Focusing on retention can improve just about every metric in your gym, from average revenue per member to length of engagement.
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” host Mike Warkentin talks with Chris Cooper, Two-Brain founder and CEO, about all things retention.
They dial in on the five pillars of retention: results, fame, compatibility, consistency and referrals. Chris explains what each is and why it matters.
Then he provides five actions you can perform today to start keeping clients in your gym longer. And these strategies aren’t pulled out of thin air—they’re proven to work based on data from about a quarter of a million gym members around the world.
For more support, and to get Chris's new “Never Lose a Client Again” guide, join the Gym Owners United group.
Links
The Prescriptive Model
Gym Owners United
Book a Call
0:38 - What is retention and why does it matter?
6:49- 5 pillars of retention
26:42 - Actions you can take today
32:11 - Get after referrals
Focusing on retention can improve just about every metric in your gym, from average revenue per member to length of engagement.
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” host Mike Warkentin talks with Chris Cooper, Two-Brain founder and CEO, about all things retention.
They dial in on the five pillars of retention: results, fame, compatibility, consistency and referrals. Chris explains what each is and why it matters.
Then he provides five actions you can perform today to start keeping clients in your gym longer. And these strategies aren’t pulled out of thin air—they’re proven to work based on data from about a quarter of a million gym members around the world.
For more support, and to get Chris's new “Never Lose a Client Again” guide, join the Gym Owners United group.
Links
The Prescriptive Model
Gym Owners United
Book a Call
0:38 - What is retention and why does it matter?
6:49- 5 pillars of retention
26:42 - Actions you can take today
32:11 - Get after referrals
Hey Coop , if I wanted to improve just about every metric in my business, from average revenue per member to length of engagement, what would I focus on today?
Speaker 2:Retention.
Speaker 1:Just that,
Speaker 2:That's what I'd focus on first. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> .
Speaker 1:Alright guys, you heard it here first from Chris. We are gonna focus on retention today and tell you what it means, how you can improve it, what actually matters. We're gonna give you some actual steps you can take today to improve retention in your business, measurably, along with a host of other metrics. This is Run a Profitable. Jim , I am Mike Morgan, and please hit subscribe before you go further with me today. As always, as Chris Cooper Tub Brainin , founder and CEO , we're gonna get right into retention. So Chris, start by telling me what is retention here? What's churn leg like, what are we actually measuring and why does it matter?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well let's start with why it matters. You know, every gym owner that I talk to says I want more clients and they think that they have a marketing problem, but they actually have a retention problem. And that's the problem that we wanna solve. Like, you can, you can get people in your door, but if they're quickly leaving again , then you get in this like never ending marketing flywheel. And a lot of experts are out there and they're telling you like, you need to do this, you need to have like a mapped client journey and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is like there's a lot of advice out there , uh, to do things that don't actually matter to people. And to get to what really matters to people, you have to understand, like psychology, you have to understand how the brain actually works. You have to understand connection and community. But more than anything, you have to understand the data. And so there are, there are great ideas out there, like, we're gonna give these clients, you know, badges and great initiatives. They do take time, they take money and maybe they matter, but maybe they don't. And so today we're gonna talk about things that are proven to matter and backed by data to actually improve the length of time that a client is with you. Look ,
Speaker 1:I can confirm exactly what you're saying. I just last week talked to , uh, one of our top gym owners, 512 clients CrossFit Gym in Denmark. And I asked him, how did you do this? He said, retention, how was it? It was retention and he's got a marketing plan, but he said retention first laid out his exact plan. So what you're saying is backed by data and real world stuff that we're getting from ground zero at gyms.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean, I've had my gym for 20 years and if, if I count all the number of clients who've been through my doors, it's close to 3000. So, you know, why don't I have 300 or 200 clients even right now? Like, well, it's not a marketing problem, it's if I had kept this person just a little bit longer , longer . Now you're never gonna keep everybody forever. And that's why we wanna look at how long you keep people instead of your churn rate. So maybe we can just talk about those terms first, Mike.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like what is churn and , and why are we kind of not prioritizing that and looking like the engagement instead? Yeah,
