Run a Profitable Gym

All the Secrets From a 420-Member CrossFit Affiliate in Portugal

• Chris Cooper • Season 3 • Episode 685

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CrossFit Mondego has 429 members—and they’re not bleeding out the door.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Mike Warkentin sits down with one of CrossFit Mondego’s owners, Luísa Mesquita, to find out exactly how she and her partners transformed a gym with high churn into a 400-plus-member powerhouse with great retention.

Luísa breaks down the key additions that fueled their explosive growth, including a data-driven referral funnel that consistently brings in new leads without ad spend.

In addition to expanding client count, CrossFit Mondego has boosted its revenue with a high-value on-ramp program, as well as small-group and hybrid training.

Luísa explains how her Two-Brain mentor, Brian Foley, helped the gym’s owners make gradual changes to move the needle and scale with sustainable systems—without burning out.

Listen to Luísa's full story, and then use her tips to build a gym where more people stay longer and pay more.

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2:12 - How retention has increased

5:32 - The impact of on-ramp

12:50 - Additional programs driving growth

19:47 - Hyrox at a CrossFit gym

24:30 - Why Luísa slowed down ads

31:56 - Advice for getting more clients

SPEAKER_03:

I'm Luisa Mesquita from CrossFit Mondego, and we have 429 members.

SPEAKER_01:

CrossFit gyms with 400 or more members, they exist, and you're going to find out how they acquired so many people today and run a profitable gym. I'm your host, Mike Working, and please hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening with my thanks. On our most recent leaderboard, our top 10 gyms for client count had between 379 and 655 clients. This is incredible. Luisa has 400 plus and she made that leaderboard and she's here to share her secrets. Good afternoon from Portugal. How are you today?

SPEAKER_03:

I am fine. Thank you, Mike.

SPEAKER_01:

I am excited to talk to you. I love hearing about CrossFit gyms with tons of members. And I especially love talking to CrossFit gyms that aren't in North America because it's such an interesting perspective. So I'm fired up. We're going to get into it. You bought the business in 2023. It had fewer than 300 clients and you had higher churn. How did you add a hundred people and keep them after you took over?

SPEAKER_03:

So when we took over, I was a former coach in the business and we identified a lot of things that weren't working in the retention issues. So the first thing that we started to do, it was collecting data. Data is everything and it shows us a lot of things and we could identify all the weakness in the business. And that was the first part of our entry in the business. Then we started to do some changes in the systems. We established some systems. It's simple things like answering the phone. So we had a phone. We're running a website and everything, but you need to get the leads inside your gym. So that was a big difference. Then we systemized all the procedures from coaches and everything to get a better retention. So Then we started to, people were coming and then with all the systems that we put on practice, we could improve our retention.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you have stats on your retention? Do you have exact stats by chance? I didn't ask you for that, but do you have them?

SPEAKER_03:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

I would love to know what you went from and what you're at now in terms of length of engagement.

SPEAKER_03:

In terms of length of engagement?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, do you have that? If you don't, that's okay. You can just give me a ballpark. I'm curious what you've changed

SPEAKER_03:

there. Our leg started in 24 and then now our leg is like 36.5.

SPEAKER_01:

Months?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, months.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. So you're keeping people for well over three years.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Good for you. So that's incredible. We had all the knowledge available. We read all the books and we spent hours. I'm talking we because we are three of us running the business. And then we started to put everything on spreadsheets and look at the numbers and share with each other what can we do because we listen to this and to that. And then we started to put everything on the spreadsheet and let that speak. And then you move around that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So you're, you're relying heavily on data and here, here's some data for you. When I ran a CrossFit gym, uh, I could have gotten to a 400 members if they weren't all bleeding out every month. Right. I acquired 400 members. I just didn't hold onto them and I could never get past. That was you. That's,

SPEAKER_03:

That was the big challenge. And then we created some systems to get the client journey. Now we are better in the client journey and 2Brain is being very useful for us to systemize everything and then to have a smooth process. But that was the first thing that we identified. People just came into experimental class and sometimes it was good, sometimes it wasn't because it was a very hard workout. Yeah, we did that. We have already two different classes, CrossFit class and the conditioning class. It is easier in the skills and the technique, but it's very intense. And people come in, experimental class, okay, then they go out and what happens? If they want to come, they want to come. But if don't, we have to go and find and talk with them. And so that was the main difference in that time, two years ago. Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And you mentioned something else that was funny to me because I did the exact same thing where you said, if you want to acquire more clients, you have to answer your phone. And it seems obvious, but I did not answer my phone. I was the only person in the business. I could hear ringing in the office and I was coaching, right?

