Run a Profitable Gym
Run a Profitable Gym is packed with business tools for gym owners and CrossFit affiliates. This is actionable, data-backed business advice for all gym owners, including those who own personal training studios, fitness franchises, and strength and conditioning gyms. Broke gym owner Chris Cooper turned a struggling gym into an asset, then built a multi-million-dollar mentoring company to help other fitness entrepreneurs do the same thing. Every week, Chris presents the top tactics for building a profitable gym, as well as real success stories from gym owners who have found incredible success through Two-Brain Business mentorship. Chris’s goal is to create millionaire gym owners. Subscribe to Run a Profitable Gym and you could be one of them.
Run a Profitable Gym
93% Close Rate: Gym Sales Leader Reveals His System
Most gym owners struggle to close in just half of sales consultations.
Korey Schindler closes at a 93 percent clip.
In this episode of "Run a Profitable Gym," Korey, co-owner of Impact Fitness in Florida, reveals how he achieved his incredible close rate by following up with leads 381 times in one month. His efforts produced 44 sales consultations and 41 new members.
Korey breaks down the process he follows to turn cold Facebook leads into paying clients: He follows up with lightning speed, relies on script-based conversations—which he still rehearses even with 10 years of sales experience—and uses a systemized consultation process.
He also shares how Two-Brain mentor Nick Habich helped him discover he didn't need better closing skills; he actually needed more leads to supercharge his sales engine. This realization pushed Korey to set up the lead ad system that's now driving record revenue in his gym.
Tune in for the step-by-step process that put Korey on Two-Brain's sales and marketing leaderboards, plus scripts and strategies you can implement today.
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1:02 - No. 1 reason for A+ sales metrics
6:22 - How Korey gets leads to book
9:49 - How Korey gets leads to show
13:02 - How Korey closes
21:58 - The value of mentorship
My name is Corey Schindler. I'm co-owner of Impact Fitness in Tampa, Florida. For the month of June, I had 381 follow-up attempts for potential clients.
Speaker 01:Corey's reward for contacting those leads, get this, 51 booked consultations, 44 people showed up, and 41 signed up. Those are huge numbers. Impact Fitness made all three of our most recent top 10 leaderboards for marketing. You're going to find out exactly how on this episode of Run a Profitable Gym. I'm your host, Mike Workington. Please hit subscribe with my thanks. Now, quick brief. We track how many leads, book appointments, and gyms. That is your set rate. We track how many of them show up. That is your show rate. We track how many of them buy something. That is your close rate. Excellence in all three areas shows a slick marketing funnel that fuels an A-plus gym. Corey, build one, and he's going to help you improve your funnel today. Are you ready to roll, Corey?
Speaker 02:Absolutely.
Speaker 01:All right, I'm blown away. I love that stat, 381. I think that's such a cool thing because our marketing experts always say, if you follow up, you'll make more sales. You are the proof of that. But what's the one thing, I'll ask you, what is the one thing that contributes most to these great sales numbers?
Speaker 02:So it's something I picked up in college. I have a door-to-door background. So I've done direct sales for about 10 years before and while I was kind of owner of the gym. And it's sticking to a script. So regardless of what step of the sales process I'm in, I have a script for what I'm going to say. And I just focus on like I used to do when I did door-to-door on moving people to the next step of my sales process. So that was my focus was not to sell someone on my product or service. It was Okay. So
Speaker 01:someone out there is listening and saying scripts feel robotic and I just like to wing it and so forth. How do you, why does the script work for you and how do you make it seem natural?
Speaker 02:So it's just something I picked up from doing door to door. The biggest thing that can hold you back is lack of repetition. So before every single sales presentation, consultation. Um, I do, I role play with myself, with my staff, just so that, um, everything's crisp. And, uh, I, I practiced it hundreds of times before I ever, you know, practice it on a live prospect.
Speaker 01:To this day, you still do that before sales consultations, all that stuff. After 10 years of experience, you're still rehearsing before you go to a call. Oh,
Speaker 02:absolutely. And, uh, another thing that I, another thing that I do is, uh, my, uh, it kind of works out that my mentor for two brain is Nick Cabbage
Speaker 01:and Florida man.
