Gym owners often think they have a marketing problem when they actually have a retention problem: It doesn’t matter how many new clients you bring in each month if they aren’t sticking around!
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper presents Two-Brain’s Top 10 leaderboard for client headcount in December 2023.
Each gym on the leaderboard has over 300 members and is super profitable. These gym owners have mastered both marketing and retention, and they’re sharing their top tips with you.
A few of their suggestions? To get clients in the door, use four different marketing funnels and audit them regularly to make sure they’re working. Then improve your length of engagement by setting up Goal Review Sessions with new and at-risk members.
Tune in to get more tips—and hear the astounding headcount of the No. 1 gym on the leaderboard.
Links
Gym Owners United
Book a Call
4:02 - Audit your marketing funnels
7:19 - Members per gym (not gyms)
9:58 - No. 1 gym
9:44 - Retention more than marketing
12:25 - Most important funnel for you
Gym owners often think they have a marketing problem when they actually have a retention problem: It doesn’t matter how many new clients you bring in each month if they aren’t sticking around!
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper presents Two-Brain’s Top 10 leaderboard for client headcount in December 2023.
Each gym on the leaderboard has over 300 members and is super profitable. These gym owners have mastered both marketing and retention, and they’re sharing their top tips with you.
A few of their suggestions? To get clients in the door, use four different marketing funnels and audit them regularly to make sure they’re working. Then improve your length of engagement by setting up Goal Review Sessions with new and at-risk members.
Tune in to get more tips—and hear the astounding headcount of the No. 1 gym on the leaderboard.
Links
Gym Owners United
Book a Call
4:02 - Audit your marketing funnels
7:19 - Members per gym (not gyms)
9:58 - No. 1 gym
9:44 - Retention more than marketing
12:25 - Most important funnel for you
Quick question. If you've got a thousand clients in a micro gym , can we still even call you a micro gym ? I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym and it's our leaderboard show and it's one of my favorites where we talk about who is serving the most clients in their box. Today what I'm gonna do is give you our top 10 for client headcount in Two Brain Worldwide. There's a few reasons I'm extra excited about this show. Number one, as always, we're gonna tell you how they did it. We're gonna go step by step and say like, here's how this gym got to over a thousand members and here's how this gym got to 700. Number two, I love the international flavor. Now of course these are micro gyms, some are CrossFit gyms, some are strength conditioning. I think , uh, FitBody Bootcamp might be um, on the leaderboard this time. Uh, there are some franchises like F 45 in the mix here too. So it's really awesome to see like how these all work together or compete with one another or play out. But what's really cool is that no matter what the Gym method is, the model that we give them in Two Brain is highly effective. And using the four marketing funnels that we teach in our mentorship practice is exactly how every single one of these gyms, no matter what stripe, no matter what country, no matter what method got to where they are . So let's get into it . First I'm gonna do a countdown of the, the top 10 gyms by client head count in Two Brain Business. Now first number 10 on our leaderboard for client head count last month comes from the USA . They have 324 paying clients and that's amazing. But what's really amazing is that their profit margin is also great. Look, while client headcount is amazing and that's what we're here today to celebrate, it's not the only thing. There are many gyms out there, especially in like the CrossFit world, but also in like some kickboxing franchises. They'll say, we got 500 gyms but they're not even profitable with 500 clients or , or you know, we got 500 clients, they're still not even profitable. Uh, they can have 300 clients and they still can't pay a coach. A single great like income or the owner is not making a great income themselves. And so often if you see people who are like , I got 300 clients and I'm gonna open a second gym, it's because they don't know how to make good money at their first gym. 300 clients is a lot. The other thing you have to consider is that like sometimes with a client headcount that's really high, you also get a lot of churn. You might not even want 300 clients because that means you've gotta get 10 new clients every single month just to replace the ones you lose. But the amazing thing about the people on this leaderboard is that while they're really, really strong at this client headcount metric, all of them are also pretty good at retention and some are amazing at a RM, you know, there's somebody on this leaderboard from the US whose headcount is under 400 and their net profit for one month last month with $35,000 one month. That's just profit, that's not revenue. So looking at client headcount to me is like looking at the biggest deadlifts in the world, amazing, inspiring, incredible. I can learn from you, but if that dead lifter is in the top 10 in the world for deadlift and can also run 17 minute 5K, wow, I'm gonna learn a ton from you. And so publicly, we share one of these every single month so that you can learn how to get more clients or how to improve client value or or how to improve retention. And then in our mentorship program, we teach you how to do all of it. Alright, so starting with number ten, three hundred and twenty four clients in your micro gym . Congratulations number nine. Also in the USA 346 clients in your micro gym . Congratulations. I know both of these gyms, I know who they are and the owners are making a good living and providing meaningful opportunities to