How the Top Gyms Serve 370+ Clients (Without Burning Out)

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper presents the leaderboard for gyms with the most paying members.

Coop reveals what the leaders have in common: They all focus on improving business fundamentals—such as retention, staffing and repeatable systems—instead of chasing shiny objects such as ad campaigns.

Another commonality: boosting average revenue per member (ARM) rather than just adding a ton of cheap, new members. To accomplish this, many have added high-value options such as small group training, personal training and Hyrox programming.

Chris also shares real quotes from these leaders, including one from an owner whose gym halved its ad spend while increasing front-end revenue.

Tune in to hear tips from top gym owners for growing your client headcount without spending your hard-earned profit on advertising.

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0:01 - Intro

1:42 - Gyms with the most clients

3:05 - What they have in common

4:53 - Quotes from the leaders

9:43 - CrossFit gyms in Europe

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

How do you get more clients? The best way to figure that out is to ask the gyms that have the most clients in the world how they did it. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and today I'm going to share our leaderboard, our top 10 gyms in Two Brain for the number of clients they have. Keep in mind that these are all coaching gyms. These are not big club gyms where people pay$40 a month and they come and use the equipment. Two Brain is a mentorship practice for coaching gyms, and we want to know who's doing the best. And so every month we track across several metrics, how many clients they have, who's got the highest value per client, who's keeping clients the longest, who's getting the most leads, who's getting the most conversions. And then we break down the lessons from one of these groups for you on this podcast for free. Today we're talking about who has the most members. Not because that's the only important metric that you can count on, but it's one of those metrics that multiplies on the others. Now, Before I get into it, because these numbers are going to blow your mind, let me tell you how we picked these gyms. These are all single locations. One owner has two separate gyms on the board in Chile. Each gym is represented separately. It's earned its own spot. Amazing. Also, these gyms are also coaching gyms. To keep things level, we don't include access gyms unless their ARM is over$130 a month because that shows that they're not just selling like a door pass access where you can come in and go out and build your business around 1,000 clients. What we're actually looking at here are paying members in a group coaching gym or a program. So let's start here with number 10 and work our way up. In 10th place, we have a gym from the U.S. with$300 members. In a coaching gym, that's amazing. And keep in mind that the average revenue per member at a two-brand gym is over$200 now. That means that these people have 379 clients, all paying above$200 on average ARM. Ninth place, also from the US, 386 members. Eighth place, from Portugal, 419 members. Seventh place, from the UK, 436 members. Sixth place from the US again, 444. Fifth place from the Netherlands, 446 members. Fourth place from Denmark, 472. Third place from Chile, 474 members. Amazing. But the other gym from the same owner also in Chile has 649 members. That's incredible. And the number one gym in Tubrain last month for the most members had 655 and they're in Denmark. Now that's close. The second place has 649. The top one has 655. They're competing for that top spot. Good for them. But what they have to teach you is probably what's more important. You know, these guys are inspirations to us, but we're all climbing the same mountain. So I want to use what they know to help you grow your gym. You ready? Let's go. Before I get into their specific tips, I want to give you some common overlying themes. So first, none of the leaders mentioned crazy marketing plans that other people in Two Brain aren't using. In fact, one of them is reducing ads to focus on lead nurture and sales better. This plan was clearly supported And I'll share their quote in a moment. operations the next level is your marketing the third level is your brand and the fourth are those unmeasurable things like culture and community all these things are important but you have to focus on the basics first and that's why you'll hear in these quotes so many of these gyms are saying we need to get better retention even when they already have like 500 members they're still focused on getting better and better and better at retention instead of doing different and different and different marketing next thing these gym owners are focusing on high value clients. They're not just adding lots and lots of cheap members by running these cheap challenges or free trials. Hyrox and small group streams are part of that, increasing the value of their memberships as well as personal training and semi-private. There is one access-based gym on the board, but they sell with the prescriptive model. They use a consultation, they use an assessment, they do a prescription, and that ranges from 24-hour access all the way up to personal training. Their ARM is 60% higher than other access-only gyms that we work with. So let's talk quotes from these leaders because that's what's gonna help you. All right, here's the first one. They said, over the past month, we've cut our ad spend by more than 50% and shifted our focus towards sales training and lead nurturing instead. We maintain the same intake rate from half the number of leads and even saw a slight increase in front-end revenue all while spending half as much on ads. That's been amazing. Boy, if you take nothing else from this episode, write that down. If you improve lead nurture and sales, you can cut your ad costs in half. The second person talked about retention. They said, we doubled down on reaching out to our at-risk clients. Normally, we track members who haven't visited the days in two weeks, but now we've lowered that threshold to eight days. Naturally, that increased the number of people on the list a lot, but we committed to calling it four days every single week. And out of 472 members, only eight hadn't shown up in the last eight days. So the effort is definitely paying off now. Another person focusing on retention said, the first thing we worked on when we bought the gym in 2023 was the systems. The churn rate was high. So