Speaker 2:I mean churn is like the percentage of your clientele who leave every month. Okay. So , uh, that's like if you have a hundred clients and three leave, then you have a churn rate of 3%. And the people who popularize churn rates are really like software companies. And if you're, if you're a software company, like churn rate is a valid metric because all your clients are faceless. Like you don't know that, right? And, and so you wanna know how many people are quitting every month so that you know how many people you have to add every month in a remote way that's kind of valid for a gym , but that's not the primary metric that you wanna track. What you actually wanna track is like how long people are staying. And the main reason is you wanna know that they're staying long enough that you can change their lives. If somebody's with you for seven months, you're not changing their lives. We know that it takes like at least two years to build a sustainable habit. And if you're listening to this and you're gym owner, I just want you to think for a minute. Like the people who were with your gym for two years and then left , did they quit your gym or did they quit fitness altogether? I think, you know, in my gym, maybe in yours too , Mike, you can tell me if I'm wrong here, by all means. But if they've been with me for two years and then they quit, it's probably because they're gonna go do something else. Like in my gym, a lot of people go ride bikes, maybe they start running, maybe they do triathlons, maybe they move to like, they wanna do weightlifting, right? But they don't quit fitness. And that's my goal. Like the mission is to get people fit. If they want to go do that at another gym, it's still mission accomplished. But the people who come to my gym and they leave after like three months, they quit fitness. It's like they haven't built that fitness habit . So the first reason that we're tracking leg is we wanna know that we're actually changing people's lives here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of the things that I don't really like about churn is it doesn't really give you a sense of who's leaving. It's like people are leaving, but who are they? Right? So like if five , if I have like 5% churn and I've got 10 people left, I got 200 members or something like that, and those 10 people were all 18 month members, that's really different than if they were all three month members or one month member. You know that , that's a whole different story because if you've got people leaving at that later stage, after two years, yeah, they might be moving life changes, they got married, moved to another city, whatever, or even moving on to like doing triathlons. But if it's those people that are leaving in the first three months, you probably have a client journey problem. They might quit fitness altogether and they're probably unhappy and you probably could have solved those problems. So I think length of engagement gives you a whole lot more insight into who's leaving when and why, and allows you to put a client journey in place that says, okay, we know first 30 days, first 90 days are critical. If we get them to this point, they're probably gonna get to this point. If they get to this point, they're gonna get to this point and so on. And you can build an entire business on that and reduce marketing problems by having that client journey. Whereas churn is just like, people are leaving, I need more people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that you just led us into the second point, Mike, which is like, you need different retention strategies depending on where the client is in that journey with your Jim . Like the thing that's gonna help you retain the member at the two year mark is not necessarily the thing that's going to help you retain that member at the two week mark. You need different strategies almost at each phase. And so in two brain and like we map out the client journey step by step with here is exactly what you need to do on day two, here's exactly what you need to do on day 270. And we're gonna share some of those with you I know today. Yeah . It actually matters that I Yeah, exactly. Like what, what is proven to matter? Does having the a hundred workout club, the thousand workout club, does that matter? Maybe, but we don't know. And so it's not gonna be the first thing that we're gonna tell you to do. Instead we're gonna say like, we know this works, let's do that first.
Speaker 1:Alright , let's get into it and let's talk about what actually matters and what the data says. And again, I'll give you an example. Like I, I started putting in an , an automation in my system, you know, you made a hundred workouts or whatever it was, and inevitably what happened is it started going out to the wrong people for whatever reason because the tracking system didn't work. And people were like, haha, that's super funny, but I've been here for five years and I'm like, this is embarrassing for everyone <laugh> . And it probably made more retention work, right? So it's these things that like, they kind of mean something, but they kind of don't. But if we look at the data, we know that those things, you know, we can do some of those things, but we're better to start off with these five or eight whatever things that we know actually get results. So let's dig in. Yeah,
Speaker 2:Man. So these are the five things that we can prove gets results. And again, like we're, we're drawing from data from over 15,000 gyms. And if you say like, ah , there's an average of a hundred people at each one of those gyms, which is a low count, we're really looking at data from about 150,000 clients worldwide.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's low for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. Like it, it's probably one 50 ish. So you're looking at like closer to a quarter of a million clients worldwide in our dataset. These are the things that people give as reasons and how we overcome 'em . Okay? So there's five things that we can do to actually improve the length of time that people spend with us. The first is results seems obvious, but we're gonna dig into that a little bit more. It's not enough to just like get them some results. You have to get them the results that they want. Uh, second is fame. They have to actually feel like they're important, that they're seeing that they're a part of what you're doing and not just a face in the crowd. The third is compatibility. Like you've gotta have good product market fit. We're , we're gonna talk more about that in a moment. The fourth is consistency. Like, let's face it, they have to show up and we, we measure a , a secondary metric called adherence. And it's not just how often are they there that matters, it's what package did they buy and how much, how well are they using that package? And then fifth is referrals. Surprisingly, people who stay longer are also the most likely to refer. And that's not just correlation, that's causation. Like if I bring you to the gym, I'm gonna stick around long enough to make sure that you're getting the results that I told you would happen. Okay, so results, fame, compatibility, consistency in referrals.
