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
Going Huge: Serving 900+ Clients Across 2 Locations
What does it take to run two thriving gyms and serve more than 900 clients?
Tyler Quinn has the answers: He operates two Denver fitness studios with nearly 1,000 members combined.
But here's the surprising part: He didn’t reach these members with paid ads or gimmicks like discounts. Seventy percent of his new clients come from referrals.
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Mike Warkentin asks Tyler about the systems and strategies behind building high-volume gyms that actually work.
Tyler explains how to stand out from competitors, how to scale Two-Brain best practices such as No Sweat Intros for 1,000 clients, and why fundamentals like clean facilities and genuine care drive 16-month retention.
His gyms prove you don't need low prices to get high member counts, but you do need to build strong systems and provide great results for clients.
Tune in to hear how Tyler scaled to 900+ clients without sacrificing quality.
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1:17 - Tyler’s business model
7:59 - How his client count has changed
21:01 - Challenges of huge client counts
26:18 - How he finds so many clients
32:45 - The keys to retention
Tyler, it's super hard to run a gym with more than 300 members.
Speaker 1:Uh, tell me about it. I've got two of them going right now.
Speaker 2:Two gyms with more than 300 members each.
Speaker 1:That is correct. Yeah, we're uh two gyms at about uh 950 some members.
Speaker 2:Whoa, okay. Will you share some of your secrets with our listeners today?
Speaker 1:I would absolutely love to, but looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:Uh nice. This is Run a Profitable Gym. We're gonna find out how Tyler and Christy Quinn of Alchemy 365 acquire, serve, and retain hundreds of members at two locations. This is a great story. I'm Mike Workenden. Please hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. For a little bit of context, our most recent leaderboard, top 10 gyms for client count, ran from 314 to 698. This is monster numbers. Industry data says most group coaching gyms have about 100 to 150 clients. Good news, you can make a great living with 120 to 150 clients if your services are priced correctly. We won't get into that today. Instead, we're going big with Tyler. So Tyler's two Denver gyms, made our top 10 leaderboard. He's gonna tell you how he did it. Tyler, welcome from Mountain Time. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm great. I'm great. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:I am fired up about this. I often talk to people who are running a smaller business model. You're going big. And so we're gonna talk about it. You got to give this the lay of the land first. What's the foreign one? Like what's the summary of your business model? Who are you selling to whom? What price? Space staff. Give me the rundown so people know what we're looking at here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Uh well, the business is called Alchemy 365, group fitness. Everything is uh class based, so we we don't have any personal training or uh or semi-private or small group stuff going at this time. Definitely high volume. So so the majority of our classes tend to be in that 15 to 30 athlete range, uh uh, so pretty crowded rooms. Uh, what are we selling? We're selling uh we're selling high intensity and functional training, but we're doing it, I think, in a way that for a lot of people feels a bit more approachable. And um we're selling it to people who I think would say that fitness is just a is just a part of their active lifestyle. They're not actually taking their fitness so seriously, it's not the the end-all be-all of their physical activity, which is important because because our customer is unique, and I think we've done a good job trying to focus on how we serve that specific customer. What do we say? What do we say? Uh 4,500 square feet. You asked about size of our spaces. So about 4,500 square feet. Uh, we have two closed-off training classrooms, so it's so our facilities sort of mimic uh a little bit of a yoga studio model where you know you there's a there's a designated lobby space and you actually enter the classroom. It's not just necessarily open floor space. Okay. We've got about 45 staff members, four four full-timers, and then just a bunch of part-time support staff members, a lot of coaches, and then some, you know, some sales and marketing, and we've got some admin, and we've got some folks doing other things, uh, but almost almost entirely on a on a part-time basis, except for those four FTEs. Yeah, and I think uh I think that gives you the general idea. Did I miss anything?
