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The Optimal Aging Podcast
Millions of people over age 50 represent the biggest consumer market in history for fitness, nutrition, travel, recreation and more. But most businesses don't know how to market to them. We'll interview entrepreneurs, business leaders and innovators to discuss this exciting opportunity.
The Optimal Aging Podcast
Marketing Small Group Personal Training to People over 50, with Author Vince Gabriele.
Curious about how small group personal training can revolutionize your fitness business and attract clients over 40? Join us as Vince Gabriele, an acclaimed gym owner, Fit Biz coach, and marketing expert, shares his transformative insights from his latest book, "The Ultimate Guide to Small Group Personal Training." Vince reveals why small group training is a win-win for trainers and clients alike, offering financial benefits and unique advantages tailored to an older demographic. You’ll walk away with actionable strategies for creating a cohesive training environment that keeps clients coming back, including those in the coveted "older" market, over 40 or 50 years old.
Online Resources
Get Vince's latest book here for free, "The Ultimate Guide to Small Group Personal Training"
Vince Gabriele's website
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market
You know, traditionally the phrase personal training meant one-on-one, individual training between a client and the trainer. Right In recent years, there's a win-win twist that's becoming more popular at gyms and studios everywhere. It means lower costs for the consumer and more revenue for the trainer. That's small group personal training. You might offer small group personal training at your gym or studio, or maybe you've heard of it and have questions about the business model and marketing the concept to your community. If you focus primarily on older clients, say 40 or 50 and up, then you might even have other questions about selling small group personal training to this demographic. Well, these questions and more are at the heart of our show today.
Jay Croft:Welcome to Optimal Aging, the podcast for people in fitness, health and well-being who want to grow their businesses with more clients over 50. I'm your host, jay Croft, of PrimeFit Content, which provides premium marketing materials to help you do just that. And my guest today is someone I've been happy to get to know recently. He's an expert on fitness marketing. It's Vince Gabriel, a successful gym owner turned Fit Biz coach, author, podcaster and speaker. He's also the owner of his own marketing agency called Kiss Marketing.
Jay Croft:Vince's latest book is called the Ultimate Guide to Small Group Personal Training how to Make Millions with Small Group Personal Training. It's a fast, easy read deliberately not a textbook with good stories and practical advice about implementing small group personal training in your business and some of the particular benefits of offering it to people who are, in the quote unquote older demographic, and at the end of our conversation he's going to share how you can get a free copy of the book. I love Vince's approach and his message and I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did here. It is Vince, hi, nice to see you today.
Vince Gabriele:Jay, thanks so much for having me.
Jay Croft:It's my pleasure. I've been wanting to meet you for a long time. I know a lot of people who speak very highly of you, and so it's nice to get acquainted.
Vince Gabriele:No, I've been excited about this interview and I'm a fan of your podcast and I've recommended it, as I said in our prior conversation, to several of the Mastermind members to start listening to the stuff you're putting out. So keep up the good work.
Jay Croft:Well, thank you, I appreciate that, and congrats on the book we're going to dive in and we're going to talk about the Ultimate Guide to Small Group Personal Training, which is Vince's latest book, and small group training is a really great topic for when talking about fitness for people who are a little older than the normal demographic that fitness usually focuses on, and you also have some great stories in the book that I want to ask you to share. So you have been in this game for a while, and in your gym and at your marketing company, and you've been a leader in small group training even before it started taking off as much as it has been recently. So tell me, why now have you written a book about it and why now do you think it seems to be at least really taking off exponentially? Or correct me if I'm wrong, maybe it's not.
Vince Gabriele:Yeah, there's a couple of reasons.
Vince Gabriele:I think one of the first reasons is there was only one other book written on small group training and I took a look at it and it was almost like a textbook-based book that it lacked the personal experience of hey, here's how this works, here's how this evolves, here's what you may need to change over time and here's how it's worked, after thousands and thousands and thousands of sessions of smoke group training.