SPEAKER_03:

You're coaching, you're doing the financial stuff and front desk and everything and it was a little it was little changes that all compound to make a huge huge difference

SPEAKER_01:

and that's it's so accurate because when i started making the same little changes that you did like picking up the phone i got more members when i started checking in with my members and having goal review sessions they stayed longer and it was just these little incremental things and all of a sudden the business gets momentum and you've taken that from 300 to 420 members just by doing these small things let me ask you a little bit about uh about the business now i'm gonna get specific here so So you said client journey is big for you. You've added on-ramp for new members. Now, a lot of people say, oh, that's a barrier to entry and people don't want to do that stuff. How did the on-ramp affect your growth, your average revenue per member and your retention?

SPEAKER_03:

So we were also afraid of running a one-run program. We had... We had only experimental classes and it was okay. They were coming and we improved our retention and we thought that, okay, this is going to be... But then we started to think that we want to increase our ARM. So... What kind of things are we going to do with small group training? That were things that we added to our services. Then, okay, we started to work with our mentor, Brian. And the first thing, let's run on ramp. And we were like, oh no. It was very challenging in the beginning. First in our minds, then putting on practice and explain that to our coaches. And then suddenly two months ago, okay, we are going to run on ramp and it worked. And it's amazing. 19 OneRamp sets in one month.

SPEAKER_02:

Really?

SPEAKER_03:

And if I'm going to see the numbers, because I have all the numbers from two years until now of people signing in, it was 16, 15, some months will be 20, but then another 18 or 15. So the number is very, very, very good compared to everything. And the difference is, in the past, they subscribed for a... a free pass or twice a week and then suddenly the value is twice that value with the one ramp session that is five sessions of PT and then we can sit again and have the prescriptions for them.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, so you've taken, put in an on-ramp, you're selling just as much as you did before without the on-ramp except you're selling like double, did I hear double the price now?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, if we look to the numbers of our free pass, Our on-ramp session is the double price.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, so you haven't seen a drop-off in clients at all.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, for each client, we doubled the entry value that they increased to the business.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, so you've doubled the value, so your average revenue per member is going way, way up. Your length of engagement is going longer, so you're keeping people longer. Everything is compounding, yeah. right? More clients at a higher rate who stay longer. This is the magic formula for giant revenue in gyms and profit and net owner benefits. So listeners, if you're out there, this is an incredible story and it's possible to do this. OnRamp is one step in that process, but it's a big one. I'm going to ask you a couple other things about that. Talk to me about, you've mentioned Brian a few times, talk to me about what role your mentor played in this growth. How did you go from, like when you came into 2Brain, talk about your client journey, how did this work and how did all these little things add up for you?

SPEAKER_03:

So as I'd before, we were a big enthusiast of Two Brain, the podcast, the free member group on Facebook, the books, everything. But as we listen all the time, knowledge is It's anything if we don't put it on practice. So we had a lot of ideas and a lot of content in our minds, but we needed to be more accurate, more straight in the line. And then suddenly, January this year, me and my partners, we went to Coaches Congress in Stockholm.

