5 Ways to Generate Year-End Revenue at Your Gym

The holidays are coming—and for most gyms, that means fewer check-ins, more cancellations and panic about cash flow. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Today on “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper shares five simple tactics gym owners can use to boost year-end revenue without falling into the discount trap.

He explains how smart, seasonal offers—such as holiday retail presales, meaningful gift cards and “save your spot” promotions—can generate real income while keeping your clients engaged and excited.

Chris also dives into using bring-a-friend events and January kickstart programs to attract new leads, re-engage old clients and strengthen relationships with current members.

All five tactics are practical, repeatable and proven to work in real gyms just like yours. 

Want to boost cash flow and retention? Get Coop's free “Year-End Revenue” guide in Gym Owners United, linked below.

Links

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

2:01 - Retail presale

5:32 - Gift certificates

9:04 - Reserve spots for January

12:44 - Bring-a-friend party

17:45 - January kickstart group

Transcript

Chris: 0:02

Everybody knows the best time of the year for gym owners, right? It's January. But anybody who's been in business for over a year also knows that the worst time of the year for gym owners is right now. It's that period from Halloween to Christmas when people are thinking about Thanksgiving and their holidays and they're putting their memberships on hold so that they can afford Christmas and all that other stuff. And in this time frame, a lot of gym owners really struggle. They have this cash flow crunch where the bills are still coming in, they still got to pay the rent, but they're not making enough money to do that anymore. And so that temptation, maybe that fear, leads them to doing things that hurt them long term, like offering paid and full discounts for people, like doing crazy promotional giveaways, or buy sign up now and get 30% off. Today I'm gonna give you five ways to generate year-end revenue that will help you in the short term, but not hurt you in the long term. This is Run a Profitable Gym. I'm Chris Cooper, and I'm gonna be sharing tips from a guide that I give away for free every year in gymownersunited.com. I'm gonna call that up on the screen here right now. This is it. It's the ultimate guide to year-end revenue for gym owners. And what you'll find in there are strategies. I'm gonna walk you through them right now that will generate you revenue between now and the end of the year without hurting you. I'm really tired of seeing gym owners do things out of desperation. And they they think like, this is it, I gotta make some money. I'll make it up later, I'll make it up in volume, I'll make I'll figure out the rest of it in the new year. And what they wind up doing is hurting themselves long term and digging themselves deeper and deeper and deeper into this hole. And eventually it's just too deep and they can't get out. So without belaboring the point, I'm gonna give you this guide at gymwarnersunited.com. You can sign in and when the guide's ready, just ask for it and I'll DM it to you. You can have it. I'm also gonna do a live walkthrough in that group so you can watch for posts about when that's happening, and that way you can ask me questions and I'll get a little bit deeper into everything too. So the first thing that you want to do is set up a retail presale. This allows you to capture cash now and hopefully deliver product before Christmas. Look, everybody who has a spouse, a kid, a parent going to your gym is struggling to figure out what to buy them for Christmas. They want to get them a great Christmas gift and they don't know what to get them. So they wind up getting them something ridiculous, right? Running shoes, more t-shirts. Maybe they try to order the right size of Lululemon pants or whatever. But the reality is that they want to get your client a gift your client will love. And if they're not familiar with your gym, they won't know what to buy them. A retail presale is perfect for that because you can sell your gym's branded gear, which your clients want. You can sell something that you're only going to sell once. You can sell something that's timely for the season. So maybe something long sleeve, you know, a beanie hat, a vest, and you can send that link out to all of your clients in your entire email list, and they can share it with their parents, with their spouse, with their kids. Here's what to get me. Here's the amazing part of all this and how this compounds. Let's say that I get an email from my gym. Hey, Chris, there's a cool new catalyst hoodie. Amazing. I will forward that to my wife. My wife never knows what to get me for Christmas. She always does a great job, but she always has to work really, really hard because most of the time when I want something, I just go get it. And a lot of your clients are the same way. But if she has this link, she'll say, Oh, good, one gift done. Check. I can go into the catalyst website, I can pre-order this and I can pay. Now, what happens when she pays? She has to enter her email address. Now she's on my email list too. And so now she's going to start getting emails from the gym and hopefully bring her in eventually as a client, too. But