their coaches at 324 clients. And that's what we care about most. At number eight, we have a gym from the Netherlands with 363 clients in their micro gym . Congratulations. We spoke to this gym and got a little bit of information and what they're, they've been doing recently to make it onto the leaderboard is just auditing their marketing funnels. So a lot of gyms will find like they're doing good things with their marketing, but they don't have a cohesive plan. And so they work with their mentor to audit all four of their marketing funnels. So real quickly, those four marketing funnels are paid ads. You need to have a paid ads funnel, even if you're spending a dollar a day on paid ads. Like if you're not doing paid ads right now, you're losing ground. We're gonna show you how to do that really effectively so you don't have to blow 500 bucks a month on it unless you want to. Second, you need a referral funnel. You need to be active about referrals. You need to have a process for getting referrals, not just like waiting and hoping that somebody brings their buddy. Third, you need to have an organic social media funnel. This doesn't just mean posting random junk on social media like memes and gif and jokes. You actually have to have a plan and you have to have a plan to get people off of Instagram and onto your seat in your sales office. You have to have that plan. Like it's the whole funnel. It's not just posting every day that counts. It's how do you get people from Instagram into your office, Facebook, et cetera. And then the fourth funnel that you use at Content Funnel, and this is like the bigger content. This is blog post podcast, YouTube, and producing this stuff is what builds trust. It helps with your retention and it helps with your marketing. And each one of these four funnels feed the other, like the , the ads funnel gets people to see more of your content and your social media funnel gets people to engage with your content better or gets 'em off Instagram and onto your website. And then like your website gets people to book the NSI. And of course we measure metrics along every step. The people who got on the leaderboard are not there because they're really, really good at Facebook ads only, or they're not there because they have an amazing , uh, retention plan. Maybe they do, but more than anything else, they're probably pretty good at all. Four, they're probably good at auditing all four. They probably routinely check to make sure that the funnels are active and working. If there's one meta lesson that I want you to take from this episode, that's it. Go audit your four funnels, audit the different stages of each funnel. Is this generating me leads? Are those leads going to my website? Are they booking appointments and are they signing up when they come in? Those are the four levels of the four funnels. You need to audit all of those steps, and if you do that, you'll get more clients. Number seven is from Belgium, 373 clients. So, so far we've only gone through four gyms. We've got two from the us , one from the Netherlands, and one from Belgium. The number six gym is also from the us . They have 391 clients. Again, these are high value clients. They're not just paying you 70 bucks a month to come in in a 10 year group class. Like these are good clients with long-term retention and a very high a RM number five on our leaderboard, just shy of 400, but also tied with number four is 395 clients and that's to a gym in the uk. Love it so much. But as I said, they're tied with number four in the leaderboard, who also has 395 clients and they're from the Netherlands. This is the first time that I can remember that we've had two completely separate gyms from the Netherlands Crack the top 10 for client headcount, value or retention. So congratulations to the owners of both of those gyms. That's incredible. Good for you. Alright , third on our list for most clients in Two Brain last month, 457 clients and this gym is in Denmark. Amazing job. Now I just wanna have a quick reminder here. These are not like 457 clients across two gyms, three gyms. This is one location, 457 clients. I know it's really popular in a lot of different like methods or affiliates or franchises to hear about these gyms that have a thousand clients, 3000 clients. You need to ask questions about those numbers. You always want to know like, yeah, but what's your retention? Are you replacing 50 clients a month? Like, you're not gonna be able to do that forever. What's the value of these clients? Why do you need so many clients? And is that like all time or you know, do you know for sure? How do you have a relationship with all these clients? So we wanna report like single location clients so that we're comparing apples to apples. You know, if somebody shows up, you know , um, for example, like maybe you're in Spain, you've only been open for a year, you got 400 clients, but that's spread across three boxes. There's less we can learn from you than from these guys who have been open for years and they have clients who stick around for years and those clients are high value and you know, et cetera . And they're still providing an amazing , uh, opportunity. They're good at marketing, but they're really, really, really good at retention. You know, most gyms that we meet don't have a marketing problem. They have a retention problem. And the way that you get to a good client headcount is not to be the best at marketing, it's to be incredible at retention. It's not just getting more people in. It's keeping the people you get. So that's a top tip from some of these , uh, people on the leaderboard. Our second place last month has 698 clients at one location in the USA , congratulations to them. And finally, I guess we could do the , the big drum roll here. Our gym with the most active clients last month is 1,034 clients. This is a CrossFit gym single location in Chile. This guy has been on the leaderboard before. He has an enormous heart. Actually. He just