Vince Gabriele:And so that didn't exist, and so I decided to write the book and really, like most of my other books the ultimate guide to marketing your gym and sales it really was like a diary of what has worked for in my business, and now I've had the opportunity to, so I've been now coaching other gym owners since 2017.
Vince Gabriele:And so, whereas my first books was really based around Gabriel Fitness and the success I had with my gym, my newest books, and especially this one, there's all kinds of stories that come from the clients that I've helped. So the people that I've helped go from one-on-one to small group, the people that have raised their prices on their members A lot of the stories throughout the book are not just my experience, but the experience my clients have had based on the advice that I gave them, and so I wanted to to write this book with that in mind. With this is not just my way with the Gabriel Fitness model of small group training, this is the way of how I'm helping hundreds of people implement this model inside their businesses and, at the same same time, make a lot of money doing it.
Jay Croft:Am I right in thinking and feeling that small group training is on the rise, or is that just a misperception? I've been in this for a few years, but not as long as you and it seems like maybe in the particularly with the over 50 market that I focus on, it has a lot of traction. So give me some perspective on where we are and the momentum of small group training.
Vince Gabriele:I think it is on the rise. When I started, I was one of the very few people doing it and I've had some great pioneers that came before me that taught me the model one being Tom Plummer, the other being Rick Mayo, who I know you interviewed on this podcast is actually where I originally heard about your podcast was from Rick's interview and the third being the Alan and Rachel Cosgrove, who have done a great job of teaching this model.
Vince Gabriele:at the amount of franchises that have the large group aspect, how many there are, how many Orange Theories and Barry's Boot Camps and F45s right and let's look at all of the chains and franchises and the people that have taken this concept and idea and then scaled it, how many large group are there? And then compare that with small, small group. This model it's almost none, and so I do believe that obviously Rick is the one. Tell me another one.
Jay Croft:Well, I don't know of any other franchise systems, but a lot of my clients who are mom and pop gyms have small group training. They find it particularly effective for women who are a little bit older because they have that accountability and that friendly support and they can, as you point out in the book, charge more and people in this demographic have more money to spend. So it just makes sense all the way around for the business and for the clients.
Vince Gabriele:Yeah, and I think, too, it is a fairly new thing. I mean, if you think about personal training and you think about large group training, it's been around for a decent number of years, but if you look at when small groups started, it's like you know, two, 2000, late 2000,. 2009 is when this thing started to really kick off. So sometimes things take time for people to adapt to changing ways. Right, for so many years we just like one-on-one is the only way to do personal training. That was like. It was like embedded in our mind that that was it, and so now I think that more people are starting to look at this model and build businesses around it, and I think that what Rick is doing and the success he's having, I think that's going to be almost like a Roger Bannister situation, where a lot more people are going to come out and start implementing this at scale for sure yeah, yeah, I agree.
Jay Croft:So let's talk about that model. In the book you describe what you mean when you say small group as opposed to group or large group or or forgive me, semi-private training. I know we're not supposed to, it's funny semi-private so I've been.
Vince Gabriele:I've been on tour, if you will, for this uh air quotes, but for this, for this book, and so I've been getting on tons of podcasts and that is like, if there's one common question that everyone has asked me, it's been this whole. Why do you hate semi-private so much? And it makes the case for you know, picking a fight and having an argument right, and so I. My answer is always 50 of my reasoning is to pick a fight to, like you know, just throw a little, you know.
Vince Gabriele:So so throw a little shade, go ahead, let's do it, let's do it right, right, but um, but the other 50 is I never understood the term, right, I never understood semi-private like what does that even mean? And right, donald miller has a quote if, if you confuse, you lose. So now we're naming our program where we can't even really come up with what that means. And now our clients are probably more confused. And you're a writer, so you understand clarity and you understand how important it is to be clear. And I've been reading some of your emails and I can see that in the content that you're putting out it's clear, it's concise. And when your name of your program is semi-private and people don't have any idea what it is, and then you have to come in and explain it to them even further. You're starting with a lot of strands of potential distrust on them, not understanding it.
