How to Build a Never-Ending Pipeline of New Leads for Your Gym

This episode features important visuals. For the best experience, watch it on YouTube.

Gym owners, if you need more clients, this training is for you.

In this detailed video, Two-Brain Business founder Chris Cooper breaks down his bulletproof system for fixing your leads problem forever by creating a never-ending stream of people who are eager to join your gym.

You’ll learn the exact strategies top gyms use to keep their sales pipelines full—and even receive plug-and-play lead-nurture scripts that convert curiosity into commitment.

With step-by-step directions, Coop shows you how to set up four marketing funnels that will consistently attract gym leads year round:

🗣️ The Referral Funnel—Turn your best clients into recruiters through structured conversations and personal connections.
📝 The Content Funnel—Share helpful, trust-building material that attracts people who already need your help.
📱 The Organic Social Media Funnel—Post consistently to highlight your community and spark real conversations.
🚀 The Paid Ads Funnel—Use targeted campaigns to amplify what’s already working and bring in a steady stream of new leads.

Plus, to ensure you take action, Chris teaches you his Golden Hour strategy: You'll learn how to set up a daily plan that will help you stay focused, create content and make marketing a habit.

Tune in to learn how to stop constantly chasing leads and start controlling your pipeline with repeatable systems used by thousands of successful gyms worldwide.

Want a free copy of all seven worksheets from this training? Send Coop a DM via the link below.

Links

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Gym Owners United

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1:06 - Part 1: Maximize Sales From Your Leads