Speaker 1:So results seems obvious to me, but I can tell you in practice it wasn't because I thought people just showed up and wanted to do Fran just like I did. I didn't actually ask 'em what they wanted to accomplish. And some of them wanted to lose weight, didn't care how they did it, and I didn't know that. So talk to me about results and what we can actually do to make things better for people here. Well ,
Speaker 2:The key Mike is like, and , and I copied your gym a lot. Like I, Mike's got a pirate flag, I'm getting a pirate flag, I still , and I mine's folded up somewhere I'm sure, because I thought that, that I was my own best customer. And so what that means in my brain is like everybody wants the results that I want. So a woman especially would come in and she'd be very nervous about this kind of gym. And I remember one of my first clients and when I opened my gym, her name's Tiffany, she comes in, I just want to tone up I what the f is that? And she's looking at a power cage that has like , um, chains hanging from it because I was doing like the west side accommodating resistance thing. And I'm like, don't worry, you'll use those next time. She's like the hell I will gone. So what's really important is that you ask the client what results they wanna get and then you track their progress toward those results and then you show 'em that they're getting those results. So I think like everybody listening to this, watching this, you've had this instance where this client is doing amazing. They've been with you for five or six months, they're down 20 pounds, they got lots of energy, they quit, and you're like, what? You're, you're killing it. Like you , you're getting these results and like they don't see it because they're inside the problem. So not only do you have to get them, the results that they care about might not be their deadlift. So you have to know what they want. You have to prove that you're getting those results. So you have to talk to 'em every quarter, measure their progress, but then you actually have to say to them, you are getting good results and like, celebrate that in front of other people. And if you don't do that, they're not just gonna like naturally realize how well they're doing. And that , that was a big misunderstanding that I had when I started.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you really can't improve this without an intake interview, like a free consultation where you find out goals, a prescription, the prescriptive model where you tell them, here's how we solve your problems. And then a 90 day goal review session where you say, here's the problem we laid out, here's the path we took, here's where we are. Are you happy? Yes, let's keep going. Are you not? We'll, make an adjustment and go further if you don't have that system in place. Doesn't work. And again, the gym that I spoke to, 512 members goal review sessions, that's what he focused on. He ma gave his CSM hard targets 15 additional goal review sessions every single month. He's got like something like 200 booked or something like that every month now or whatever it is. And he says that this is the absolute key to growing his gym because he's retaining members and he's selling more in those sessions. So I don't think you can do it without that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think a lot of people are scared to do a goal review because I can remember, you know, when I was a new trainer, I would be terrified that a client would ask for a , a body fat calculation or they'd ask to get on the scale because it's like, oh , what if we're not getting results <laugh>? But the reality is like it's better that you discover that the client's not getting results and then say, here's what we're gonna change then for the client to uncover that on their own and be like, this isn't working. You know, Brian bot once told me that the best prescription for a client is always the next prescription because you're just gonna keep making like a, a tighter and tighter prescription for them over time. And so if after the three months you call a client in for a goal review, they get on the InBody, they haven't made progress, they're gonna look to you to say, what do I do? If you don't call them in and they get on a scale at their mom's house and they haven't made progress, they're gonna be like, I'm embarrassed, this isn't working. I'm wasting money and time. I'm gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that