Speaker 2:No, I think that's it. So you're looking at high intensity kind of stuff. I want to ask a couple questions about that. Like you said 4,500 square feet, and yet you're packing in like 17 to 20 people. I had 6,000 and I was serving like seven, you know, and I'd made some really bad decisions that cost me a lot of money with unused space. Uh, what kind of high intensity stuff are you doing there? Is it like barbell stuff? Is it different stuff that takes a little bit less space or what are you doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and and and Mike, cut me off if I'm if I go out of out of line here, but I I think I think I think a little context probably helps answer that question, which is that I I started Alchemy after owning and operating four CrossFit gyms in the Twin Cities in Minneapolis and St. Paul. So uh came from the CrossFit space. There you go. There you go. Came from the CrossFit space. And uh when we were when we were playing with the idea, we being me being my business partners and I, when we were playing with the idea of launching a new concept called Alchemy, we did, we were, we were pretty focused on optimizing space for one. And and two was uh how do we differentiate a little bit from CrossFit? How do we make sure that if we start something new, people don't just see it as you know, some sort of perversion of CrossFit? We wanted to sort of forge a little bit of our own space to play in. And so we actually created a piece of equipment called the torpedo, which looks like a dumbbell with handles on the outside. And so what it allowed us to do was give people who had at that point really never been under a barbell an opportunity to put two hands on an implement and do things like a push press or a or a power clean. You know, I put an asterisk on that for the Olympic weightlifters out there, but something that looked like a power clean, something that looked like a push press with a two-handed implement, it also allowed us to swing it like a kettlebell and then hold center handles like a dumbbell. And so all of a sudden, you know, a human being got a parking space inside of our class that was about the size of a yoga mat. And that completely changed the operating model for us because instead of needing 4,500 square feet for seven people, like you were talking about, uh, our classrooms are 2,000 square feet, and yeah, we're getting, we're getting 15, 20, 25, 30 people in a classroom.
Speaker 2:Wow, what a fascinating way to solve a crazy problem. Because back, I mean, we realized before the show that we'd actually met each other back in 2012, uh, when I was coming to cover a cross level one seminar at your gym, and I saw one of your new facilities. And like back in the day, the big plan at that point was to like go as big as you can and fill it with a monster amount of people. And like I kind of went in the middle and picked 6,000 square feet, but it was still way, way, way too much. And now we're looking at the other end of it where there's a lot of gyms that are around now. They're operating in like 1200, 1500, 2,500, and their their revenue per square foot just dwarfs what I did. And like their rent is smaller, and like they're doing all these amazing things. And so you found a way to not have to have that much space and serve large numbers of people because listeners, I'll tell you this. Uh, state of the industry data is coming out again this year. I can tell you uh without doubt that average group CrossFit, not CrossFit, group class sizes, seven, maybe seven people across the entire fitness industry. This is data from Watafi, this is data from two-brain dashboards, uh data from surveys, like thousands of gym owners. Seven people. That's the average. Most gyms are not able to get 15 people in there. So if you're building around a giant model, you better have a plan like Tyler's got because it's not going to work in a lot of situations. I couldn't do it, Chris Cooper couldn't do it, Tyler found a way. So this, do you sell the torpedo?
Speaker 1:You know, we we don't anymore. And I I'll tell you, so so the pandemic, not to, not to pull that old sob story out that we did that we yeah, I mean, we were we were wholeselling the torpedo prior to 2020. So we were selling the gyms, hotels, apartment buildings that had little, you know, little gyms inside. We were we were doing a pretty good little business there. We also had an online concept called Alchemy Anywhere, which was oriented around this one implement. And so we were selling direct to consumer as well. We've kind of we've kind of put that on ice. So we still own the patents, we still have uh you know the manufacturing rights, but we we're not really totally sure what to do with it post-pandemic. And and just to just to comment, what I'll tell you is I wish we I wish I could go back and go even smaller, right? So back to the square footage conversation because even uh from 2015 to 2020, in the ramp up phase of Alchemy's growth, we were still falling into the trap of chasing larger and larger, more expensive spaces, uh more costly build-outs. And now in retrospect, I look back and I go, boy, I I I still see areas where I could have shaved 500, maybe even a thousand square feet out of each of our facilities and not had any impact on the customer experience. And so if anyone's listening, it's like just constrain your thinking and restrict yourself down to the smallest footprint possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Chris, that echoes what Chris has said. If you can just start small and don't expand until you're bursting at the seams and do it then from a position of strength, because every time you expand, you've got build-out costs, relocation costs, paint costs, branding costs, all this other stuff, more heat, more everything, and like all of a sudden your profit margin goes down. You can build it back up, of course. But if you just make the wrong decisions, like I'm going at 12,000 feet from 2,000, which a lot of CrossFit gym owners did back in the day, you can end up with a horrible lease, a vacant facility, and all of a sudden no money in your bank account and you're gone. And that that happens to too many gyms. So uh let's talk about this. So let's talk about client count because that's what we're here to do. How has that changed over the years? Have you like started out with smaller numbers and built up? Did you go big right away, or how have you built to these impressive numbers?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, let's think here. So we're well, you're asking me to go back 10 years, so I'm trying to try to noodle on exactly how this evolved.