SPEAKER_01:

Nice.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. And then, again, we had some conference from two great business guys, and we were discussing the need that we had to get... someone from the outside just trying to help us structuring our thoughts and our actions. So at that time, it felt like we need to do this because, okay, we are getting results, we are growing, but we want more. And for getting more, we need to go to the best and try to learn from people that are in the business more than we are. And then we talked in person in the Coaches Congress. And then we booked the call and everything went smoothly. And now what we feel now, everything has... a flow that we just need to do our work and of course we need to do that work otherwise it's not going to happen it's not going to be a miracle but everything runs smooth in the paid ads it was something amazing that everything was on time and then we talked with Colm and then we talked again with Brian and everything the mentorship is getting us on track and runs smoothly

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. So you looked at all the free stuff. And again, Chris Cooper's philosophy here is no gym left behind. So he wants to put in a ton of free content to help gym owners do whatever they can. Right. So like raise your rates. All this content is out there, but it. if you have to do the work and that's the thing that we have trouble with. Yeah, it makes a huge difference, but it's hard.

SPEAKER_03:

Because we want to do everything and we want to listen to everything and read everything, but then we don't put anything on practice because, or we are going to, in our case, okay, we worked a lot on the retentions and systems and we are, we, I'm a little bit of a nerd in the data and the SOPs. But then it was everything on my head. And then Brian told me, okay, just write it. Okay. Then going to talk with your coaches. Okay. Then talk with your front desk. That was another thing that we didn't get. We understand the value of a front side the month that we hired her because it was amazing the job that she can do. And then we have more time to think and read the data and choose what we need to go through.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So if you're listening out there, It's important to think that like you can take all this stuff that's out there, but when you find that like, okay, I don't know exactly what to do when I want to go further faster. I want better results. That's the time to book a call and talk to a mentor because everything that's free is out there and it can help you. And we want that to help you. But if you really want to start moving the needle and getting to that next level, that's what a mentor says here. I've analyzed your business and we need to target this. Length of engagement or average revenue per member or any of these other things. Here is the exact tactic that you're going to use right now. I'm going to tell you how to do it. Here are the resources. And I'm going to check in with you in a week and say, did you do it? And then we're going to move on to the next thing. Is that how your experience went, Louisa?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. And another thing that I want to share is when we are freely getting the knowledge, we want to do everything. I'm going to do this and then I'm going to do that. And then Brian said, our mentor is like, okay, let's do one thing at a time.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Let's do one thing well, and then we move to another one. And that's the importance of the mentorship. And in other areas of business and in other areas of life, that's important. And that's what's going to run smoothly everything.

SPEAKER_01:

So you talked about some of the stuff that helped your growth is on-ramp because you're bringing people at a higher rate, but they're also staying longer. Talk to me about some of the other additional programs you're using to drive growth, like Small Group, High Rocks. What else have you got going on there?

SPEAKER_03:

Small Group was the big... Biggest improvement that we did.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. What happens there?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Back in time, we just had CrossFit classes and conditioning classes. And then some accessory core and flow and mobility and nothing else. But big groups always. So a value per session, a little bit lower. A little bit. How

SPEAKER_01:

big is a big group for you?

SPEAKER_03:

And for us, we had 30 people in the CrossFit class and 26 on the conditioning. That's a big group. Yeah, we have a big space. And then it's two different areas. And we can run a CrossFit class with 30 students with two coaches running the class. And then 26 for the conditioning, that's easiest, low skill class, but high intensity. So that's a big group for us. And we have more than 60 classes during the week. So we have a lot of students coming. We have approximately 200 students coming daily. So it's hard stuff to manage all the schedule. It's a challenge for us. Then back, I think in the end of 2023, we were, okay, we need to get more money per member. So what can we do? We had the small space over there that, okay, let's do some construction. works here nothing very expensive and let's try small group okay four persons maximum and we tried okay let's see one month two months three months then suddenly in this moment I have in small group training 31 students We have an increase of value in our ARM because these 31 students, they pay at the double that the other ones. Twice

SPEAKER_01:

as much as your big group clients.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Yeah. I think more. Yeah. In average, it will be that number. Okay. So, okay. There are 31 now. They started like two or three, but this is compounding. And that was the, and it's a thing that we are going to continuing to get our credits on that.

SPEAKER_01:

And do they do, oh, pardon me, go

SPEAKER_03:

ahead. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, no,

SPEAKER_01:

no. In that small group setting, are they doing the same workout with one coach?

SPEAKER_03:

No.