Speaker 02:Yep. He has the no sweat intro script modules on the toolkit. So I usually watch those. I go through a couple role plays of my closing script and then I'm ready for the no sweat intro.
Speaker 01:So why does the script work? Why does it work so well?
Speaker 02:I think the biggest thing is just confidence in it and understanding that you got this person's contact information regardless of how the lead came through, they're interested in your service. They're interested in sports performance for their younger athlete, which is what we focus on. So focusing on that as opposed to making it awkward or being a cold call or anything like that makes it a lot simpler and a lot more fluid when I go through kind of going through the sales process.
Speaker 01:Listeners, I'll just break out two things for you. Corey follows up with leads. A lot. 381 was the number that he put out. Are you following up at all? Is it over 10 times? Follow up with leads quickly. Do it regularly. Keep contacting until you get in touch with the person. The second thing that he's doing, he is rehearsing and practicing. Even after a decade of sales experience, he is making sure that he's ready for all scenarios. He's got a script that's been tested, that's data-backed that we know works, and he's using that to make sales. It works. Try those two things. If you are not contacting leads, if you are not rehearsing things with a script, you are losing sales. 100% guaranteed. Corey, let's dig into your funnel. So you mentioned a couple of things here. You have an interesting business going on. I love it. Who are you targeting and how?
Speaker 02:Yeah, so our client avatar is called Sports Mom Susan.
Speaker 03:I love it.
Speaker 02:It's a sports mom with two to three kids that play travel sports. And they're looking, their coach for playing time reasons, for injury reasons, has directed them to get some outside strength and conditioning. And that's what we focus on. So we really target, we have a marketing mix for the areas of our funnel from the top. So we work on a lot of referrals, organic referrals from talking to the members that we have, as well as siblings and parents of the kids that we're training so we have family plans set up so that an entire family can come and train with us and that's a lot of our membership
Speaker 01:okay so that's a referral that is awesome if you get one kid and the kid plays sports you know sports on a team and they want to be good at it they probably have depending on the sport like 20 other people that they know right
Speaker 02:exactly
Speaker 01:yeah Yeah, that's incredible. So your referral funnel sounds amazing. Do you run any paid ads?
Speaker 02:Yeah, so we do Google ads, we do engagement ads on Facebook, and we do lead ads on Facebook as well.
Speaker 01:Do you have a rough sense of what your lead breakdown would be from those two sources? Is it like 70-30 or something? Do you have any idea?
Speaker 02:So for Google ads and engagement, it's kind of tough to track. For lead ads, we probably get 15 to 20 leads a month. One thing that kind of prompted me to revamp my sales process was Nick, my mentor, helped us set up the lead ads a couple months ago. And I noticed that the leads coming in were a lot colder than a referral that is coming in. So that kind of forced me to go back to my roots of direct sales and build a process so that I can just move them through the step of the step of sale.
Speaker 01:And that's exactly what we're finding in gyms is that referrals are the hottest leads you're ever going to get. They're almost slam dunks in some cases because if Tim brings in his best buddy, Sam, Sam's probably going to join because he's heard so much good stuff from Tim and sees how great Tim is looking and so forth or whatever the situation is. Like referral ads, they cost you nothing but your time to say, hey, do you know anyone who could benefit from our services? And they're a slam dunk in the sales office for the most part. It's one of four funnels that Chris Cooper recommends that gym owners should set up. Paid ads is Number four, you've got content and organic social media in there. But in terms of paid ads, those leads are great, but they're cooler and you have to have a system in place to nurture them. We're going to get into that a little bit. Talk to me first about how you get so many of these leads to book appointments, even if they're cold ones. What do you do?