Vince Gabriele:So that's why I like it. Plus, it's like the definition of semi is half of. So it's like no, you get half of this, it's not as good as this. So you get half of it. You get the rest you get leftovers.
Jay Croft:Hold on. I'm going to go be semi with someone else for a minute.
Vince Gabriele:Yeah, so I think that that's why and again, as I said, there are some people that call it semi-private, that are doing great and that are successful.
Jay Croft:On this show. I like to talk about the communications and marketing and content around promoting fitness to this demographic, and so that's really important. I get it completely. When we talk about small group training, we mean three to six people, right Roughly in that range, and we're not talking about semi-private because that doesn't make sense and it's confusing, and we don't talk about classes, for some real reasons that are bigger than things that annoy.
Vince Gabriele:Vincent.
Jay Croft:Right, there are reasons for this. So tell me about, again, about this model. If I'm listening to this and I think, okay, fine, what's that mean? Small group personal training? Tell me, what is it yeah.
Vince Gabriele:So it's comparable to one-on-one right, where you can think about what someone, what does someone get in a one-on-one session? They get guidance from a coach, they get a really good close communication, they get individualization, they get progression. They get all these things from a one-on-one personal training session and the goal is that they get everything that they would get in that one-on-one session, but they do it in a small group environment with a few other people at a fraction of the price.
Jay Croft:Simple math. I can charge one client $100 an hour, or I can charge six clients I don't know $70 an hour and I get a lot more money that way. Is that what we're talking about, right?
Vince Gabriele:Yes, I think notoriously the industry is not filled with a lot of millionaires. There's not a lot of people that are making a lot of money, and that's what I wanted to change, because I do believe a model like this can provide. I have several guys in my group that are millionaires right now from this model and not like just making a million dollars in revenue legit cash, millionaires from running their gyms. Obviously, they've been running them for some time, but these guys are making money and I believe that what we're doing is really, really important. Right and that is my life's work right now is educating gym owners about business so they can get better at business, so they can make more money, so they can live better lives.
Jay Croft:What are the pushbacks from the trainers and the gym owners who say, man, I don't want to do that, I want my one on one?
Vince Gabriele:I think that that is a pushback. It's a definite, legitimate pushback of you know, I don't want to change and my response to that is everything changes. But I believe they did a study a few years ago and the average gym makes $300,000 a year. Now, if you take the margins on that right 20, 30% that's not a lot of money. That's not a lot of money for the amount of risk that people are putting themselves under. They're signing leases, they're signing up to pay people's mortgages and everything like that, and when you're strapped for cash and you're stressed about money, you help less people. And I think more people need to get out of that survival mode of themselves and get into more of an abundance mentality and start making some serious money so they can help more people.
Jay Croft:Let's talk about age you mentioned in the book 40 to 60. I primarily write for gyms that are trying to reach people 50 or over. You can say 45, you can say 60, or the same kind of idea. Roughly middle of adulthood, when women are either going through menopause or about to, or just have, and men are starting to have that spare tire and retirement is here or coming really quickly and you're having grandkids, et cetera. Your whole life changes, your whole body changes. So is there a sweet spot for you as far as the age goes? For gyms that might want to try this?
Vince Gabriele:Yeah, I like the sweet spot of 40 to 60. It does not mean we don't go higher than that and it does not mean we don't go lower than that 60. It does not mean we don't go higher than that and it does not mean we don't go lower than that. We have people in their 30s in our gym and many of my clients do as well. Personally, I think there's a couple of things that make this 40 to 60 market very good.
Vince Gabriele:By 40, a lot of times people are doing pretty well, and so I think to support what we were saying before, from a financial standpoint, that age group tends to have the most disposable income to invest in that. That's the kind of the start point of it. The second thing that I really like is you just kind of mentioned it at the same time that all these people's responsibilities in the world are increasing. They're getting more higher profile jobs, they're increasing their careers, they're starting more businesses, they're raising children, they're serving their community. At the same time, all of that extra things that they need to do and the extra stress and that's pressure their body physiologically is starting to break down at the same exact time. So here we have.