SPEAKER_01:

What are they doing?

SPEAKER_03:

So we have a specific programming to small group training and then we have hybrid programming. So we have small group training with the normal programming that is adjusted to the CrossFit programming. And then we have hybrid that we are going to do like the prescriptive model. And our client asks us to work out the upper body or just lower body. And we have the different kind of workouts in the same space.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so some of it's personalized in the hybrid stream.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, but not in the 100% that we want because we have to improve the systems with our coaches and getting them on track to do different workouts for members. The senior coaches, they can handle it. But we see that the youngest, it's a challenge.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so what you've got is a small group training with some hybrid stuff going on and you're looking maybe at some semi-private stuff down the road. Is that accurate?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, semi-private. That was the missing word, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And listeners, I'll give you a quick description. Small group is going to be one workout and it's probably about four people in there and there's a coach and they're going to do variations of that workout. It's like a small CrossFit group class. Here's the thing though. In some CrossFit gyms, like the one that I used to run, I was doing small group training by accident. I wanted 30 people like Marie has got, Louise has got, but I was, you know, doing it the other way where I had, four people show up or two people or one people. I was in PT and it was calling it group sessions. That's a whole mistake. The other side of that is semi-private training. And that's where you have, it's basically personal training in a group setting. So you've got maybe four different people and one's doing an OCR program. One is doing hypertrophy. One is doing maybe a CrossFit workout. One is doing powerlifting, whatever. They all have their own programs. And one coach delivers that personalized program to each of those clients. This is a very, very high value program where they're paying higher rates than group rates, higher rates than small group rates. It's premium, but it's less than one-on-one personal training. So those are the variations. Go ahead. What do you

SPEAKER_03:

got? That's the

SPEAKER_01:

next step. That's the next step.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, but I want to share another thing that was my partner's idea to improve our retention when we identified some... So we track if they are coming or not, the red flags they are missing for one or two weeks, and then we call them, etc. And then suddenly... My partner, Ricardo, proposed that to us. When we identify someone with some kind of injury, let's invite them to one session in the small group.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I like that.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. And then what worked for us, it was two different things. One, we can take care of our clients just one week or two, and then they will return to group classes and Great, because they kept going to the gym. Another thing that happened, it was that guy that was like one or two years with us, and it was like, okay, this is always the same. Of course, it's not always the same because we don't have to work out the same, but... They tried our small group training, and then suddenly, I want to do one month in small group training. And suddenly, our client in group class pays X, and then in PT small group, they pay double. So for us, it was another way of increasing our ARM with one strategy that started to just worry about retention, and then suddenly just improved our ARM also.

SPEAKER_01:

wow that i love that i love the way that's evolving because that's what we often saw in crossfit gyms is they would acquire members but they weren't high value members and there's nothing wrong with that but if you want to increase the value of your time and pay your coaches more and increase revenue fast pt one-on-one small group semi-private training these high value options can be tacked on to a group program and all of a sudden revenue goes up a lot so that's exactly what we're seeing at your gym talk to me about high rocks this is a big deal in europe it's a big deal around the world now what's going on there

SPEAKER_03:

so high rocks was Our conditioning class, if we are looking in the physiological way of looking at things, it was similar, okay? It wasn't IROX. It didn't have the running focus that IROX needs, but it was a great class. And then in Europe, two or three years ago, we started to talk about IROX and we were like, no, okay, IROX, but our conditioning is good. We are not going to change anything. But then... The hype of IROX is like boom here in Europe.