Speaker 2:Because you know, we tread the same path and like you took a very different approach and you're at a different spot. I'm so curious about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so so so when we opened, well, actually before we opened, when we were teeing up this idea of alchemy, it was initially just going to be a class offering at our CrossFit gyms, right? It was, it was, it was just like, you know, you hear people talk about trying to solve basic problems for your customers. And we had some people who were leaving our CrossFit gyms and basically saying, look, I I'm not interested in having my exercise be competitive. I'm not interested in some of the Olympic weightlifting or some of the more marginal gymnastics movements. And so we just thought maybe we can offer a class, uh, you know, a service inside of our CrossFit gyms that will take care of the these people and these needs and keep them around longer. So we started just testing it, free classes, free, you know, this had nothing to do with your membership. You could anybody could come in, bring a friend, whatever. We just wanted to beta test what we were coming up with. And uh what we found, you know, I'd be I'd be finishing up my 5.30 p.m. CrossFit class with seven to ten people in it, and then the door would start opening and closing. And by the time the 6.30 test class rolled around, there'd be like 50 or 60 people there. Whoa. And so that was that was when we knew, okay, well, there's something attractive to uh to a lot of people. And so right off the jump, we started to build our business model around this idea of how can we how can we get to million dollar units, right? We wanted to have each unit be a million dollars. And so we had a membership goal that was going to drive that revenue objective at each business unit. And that's kind of the way we we sort of triangulated around how many members do we want, how much space do we need, how do we service them? You know, it just kind of all worked around that that that number. And and that wasn't drawn out of a hat. We did have big aspirations about scaling the business up to be uh, you know, a national, national player. And so we were meeting with private equity, and and and a lot of private equity advice was that's the standard, that that that million dollar per business unit is the standard. And I'll tell you, I look back on that and I think that that was bad advice for us to try to chase it. It was the wrong thing for us to focus on, and I think it drove us to make a lot of really bad decisions during our initial growth years.
Speaker 2:Wow. So I'll I'm gonna point out one thing that I think you did that was brilliant, and I'm gonna ask you a question about your mistakes. Uh the thing that you said that was really, really cool was that you you started with an idea of like, what do we want these gyms to do? And then you work backwards from that. Because I started with an idea, like, I want to teach squats. And then I worked from that, and like there was honor in what I did, but like there wasn't a lot of business sense in that. And like my my results showed that. You went the other way, and this is what we recommend to gym owners now is like, what do you need to make? This is the number. How do we work back from this? How many clients do we need at what price? What's the marketing plan? How do we fill it? How many leads do we need to close this many sales? And then the whole thing is just this daisy chain of business metrics that didn't exist back in the day. So you did a great thing. And here's what I want, here's how I'm gonna do it. But tell me about a couple of the mistakes. What happened there that didn't go according to plan that you said, like, ah, I should have maybe done it differently?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I think I think that the chasing the revenue number led us down the path of all revenue being equal and any revenue is good revenue. And so I look back on the I look back on the you know first five years of our business and I look back at situations in which we were opening a smoothie bar at a couple of our locations and trying and trying to take that on and manage it ourselves. And so, so you know, I'll use a Highland Park location uh back in Minnesota. We open the smoothie bar within six months, the membership starts to go down, but the alarm bells aren't going off because we're we're just offsetting the revenue with food and beverage. Right. And then all of a sudden, you know, I'm noticing on Slack that um in between classes, our general manager's running down to the Trader Joe's to get more avocados for smoothies, instead of, you know, like being there in front of our customer. And sooner or later, you know, sooner or later, the the the membership started to drop. But conversely, the moment we eventually sort of said, look, we're gonna outsource this is a who not how situation. Let's get somebody else to run the smoothie bar and figure that out for us, it it just rebounded. That's an example of uh us chasing all revenue at all costs. We we sold longboards with alchemy branding on them. We were doing alchemy retreats and getting people running marathons and uh in Iceland and climbing Kilimanjaro all through the alchemy brand because it was all this. How do we just generate revenue and build this lifestyle brand? And I think probably what we should have done was that and this is pretty fundamental business advice, I think, which is like figure out what you can be great at, do that thing, and don't start chasing all the shiny objects that are that are available to you just because you're having success in one area. So that that's probably the the the biggest mistake. And I but I also would just say you know, you talked about how we we were smart about backing into our goals. That came after a lot of hard-earned lessons. I mean, I don't think we did that in our CrossFit business. I just I wanted to teach squats just like you. I wanted to teach CrossFit. And um, so it was it it took like a second try in rebooting a new business and thinking a little bit differently about it that allowed us to hopefully make better decisions than we had made the first go-around.