5:53 - Lead Nurture Scripts

8:03 - Booking Best Practices
 
19:16 - Worksheet #1: Lead Nurture Checklist

19:27 - Part 2: Get More Leads
 
20:17 - The Referral Funnel
 
22:37 - Worksheet #2: Seed Client Exercise
 
24:43 - Worksheet #3: Affinity Marketing Cheat Sheet
 
38:15 - The Content Funnel
 
47:20 - Worksheet #4: What to Write About
 
49:57 - Worksheet #5: Golden Habits Checklist
 
50:09 - The Organic Social Media Funnel
 
51:29 - Worksheet #6: What to Post Where
 
58:34 - Worksheet #7: Sell-by-Chat Review
 
59:00 - The Paid Ads Funnel

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

Gym owners, if you need more clients, this training's for you. I'm going to show you how to fix your leads problem forever. This isn't just a hack for filling your gym one time. This is a bulletproof system for building a pipeline, a never-ending stream of people who are eager to join your gym. When they need leads, most gym owners frantically launch these desperate discounts or these last-minute ad campaigns. And they're reactive instead of being proactive, which is like looking for water in the desert. So today I'm going to teach you a better way. These are systems that the best gym owners in the world use to create a faucet, a flow of new business that's available whenever they need it. First, some good news. You need fewer leads than you probably think. Many gyms have enough leads, they're just not converting. That means the faucet is flowing, but their cup has a leak, and we need to stop the leak before we start pouring more water into the cup. So what we're going to cover first is how to turn your normal flow of leads into the maximum number of new clients. And then we're going to talk about how to get more leads, maximizing sales from the leads that you're already getting. Let's start with the question: do you actually need more leads? The average big group gym, like a CrossFit gym or a boot camp, gets 31 leads per month, but only six of those turn into appointments. And that's a really scary statistic because it tells me that gyms are not doing a great job with lead nurture. Now, lead nurture often gets overlooked or even ignored because most gym owners just don't like doing it. You didn't start a gym because you like calling people or responding to emails or answering texts, but it's one of the most reliable and predictable ways to actually grow your business. Here's how the best gym owners in the world nurture their leads. First, they call their leads really, really quickly. When somebody fills out your form or sends you an email, they're putting up their hand and saying, I need help, and you want to rescue them as quickly as you can. The second thing that the best gyms in the world do is they call them again and again until they answer because they're not offended or put off when somebody doesn't answer the first time. They might just be busy. The third thing that the top gyms do is they'll send a voice or a video message so that the person knows that it's not a bot just auto-dialing them. Fourth, they will book the client in or the future client in for a no-spread intro or a sales appointment as soon as possible. The longer somebody waits, the more doubt starts to creep in and the more hope they kind of lose in their eyes, and the more inspiration and motivation they lose. You want to book them in as quickly as you can. The fifth thing that the top gyms do is they make it really, really easy for the lead to book an appointment. The sixth thing is that they use a CRM so they can track when somebody has filled out a form, when they booked an appointment, whether they've showed up for an appointment. They can track that future client's journey and coach them along that journey. This is actually the first step of coaching, and many gym owners don't realize it. Seventh, they'll build a container. This could be an email list, it could be a public Facebook group where a lead can be nurtured for a long time. I once had a lead who stayed on my email list for nine years before he signed up. Now, obviously, we want to get him in before that, but the reality is that if you can keep people in a conversation, eventually they're more likely to sign up. The eighth thing is that they build a sticky net. That means they've got referral partners, they've got local neighborhood, you know, friends who are always talking good about their gym. The ninth thing is that they share a bright spot. So they quite often, when they're nurturing a lead, they'll share something on their social media or a message to that lead about a current win that another client has had in their gym. And it means look at this person who's just like you doing the thing that you want to do. And tenth is they preempt their objections. So when the client comes into the gym, the first thing that we do, or even before they get to a gym, is have a conversation with them about the kind of gym you are and what the client can expect from that first meeting. You want to overcome objections in advance, and that's really great lead nurture. But the most important thing is that you call your leads fast, you call them again if they don't answer, and that you book them in as quickly as possible. And if you just start with those three elementary things, you can build into the more advanced things as you go. Now we're gonna dive deeper into each one of these because you're probably feeling a little bit uncomfortable already. You know, you didn't sign up to sell or to even to market to people, and you think that your service should probably sell itself. But the reality is that lead nurture and sales are the first act of coaching that you ever get to do with a client. Long before you can say, push your knees out in the squat, you have to coach them to come in and talk to you about changing their lives. And then you have to coach them a second time on actually committing to themselves. So, what I want to talk about first is why it's important to call leads fast and kind of get over your own internal BS about what they're expecting on the other end of the line. When somebody's looking for a gym, they're likely shopping around. A study by insidesales.com found that 80% of buyers of new gym memberships go with the first gym who responds. Additionally, a lead is seven times more likely to buy if you respond within 60 minutes instead of waiting until the end of the day or waiting until tomorrow. You and I know that's usually just procrastination. They're in the water, they're flailing around, they've got their hand up, come and rescue me. You don't want to say wait till tomorrow. In our own state of the industry guide, we found that 23% of big group gyms take more than 60 minutes to call somebody who's asking for help, and 