SPEAKER_02:

It's

SPEAKER_03:

here. Yeah. And then we have the IROX ambassador here in Portugal, Thiago Louza. It's a great friend of us. And we started to, okay, let's try this. Let's get the hype in this moment. And then we want to subscribe. And then we got the affiliation. And... In the beginning, it was December last year, we didn't add more classes in the beginning, we just changed it. Again, we looked at the numbers and we identified which class had the fewer members in that time of the day. We know more or less people that are running awfully the same classes. Okay, we are going to try this schedule, this one, this one, this one. And it was amazing. A lot of people engaged. And then suddenly, okay, we need to add more classes and then we add more classes and we I think we we have like version 4 or 5 from the schedule because we are always changing everything but it's I think from now for now it's it's being a good thing because we have people from other gyms that don't have IROX affiliation or CrossFit affiliation anything that they are like okay they have sleds and a 30 meter running track to the sleds and let's try and let's let's ask them if they have IROX IROX program or something like that. So we are now getting more students, more leads, specifically for IROX. Wow. Yeah. There's only, we are not a very big town, but there's only two CrossFit gyms and the two IROX gyms. But there's a big hype going around IROX and they just got with the flow and it's been great for us.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, I have two specific questions about that. The first one, do you have a specific IROX membership or is it just like a group training membership so they can go to those classes?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Our membership is free. If you have the free pass, you can choose CrossFit, conditioning, or IROX. You choose everything.

SPEAKER_01:

But you're getting leads who specifically want IROX. Okay, so that's a big deal. So that's really, really interesting. My second question is, would you say that you're seeing a good return on your investment in IROX affiliation?

SPEAKER_03:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, you are. Sorry, sorry. In

SPEAKER_01:

High Rocks affiliation, like you paid, are you seeing a return on investment in

SPEAKER_03:

that?

UNKNOWN:

Uh...

SPEAKER_03:

I need to check the numbers.

SPEAKER_01:

No, you're a data person. That's okay. I just threw that one at you, but I was just curious. That's interesting. And if you're not breaking it down by stream, that's okay because you're selling one membership and they can go. So I've asked other gym owners this question and it can be difficult to pull that number up, but I was just curious if you had a gut sense.

SPEAKER_03:

I think we now get the information because we now are running an SI since we are two-member mentees. And then we just check everything and we register everything. So we know, I think in six months from now, if I'm going to be here with you again, I'm going to tell you. Yeah, that's it. 100 members, 20 were looking for IROX. And I sold 20 memberships and then I'm going to do the maths and I'm going to see if it's worth or not.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so you're still in the early stages of it. We'll check back with you because we know this IROX is a big deal. And I'm talking to gym owners about this regularly, some of whom are doing what you're doing. doing where they're bringing it in other people are looking at very specific angles for high rocks we'll figure it out and then listeners will tell you what the best thing you can do with that program is because it's a big deal and a lot of crossfit gyms are finding that if they have the space or even some that don't you can definitely acquire people who are interested in that program and you have most of the equipment sleds might be the only thing but a lot of crossfit gyms have those sleds anyway so that's okay now here's the interesting thing so you talked you talked to me before the show and you said that you've adjusted your ad campaigns because you're getting too many leads this is the greatest thing ever, but you've adjusted it because why? What are you working on now?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, we adjust why? Because we felt that it wasn't fair to get the leads and don't have the ability to call them or to write them an email.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so you'd grow too fast and it'd be a problem.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, the feeling that we had, it was because... In an experimental class, the new guy is going straight to a class. And if there are 20 or 25 students or four, it's the same. There's one coach there for them. When we have the on-ramp program, I need one coach to one student. So we had the staff problem. As our mentor told us, it's a good problem. But then we had to adjust. And everything, it was one month running. And then we had leads coming from paying ads and from the other funnels that I think we work well, our referral funnel. And then suddenly, yeah, no, that's the biggest one. And I have data on that. And that's the number one

SPEAKER_01:

for us. I want to hear that after. Finish what you're saying and we're going to hit referrals because that's a big deal.