the primary goal here is just upfront cash flow. There are some retailers who make this really, really easy. My favorite is Forever Fierce. If you go to the Forever Fierce website, there's videos on how to set this all up. We help clients in the two-brain business mentorship program set this up three to four times a year. It's a great cash flow infusion. So your clients click the link, they pay in advance. When you've got your order together, you make the order, you pay for the order, and you keep the difference. But this will help you bridge that cash flow. What do you want? Well, look, Forever Fears are the experts at this, but at this time of the year, usually my gym is doing like a hoodie, a special hoodie. Uh, we've done beanie caps, we call them tokes here in Canada. We've done gloves they didn't handle as well in the past, and we've done vests. Usually what I do, because we're not in a cash flow crunch, is I'll take the profit from this, usually about $800 to $1,200, and I'll buy Christmas gifts for my coaches. So if you do need cash, keep this profit. Absolutely. Get your coaches coffee or take them out for breakfast. If you don't really need the cash, do this for your clients to do a good service for them. Get more of your swag out there. Don't buy a bunch of inventory that's going to tie up funds for you, do a pre-order instead, and just use the profit to take care of your coach's Christmas gifts. It's a win all the way around. And this is so, so, so easy. You can set it up in probably about 30 minutes. You'll do maybe five promotional posts to get it out there, and then you're done. Easy money. Now, if you have some kind of event at your gym between Thanksgiving and Christmas too, you can also make that like the deadline to sign up for pre-retail. And you can even do like a supplement pre-order also. Like this is really, really, really easy. Don't skip on this. Second is gift certificates. And again, remember that people want to buy meaningful gifts for your clients, but they don't know what to buy. And so just the simple act of making up gift certificates in denominations of, you know, one month of membership, two months of membership, three months of membership, or five personal training sessions or 10 personal training sessions, sell the service, don't sell a dollar value. And you just put them on your website and then you just publish a post. And you know, the post that I reuse every single year is like 10 gifts to get a catalyst member for Christmas. I used to do this post called 10 gifts to get a crossfitter for Christmas. You can call it that if you want to. And then what you do is you pick like the top 10 gifts that people should be buying for others in your gym, right? And so one of these things is gonna be gift certificates. One of them is gonna be a hoodie, which I just mentioned. Um, one of them might be a skipping rope and you just like link to Rogue or whatever, right? But you make this cool list. All of your clients are gonna forward that to all their friends, all their spouses, their co-workers, their kids, their parents. Like, I know you don't know what to buy me. This is it. Here's the list, okay? And basically you're helping them compile a wish list. Now, at least half the things on that list are going to be things at your gym. So maybe that is if you sell protein supplements, boom, it's on there. If you sell fish oil, okay, great. You know, if not, but the biggest thing too is like you want to have the ability for people to pay for your client to come to your gym. So if your average membership price is 205 a month, you know, you have a pay for one month, pay for two months, pay for three months, pay for a year. You never know, right? Like some people might actually do that. For myself, you know, I look at my daughter's gym. And if I could pay up front for a year, that would be a great gift that I know she would love. And, you know, it basically takes care of like a big gift for her. Okay. So make sure that you set up gift certificates. Look to your billing and payment software, set them all up on there. You know, you basically want three or four different options. Put them in a put the links in an email and send that out to your entire list a couple of times. If you can compile it into like one post on what to get a gym member for Christmas and send that out to, like that's going to get a lot of traction for you. But it should be very, very easy for people to buy. So they should be able to click the link that takes them to your site, they add to cart, they fill in their information, and it's automatically sent to them to print out a gift certificate and put it on the tree. So that's the last piece here. This should generate like a hard copy gift certificate. If your software can't do that for you, I do it with Zen Planner, it's fine. I used to do it with Mind Body, it was even better. But if your software can't do that for you, then what you want to do is make up a nice gift certificate. And when somebody buys this online, you can get in contact with them and say, Do you want me to mail this to you? Or do you want to pick it up at the gym? And if they're going to pick it up at the gym, I recommend make an appointment to do that. So you can sit them down. Hey, thanks for buying this gift certificate. Here it is. It's all nice. You've got it on like high quality cardstock. Maybe