14.4% of gyms don't call their leads at all. Now, if this is you and you're saying, I need more leads, but you're not calling the leads that you get, you're just hiding from the work that needs to be done. So if you're one of these gyms, this one change will profoundly impact your sales. When you call somebody, here's exactly what to say. Hey, Jill, it's Chris from Catalyst Fitness. I saw you just filled in our form, and I can't wait to get you booked for a no-sweat intro. Do you have time tomorrow or the next day? Okay, that's it. Like get over this internal monologue of I need to convince them, or we build these things up way too much in our mind. Keep it really simple. Follow this script that I've got on the screen here. Call them again. They might be busy, they might be distracted, they might see an unknown number on their phone and not answer. Most gym owners, if they call their leads at all, will only call them once. Study after study has shown the persistence pays off. More contact attempts lead to more conversions. If they really don't want to hear from you, they'll just block you and you won't get offended. We recommend making six attempts over the first three days a lead is in your system. You've got to be persistent if you really want to help them. Then I want you to follow up with a video or a voice message. And I still do this. If you've ever been on the fence about joining TwoBrain, you might have received a voice message from me through Facebook Messenger or another medium. And the reason is simple. I want you to know that you're dealing with a real human here and not a robot. And a lot of your potential clients are feeling the same way. They're starting to see automated tasks, they're starting to distrust AI and bots in general. Having that human connection triggers a part of our brain that says you can trust this person. And with so much automation these days, a little personal touch goes a long way. Here's what to send in an audio text, or a video text is even better. If you're comfortable on video, send this as a video text. But if not, an audio text is, you know, still pretty good. Hey, Jill, it's Chris over at Catalyst Fitness. I saw that you were checking us out. I just wanted to personally say hi. I'd love to show you around the gym and talk about your goals a little bit. So give me a call back or respond here with a text. Have a fantastic day. That's it. Like you were meeting a high school friend in the cafeteria line. Hey, just wanted to catch up. When can we get together? When can we chat? Just shoot me a text back at the time that works for you. That's it. It should feel comfortable and natural. Book them sooner. You are competing with other gyms for this person's business. You're competing with overwhelm, distraction, procrastination, all the things that got them into this position in the first place. You're competing with those. So when somebody is looking at your sales calendar, it means they're ready to make a change right now. Don't make them wait. They'll second guess, they'll put it off, they'll procrastinate, and they will continue to just watch their health deteriorate. So here's what we recommend. These are the best practices for having appointments available in your calendar. First, you want to have a three-day booking window. So only show the next three days of available appointments. So they can't trip themselves up and book two weeks down the road and then change their mind 50 times and cancel. Second, you want to have availability during your peak class times. If you're a single owner operator, this might be a little bit challenging, but get somebody to coach your classes for you so that you can take NSIs. You want people coming into a busy gym because nothing attracts a crowd of people like a crowd of people does. And third, you want weekend availability. You know, one of the first lessons I learned in the service industry is that you need to be available when other people are available. And if you're trying to work a nine to five in the service industry, your clients won't come in because they're also working nine to fives. They're busy. So only allow people to book over the next 72 hours. If you let people schedule an appointment further out, they're way more likely to not show up for that appointment. Second, people buy gym memberships at the same time they usually want to go to the gym. So make sure you have sales availability during your peak hours. And third, we recommend offering some sales appointments on Saturday mornings as well because that's when they're free. Remember, the harder it is for somebody to schedule with your gym, the harder it is for them to sign up and buy. Make it easy for them. You want to have a very clear booking link on your website. This is my website, by the way. It should be in a prominent place and visible without any scrolling. It should be one of the very first things that they notice or see. It catches the eye. I use bright colors on my site, like a bright green, to make the buttons really stand out. Additionally, you want to put a scheduling link in the header section of your Facebook and Instagram accounts to make it easy. If people have to look around to find out how to book with you, they probably won't. They'll give up. Most prospects won't actually self-schedule. Some will book themselves in, but not most. So before I show them the calendar, I collect their name, their email address, and their phone number so that I can call them, text them, and email them and try to book them manually if they don't book themselves. 10 years ago, I can remember that self-booking was so novel that most of my prospects just did that. They booked themselves in for a no-sweat intro and that was it. But now you really have to guide them step by step through the process, again, just like you're coaching them. The sixth tip is to use a CRM. We know that the average gym is getting 31 leads per month, but 20% or more don't call them quickly. And so the lead starts getting cold. Well, maybe they're not that interested in me. Maybe I don't actually have time. Maybe I was premature in filling out that form. You can use software to automatically respond to these leads and start to nurture them and organize them, keep them all in one place. For example, I have a year of automated emails and texts that automatically go out to people every time a lead fills out a form on my website. That creates this kind of lead safety net so that nobody just falls through and gets lost. It's still not as good as a personal connection, but it's something and it can keep the client engaged until you can step in personally and call them or send them that voice message or that video text. I use Jim Lead Machine by Kilo. It's