SPEAKER_03:

And then suddenly we were running ads and everything was okay. Colm was amazing with us. And then I was, Colm, we need to slow down because I can't have... 10 people every day coming to my beta business. I was afraid of clicking the meta business because they were a lot. And the feeling was, I'm going to lose these leads because I can answer them. And I cannot put them on the on-ramp program because I don't have schedule for them. So we talk with our staff. We've made the little changes. We increased the number of hours of some of them. Me and my partners, okay, let's go. And then we are going to run more classes in this phase to help and to establish all the procedures and everything because if we want to delegate, we need to do that and understand and have the feeling of what's working or not. And then we slow down a little bit our ads, but then we have like daily six, seven leads, we call them. We have all the tracking of the set rate and the close rate. So It was one necessity to slow down a little bit the ads, to have some time to breathe and reschedule everything and put everything working.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so you laid out a trap that many people fall victim to and it happened to me. I started running ads around a special program. I got a ton of people in the door. I put in like 30 or 40 people as this huge crowd and I didn't have enough coaches so they weren't getting the attention they needed. And that's a bad experience. Right? It's a bad experience. My existing clients were upset because there was too many people in the gym. The people that came in that big group of 30 to 40, many of them, I want to say 95% left because we didn't follow up with them. We didn't work on retention. We didn't find out what their goals were. And so this giant boost that I had washed out immediately and my current members were upset. So it's very tempting to try and grow fast. It's a better plan to grow slowly and sustainably and chip up. Yep. Just get that on

SPEAKER_03:

ramp. My partners, they are amazing in the sales systems. Yeah. They... And... what we felt with the NSI, the on-ramp, it's possible and it's, you can train it, you can work out on that and be good at sales. We have, João is amazing, Ricardo is amazing and then we are trying to get reps, reps, reps, reps and then just delegate to our coaches because it's possible. I didn't sell anything to anyone ever and then suddenly I have like 10 NSIs closed to on-ramp so it's possible.

SPEAKER_01:

So you learned and your mentor taught you Brian?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And do reps with my, my partners, do reps with my partners, do reps with the staff. It's amazing. That's interesting. Go ahead. We have regularly weekly meetings with the staff, with our staff. That's another thing that changed from the, the, the, the, since we, we, we run the business and everything can, can be done with reps regularly. and the right orientation from our mentor.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So again, this is again, the value we're talking about free content versus a mentor. Here's an interesting thing. If you're getting a ton of leads and you're getting, you have this free content, you use all this stuff to get a bunch of leads, but your close rate is terrible. And one out of 10 people signs up, you're wasting those leads because you're bad at sales. A mentor can say your sales metrics are not very good. We are going to slow this down. We're going to get you some sales training. We're going to make you better at training, selling, pardon me. And when we get your close rate and that's 70, 80, 85% range, then we're going to start working on getting more leads in because you're going to close eight or nine out of 10 as opposed to one out of 10. We're not going to waste your ad dollars or whatever. That is a key point of mentorship. I need to ask you this. This is a big deal. Referral funnel. What have you got there?

SPEAKER_03:

It's amazing. In our client journey, the past client journey, now it's improved since we work with our mentor. We decided to, okay, we didn't have NSIs or gold reviews. It was everything, a lot of organic things happened, but then we established, okay, since they are here in our gym, okay, one month now, we are going to chat them in WhatsApp and tell them something. And we're going to offer one PT small group session or one hybrid session. And then in that process, in some week of that process, okay, let us know Who do you want to come here to experiment? And that time was experimental classes. Who do you want to offer a session or something like that? It was amazing because... Because if we do this in the same frequency, like you enter now at the gym and one month from now, I'm going to ask you referrals. Yes. There's someone that is going to enter the gym tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. So one week and one day after, in the next week, in the next week, we are getting our referrals done. In a constant way. And when I look at the numbers, I see that the most people that come to our gym, it's always from referral funnel.

SPEAKER_01:

Turin teaches clients to build four different funnels? you've got referrals is the most important one, but you can't just ask a new person, Hey, you got any friends? You have to do it at a specific time. She talked about the specific time

SPEAKER_03:

and a specific moment.

SPEAKER_01:

There you go. And that, and we teach people how to find it.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01:

You can't just say like, you can't, you know, it's just not a thing that's going to work. You have to do, you have to be very clear about when you ask for those referrals and there is a system for doing it. When you do that, some gyms that I know, um, run exclusively on referrals they don't have they don't need anything else because they fill their gyms with that but we would always recommend four different funnels you've got organic social media you've got content and then you've got paid ads and if you have all four of those funnels running at once then you can be assured that your gym will always have new leads and new clients so yeah but start with referrals because it's the free one you don't have to it's nothing but your time and you but you have to talk to your clients to do it so i'm going to close this out you've done given me a ton of information here I'm going to, what is, if someone is out there and saying, I want to build a gym with a lot of clients, this is a trap because a lot of people tried to do it and we made huge mistakes and destroyed our businesses. How would you advise them to do it properly so that they build, they get a lot of clients, but they don't fall apart? What would you do?