it's in like an envelope, it's not folded. You hand it to them. Great. Hey, what do you know about my gym? And you can start a conversation with that person too, do a little bit of affinity marketing. But just having the gift certificates on your site is the first step. If you can digitally deliver them to the buyer to print out and give them to the person on Christmas Day, that's the best. It's the easiest thing. Once again, this is probably going to take you 20 to 30 minutes to set up if you've never done it before, but you're probably going to make three to five thousand dollars on this, honestly. The third thing, the third way to make money quickly is to run a promotion. Now, the promotion is not like sign up now and get 20% off. It's just save your spot because there are a lot of people right now who are not buying from your gym because they're waiting. And instead of trying to talk them out of waiting and making one of those posts about how, you know, give up your coffee every day and pay for the gym instead. P.S. Nobody's going to do that. Instead of making a post like that and trying to like hector people or guilt people into signing up for your gym, just have a save your spot, right? Like you don't have to change their behavior yet. You will. You're their coach, but you want to get them to save their spot for January. So you say, look, we're we're going to take 10 clients or five clients in January, and that's it. We want everybody to have an amazing one-on-one experience when they sign up for my gym. And so to onboard you properly, you know, beat the rush, save your spot now. To do that, you don't have to pay for our full on-ramp program. You just have to make a down payment of maybe it's $100. Or you can say, hey, click here to pay for on-ramp now. That way you know you've got your spot locked in. You're not going to procrastinate anymore. You can start at the gym just like you're telling everybody you're going to January the 1st. We'll have you locked down. You'll have an appointment. We'll have a trainer assigned to you. You'll be all ready. And you can tell everybody on your list that you're doing this, which is going to, you know, help hold you accountable. Okay. This is, I think, a message that goes straight to all the people on your email list and all the people in social media. Again, you don't need to offer a discount. What you're actually selling here is a commitment to themselves. Okay. So save your spot for January. So what you do is you have a link to your on-rant program. You have people click that link and buy it. And, you know, maybe even they book their first appointment. I think that's really smart. That way you don't get into that whole buyer's remorse scenario. What I have seen happen, and that this can work, is that people will sign up their spouse for January. You just have to be very careful about this. And I don't overtly promote this because the last thing you want is somebody like buying this present for their spouse, and their spouse doesn't know it, or their spouse isn't really ready to join the gym yet, or they don't want it. It's like, it's like buying your wife a vacuum cleaner. Like it's just not a good idea. In fact, I can remember this woman, Krista, coming to my gym years ago, and her husband bought her a treadmill because he didn't know what else to get her. And she's like, I don't know what to do. I hate the treadmill. I like running outside. You know, I like coming to the gym. But now I feel like I have to stay home and use this treadmill because it was really expensive. And he bought it for me, and his feelings will be hurt, right? Giving the wrong gift can backfire. And that's why you want to make sure that like you're promoting this the right way so that people can give the right gift and be thanked for it and rewarded. Look, if you sent this to your entire list and uh somebody that was close to me, right? Like my mom, she she gets this gift and she's like, or she she says that she gets the email and she's like, hey, Chris, you know, this is what I want. I want to start a catalyst January the first. Like, this is the gift that I want. I know you're gonna go buy me something, it's gonna be nice. It might not be something that I need. I'm gonna like your gift, but like this is what I actually want. Or maybe, you know, it's somebody who wants to get started at the gym, but they can't afford on ramp right now, or it's a student and they don't want to spend their own money on this. Like, this is an amazing gift for the right person, and that's the way that you need to promote it. But it's super effective, by the way. Like, all you're doing is asking them to commit in advance, save their spot, you know, create a little bit of sense of scarcity, and you'll you'll help them get into the gym. Next is bring a friend holiday party. So um, this is not like, hey, $10, you can show up and and try people. I know a couple of years ago a business coach was telling people to sell tickets to their holiday party, which I think is asinine. But here's the thing you want to have this holiday party. Okay. Now, every year we do this party at Catalyst called the gift. And it's amazing. We adopt between 60 and 80 local families who really need help at Christmas. Uh, every family it comes through social services. We we don't get names, but we get like lists of ages and sizes for their