my favorite. I think it works amazingly well. But any CRM is better than no CRM. Okay, here's an example of a lead who received messages for months from my lead nurture campaign before booking an appointment. If I didn't have a process or an automation like a CRM for keeping these leads warm, I would have lost this sale. And you can actually see here, this person comes back and says, hey, I'm back. Can I book a time next Thursday at one? During these months of sending these automations, I could have told myself all kinds of crap about this person, hating me, not wanting to hear from me, getting annoyed, you know, sending me to spam. But instead, the software just kept up with texting them over and over because the software doesn't have feelings and doesn't have self-doubt. And eventually they booked. And guess what? If I hadn't done that, this person would not be coming into my gym and would not be changing their lives. It's really, really important to stay on top of them. If you can't do it because you're so busy that leads don't matter to you, you can use a CRM to automate the process. Just keep in mind that it's a safety net. It's not the whole trapeze act. You are it. You need to get in front of these people and do like voice messages, video messages, call them and call them and call them, and rely only on the CRM to catch the people who might have otherwise fallen through. Next, I want you to build a container. And this is something I've been talking about for 20 years now. This is like the water supply, the reservoir from which all the leads come into your faucet. A container is a place where prospects can go to get a taste of your culture, to see how much you know, to get a feel for your coaching. So for TwoBrain, I run a free Facebook group called gymownersunited.com. And inside that group, I tell stories, I give away knowledge, I share free tools, and I interact with members of the community. So let me show you how you can copy this as a gym owner. TwoBrain mentor Kieran O'Dwyer uses his local Facebook group to book an extra two consultations every single week. Here's how he does it. So first, every week he uses Chat GPT or another online tool to create a really helpful lead magnet. Then he goes into his free Facebook group and he says, Hey, I just made this. Who wants a copy? And then when people comment, he follows a simple sell by chat script in their DMs that I'm going to share with you in a moment. You want to make and publish content. Content is your sticky net. So people are out there roaming around the internet and they're searching for answers to their big problems. Creating content is the number one thing that I recommend gym owners do to grow their business because when people are searching for help, you want them to find you. And that's your content. They're not searching for you, they're searching for answers to their problems. And that's what your content should address. Good content not only helps when you get more leads, but it also helps you to nurture the leads that you have and showcase your authority and your expertise for the clients that you have in your gym too. It keeps your business top of mind so that when a lead is ready to buy, they're thinking about your gym. Now I'm going to break down a full content system later in this training, but here are some examples. You know, I've got YouTube videos here, I've got podcasts here, I've got blog posts going back the last 20 years at my gym. When somebody in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada is looking for weight loss, or they're looking to get fit for hockey, or, you know, they're looking to burn stress and they go on Google or their favorite search engine and they start searching, they're always going to find my stuff. There's nobody else in my market with a bigger, stickier net than Catalyst has. And that just gives me a massive advantage that keeps growing over time. Tip number nine, publicly share your clients' wins. Bright spots like this one create hope and hope creates action. You want to show people doing what your leads want to be doing and achieving the things that they want to achieve. This shows your lead that people like them are succeeding at your gym. We collect our clients' bright spots in two places. First, when we do our goal review sessions one-on-one, we sit down, we measure their progress, we say, Are you completely happy? And I'll explain the rest of that process later. And second, we do something called Bright Spots Fridays and we post this into our clients' Facebook group. So every Friday, we ask clients to look back at the week that they've just gone through and post what their favorite bright spot was. What was the biggest win that they had this week? The purpose of this is sometimes that we generate these bright spots, which we post and we share and we make the client feel really successful and famous. But also because we want the client looking within and reflecting on those wins. You know, in our culture, we tend to dwell on the negatives. And that's what we think about all day. And if we don't stop and take note of the positives, we forget them. They just wash right off us. And it's the same with our clients. They can lose 20 pounds and not even realize that they're being successful unless they take that time to reflect. And so doing Bright Spots Fridays helps them take that time to reflect, think about what's going right. It reinforces their decision to stay at your gym. And it also gets us amazing social content. We're not just asking the client to do us a favor by sharing their bright spots. What we're actually doing is putting them on a podium. There is nobody else in their life who is celebrating them by bragging about them on Facebook or taking the time to make up a congratulations post or highlighting their picture on Instagram. You are it. You are the only podium that they have, and making them famous will make them also feel grateful. Preempt their objections. Overcome their barriers before they even encounter those barriers. Most leads hesitate to buy for one of five reasons. The first is money, the second is time, the third is fear of failure. Like, is this gonna work for me? The fourth is fear of looking dumb, and the fifth is just uncertainty. So you can address all of these five potential objections through your lead nurture emails, your Facebook posts, your website messaging, and gently talk about how other people had these same objections, but overcame them, took the risk, and got amazing results. And if people see these potential objections in advance, then their questions are already answered before they even voice those objections to you. So here's a post that I wrote in 2021, and it worked really well. And