Speaker 2:Okay, so that's the history. That's very interesting. With these two facilities that you've got now, did you scale up to these member counts very quickly? Or was it uh like a chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, or a slow builder? How'd that go?
Speaker 1:Yes, we we started to feel like we had a pretty good, pretty dialed launch plan that was going to allow us to get to a solid membership number pretty early. We made lots of mistakes, but I think we did build a strong brand and we had good brand recognition, and that allowed us to kind of hit our membership goals within a reasonable time frame. So we we felt like we felt like uh we wanted to be in the black on day one, and then we wanted to be at optimization 12 months, right? We were at a 12-month time maturation period, right? We sort of felt like at the 12 months we need to be at this number. And I would say for the most part, our new studio launches, we were able we were able to accomplish that. And so so yeah, we it was it was relative, I mean I would I would call that relatively quick, you know, getting to 500 members at Lohi, which was a a new studio in a new market, not in our backyard. We did that, you know, probably in probably in nine months, and we were you know sitting pretty pretty solid at that location. They didn't all go that well, but that's kind of an example of of uh the growth pace that we were trying to achieve.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's great. And I'm gonna ask you at the toward the end of the show about the sales market and how you did that, but I want to talk about a couple of quick quick things first. Uh client count is awesome, but it's not awesome if the other numbers that back it up don't like if you have a thousand clients and they all pay a dollar, you're not making any money, and you see the you know the obvious example there. So, two key metrics that are related to client client client counts is average revenue member and length of engagement. So, like in some very large gyms, and often in these access facilities, these numbers are like 29 bucks and it's two months or something like that. Their length of engage is terrible. They want you to sign a contract at a cheap rate and they hope you don't come. That's just one of the business models that's out there, and it works for these large corporate facilities where they, you know, they're just it's equipment rental essentially. What are you aiming for in your gyms? Because you've got a very different model.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a it's a really interesting question and it's a timely one. And again, I want to I want to provide a little context here, which is we were we were a growth company from 2015 to 2020. We were focused on becoming a nationally recognized brand. We wanted to have a hundred corporate-owned studios around the country. That was our that was our mission. In 2024, in late 2024, my wife and I ultimately made the decision to close down seven of our nine operating studios.
Speaker 2:Whoa, okay.
Speaker 1:And I don't know if you know that. Uh so so so it was it was a matter of it was a matter of feeling like four and a half years post-pandemic, the the the industry has changed so much. And I bet a lot of your listeners can can know what I'm talking about. The industry changed, and it and even the customer changed. Yep. And we had a lot of residual modeling that just didn't reconcile with a post-pandemic world and the industry trends. And and moreover, I think my wife and I just we were 10 years older, and we just thought, do we, do we want to be flying to all these to different cities and opening cities? Is that really the what we want to do? So why is that why is that relevant? We have made lots of changes over the last 12 months to downsize and refocus and think about our business differently. It's part of the reason that we ultimately swapped software providers. We went we went from mind body to I don't know if you know Wattify is our new software provider and they've been a huge partner in us sort of rebuilding our business smarter. It's part of the reason that we've plugged in with two bringing because we don't, we're not even sure we remember how to run a two-studio business in one market. Like it's like I didn't even, I could, I couldn't, I couldn't remember what that was like. And so that's a lot of context because you're asking these really great questions about arm and leg and alchemy today. Right now, we're sitting at about 134 uh average revenue per member, uh, length of engagement, roughly 16 months. You know, what are we aiming for? My as I was thinking about this conversation, I wrote down like there is there's no ceiling on what I want to achieve on those numbers, but all of a sudden, we're thinking about those numbers as more critical, more front and center than we had been, right? Where in the historically it had been volume, it had been about number of units, and just top line and just like just show investor types about how robust our business is. And now we're trying to run something that is actually healthy and profitable and sustainable. And so now, you know, we're working with Peter at Two Brain, and and and uh we're able to start to like tinker with our business in a way that's appropriate at our size now to drive those numbers up. So 134 and 16, that's the short answer. Yeah, but I gave you a lot of context, hopefully, that's it.