SPEAKER_03:

First, we have to have space and staff for all of that, okay? And we need to have a vision. One of my partners is amazing at doing that. We have a long-term vision and to be scalable, the business. Because if we are going to just focus on the members, we are going to... It will probably be a mess because you need extra revenue from other things. Because when you... Okay, your business... I had 300 members and now I have 130 more. So my expenses will be more, that's obvious. So we need to have more things to structure the business and to be able to run everything. I think if I didn't get on this business like I did because I was a coach and then I bought the business, I think the first thing that I would do, it was listening to someone that already knows how to run a business. And I think the mentorship is amazing for that. What I feel is that we are in the first steps, but I think we are in the first steps with a lot of things. done already and we are just we want more okay Brian is always okay calm down but I think systems

SPEAKER_02:

there it is I

SPEAKER_03:

think it's everything and data Because data is going to show us if my expenses are higher or if my revenue, how is going, how am I going to pay everything, number of frequency of classes, why I have to have a class with two or three people. That's not, it's not going to work. I'm going to throw money away. So data systems are, I don't know, and a big space to have all of the 429 students in.

SPEAKER_01:

So if I look at your business, here's this plan that I'm going to lay out for listeners, and you tell me if you agree with me because I'm basing this on what I think you've done. If I wanted to build a 400-member CrossFit gym, I would first address my retention. I would figure out the best way to hold on to every single client that I get for as long as possible, and I would do that first– by putting in an on-ramp and doing goal review sessions 90 days after that person comes in through the business. Those are the two things that I would do. And the third thing is I would systemize everything in my business because if you don't systemize it, the screws are going to come up. Everything's going to rattle apart because you're going to have too many people too fast. Then you're going to start bleeding people. So those three things, the step-by-step plan for that exists, Two Brain created it, and a mentor can lay it out for you. So I would get a mentor. Those four things. What do you think?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I completely agree. And the second that you told... establishing the connection with our clients not in a in a big group class but in goal review sessions seated with them taking a coffee the connection with the clients i think we are strong in that also we have a big community when you have a when we have a holiday and the box is closed and then we we just open the open class session and then it's like 100 people doing a workout with us so the strong connection that we built and we are in i think the the nsi the the goal review it's very very important because that's what in the end it's going to keep us keep the clients with us if we I have my own PTs my clients and they are with me a lot of like two or three or four or five more years because we have a connection and when we and if you could establish that connection but it's not me Luisa the owner it's everyone it's the coach is the cleaner is the front desk and we when we have all the systems to Okay, cheer up and have a high five and talk to the client by his name. And then we have like bright spots for the clients that we send every Monday. That's going to make the difference in the end of the game.

SPEAKER_01:

I love it. So listeners, do not set a goal of getting 400 members in your CrossFit gym. Set a goal of getting 150 in a business that runs like a well-oiled machine. Then... set an average revenue per member goal of about$205. Then... Get a mentor to figure out how to scale up. And if you want to get to 420 with great retention and high average revenue per member like Louisa has, then you can do it. But don't set that goal of like, I need 400 people. Get 150, then move up with a well-oiled machine underneath you and things will go well. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I appreciate it so much.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm going to get you back and we'll talk high rocks again. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. That was Louisa Moschita and this is Run a Profitable Gym. I'm Mike Morgan. And please hit subscribe wherever you're watching and listening with my thanks. We crank this stuff out every single week to help gym owners like you. And now, here's to rain finder Chris Cooper with a final message.

SPEAKER_00:

Hey, it's Two Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I'd love to have you in that group. It's Gym Owners United on Facebook or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today. Hey!

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Chris Cooper

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Mike Warkentin

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