Speaker 02:Yeah. So the biggest thing is urgency. So as soon as the I actually just got a Facebook lead this morning and we have it set up through Zapier and pushover. So every time that lead ad comes in, I get a notification on my phone and I usually call them within a minute or two of getting it. And it's pretty common that like that one this morning literally said, wow, that was fast. So they're they're hot when they're filling out the form. That's probably the warmest they're going to be in the entire process until you get them into the gym. So it's just a matter of getting them on the phone if I can, if they answer. If they don't answer, I put them in something that I've been doing for a long time. I call it a Vafu, which is a value-add follow-up. So rather than just continually calling or texting and, hey, do you want to come in? Do you want to come in? That can get kind of... salesy and grimy. So what I do is I send them a video of some of the speed and agility work that we've been doing in classes or send them a short video of the strength training work that we've been doing with our athletes. Just leave it on there, allowing them kind of sprinkling in calls, video texts, video sends, emails. I kind of do a little bit of everything just to hit them different avenues because each person is going to respond to their medium that they prefer differently. So I figured if I can hit all of them, then we have a much better chance of getting them in the door.
Speaker 01:Yeah, and it doesn't sound like you're just making this up as you go. This is part of a clearly defined system, listeners. So if you're out there and you're thinking like, I'm just going to make this up as I go, just write it down and fix it as you go through it. Corey's got a clear system, and that's why he's on all three of our marketing leaderboards. Someone is going to say I cannot possibly respond to leads as fast as Corey does. And here's the thing. When I tried to book this appointment with Corey for this podcast, he responded within five minutes to my email. It was awesome. How do you find time or how do you do this because leads could come in at any time? How do you do it?
Speaker 02:So that's my main focus in the gym. I've been involved with my gym since 2014 and in an ownership role since 2017. So it's taken kind of some time. tough uh years and tough kind of work working through different setbacks and different avenues for what my best role is and we're blessed enough to have trainers that do a lot of the day-to-day operations at the gym so we have a head coach we have two supervisors that do a lot of the training so my main role is to do uh is lead nurturing so taking in the leads that are coming in so i just set it up so that's what i'm paid for at the gym I don't do a whole lot of other stuff outside of that besides training a couple of one-on-one clients.
Speaker 01:Yeah. And Chris has written about this and he said, I think the line was something like, someone has to be directly responsible for sales at your gym and if no one is that's you so if you're an owner operator you got to be the salesperson but you can definitely look at this value ladder exercise that your brain has where you list out all the roles in your gym you put a dollar value replacement cost beside them and then you start getting rid of them and a clear one would be i'm going to hire a cleaner for four hours a week i'm going to use those four hours to sell stuff and if you do that you will make more money because a cleaner costs 15 to 20 bucks sales can be you could you could sell thousand dollar packages if you get good at it with a script like cory right so that's the principle and And we're not going to dig into that because we have other shows on it, but that is the exact principle Corey is living it, where he is focused on sales in his gym. That is his job, and that's why he's so good at it. Tell me, how do you get people to show up? Because especially when you've got those cold leads, it's hard to do, but you're getting people in the door. How do you do it?
Speaker 02:Yeah, so it starts with the mentality. When I call them, the only reason I'm calling them is to set up an NSI. It's not, yes, I'll answer questions, but I really don't like to go over pricing too much.
Unknown:Right.
Speaker 02:I'll answer one of their questions and I'll immediately go into my script for getting them in the door. So what it is, I basically say, now the next step or the first step is to book an intro with us. so that we can get your goals and introduce the type of training that we'll be doing in the sessions. We have opening, we have open slots at tomorrow and Thursday at 10 a.m. We work better for you. So I just, that's the reason for the phone calls to set up the no sweat intro again, moving them through my sales process. And I give them a reason for setting up the intro. And I give them a couple of options as an option close. Yeah.
Speaker 01:Okay. So there's lots of stuff there guys that we'll unpack. And the first thing is that like Corey's sole focus is getting these people into the gym to talk. Do you ever, I'll ask you this before I go further. Do you, do you ever close sales on the phone?
Speaker 02:I get a lot of information from the phone, but most of the time, if they're colder leads, we do a little bit different for that no sweat intro process than what normally goes on, which we can dive into. But it's pretty rare that I'm able to close someone over the phone just because of, they may come in interested, but just showing them the gym and getting the atmosphere is what we like to do.