Vince Gabriele:This conundrum of life demands more from me right now, and my body is not able to handle it from a physiological. This is not just the thing, this is fact. Muscle this is not like I'm not making this up. You enter the things that people need to do to help navigate this situation, and that is eating right and that is exercising and that is building muscle and strength training and all of that. And so what I think this age group does, and taking our model and whatever your model is small group, large group, one-on-one. In this situation it doesn't matter. It's like are we moving our bodies? Are we getting stronger? Are we building strength? Are we eating good foods and doing it at the right time in our lives to help us thrive during the most important years of their life? So that is, I think, why this market is so important. I think it's the most important market.
Vince Gabriele:I really do believe this is the most important market to help. There's a most on the line for these people.
Jay Croft:Yeah, I agree. And it's also a huge economic opportunity for gyms to make money by focusing on people who are older and have more money and more time to spend and more compelling reasons. So I think we're definitely on the same page with all of that. It's just so compelling.
Jay Croft:I am talking to a friend of mine from college who is my age she's 60, and she recently got into fitness for the first time in her life and got into powerlifting, which you could have knocked me over with a feather when she told me that right, and she said she was angry because when we were growing up in the seventies, no one told us about weightlifting or resistance training or strength training or whatever you want to call it. We saw it on TV every four years for the Olympics and when Arnold Schwarzenegger became famous and that was it Nobody ever said hey, kids, you're going to lose muscle when you start in your 30s and 40s and by the time you're old, you're going to be feeble if you don't build some muscle. We had no idea. So here she is, 60. She's had two kids, she's winding down her career and she's just now learning this. I think that's really common.
Vince Gabriele:I think kids are growing up, not to say that they're any healthier, but they are growing up knowing the importance of exercise. You mentioned Arnold. It was like taboo. It was like this underground type of thing that no one knew about. And now I think fitness is a. It's a. It's a multi, multi, you know, billion dollar industry. That is getting a lot of attention more and more, and rightfully so, and I think that's helping all of our cases.
Jay Croft:Tell me what are some of the other challenges that gyms and trainers have in reaching this demographic with small group training or just period to get them active in this way, and how can we overcome those challenges?
Vince Gabriele:I think the challenges are more within than on the outside. I really think that obviously you have the normal challenges of time, right, that's usually probably the biggest one where people are busy and they don't have a lot of time and maybe they don't prioritize getting to a gym or getting to fitness right, or maybe they feel like they can do it at home and they can just ride their peloton bike, you know, a few days a week and that checks the box of of exercise. There's always going to be that. That's's not going away and, if anything, that's increasing with all of the invent of these virtual and at-home things like that.
Vince Gabriele:But I really do believe and you're an expert in this I really do believe the barrier lies in what the business owner is willing to learn. What the business owner is willing to learn, and that my mentor, dan Kennedy, said that the number one skill that a business owner needs to develop is the skill of marketing and the ability to write words that sell, the ability to create a message and for that message to get sent to a person and for that person to be able to raise their hand and say I feel like you were talking to me. I believe that's the biggest barrier that people are not going to learn how to do that. And if you don't know how to do that, it's going to be very hard to continually starting to attract the population that you want. No matter what the population is, you still need to have a message that intrigues them to want to come to your gym and unfortunately, you putting a sign outside of your gym that says small group personal training is not going to do it.
Vince Gabriele:It's low level marketing. It's not going to cut it. And if we want to rise above the mediocre things that are being done to try to attract new customers, we have to learn marketing, at least the basics. That's kind of the barrier that gets in the way is the skill sets that maybe the business owner isn't willing to learn, and that's why I created I wrote all the books that I write and that's why I created the course. I have a course called the six week new client search that teaches gym owners how to market their gym and I know that my life changed when I learned it. There was a period of time where my life went from good to great when I learned the skill of marketing and I dedicated an hour a day.
Vince Gabriele:It's called the marketing power hour and I dedicated myself an hour a day to learning that skill and you know it's been probably the best decision I've ever made to be able to get good at that, and so I think what stands in the way is the ability or the willingness to learn specific skills that that business owner needs to be able to attract the customers that they want into their business.