we started by focusing on retention and systems. We saw a ton of change in progress. Now, another common theme here was these gyms adding a hybrid model of group coaching or small group or high high rocks, et cetera, okay? This person said, our main service is group classes. We have 400 students with lots of scheduled classes, all CrossFit, high rocks, or other simple metabolic classes. Plus, we added small group training with 28 members so far. And after six months of running this business, we realized we wanted higher revenues, and so that's why we added small group training. And we're using our metrics to make decisions. Another person said, we added Hyrox in December 2024. Conditioning classes are similar to Hyrox, so this was really easy to add. The Hyrox brand is getting a lot of exposure. It's been a great experience. We added the classes when we didn't have anything else scheduled, and we have 26 people in the classes sometimes. That's amazing. And Hyrox is not like the gold, the silver bullet, but it's an example of how adding additional things or new things can boost average revenue per member. Adding something like Hyrox is not going to save your gym. Remember, you've got to have your systems and your retention down first. Then you've got to have your marketing. But adding a brand like High Rocks, CNU Stretch, Parisi Speed School, on top of those two base layers of ops and marketing, that can really catapult your business. The next person said, we focus on calculated, sustainable growth. Last month, we turned on our ads and we needed to turn those down right away because we don't have enough staff now. So adding the team is our new focus. Another person talked about metrics based decisions. They said, we're trying to reduce the total members because we're trying to increase ARM. We started at 500 kroner seven and a half years ago when we opened up, and now we're at 649. The increase has come across the last three years. So this is an increase of about 76 to$100 US, but in Denmark, this is a massive deal. Fitness in Denmark is very underpriced, very undervalued, and our gyms are trying to change that. Another gym said, it was all about staffing. They said, I hired a CSM for a three month internship. We measured the no sweat intros and we measured the goal reviews that we did. Her goal is to double the goal reviews and no sweat intros that we do. She's also doing three months of internship with the marketing agency that we use. She's tasked with uncovering what our top 10% of content is and seeing how we're doing so that we can produce less media overall and focus only on the high performing stuff. This is a very high level strategy. Yours doesn't have to be this complicated. Just produce more media, build your content funnel. A different person said, two years ago, I hired a box manager. If I see improvements that we need, then the GM comes up with a solution as the operator. This, by the way, is very rare. Hiring a GM to save your business usually doesn't work. Hiring a GM to operate your business by executing on your systems and your operations and doing your marketing that you've already set out, that can work and that frees you up to build the new stuff. Finally, somebody said, we started mentorship after consuming a bunch of Two Brain free resources. They said, we've been growing since starting with Two Brain in February 2025. This is a box with 13 years of history and we've owned it since 2023. We were mainly growing from the Two Brain methods laid out in the free content. And we went from 289 clients with the old owners to 400 plus. And so we finally decided to invest in the business and ourselves with Two Brain. We focused on adding an on-ramp and we usually have 10 to 15 new clients per month. cancellations are also down. This is a box in Europe. And listen, if you're a CrossFit gym in Europe right now, you are probably seeing a lot of people coming in just to try it, right? It's still novel. It's still new. You're still getting the early adopters, but that churn rate's going to be high. And eventually you're going to run out of these early adopters. You're going to run out of the inflow of new people. You have to make the change now to add an on-ramp and focus on retention and operating systems. You want to be the first box in your town to do that, you certainly don't want to be the last because the first box to figure this out is going to be the box that keeps people while the other boxes are just bringing lots in and flowing them right out again and maybe ascending those clients to you. So adding an on-ramp now, being the first in your city to do that, means that you can be the one to keep clients and keep maintaining your pace while the other boxes start struggling when the new clients stop showing up. I make this point because this has been a trend that we've been watching for the last decade. First, it happened in California. Then it happened on the east coast of the US. Then it happened in Australia. Then it happened in Western Europe, you know, Scandinavia. Then it happened in the UK, then France, then Italy. And it's moving eastward. And the exact same trend is happening time after time. You open up a CrossFit gym. Whoa, stuff's really, really easy. People want to try this new thing. They're excited. I'm the first CrossFit gym in town. A year later, well, they're not coming in quite as often now, and a year after that, it's like, uh-oh, what do I do? Maybe I'm not as good at business as I thought. I need to start marketing. Oh, panic, right? Look, I know this because it was me, right? I thought I was good at business until, unfortunately, I realized that I wasn't, that leveraging this certain brand was what was bringing people in. The early adopters were gone. I hadn't kept very many of them, and now I was in trouble because I couldn't get new people in. The way out of this is to work with a mentor to build your operating systems. A lot of the longest standing gyms in the world, you know, this one that I just quoted, they've been around for 13 years. They've been through two owners and it's because the gym is not actually successful. Just surviving doesn't mean that you're healthy. And it's the same with business. If you want to have a successful gym, you want to have enough clients paying a high enough value to make it successful. That's the key. Work with a mentor to figure that out and guide you through the changes if you're not sure what to do. Use the free resources until you're ready for help making a change. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and I want you to do even better.