Speaker 01:Okay. And listeners, one of the reasons we're going to dive into this in the next section, but Corey is not selling to his clients. He's selling to the parents of those clients. That's a really interesting thing that We're going to go over in just a second, so we'll qualify that. But the other thing that he did is he's got availability right away. Can you come in same day, tomorrow, Thursday, whatever? It's very close. Here's something that happens so regularly in gyms. You're busy at 5 a.m. or 5, sorry, 5 p.m. and you're busy slots, right? You're coaching, your gym's packed. You don't have availability at those times. So you put these availability slots at the worst possible times, like 10, 25 on Tuesday morning. Who wants to come and see you at that point? You have to have calendar availability. And I'm guessing, Corey, that you, because you're the sales guy, you keep slots open so that you could book someone, say, in like this afternoon if you needed to.
Speaker 02:Yeah, exactly. So the most common thing we do is 3.30 or 4.45 in the afternoon.
Speaker 01:Right.
Unknown:Perfect.
Speaker 02:I pretty much, I take everyone through the first workout in the NSI. So I keep my calendar pretty open to be able to do that.
Speaker 01:Yeah. So, I mean, the huge lesson, you guys, is have calendar availability open like ASAP and you know, Corey said this, like they're, they're warm at the beginning. They cool off the further they get from that initial sign up into your, or jump into your funnel. And there, there are so many ways for them to fall out of the funnel. There's your competitors, there's boredom, there's chips, there's beer, there's all these other things that distract them. If you keep them going fast, you're much more likely to close sales. I'm going to give you this one example. I recently tried to book a service. I researched online who are the best in the area. I got into two sales funnels. One called me back immediately and I am engaged with that person. The other one has not called me back even though they were rated higher. Who am I going with? Choice is obvious. So you're working hard, you're contacting people, you're getting them to show up. Now talk to me about how do you run consultations and close sales? Because this is interesting because you've got a very specific niche that you're into.
Speaker 02:Yeah. So our... No-switch initial process is a little bit different. So basically what we do is they come in. I usually greet them by their name because I set up the appointment. And then I tour them at the gym. I answer any questions they have. And I also kind of prime them up for some of the membership options that we have.
Speaker 01:And this is the parent, correct?
Speaker 02:Yeah, this is a parent, usually with the athlete. So we're walking through the gym, we're going through how the classes are laid out, the order of operations of things. So we'll do about five to 10 minutes of flexibility, then about 20 minutes of speed agility work. And then I walk them to the weight room, show them the weight training. I overcome their common myths of weight training and youth stumps growth in kids. I kind of equate it to what they're going to be lifting and the fact that everything's coached and supervised. And then we go through what we call a ramp workout. So while the parent is taking through or signing the liability waiver, we have coaches that are taking the athlete through an introductory workout that, again, it introduces the type of concepts of training that we're going to be doing without pushing them too hard or getting them nauseous or anything like that. We've just learned from experience that it's a lot better this way rather than pushing someone so hard their first time never having trained like this before and then end up throwing up or feeling nauseous like that.
Unknown:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 02:And so that's what we start with. The tour, we go through the ramp workout. And then usually what we'll do is I'll walk him or the athlete and their parent back into the office. We'll close the door. I'll have them sit down on the couch. Sitting down is super important for closing. And I'll ask them a couple of questions that are kind of priming them to say yes a couple of times. And sales, one of the biggest thing that you can do is to get the prospect saying yes before the big yes comes. So What I do is I ask, do you think workouts like that would help you achieve the goals that we talked about? Yes. And then I go through the different group training options that we have, and I suggest which one I think would work the best for them. And so a big thing that I got from Nick's videos on the toolkit is not getting settled up on the price. So once I go through the price, for instance, this is what I'll say– You know, based on your goals, I would recommend group training with us two times per week. The way the membership works is it's $1.85 for the entire month. The next step would be to schedule their next workout. It does seem like this time slot works for your schedule. Would you want to get started Wednesday at 10 a.m.? So when I ask it like that, if they give me a yes to the date that they're scheduling, they're saying yes to the cost. So it just makes it a lot smoother and a lot more gradual heating up of the sales process so that when they're ready to close, if they tell me that they're ready to schedule a second workout, that's an indication that they're ready to close. And I'll close them right there.