Jay Croft:What are the biggest hangups that you see? I've got a couple things that always bug me, but I'm more curious to know what do you see as the big mistakes that people are making and the mistakes that, once you point them out, they go oh wow, you're right, now I understand, I won't do that anymore.
Vince Gabriele:Yeah. So I think if I could summarize marketing in three parts it's one, target market. It's two, marketing message, and it's three, the media, the things you use to get the message out to the market. A lot of times people skip right to the media. They skip to. I need someone to run a Facebook ad for me. They fail to have clarity on the market that they're trying to get. They don't know the people well enough.
Vince Gabriele:I look at every opportunity and every conversation I have with a client as an opportunity for me to be getting what I call a PhD in their lives.
Vince Gabriele:And the better I know the person that I'm trying to attract, the better I'm going to be able to create things that'll do that. I mean, if you think about copywriters, you know a copywriter gets hired to write for bodybuilding magazine. He will go and read every bodybuilding magazine he can. He'll go interview bodybuilders. He'll go train at a bodybuilding gym. He'll go compete in an amateur competition and when he submerges himself in that world and in that culture, he knows the problems, he knows the challenges, he knows the things that keep those people up at night and from that knowledge he's able to create things that intrigue people and get people to want to buy. So I think the first thing is people think that they know the age of their customer and they know where their customer lives, the demographics and geographics. They think that that is enough and that's just equivalent to putting the sign out in the yard that says smoker, personal training for sale, and what they really need is the third level, and that's the psychographics.
Vince Gabriele:And that's why people buy. Why are they buying? What is the challenges they're having? What is keeping up at night? What are they passionate about?
Vince Gabriele:and knowing that knowledge about their market is huge and then the second piece of it is the message, and this is able to for you know how do you communicate how you're different. There's so many different options out there. How do you communicate how you're different? What are the things that are unique about your business and the things that you're doing at your gym different from the guy down the street? And I think that having a knowledge and a clarity around that and knowing what those things are and sticking to that and repeating those things over and over and over again is what is going to push the message to that market and connected with that is the offers that they put out.
Vince Gabriele:Connected with that is what are the different offers? What are the things that you want to try and amp up your marketing? Just change a bunch of offers or make an offer every day and you'll see your marketing take it to the next level. So that's the message piece of it. So I think what stands in the way is the lack of learning and education around the market and the message. Like I own a marketing agency and we build websites for people and we run Facebook ads for people and that's fine, you can have people do that, but as a business owner, you still need to understand this stuff.
Jay Croft:And then the third is the media.
Vince Gabriele:And the biggest mistake with media is having one way. You want to have multiple ways that you are generating leads, so one of the biggest things is not just to rely on one Back in the day. I'm sure you remember Groupon and Facebook in 2015, and you put a piece of dog poop on Facebook and all of a sudden you get 444 leads at two bucks a lead.
Vince Gabriele:It was easy, but that went away very quickly, and so I think a lot of people got hurt because they relied on the easy way and they didn't do anything else, and so I think you need to protect your business. It's like an insurance policy for your business that you need a good website, you should be running digital ads, you should be creating joint ventures, you should have a referral system, you should be sending regular emails, like you're doing, and that's just a really well-balanced attack for marketing.
Jay Croft:Hey, I said at the beginning of this that I wanted to hear about a couple of the stories in the book. Tell us about Mike and Mike and how that relates to-.
Vince Gabriele:Mike and Mike is sorry, go ahead, yeah, just your understanding of the power of this, Sorry go ahead.
Vince Gabriele:Yeah, just your understanding of the power of this. So Mike and Mike are not their real names. When I started my business my first year in business I was an independent contractor and I trained people in my mom's basement. I trained kids at local fields. I rented space at a local gym and I was like a man possessed just trying to get a business started gym. And I was like a man possessed just trying to get a business started and my first clients that I had were one-on-one adult clients, one-on-one guys, two one-on-one clients that were coming to my mom's basement.