buys you extra time right's, right ? Each prescription buys you extra time. That's right . Yeah . And like exactly what you said, if they just pull the ripcord in three months, nobody's talked to them, they're gone. But that if you talk 'em at three months, you can then fix something by another three months and maybe you get it right at that point, and at least you're holding them a little bit longer that's good for your business, but it's also gonna get them close to that point where exercise becomes a part of their life and it's better for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, think about like going to the doctor, right? And , and the doctor says , um, you've got high cholesterol and we're gonna, we're gonna try Lipitor. Let's book again in two months, you're gonna come back, we're gonna measure your, your bloodborne cholesterol at all again and see if it's doing any better. Well , you go back in two months and your cholesterol is not better and the doctor's like, okay, Lipitor is not the answer. We're gonna try this next thing. You're actually way more likely to stay with that doctor because you've been through step one than to go start all over again with somebody else. And that's how you actually build trust.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. So retention or , or pardon me , uh, results is gonna be your first thing to focus on what's next? What else we got
Speaker 2:Fame. So surprisingly people wanna feel like they are important to the community, not just part of the community. Mm-Hmm . And this is a , a difficult one to measure, but like what you wanna do is make everybody famous to everybody else in your gym. So yesterday, man, or Wednesday, I walked into my semi-private session. I was the last one to arrive as usual. You know, the three women who were also in my semi-private group, they were already there working out. And first Kelsey's like, Chris, what's up? And I'm like, Kelsey , you haven't had your baby yet. And then Lauren is like, what's going on? Chris, glad you're here. I got so many frigging planks and you need to tell me jokes while I'm doing it. And then like, Natasha's over in the corner and she's like, go , what's up? I heard you got deadlifts today, right? Like, you want to be famous within your tribe because if people know you and know things about you, you fit in, you're part of it, right? So that's, that's really important is , is that you like, make your clients famous to all of your other clients. The only skill that I really ever had here was that I'm a classic over introducer. I can't remember if I've already introduced you to Crystal or not, so I'm just gonna do it again, right? And people make fun of me for it. But like, that's, that's how you make people famous. So you , you wanna do a couple things here, Mike, like number one, you , you want to , um, get people to have like a , a PR board in their gym. So, hey , uh, Mike, you've never cleaned 205 pounds before. Amazing bro. Like, let's go put that on the PR board and ring the bell and take your picture and put that in the private members group, right? We're doing that for you because it helps you feel famous among your peers.
Speaker 1:From a media perspective, I like using social media for stuff like this where you collect the stuff, you collect videos and pictures and all this stuff, and then you just celebrate your members and make them superstars. And what inevitably happens, you know, they like the post that you put up, which is good for you, but they also share that stuff. So when you put up these videos of them doing incredible things or even just like, you know, basic things that are incredible for a basic person, right? Like, I'm not talking about about a 400 pound deadlift. I'm talking about what someone who just deadlifted a hundred pounds, they put that up, share with their friends. Their friends are like, maybe I could deadlift a hundred pounds and all of a sudden and we're gonna get to referrals. But that's where that piece comes in. So these are these pillars that you're laying out, they're interlinked, like you can see already sort of how that's coming. But it definitely works. And I love the idea of making people famous internally inside your gym newsletters and even externally on social media or like blogs or testimonials. And we know that that works in marketing as well. So that's, that's a great one. What do we got next? What's pillar three?