texted us , uh, two nights ago. He was on the beach somewhere in Mexico on a family vacation. His gym is still going without him . He is got over a thousand clients. Like this guy is a rockstar in the fitness community, let alone the CrossFit community. He is legit when he says he is got 1,034 clients, that means like active as of you know, today. He knows exactly how many clients he's got. He's got systems in place to help him get and keep those clients. Now I've got a couple of other tips for you from the leaders. So I said earlier that the, the reason that a lot of these gyms get these clients is retention more than marketing. You know, used to hear from all these marketing agencies, we put 80 gyms into this cli into this, or 80 clients into this gym last month. They never say and 60 are still there today. They never say we put a hundred people into that gym last year, and 98 of 'em are still there, right ? You never hear that. And that's because while these agencies sometimes are effective at getting people in your gym, the people that they bring in are the wrong people, or those people are really not interested long term and it creates this big churn problem. These gyms that I'm highlighting to you are impressive not just because they have big numbers, but because they keep them . And so when we were talking to , um, one of these gym owners, he was always on the leaderboard, by the way. Sometimes he's top, but he is always like top four. He said, my numbers are due to retention. I use a CSM that's a client success manager, somebody who's just in charge of retention. And we do goal review sessions. I gave the CSM targets and they dramatically increased the number of people who show up for their goal reviews. We started doing them first with new clients, then we started targeting at risk members to save them by booking goal reviews and talking to them before they quit. Then we started back filling with goal reviews on all of our existing clients. And at first they were hesitant, but we're now seeing new people get better service and results. I tracked all my metrics and I saw 'em improve as a result of this. My business is 75% group and 25% personal training. And while group rates in Denmark, this guy's in Denmark are not good, like a hundred bucks a month or something. Personal training rates in Denmark are very high, like 130 bucks a month. So almost double the average of the us . So there's a massive premium there. And the beautiful part about all that PT is that the people who sign up for PT at this guy's gym in Denmark, there are people who would've said no to his group program. Like he, he's opening the door to them and letting them come in and , and keeping them longer in pt and they're paying more per session than most people pay per month for a group. So like, you know, while this is kind of a, a hit model type gym, just having that option for one-on-one will allow people to come into your gym who wouldn't be signing up for your group program. I think that's really important to learn here. And he's keeping them. The same guy says he's also having great success with Facebook ads and he hit a jackpot in January after the leaderboard came out. He got about 200 leads and he added about 50 more clients. So his board total of 4 57 back then is now 512. That's not his only funnel, but it's the big one for him right now. So look, which of the four funnels are gonna be most important to you? It depends where you are in the world. It depends what you know, where you are in the lifespan of your gym right now. If you're in Western Europe, Facebook ads seem to be working really well. Uh, right now. If you're in the States, depending where you are in the states, Facebook and Instagram ads might be working or they might not be. Uh, it could be where you are in the states that Google is far more important and you need to be working on reviews. The key though is that you've mapped out your four marketing funnels. You check them every quarter or so, you audit them to make sure that they're working. The big mistake a lot of gym owners make when they're trying to get more clients is they'll just try one thing in isolation. I'm gonna post every day to Instagram for 30 days. Great. Like, that's one part of one funnel. It's like changing one tire on your car and letting the other three stay flat and not checking them. You know, you have to, you have to do this. It doesn't take a PhD in marketing to figure out how to do a social media audit. We do it with our clients all the time. It's a standard operating procedure between the mentor and their client. They just do this. And once they fix those funnels, they find that, oh, I don't actually need to do this new thing, or I don't have to go learn about this crazy thing that I don't have time for. I just need to fix and shore up the marketing that I have if I wanna get more clients. And most importantly, for the millionth time, keep the clients that you sign up longer. That is the key to big numbers. It's retention, not marketing, but you have to have the marketing too. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Ron Profitable. Jim. Hey, if this is helpful to you, you can talk to the people on this leaderboard@gymownersunited.com. That's our free group. There's almost 9,000 gym owners in there, sharing advice, sharing tips, sharing resources, and we share free stuff from two brain every single day. If you're ready to stop trying to figure this stuff out all on your own, you want to just get the results fast instead of, oh , I'll read this book. I'll try and figure out what he's talking about with funnels and leads and set rates , show rate, close rate. Uh , I'll just like forget about this podcast. Look, book a call with my team, get a mentor. When you buy mentorship, you're buying speed. You don't have to guess, you don't have to figure it out, you don't have to study on it. You just have to do it. And the mentor is there to do it with you. Thank you for your service.