Vince Gabriele:And when I moved to the gym and I signed my first lease, I said to these guys I was like hey guys, I'm going to a different model and the model is you're going to train with a group. And they were like what? I'll train anybody else? I don't want to train anybody. This was like you know this is 2007 when a small group was like no one even heard of it. So like the thought of training with someone else was like weird. And I told them and they kind of understood. I explained it to them. They're business guys. So they kind understood what I was doing and I remember the night before I didn't sleep because they were all like hemming and hawing about it and the first session they didn't say a word to each other. It was just so awkward. I was trying to train these two guys together and introduce them and trying to make small talk and they didn't even look at each other Second session not much better.
Vince Gabriele:But then the third session they started busting each other's chops a little bit. And then the fourth session we had them do this exercise called dirty dogs, where you go on all fours and you bring your leg out to the side and it's like a hip activation type of drill and they would always like bust on each other about that you know drill and they would look stupid.
Vince Gabriele:You know, you look like a dog being on fire hydrant right and one of the guys was like making fun of the other guy when he was doing it and then went down and tackled him on the floor and started humping him like a dog yeah like, while, while he was on the floor, and then they both rolled over on the ground and were hysterically laughing and I was just like, I like took a breath and I was just like, okay yeah we're okay, this is going to work, because I didn't want to.
Vince Gabriele:I had just gotten done spending the last six years of my life doing one-on-one session after one-on-one session after one-on-one session 40, 50, 60 hours a week of one-on-ones and I was burnt toast and I didn't want to do it and I wanted to make money and I knew that this was the way to get there, but I didn't know how to do it because I had never done it before. And that was the moment of like okay, this is going to work, this can work. And so, yeah, you're going to have people with different personalities.
Vince Gabriele:And it's not about finding the right groups of people and putting them together. That's a recipe for disaster. You put on the calendar, you have six spots or four spots or whatever spots, and you funnel people in within your market that 40 to 60 range or whatever your market is, and the better you do at marketing. I was on a podcast the other day, jay, and they asked me this question is like how do you deal with the varying degrees of people and how people can be so different and how it's so hard to train different types of people in the same session. And I said that one of the most important things you can do is good marketing, because if you do good marketing, what you're going to do is you're going to attract those types of people into your business. So you shouldn't have these very, very large varying degrees. Yeah, training an 85 year old woman that barely can walk and a 35-year-old dude, that's a stud. That is difficult, but training a 45-year-old woman and a 55-year-old woman that is not very hard.
Vince Gabriele:You can go back and forth with that. You do goblet squat, you do bodyweight squat, you do kettlebell swings, you do kettlebell deadlifts, and so we can make it an individualized situation if we do a good job with the marketing.
Jay Croft:So that story with Mike and Mike was 17 years ago. They became long-term customers. You built your name and business on small group personal training. And they're still buddies Still buddies today. And here we are with your book buddies, still buddies today. And here we are with your book the ultimate guide to small group personal training, subtitle how to make millions with small group personal training. So tell the folks where they can get this book and learn more about you if they want to do so I would love for everyone to get a free copy of the book a free copy free copy of the book because I want people to read it.
Jay Croft:I'm giving it to your audience and everyone else's audience um for free and it's just small group personal trainingcom personal trainingcom, and if they want to be in touch with you or learn more about your other services, my my website is just VinceGabrielcom. Okay, I'll put both of those in the show notes. Well, it's an easy quick read. It's very action-oriented, got a lot of good stories in there and it's a pleasure to read. And it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks for joining me today.
Vince Gabriele:Thank you, jay, thanks for having me.
Jay Croft:Thank you, jay. Thanks for having me All right Talk soon, bye, bye.
Speaker 3:Thank you for listening to Optimal Aging. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you'll subscribe, tell a friend and write a review. All of that helps me grow my audience. You can learn more about me and my content business at primefitcontentcom. You can send me an email at jay at primefitcontentcom. That's jay at primefitcontentcom. I'm also on Facebook, linkedin and Instagram, so you can find me anywhere you like and be in touch. And again, thanks for listening. Join me next time.