Speaker 2:Um , nu number three is compatibility. And what we're really talking about is interesting here. Yeah. This is product market fit and, and this topic is gonna make a a couple people nervous, but like you have to understand that while your service is for anybody, it's not for everybody. And so you, you want to be like attracting the right people. What happens a lot of the times with gyms is they spend so much time and energy and money marketing to everyone that they wind up getting a lot of the wrong people in. And so those people will have a very short leg, they'll be out of your gym within three months. And that's exhausting for the owner. It's exhausting for the coaches because they have to work with new people all the time. And you start to feel like you're on this treadmill of hopelessness. You, you, you really are like churning people out really, really quickly. So what you have to ask about your clients is like, can they afford it? Right? We sell a coaching service that is a premium service that not everybody can afford now. Yeah. I get like, you got in this to help people. You wanna help everybody in your community. You live in the lowest income demographic in America. I think everybody's told me that once, but the reality is like we sell a high value service and it's, it's not gonna be a good fit for everybody. I'd rather you make lots of money and give it away to people who need it by focusing on the right clients who want to pay for coaching than by undermining and having this like , uh, constant revolving door of clients who just don't have good product market fit. So can they afford it as one? But do they like you as another? Like are you likable? And another is like, do they fit with your other clients? You know, sometimes you don't get that compatibility between clients either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'll put this in perspective from an experience that I actually had is that we try to get every single person, 'cause everyone can do this fitness program. We love everyone, we bring 'em in and all of a sudden we've got this, this mixture of people and some of them really wanted to be competitors. I didn't really care about that after about 2012. And so we had this wrong group of people in our gym who wanted to do competitions and open gym and focus on their special little snowflake programs. And our gym struggled. We lost a lot of people. And so we look at the client journey, we were losing people at a certain point because they wanted to do competitive programming and extra stuff that we didn't offer or care about. I had the wrong people in the gym when we got those, those people, when they moved on to their other places and they're great people and they moved on and were happy, we started referring when people came in and said, Hey, I wanna focus on competition. I'm like, that gym down the street is much better. They're the place for you. They specialize in that you're gonna have a much better time. I'm more for professionals between 30, 35 and 55 who wanna generally get fit and have fun and then take their kids to the park. And I got all those people and they were amazing. We built our business stronger, the competitors went somewhere else and made another business stronger that that was the right people for them. So I agree with you, compatibility is super important, but you don't see that as a new gym owner because you want everyone. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think the key to your story though, Mike, is well one key is like that the competitors went somewhere else where all the other competitors were. Like for some people that competitive audience, that is good product market fit. Yep . But it's not for me.
Speaker 1:It wasn't for me either.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like more and more my best audience is people over 50. They're stable in life. They probably have adult kids, you know, I mean our legends program, it's called Prime at Catalyst. But like those are amazing clients for me. They're very high value. They show up every single time. They're so coachable, they're lots of fun. They refer their friends, they want every catalyst teacher there is, you know, and I just, I love 'em . So that's good product market fit for me. But that product market fit can change over time too . You know, it is just a matter of always assessing like who are my best clients?
Speaker 1:Yep . No, the gyms that these people went to, they still exist and they're still focused on competition and they're still going. So they have a good product market fit, they've got the right people works , so they're so literally solving problems for the other gyms.
Speaker 2:The the key is to figuring out like what is your best product market fit? And uh, we teach this exercise called the pumpkin plan . And just really quickly, like what you're gonna do is you're gonna pull up your client roster, you're gonna write down the people who pay you the most money again. Like can they afford it? That's an important filter that you have to embrace and accept. You write down the top 10 who pay you the most, and then you also write down the top 10 who make you the happiest. And some of those people are gonna be different, but a few are gonna be the same. And, and those are like, that is your target audience. And so to get good product market fit, there's your market, how can you reframe your product to better serve them? And what you'll find is that over time you wind up like niching down and specializing, which makes you more valuable and improves your retention.
Speaker 1:That's the first exercise you guys can do right now to improve your retention is do that pumpkin plant exercise that Chris just laid out. Pillar four, what do you got? What is the next one?