kids. And people from my gym can go out and buy gifts and they bring these gifts together, usually around December 18th. That's my birthday, and that's why it's called like the gift. And um, so people like bring these gifts for these families in need, they stack them all up. We have a big potluck, and then um, you know, the social services vans show up, we load all the gifts up and they take them out and distribute them. If you if you look on YouTube, you can actually Google like Catalyst Fitness, the gift, and you'll see a media crew covering this at my gym one year. But that's not going to recruit new clients. And if your goal is that you want to make cash fast, what I would suggest is that you set up a special bring a friend event. Now, there's right ways and wrong ways to run a bring a friend event. The right way is that your clients are introducing you to the people who are most likely to join. So you need to run this for one day, not a week. There's no extra value in running this for a week. One day, one event, a fun party afterward. So that they come in, you do this fun little challenge workout. You know, it's not like today we're gonna teach you how to overhead squat. It's like uh you set up kind of an obstacle course. Think high rocks more than thinking like CrossFit games. Okay. We're gonna do this obstacle course, we're gonna warm everybody up as a group. It's gonna be super duper fun. We're gonna do a demo, everybody try each thing a couple of times. You've got it ready. Three, two, one, go. And you know, you do this thing, it's super fun. And afterward, two things need to happen. You need to celebrate. So you need to take pictures of people with their buddy. We did it, you know, holding up whiteboards. Yeah, we finished the whole thing, we finished the catalyst holiday challenge, whatever, make them famous. And you need to book them in for an NSI. You need to talk to them about their goals. Like, this is great, you're hyped up, you've never been more excited about fitness than you are right this second. Let's talk about your goals. So every single person that signs up for this should sign up in advance. And as soon as they sign up, you should reach out to say, when can we chat about your fitness goals after the event? So you want, if you can, like do it immediately at the event, sit them down, take them to a quiet place, do an NSI. If you can't do that, book them for the same week. Okay, 24 hours, 48 hours. The longer you stretch out that band, the more likelihood that they're going to lose interest. So the key to doing this right is to use it to book NSIs. That means instead of just openly publicly saying, hey, free community trial workout, free trial, your client should invite one or two people who are close to them to this party. And you should return the favor by doing everything you can to coaching that person to sign up. You're helping your member by doing this because if they've got one more person in their life who is also getting fit, that's one less person trying to talk them out of spending so much time at the gym or making two meals or getting up too early or being too tired to hang out with the kids on the weekend. Okay. Like you, the best thing you can do for all of your clients is to recruit people who are just as passionate and excited and committed to fitness as they are. So they've got that support when they leave the gym. This is one great way to do this. And again, you know, I go into detail in this guide, and you can just get it by going to gymownersunited.com by sending me a DM in that group and asking for it. You'll also see me post about this guide in the group. So just comment on those posts if you forget, or show up for the live training that I'll be posting about in the group too, and ask your questions there by all means. Okay. The key though is that you're not making the mistake of just running another free trial or, you know, running this free week. Come in and try it. A lot of gym owners do this, and the reason they do it is because they're hiding from the conversation that ends with, are you ready to sign up? They think that if people just try my free sample, they will sign up and I won't have to ask them. That's not true, right? You're not Costco, where you're giving out free samples of brownies and then people go find the brownies and buy them. You're a service business, you're a professional coach, and you need to coach people to sign up. Free trials don't do that unless you frame it properly with an actual referral and a conversation about their goals and the question, are you ready to start now? Okay. A lot of times we hide from ourselves, we hide from that conversation by just doing free trials and thinking the service will sell itself. That's bullshit. Nothing sells itself anymore. Be a professional coach and coach them to buy your thing. All right. Enough of that ranty rabbit hole. Next is a January Kickstart specialty group. So look, if people are maybe not attracted to just joining a gym, have a specialty group that feels more like a challenge. Okay. You want something that will run for about four weeks. If you're in two brain, you know, follow the uh golden habits checklist, run that in January, set it up. People are already guilty about or feeling guilty about what they're about to do. So how am I going to repent? How am I going to make up for this? It's