, like they'll book a No-Sweat Intro and come in. Right. So just because they're not ready, right, when they get into your funnel, it doesn't mean they're not ready.

So really you're doing yourself a disservice if you aren't constantly following up with these people until you get a yes or a no. I want a yes or no. Personally I prefer yes, but I will take a no as well cause they tell me no. Okay well I can scratch them off the list and I can move on to the next person that I can help.

Right? So I was spending seven, I was spending 750 and then that was turning around and about $11,000 in front end revenue. Because again, everyone that comes in, they're not doing, you know, like we would require some personal training before we allowed them in our group. So some people it will come in and do a little personal training. They didn't go to group. Some people that would come in and be like, Hey, I only want to do personal training.

So you know, for us, everything sort of starts with personal training anyway. So that's how we get our numbers. Our numbers are so high. So for me, um, you know, this year we bumped our ad spend up to about $1,200 a month. You know, so, and we're seeing, you know, the, the benefits of that. And I think one of the, one of the main things I've learned is to, this is sort of a, trying to think of the right term is sort of a hit and miss game, right?

It's not going just because you spend x amount of money per month, it doesn't guarantee that it's going to work. Right? You have to play with your ad, you have to get your, your copy right, you have to find the right picture. And sometimes one picture may work and it may be crushing it. Then all of a sudden, two weeks later, it may not be doing as well. Right? So that's what you, you're constantly sorta of with it, making it better.

But I've seen a huge ROI on my, on my, uh, on my investment with, TwoBrain marketing and so I couldn't be happier.

Because you better believe that there's other franchise type gyms out there that are absolutely selling. They're trying to sign these people up. So, as are we, and I think one of our, one of our biggest pieces have been my coaches and myself. We really take the sales piece seriously. We read, we get together, we role play. We're constantly trying to get better at that sales piece. Well, I think there were going to have to do a whole other call just for that man for sales training.