Speaker 2:Well, this one's consistency and I don't think this is a surprise to anybody, but there there is something a little bit surprising about it. So, you know, the common mantra around fitness is that the more people show up, the longer they're gonna stick around. That's not actually true. Um, some people shouldn't be with you five or six times a week. Some people can just like burn out . And I mean, you know what it was like, you were probably an early adopter for CrossFit. Like I was where it was like, I can't get enough of this. Like I can't rest day, hell no. Like let's go again and you're hitting like refresh on the main site at midnight and stuff. But then over time, like, you know, for a lot of people that enthusiasm waned and they moved on to the next thing or whatever. What you actually want is to measure adherence. So if somebody signs up to come to your gym three times a week, how often do they get there Three times a week? Like how often are they actually fulfilling on that? Because if they sign up for three times a week and they're only coming twice, they're way more likely to drop off, right? People don't care about spending money as much as they do about wasting money. And if they're paying for something and not using it, then they will say, I'm just not using the membership. So again, in a goal review session, if they're only coming twice a week, you should absolutely recommend that they downgrade their membership till twice a week. If they're coming three times a week and you want 'em to come four times, you better make a strong case for them coming four times and say, we're gonna reassess this after 90 days to make sure that you're actually showing up four times a week. You know, because it's not like how much they're paying, it's how much they're wasting.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's interesting because I used to think more is better. Yeah . I wanted everyone to go to my unlimited program, which was the most expensive one, which was underpriced, but it was our most expensive program and I wanted everyone to ascend to that. So I'm like, okay , off , off , off one to like, one to three times a week and have these weird memberships in there, everyone will ascend to unlimited. And that didn't happen my one time a weekers left, they all, every, every single one of 'em just left because it was not, there was no consistency there. And they would miss one thing and that's a hundred percent of their classes, right? Two and three kind of were okay, but there was not really an initially an ascension plan. So you are saying measure how often people come in relation to what they've booked and try and get them to fulfill as much of that as they can. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like what they're doing should match what they're buying basically. There's so many problems with that whole unlimited idea, Mike , but you and I both had problems at the other end of the spectrum, which is like, people thought unlimited meant unlimited access to our life. Like, hey Chris, I'm borrowing the truck. <laugh> .
Speaker 1:<laugh> . Yeah , you're yeah , that's, that actually happened guys. So that's a thing. <laugh>.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Okay. So that's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I I'm gonna call you at 5:00 AM Hey Chris, it's 10 30 at night, man. I , I'm really craving cheesies , what should I do? Don't eat the cheesy ,
Speaker 1:What's the workout tomorrow? I saw a typo on the blog .
Speaker 2:Oh my god. Right?
Speaker 1:You know that one? Oh my , what's the workout tomorrow? That one you missed the post by five minutes and you're getting three to 3, 4 10 texts like that happened.
Speaker 2:Oh, even recently? Like what do you mean I can't commit 20 minutes before the class starts? My membership says unlimited, unlimited, right? Yeah, yeah , yeah . Okay. I mean, I'll leave a shovel outside. You can clean off the roof. Yeah. And , and so the , the fifth one is referrals. And this one was always kind of a surprise to me, but only like in retrospect of learning the science behind it doesn't make sense. So if , if you read like an anthropology book about like how tribes are made up, we're very, very cautious to recommend things for friends because of something that's called social risk. So if I'm like, Mike, you know, the new , uh, Ford F-150 Lightning is amazing. You should get one and then you get one and you hate it. It sucks, it sucks. Chris , you're gonna second guess. Like, is Chris really? Is he dumb?
Speaker 1:The next thing you tell me, I'm not gonna listen.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So there's massive social risk . And so when somebody does refer a client to you, you're actually invested in like that person's success, right? So I I'm like, Mike, you know, you really gotta take Crystal to this amazing restaurant and you come back and you're like, actually, you know, I , I'd give it a b It was, it was okay. And I'm gonna be like, what ? Oh my God, come back with me next time we're gonna sit at the back, we're gonna ask for like Rico as the waiter and I'm gonna call the chef in advance. Like, I'm invested in you liking that.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you what to order 'cause you ordered the wrong thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, <laugh> , you screwed this up. But like, I'm invested in , so, and also I'm gonna defend my position because I don't want you to like, you know, distance yourself from me because then I'll be pushed out of the tribe. So if I, if I refer somebody, I'm more likely to stick around too and make sure they're successful, right? Like, you , you're not, I'm not gonna be like, Mike, you should come to this restaurant with me. Okay, let's get seated. Okay, let's order, oh , you're happy with your order, see you later. Like , I'm gone , right? Like, I'm in , I'm invested. I'm gonna stick around and make sure you enjoy.