Speaker 2:No, but it's so needed. And what you're getting at there is business models, and that was again something that didn't exist really back in the day. There was like maybe like the business models open across the gym with a lot of space where people show up. That was one not very good business model. There's also like the giant bodybuilding thing that was kind of skitting stale at the end of that period, right? Where it was like, ah, you just get all the Nautilus machines that you can and you just funnel people in for 30 bucks and hope they don't get huge. Like that existed. But like now we're talking about different business models. So you've evolved from like this one where you wanted to set a goal like national chain. That is a huge, huge thing that requires like huge CEO level skills, right? So you had to like completely different concerns, and you're talking about like a volume game. And alongside that, you're not coaching squats anymore, like you said back in the early days. You're like private equity meetings with investors and replicating brands and all this other stuff and leases and all these crazy things. That's a completely different skill set. Now you're pulling back a little bit. But what I want to point out to your listeners is Tyler's got a ton, a ton of members, but he also has a strong length of engagement. It used to be length of engagement in the industry was like eight months before something pretty bad like that. And in some corporate facilities, with like the equipment rental thing, length of engagement is maybe three months. They join in January, they're up by February kind of thing, maybe March, if you're lucky. That's completely different. And the other thing you've got going on is an average revenue per member. 130, you said I think it was something around there?
Speaker 1:Well well, 134 right now. But um yeah, gotta do better.
Speaker 2:But that's pretty good considering the number of clients you have because there are like in a one-on-one, we'll see one-on-one. Like our I think our top ARMs are $500 plus at two-brain gyms. That often comes in personal training and small group facilities that are a very different business model again. So, like what we're talking here, Lishes, is different business models. And as I said in the intro, if your business model is 120 to 150 people, your pricing and strategy and avatar are gonna be completely different than if you're going for larger client counts. The point figure out what your business model is, a term mentor is the perfect person to help you do that, because then you can start to get these numbers in line and say, uh, this is what I need, this is how we're gonna do it, and this is the next metric we're gonna work on. And it's this whole cyclical process where you're not just saying, I need more. And that's how you said you went through a little bit of that where it's like more for the sake of more and more for the sake of revenue and numbers and investors. That's a hard game to play. When you start getting targets in place, things are very interesting. So those are some really, really cool leg and arm numbers from a very big gym. And like, I'd I'd suggest that those are very out of the ordinary and outstanding numbers for people with 900 class. Uh we'll go on a little bit. I want to ask you this, because like you've talked about huge numbers of gyms, huge numbers of clients. What are the challenges like uh besides the complete level of overwhelm that I would feel instantly in your series? What are the what are the challenges and how does your mentor help you solve these problems now with two big gyms?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I I I think that I think the biggest challenge is just keeping track of people, right? And that probably seems obvious, right? So But how do you do it? Well, yeah, and essentially like there's just a lot, there's a lot of human beings coming through the door. And and and and and if you're trying to be an environment where you know people's names and you understand their objectives and their goals, and you're trying to be a high touch point, that that can be challenging. Having uh close to a thousand members means you have to have a lot of classes on the schedule. Having lots of classes means lots of coaches, and so I would say that quality control is a challenge for us, for sure. You know, we talk about how the part-time group fitness coach is a bit of a transient population, right? Those people come and go. You're constantly trying to backfill with with good coaches, and for us, it feels like I mean maybe not on our heels, but certainly not on our toes, where we're we're always a bit reactive and feeling like it the quality of our coaching staff is never quite where we want it to be. We always want to drive that to uh to be better. Churn, churn, I mean, churn probably for all gyms is a challenging thing, but I think there's a certain natural churn that takes place for every location. And so if you just think about that equilibrium, right? You know, if if if if if you're battling for roughly 5% churn, you know, 5% of a thousand is is it requires an awful lot of selling and a lot of conversion just to stay level. And so it feels like you're on a you're on a treadmill that's just a tiny bit too fast for you. You know, like you're like you can keep up, but it's not comfortable, and you know you're always wondering like how do we how do we increase efficiency in this machine? Uh your your question was how does how has our two-brain mentor helped?