like, well, you know, I know I'm going to cheat on my diet. So I better commit to starting a nutrition program January the 1st. And so a lot of people will actually do this. You'd be surprised. They will book into a challenge for January 1st for two reasons. Number one, they don't want to feel guilty about eating crap at Thanksgiving. And number two, they want to have license to eat crap because, well, I'm starting in January anyway. Okay. What we're not doing is giving them permission to eat crap, but we're acknowledging that they're looking for an excuse and giving them a way to commit to turning their life around in January. Let's face it, if we don't give them this process, they probably won't change their life, right? They'll use that excuse and just get worse. So what you can do is set up a four-week challenge. Call it a kickstart if you want to. I think that's a fantastic name. And it lasts four weeks. It includes, you know, like some basic habits, protein it every meal. Um, four of these a day, 45 minutes of movement every single day, eight hours of sleep. Make it as easy or as hard as you want. Go 75 hard, copy that, or just go very, very easy. Focus on the basics. Include with that three workouts a week. So, you know, three times a week, you're gonna come in. There's gonna be a small group of us, and we're gonna be doing some basic movements to either start you on the road to fitness or help you get back to fitness. Let this be your on-ramp back into the group program that you want. So this should be attractive to two people. Number one, people who are on the fence, leads who are warm, but they haven't started yet, and people who have fallen off from your gym, former members who need a pathway back, but you're not just going to throw them into group classes. You're going to give them an on-ramp, a kickstart to get them back into that process. So, what you need to do is set this out really simply. Now, if you're in TubeBrain, of course, you go to the toolkit, you look up like the golden habits challenge, and bam, there's your template. You set this up. You add exercise, you know, you bring the price from 99 to 399 for the month or whatever. And there you go. You teach your on-ramp, whatever those movements are, as a part of this. So it winds up being like a nutrition challenge plus your on-ramp. They're going to do it as a group. After they're done, you have a conversation with them about their next best step. You know, okay, I recommend you come to work out three or four times a week. Would you be more comfortable doing this in a group setting or doing it one-on-one with me? And now you've ease them into long-term clienthood. And that's really the goal here is like we do want fast cash to help us bridge the gap between Thanksgiving and New Year's, but we also want this to turn into long-term clients, right? We don't just want to make a quick buck and then get out. This is the kind of trap that you used to hear from ad agencies. We're going to sell this challenge. It's going to be $300. We're going to teach you how to sell it. We're going to teach you how to run the ads. We're going to do this for you. People will come in, you'll make $10,000 the first month. You'll love it. And then, of course, those people wash out. And you get on this marketing treadmill that leads downward into a spiral because the leads keep getting worse. It's really important that you're keeping people too. And that means no bait and switch stuff. It means no one-off sales. Every one of the strategies that I've just shared with you should lead to more long-term members, a higher ARM from the clients that you have and a tighter community than what you had before. That's right. A lot of people will talk about culture in their gym and building community and figuring out retention. But all these five ways that you can use to make money fast will also help your retention. They will also boost your ARM. They will also enhance your community instead of taking away from it. If you run, you know, 20% off for January, sign up now, you are going to harm your culture because what you're telling your current clients is that the new clients are more important than they are and they get a discount that your current clients don't. If you run a paid trial workout over the holidays, you know, you're really not building your community. And also if you do like free community workout every Saturday through December, what you're telling your clients is like, I am more worried about getting new people in the door than I am about servicing you, my paying clients, who is paying to come every Saturday through December. So the super duper long-term bonus, the deeper level of this guide that I'm giving you is it's going to make you money. It's not going to hurt your business long term to do these tactics. And there are also retention and community building and cultural benefits to it too. That's what we're all about here. We want to, we want to run a successful gym business in a way that makes us feel good and doesn't harm our clients or our staff or ourselves or our families long term. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And yeah, profit's super duper important, but you got to have a gym that you love to run. And that's why we give you these guides. I hope you use it, make your gym more profitable, and keep it something that you love.