Speaker 1:Think about that at your gym. You've seen it the exact same thing. Someone refers a friend, they're definitely like, Hey, walk in their friend and their friend looks nervous. They're just like, oh, this is my other friend here. This is where we put our sh stuff, this is the whiteboard, this is how this works. Class is gonna start here. The snatch is this one. Like, they're helping, they're literal like kind of being your assistant coach at that point. And it's great because, and oh yeah, you know, where hey, hey , uh, Cindy , where's, where's Jen? Oh, you know, I messaged her and she's coming tomorrow for sure. Like, you get all these different fringe benefits when someone refers someone because they're, they're sticky to or that other person. So it's something that you might not think of. But again, it also solves a marketing problem because if you get a ton of referrals and a ton of retention, you don't need to market all that much. So it's a really important one that has double benefits.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it , it doubles like, it doubles the effect of your ad spend because now everybody who comes in through your Facebook funnel is bringing a friend, right? Like, if you don't believe us , like try this, do do it . Bring a friend event at your gym, okay? And you tell people it's invite only, you know, you can bring one friend and we're gonna have like a protein supplement thing. We're gonna do a fun workout, it's gonna be partners, blah, blah, blah . You do the little workout and then you go up and you say, okay , uh, crystal, I know you brought Mike here, Mike, hey , what , what'd you think of my Jim ? And you're like, oh , this , that's good. You know, it's all right . Thanks
Speaker 1:Gary .
Speaker 2:The , the next thing that's gonna happen is Crystal's gonna jump in and try and sell Mike on like buying the JI signing , right ? Oh , you did amazing. Yeah, you did so great. Oh my God. Like you gotta sign up. Like that person became an advocate because they've invested social currency in convincing that person to join. So it does make sense in hindsight that like referrals is the fifth pillar of retention. It really does push retention among your existing clients. Alright ,
Speaker 1:So that , those are the five pillars and we gave you one actionable thing, which is the pumpkin plan to find combat compatibility and find the right product market fit . Chris , give me as we close this out , what are other things people can do right now? Now let's give 'em some actions to take to measurably improve retention. And we're not pulling stuff outta the air here. This is stuff we know works. So what, what do we got on the plate here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, man . So I , I'll give you one for each one. Yeah . So results start doing goal reviews, measure results, change people's prescription, but make sure that they understand that they're getting results. And often you have to tell them they won't just see it on their own.
Speaker 1:You know what, I'm gonna jump in Chris, I'm gonna give you listeners an easy button for that. I'll put a link in the show notes to the prescriptive model that tells you exactly how to do all of it. Easy button. Awesome Chris.
Speaker 2:Thanks buddy. People think I'm generous, but you just give up away our stuff all the time. So it's actually you that's so generous. Yeah . Maybe,
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Fame, what I want you to do is like, brag about five clients this week. You know, go on social media. Here's a picture of Mike. Here's a picture of Crystal . Like, here's what I love so much about Mike. Here's why Crystal is like, you know, the best , uh, dead lifter in the gym, whatever, like brag about them that you will feel great, number one, but they will feel amazing and they'll have their story on the internet and their friends will see it too. So
Speaker 1:Put five people on a podium.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah. Podium week is a great way to do it, by the way, you know, next is compatibility. You wanna have that good product market fit. And we talked about doing the pumpkin plan. I mean, to take it a step further after you identify who your three or five best clients are, take each one out for coffee. Hey, you know , I did this with a woman named Anne . Anne , you got time for coffee? Okay, we sit down for 20 minutes. I'm like, you know, why did you pick Catalyst in the first place? You know, what , what is it that about Catalyst that keeps you coming back? She wasn't traditionally a gym person, you know, and before you know it , she's bringing her husband Jamie in , uh, off the street too. And like, that's the perfect client because he's already got product market fit, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> . So pumpkin plan , pumpkin