Speaker 2:I think Peter Burstulan, correct?
Speaker 1:Correct. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's run some big facilities, million-dollar guy. Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's been it's been so much fun. I mean, we have to be careful with to stay on agenda because we like just we like just shooting shit and going back and forth with each other. I think one of the primary themes, given our size, has been, you know, how do we take all these best practices that TwoBrain has uncovered, developed over the years that they've been doing the work that they've been doing? How do we take those best practices and how do we apply them in a way that works for our business at our size? So something like a no-sweat intro. Like what does it look like when you know, based on our first-time attendance and the number of folks we're trying to draw in just to offset that churn of 5% at a thousand? How do we do that in a way that that actually still works inside of our business? And so a lot of our work has been, it's almost been like a uh it's like a translation effort. How do we take the best practice and translate it into something that doesn't feel quite so manual and can be applied inside of our business?
Speaker 2:You gotta scale a little bit, right? Because you're one of the bigger gyms.
Speaker 1:You gotta scale it. You gotta scale it a little bit. Yep and I and I and here again, I mean, not to, you know, look, I I the the software transition for us was a huge deal. And I think yes, as as good as the two-brain uh mentorship has been for us, I think the other part of the equation has been, you know, we we joined uh we joined up with Wattify, and the software, they've been able to bring some technology into our business to help us manage athlete check-ins, promotions, retail, the kiosk system, their workflows. So I'm taking, you know, I'm taking Peter's solution, two-brain solution, and I'm oftentimes going to Wattify as our like total side-by-side tech partner and saying, look, here's this thing that I'm trying to do. I really think the value is there. How the hell am I supposed to do this based on our new visit volume or based on this? And what I've found is that the combination of the great tech along with best practices is sort of the breakthrough opportunity that we've been looking for.
Speaker 2:And that's cool. And that's you know one of the reasons I mentioned our state of the industry report working on it right now. It's gonna come out in uh early November. What if I partnered with us to give us all the data and it's anonymized data? We don't see what gyms have, but we know that across Watify gyms, this many people show up to classes, this many people, this is the demographics. And so we we see all that data in a raw form, and we can put out this industry-leading report. Uh, we partner up with Whatify and Kilo, do that. And that's the idea is finding you've got these best practices. How do you scale it? How do you use software, you know, to figure it out and make sure that it works for your business model? And for you, like that's an incredible thing. Because like with 120 to 150 clients, you could literally manage client journey and goal review sessions and no sweat intros on a spreadsheet if you really wanted to. There are better ways to do it, but you could do that. 500, 900 clients, that's not gonna work anymore. It gets pretty gnarly. So that's a really interesting way that you've got to find the technology to link the best practices up with what works at ground zero. So I I love that one. Let's not delay on this one anymore because you've mentioned a couple of times, and this is like whether this is a big one. You've talked about clients and churn and replacement and so forth. So sales and marketing. I know now if you're talking you've got to replace 50 clients a month to to break even at your current number, that's a huge pressure. How are you doing it? Like, how are you finding closing and keeping so many clients?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, so so you everyone's heard the term death by a thousand paper cuts. I sort of feel like it's like it's like success and culture and team building, etc., by a thousand little data points, right? Like these little things that kind of combine and add up. So, so I think brand awareness is huge. I think we've we've we've done a lot of work to build our brand out inside of our markets so that people at least are aware of our existence.
Speaker 2:Through advertising or what?
Speaker 1:Yeah, advertising, but also a lot of organic stuff. So, so a lot of, I mean, we do just do an immense amount of off-sites, pop-ups, uh freebies, special events. And I know that you know, it's uh two brain is uh a big they're a big proponent for this, right? Like this is a huge low-cost way of building your brand inside of your market, is just just put yourself out outside of your gym, out into it out into the world and let people interact with you and interface. I think 70% of our first visitors are still coming in as referrals or buddy passes.
Speaker 2:Are you serious? That's huge.