Speaker 01:Wow. So this is, I mean, this is greasy and I don't mean that in the slick used car salesman kind of way. I mean this in like, this is a very smooth process where people are coming into your gym and you're making it so easy for them to slide right into place. Now listeners, I'll tell you one thing, the, the tour and workout just by itself is a bad idea. right it's the thing that cory is hanging all of this on is a consultation after the fact where he gives his recommendation based on their goals and his service packages and so forth because back in the day i did this and everyone has done it you bring people into the gym you show them all your sleds and all your cool stuff and then you put them through a workout you make them puke and you ask them if they want to sign up and they're half of them say no more than half at least now probably 90 and it does not work so i'm not suggesting that you should do introductory workouts but as part of a sales consultation we call it a sweat intro to brain there's a problem process for that the key is these consultations because cory is having this really great conversation with people and he's also in a very interesting market where he's not selling to the kid because the kid is not putting the credit card on the table that's the parent and it's all part of the whole process where the kid comes in and i imagine when you get them the office together the kid comes in after this work and it's like whoa that was awesome can we do this and the parents like uh yeah right like is that what happens
Speaker 02:They say yes for me. The kids always love the workouts and it makes it a lot more likely that they're going to sign up.
Speaker 01:Yeah. And you know what's funny? There was an ice cream shack nearby when I was growing up and one of the signs that they put up for and got a little bit of trouble for was scream till daddy stops the car. And you know, that's the principle here, but it works like these kids want to have fun. They have an awesome time and they're just telling their parents, I want this. And parents want to help their kids achieve their sports goals and success and stay fit and get off the screens. It's like a slam dunk. This process clearly would work for that. I love what you're saying about This is my recommendation based on your goals. That is a key part of the prescriptive model where you find out and you're providing solutions, right? Solutions to problems. And, you know, do you get pushback from parents very often in those closings, those sales meetings on closing?
Speaker 02:Very rarely. So the most common thing that happens is they'll want to talk to their spouse or they got to check their schedule and that sort of thing. How do you handle that one? So usually we don't do a lot of high pressure stuff. I allow them time to think about it just because a lot of the sales that we get aren't necessarily closed at the time of the workout. Okay. Just because... Kids have a lot of travel schedules and their parents are their chauffeurs. So what that does is it kind of puts them into a different part of my sales process so that I always follow up them immediately after the workout. And then within the first couple of days of, again, while they're still hot, I'm calling them, I'm asking them, hey, I know we talked about getting training for Nathan with us. I just wanted to check in with you guys and see how you're doing. So something along those lines so that the first couple of days, I'm going to make them Tell me no. That's the most important thing. If they don't close at the time of sale, I don't get no's. No, we're not going to do this or no, it's too much money. We very rarely get that just because we have our services priced really reasonably. But I make sure that no matter what, that they're going to have to tell me no in order to stop me from calling them. Yeah.
Speaker 01:Yeah. And I would ask you if this process works for you, but I don't have to, because your numbers speak for themselves. You had 44 people show up and 41 people bought. So whether they bought in that appointment or a couple of days after that, because you called them, then that's a, that close rate is, is ridiculous. So that's like, it works. Obviously the numbers back it up. We always rely on data here. We'll never tell you something without backing it up on data. So that's exactly, you know, the process works by following up. If you hear a drumbeat here, listeners in this show, it's systems, And following up, practice, scripts, reps, it's all a systemized process. So if I can give you one thing to do right now, start systemizing your process. How many times have you followed up with this lead? How many times have you followed up after a person said, I'll think about it? How many times have you practiced your sales scripts? How many times have you confronted objections, whether it's with your dog or your staff? If the answers are zero across the board, you're not making sales. you can improve those numbers by doing this. I want to talk to you. You've mentioned Nick a number of times and mentorship. How does a mentor help you do this? You obviously came into this thing with 10 years of door-to-door experience. What did you sell door-to-door first?
Speaker 02:So security systems. Okay,
Speaker 01:there you go.
Speaker 02:Yeah. So it's by a company called Vivint. They're owned by NRG now, one of the largest energy companies in the world.
Speaker 01:Okay. So you did... Go ahead. Pardon me.