Speaker 1:Plan plus, we'll call them seed client interviews. Identify your best people, find out more about them. They're gonna give you marketing gold and a lot of important info. All right , number four.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I know I'm skipping over this, but we teach people and, and we walk 'em through it step by step in the mentorship practice. Mm-Hmm . <affirmative> like that's what we do. Number four is consistency. And really like, what you wanna do here is just do some goal settings. So when somebody's new, especially the win is the work. Like the win is showing up. They're not gonna lose 20 pounds in their first session. The win is they came back for the second session, they finished OnRamp, they did their first group class. And so what you're looking for in consistency here is for you to, to say to them, okay, can you commit to three sessions per week? And then after the first month, you call 'em and be like, you did it like you, you made all 12 sessions last month. We're so proud of you. Can you commit to the same next month again? And you really wanna be tracking that. So this is like why we track lag and why we track it . Adherence . The best thing that you can do is look at your reports every month and say, oh crap, you know, Mike is paying for eight and he only, he only showed up four times last month. Like , let's get on the phone , make sure, yeah, you know it. But if you're not looking in the data, like you might, it might take you a while to catch it and then it's too late. Like, Hey, has anybody seen Mike? No, I haven't seen him in like five weeks. It's too late. By that
Speaker 1:I only coach mornings. I don't know , you know, that whole thing ,
Speaker 2:Uh , thousand percent. I mean if, if I went into my private coaches' Facebook group right now and I'm like, have you seen this person? You know, four of the coaches are gonna be like, I only coach mornings. I only coach evenings. One is gonna be like, oh, I bumped into him at the grocery store, <laugh> . You know, and like, where is he? And, and that's why you have to look at your client list and your data every single month.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's a good one guys. Check that one out. Number five thing thing that you could do today to improve retention. Yeah, I
Speaker 2:Mean the , the easiest thing is like if you have five clients that you know really, really well, especially if they're like a personal training client is just say, Hey, do you wanna bring your spouse in for a buddy workout next week? That's the easiest. Uh, if you're not tight enough like that with your clients, I mean that's a red flag. But what you can do is just run and bring a friend event. So basically you say like, we've gotta bring a friend event on Friday for , uh, 10 buddies. It's invite only tell me in advance who they're gonna be. And you know, you set up a fun workout, you know who these people are gonna be. So you've got them in your lead nurture process. You book them for a nose , sweat, intro when they're there, you know, don't just give 'em a free trial and let them run away to make up their own mind, like hook them in no sweat intro and you know, leverage the person who's already in there. You know, do you want to do what Ann is doing? Frequently what we'll find with referrals is like everybody starts with on ramp at Catalyst, but their next step is determined by how they came in. So if they came in through an ad, they're probably gonna wanna pick semi-private. If they came in through a referral, they'll want to pick whatever their buddy is doing. I wanna do this with Mike, that's fine.
Speaker 1:And I can tell you , uh, another Jim on our leaderboard from December, 2023 with a huge client count, they have a very formalized bring a friend event that happens on a regular schedule. It's, it's laid out. They know exactly how they're gonna run it, when they're gonna run it, what they do at it. And they have a huge client count as well. So these events do work. The pacing of them, we'll have to figure out our mentors, help our clients figure out exactly how often to do them and you know, in relation to their other strategies. But bring a Friend event can have good results, but it's not a whim . Whimsical, ah , bring a friend and toss into the wind every Saturday. People show up, right ? It doesn't work like that. You have to make it formalized and it's even better if you can say, dude, your best buddy Phil should come to the Spring of Friend event because he is got that 5K run coming up. Would you invite him? Phil's gonna be there. Phil will probably sign up. So it has to be more formalized than just saying, posting it on Facebook. It does not work like that anymore. You have to be a bit more tactical and we help our clients do that specifically. So those are five things you can do today. Take them from the show. Uh, Chris, if people haven't been taking notes, we have a brand new guide that's gonna lay out some of this stuff. How can people get
Speaker 2:It? Well, it's called Never Lose a Client Again. And all they have to do is go to gym owners united.com and say, Hey, can I have it? You know, send me a DM on Facebook. We're not into like a formal process here where we gotta fill in a form, then we automatically email it like you DM me on Facebook, I'll send you the guide, I'll ask you how things are going because I care. I want to know. And if there's something else that I can do to help you, then I'll tell you.
Speaker 1:Never lose a member again, guide. If you want to get more into this topic, keep more clients, earn more money, get that guide. All you gotta do is DM Coop and you can do that through the Gym Owners United Group. Chris, thanks for your time and sharing all this stuff. I hope it helps gym owners keep more people,
Speaker 2:I hope . Yeah, that's how we change lives. Thanks Mike.
Speaker 1:This has been run a Profitable. Jim . I'm Mike working in , my request to you is just to hit subscribe on the way out and then head to Gym Owners United to get our new guide . Thanks guys .