Speaker 1:Wow. So so so it's so as as much as important as paid ads is and as as important as um well you know yeah, advertising is, uh it's organic still drives the majority of our first-time visitors and still drives the majority of our opportunities to sit down and sell our products to to prospects.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:So and then you know, when we do our paid advertising, and when we are when we are speaking to our customers, one of the things that we really focus on, and I this there's a there are a hundred different terms for this. We we use the term three uniques, it comes from an operating system called uh EOS. Uh so our three uniques are just the the trifecta of things about our business that we believe in combination with each other, we do better than than anybody else in the world. And so what we have done really, what we've been mindful of is clarifying what our three uniques are and then repeating that storyline over and over and over again, and just doubling down on it. So when successful franchises pop up a block away from us, and that's happened so many times over the last 10 years, berries and rumble and the yard, and like they're all they're a quarter mile away from us, it always causes this like this little blip of anxiety and and and a little bit of fear and a little bit of scarcity mindset inside of us. And then you you remember there are plenty of people out now in Denver, but it used to be Minneapolis and Denver, there are plenty of people in our market who are looking for precisely what we do. And so now is not the time to try to emulate our competitors or try to pretend we're something we're not. Now is the time to double and triple down on exactly what we do best, why we do it, and who we do it for. From a sales and marketing standpoint, you know, the tactics are one thing, going out and doing organic marketing in combination with some good, effective paids. But I think like what you're saying and the way you're presenting yourself to prospects is just as important, perhaps maybe, maybe even more important. And um I it as a total aside, and I don't know if this is this matters, but I invite any listener who's out there and interested in this. I invite open invite to come take some classes at Alchemy. If you ever find your way to Denver and you want to pop in and look me up and let's let's have a cup of coffee and talk about your three uniques in your particular facility because they're not like anybody else's. They are yours and yours alone. And um, I'm writing some content right now about some of this that's gonna be coming out called the fitness. Series. It's just going to be an open source content on how to do some of this work, including defining and articulating your three uniques for your prospects. And so I don't know if TwoBrain has a different language set or angle on that, but I think just knowing who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and why you do it is a very, very important part of your sales and marketing efforts. So that's a long-winded answer. Sorry about that.
Speaker 2:And you but you nailed it there. And the two-brain version essentially is like, what is your avatar? And every successful gym owner that I have from our leaderboard that comes on the show, I asked them and I did it to you as well. What's the 411 in your business? Who are you serving? Who are you serving? What are you selling? And every successful gym owner can rattle that off in about 20 to 30 seconds. And it's very clear. I serve 25 to 37-year-old, predominantly females who want to accomplish this, and they're all busy professionals or any variation thereof. It's something like that. Yeah. And that's the thing. When you know your market, you can then dial in. And like you said, like the worst time to like, you know, reorganize your tent and pull up pegs is when there's a storm, right? That's the worst time. And so when a business goes beside you, like, oh, I got to start changing all my stuff, then everything falls down. It's the time to start hammering pegs in, right? That I'm good at this. This is the right location, this is the right thing. Hammer those pegs in deep. I love what you said there, and really double down on what you're good at. And that's something that a lot of gyms they make the mistake of chasing too many things. You talked about a little bit earlier. Yeah. Doing all the things rather than doing three things really, really well. If you can find that focus, things will be better. Here's something, listeners, that I want to point out. Tyler's got like about 900,000 members, and he just said he's operating on organic and referrals more than paid advertising. That's a really fascinating thing. And if you think about it, the more members you have, the more referrals you should get because every person in your gym should connect you to at least one more person, if not two or three, if you're really good at that referral process. We teach Tim Morris how to do four different funnels. Referrals are, I would say, the most important one because it multiplies your very best clients for essentially free. I mean, there might be some little time costs and stuff, but just saying, hey, Tim, I know your buddy Derek was talking about just feeling out of shape on the football or the rec league, beer league, baseball field. We get him in here for a two-on-one and see if he wants to join. Sure. All of a sudden you've got these two high-value people working out together. They sign up. It's kind of like fishing a barrel with a hot lead. Referrals are such an amazing thing. Do not miss the boat on referrals. And then I love the organic thing that you said. Like it's the anchor man thing where like you're probably kind of a big deal in Denver, right? People start to know they know it, they know who you are. You're you're known in the community, they know the brand, they know the face. Getting out there and doing it. That's my wife, not me.
Speaker 1:Not me.