Speaker 02:I was just going to say they... So I went to school for exercise science. I have an exercise science degree from USF in Tampa. And they didn't teach me anything about being a business owner. I learned the technical aspects to get my CSCS for certification. So I felt super confident in that. But it was really the direct sales and the door-to-door that allowed me to flourish and not give up because it was pretty dark when I first came on for ownership. about eight years ago. We didn't have any systems in place. We didn't have a whole lot of stuff going on. And it was tough to kind of pull us out of that hole. But I know we were talking about the numbers from May, but we just had June was the largest month in revenue that we've ever had at the company in 13 years. And that's just testament to the quality of our trainers and the systems that we put into place to make sure we have the right people on the right seats in the bus and have those people focus on those things that they're really good at.
Speaker 01:Yeah. And back in the day when I started gym 2011, 2012, you could get away with being terrible at sales because I was selling a unique product in a giant market with one other competitor. And it was a slam dunk, even though I was terrible as a gym owner and as a salesperson. You can't do that anymore. You know, intensity has been commodified. All this, everybody's doing fitness. You have to do it properly and you have to know how to sell stuff. Talk to me about mentorship. Again, you did this for 10 years and you've mentioned a lot of stuff that Nick's helped you with. What did the two brain system and two brain mentorship help you do and make and refine yourself as a salesperson?
Speaker 02:So the biggest thing with, uh, the monthly meetings that we have with Nick is to address one problem that we're having. That's really all the time that you have. And we've had coaches in the past that got us to a certain level and then we kind of plateaued. The biggest thing is making sure that we're coming to those monthly check-ins with our mentor prepared so that my business partner and I have something that we need to work on. It actually happened a couple of months ago. that all this kind of came about for me setting up lead ads because i was a little bit concerned that our closing rate was down so i asked nick about it and he said listen man i'm i've never been concerned with your closing rate you just need to get more leads so It kind of was the impetus for us setting up lead ads, us getting colder leads coming in the door and realizing I needed to revamp the process, what I'm responsible for. I need to revamp the sales process to make it so that it's a lot more fluid and a lot more structured. So just coming to Nick with one problem a month and having him listening to his advice and his experience and immediately acting on the advice that he gives us has been integral in where we're at now.
Speaker 01:Yeah. So you just laid out one of the greatest examples I've ever seen of talking about how the mentorship process with Two Brain is that you figure out what's wrong or the biggest problem in the business, the one thing that you need to work on, and then you hit it right away. And then you move on to the next thing and you do that in succession over and over again. And you don't stop doing the things that are working. You fix the other thing. So like the example you said, you looked at your funnel. and you analyze your funnel and everything, you know, set rates, good show rates, good close rate, outstanding. What do you need more leads? Because everything is perfect. You would not get more leads. If your show rate sucked, like that'd be just a mistake. Cause then you're buying all these leads. They all, they don't show up. Like it's just a waste, right? So we're analyzing the funnel and this works for every other aspect of a business, not just marketing. What is the problem? How do we fix it? Take these steps. Did you take these steps? That's the mentorship mentor providing accountability. And then again, systemizing it, moving on to the next thing, and you just keep doing that over and over and over again, and businesses gain momentum and spiral up. Is that an accurate description of what you've been doing?
Speaker 02:Yeah, 100%. That's right on for where we've seen the biggest changes and where the scalability of our business has been going.
Speaker 01:Yep. And that's how big businesses become big businesses. It's on the backs of systems. It's not on the backs of random stuff and napkins. And I forgot your sales appointment. It is systems, repetition, and scripts. I'm not going to beat this to death. Corey, I'm going to let you get back to your next sales appointment. I want to thank you for sharing all these tips. This episode is hugely valuable. Listeners, rehearse, do your scripts, get your stuff together, make a difference in people's lives by selling them. Corey, thanks so much for sharing everything today.
Speaker 02:Appreciate it, Mike. It was a pleasure.
Speaker 01:We'll have Corey back because I think his sales numbers are going to keep going up. Thank you for listening. This is Run a Profitable Gym. I'm Mike Worgen and that was Corey Schindler. Please subscribe for more episodes. You do not want to miss them. And now here's to main founder Chris Cooper with a final message.
Speaker 00:We'll be right back.