Speaker 2:And that could be the right, that's probably the right plan, right? Like you do the back end stuff or whatever. She's the face, the thing. That works. But the idea is like they know who you guys are, and you're building a brand by saying the same thing over and over and over again in a strong way. And then, of course, you can tackle on that paid advertising. Like I said, we recommend all these different things. You mentioned content as well, putting things out, telling people who you are. I want to ask you this one because this is the last one I'm gonna ask you. I'll let you get back to running your business. But length of engagement, you've got it like 900,000 people. How are you keeping that number of 16 months so high and driving it up? Like, what are you doing specifically to keep these people? Because it's so easy. I started to lose people at 200. You've got five times that. How do you keep them?
Speaker 1:You know, it's a timely question because our last our last mentor call with Peter, that was the theme. Is like, what are the what are the actions that we're gonna take to drive that number up even more? You know, I think that I think that what we've done is we I I I wish I could give you a tactical answer. I think we've done a good job. Keeping our facilities clean, running our business, running our business professionally, uh, classes, the studios open when you get there. Classes start on time and they end on time. Fundamentals. The fundamentals go a really, really long way. I know this is gonna sound crazy. We give a shit. We we we try really, really hard to demonstrate sincere, genuine care for the people that come through the door. That being said, there are some really great tactics that Peter and Two Brain has have been introducing us to that we're we're kicking around right now. So, like some athlete check-in, some goal settings, some some uh some much better, much better nurturing on the front end, right? Uh so I'm really excited because I think if 16 months is good and and we got there sort of just with the fundamentals, I'm really excited to see if alongside Peter's mentorship and if like what's gonna happen? Can we get it up to 18? Can we get it up to 24 months? I mean, what what would that do for us? I I know that that's probably not a great answer, but I but I also think that there are a lot of operators out there who have maybe taken their eye off of the fundamentals, and there are things that like that flickering light in the back corner of your gym that's been flickering for the last 12 months, like it's become completely invisible to you. It's the reason why somebody finally says, F this, I'm done, I pay my money, and I can't even get these guys to restock the teepee. I mean, come on, you know, and so I I think that checking in on fundamentals probably goes a long way for a lot of operators. Overlay that with good tactics, which is something that I'm excited to be doing in the next uh three, six, and nine months in our business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's how it hits you right there with what you're talking about with Peter, literally right now. Like you said, 16 months, you can get to you got to a great spot. Uh the top tribe gyms are 24 months. So that's a lengthy engagement that's life-changing where a client has now built a 24-month, two-year fitness habit, will probably keep training for the rest of their lives. You've changed the life. Your lifetime value for that client is monster at that point because you're gonna go, when you hit that, it's gonna be eight more months at 135 bucks, whatever it is. So do the math on that. Listeners times a thousand people. Like this is these are huge numbers at this point. And the two things that you mentioned, uh, you've got to figure out, Tyler, obviously, how to do it at scale. But listeners, if you're in a smaller gym, and you almost certainly are, no sweat intros, start selling with that prescriptive model, meeting with your clients, get your client journey 90 days, and then the rest of it all laid out. Schedule goal review sessions every three to six months. So you're checking in and giving clients more. Everything there increases length of engagement, lifetime value, average revenue per member, all of it, and your sales and close rates will go up. So I'll tell you that is the secret sauce for that number. Tyler has got the challenge of a thousand people and major staffing things because he's got so many people, he's got to figure it out at scale. If you've got a smaller gym, you can do that. But master the fundamentals first, build that 120 to 150 client gym, make it amazing. Then, if you want to scale up, like Tyler did from a position of strength, the world is your oyster. Don't go big too soon. That is the one thing I'll give you this. Tyler, this has been awesome. You've given us a ton to think about. I'm not gonna keep you any longer from this, but thanks so much for showing us inside uh two incredible businesses, and I'm excited to see where you'll be in about a year. And if that length of engagement goes up, that'll be awesome.
Speaker 1:I'll keep you informed. Thanks, thanks a lot for having me on.
Speaker 2:It's been a pleasure, and I do want to connect with you again about this because I think it's gonna be a pretty cool story. That was Tyler Quinn. This is Run a Profitable Gym. I'm Mike Warkinen. Thank you so much for watching or listening. Please hit subscribe on your way out the door so you see more shows just like this. And now here's Two Brain Founder Chris Cooper with a final message.
Speaker:Hey, it's TwoBrain 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 gym ownersunited.com to join. Do it today.