so I've shared it with hundreds of different gyms, and they've used it successfully in the Two Brain Mentorship program. Let me explain why it's so good. First, the very first line says, I will never be the cheapest gym in town. That tells people that I'm not there to compete on price. They're probably gonna read on because that's a pretty bold statement. The second thing is that I don't have more equipment than good life. So they already know two things. I'm gonna be more expensive than the fit for last down the street. And the second thing is when they come in, they shouldn't just be giving a tour and saying, oh, you know, Chris has fewer peck decks than are available at the Global Gym down the street. What I do next is say I sell coaching. What this does is it differentiates what we do from selling access, which is what most of the big clubs do. Okay. And we have lots of copy paste stuff like this in the mentorship program. Let me explain why I'm good at this. I've been doing this for about 30 years. And when people see these posts, they want to just copy and paste them most of the time. But sometimes gym owners think like, oh man, I can't do that, right? I have screwed this up so many times that when I finally find a really good one, I give it to gym owners who are in Two Brain so that they can just copy and paste it and they don't have to go through all that trial and error themselves. All right, so that's my step-by-step process for making the most out of every lead that you get. If you want a copy of this lead nurture cheat sheet, just send me a DM on Facebook and I'm happy to provide it for you. But now let's move on to the fun part, which is actually getting more leads into that amazing funnel that you've just built. So now we've filled the holes in our cup. Now let's learn how to turn on that faucet and start pouring leads in because we're not going to waste them anymore. When most gym owners need leads, they frantically launch discounts for these last-minute ad campaigns. Now I'm going to teach you the systems the best gym owners use to create that flow of new business that's available whenever they need it. We recommend to all gyms in the two-brain mentorship practice that they build four funnels and keep them all running at the same time. These funnels are the referral funnel, the content funnel, the organic social media funnel, and the paid ads funnel. When you have these all going at the same time, you don't get into panics and do panicky things like just throw a bunch of money at an ad agency. We all know why referrals work. If you think back to the best clients in your gym, they were probably brought in by a referral from another great client. We know that word-of-mouth advertising is the best advertising, but it's too passive. Sitting and waiting for people to talk about your gym is not a marketing strategy. Yes, getting people great results is important, but it is not sufficient to bring new people in. And as the owner of a coaching gym, you're in a unique position of working face to face with every client that you have. That means you likely have very strong relationships with all of your members and they trust you with their most important asset, their health. Affinity marketing is a system that turns relationships and trust into more members in your gym. This might not be news to you, but your best clients tend to come from your best clients because good people tend to surround themselves with good people. Your best clients are likely getting good results at your gym and they're happy with your service, so they're more likely to talk about it. But they're not likely to initiate that conversation. And waiting for your best clients to be asked, how did you lose 20 pounds? is not gonna work fast enough to sustain your gym. So we're gonna break down how to identify your best clients and get more people like them next. Referrals are a nine-step process. Instead of sitting and waiting for your best clients to talk about you and drag their friends in by the shirt collar, and two brain, we actually break this process down into nine steps. So, first, you're gonna identify who your best clients are. And there's you know a very simple process for doing this that I'm gonna lay out here in a moment. Then you want to find their one-degree connections, the people that they live with, work with, or hang out with on the weekends. Then you wanna meet those best clients for a goal review session one-on-one. When you do, you're going to update their plans, measure their progress, make them famous, you know, put them on social media. And then you're gonna bring up this one-degree connection. We call that a high affinity connection. Affinity is like magnetism. You're gonna offer to help that specific person. So instead of saying, You got any friends you might like doing this, you're gonna say, How can I help your husband? After that, you're gonna give the person who referred the other person some kind of reward. And you're gonna repeat this every single month. And quarterly, you're gonna run kind of a catch-all group event, and I'll walk you through that in a moment. We wanna start with who are your actual best clients? And so, what I'd like you to do here is just take out a piece of paper. You're gonna draw a long vertical line down the middle of it. And at the top of the left-hand column that you've just created, you're going to draw a smiley face. And at the top of the right-hand column that you just created, you're gonna draw a little dollar sign. What I'd like you to do is just quickly pause this video and think who are the clients who light me up when they show up? Not just the ones who are a pleasure to coach, but the ones who actually feed me with energy. When I see a big group in front of me or a complicated workout on the whiteboard, and I see this person, Betty Lou, come through the door, I breathe a sigh of relief. No matter what happens, Betty Lou is going to make this a fun time. These are the people who show up with batteries included and have more energy than they need, and that spills over to everybody else. These are the people who other people in your groups look around and say, Where's Betty Lou? Where's Dave? When they're not there. By the way, Betty Lou and Dave are two of my actual best clients. I want you to write three or four, maybe five names in the left side of that line under your little smiley face. When you're done that, I want you to move to the other column. This is the dollars column. Now, we all have clients that we really, really love, but that doesn't automatically make them our best clients. Our best clients are also the ones who don't have issues with our price, who want to buy every new t-shirt that we sell, who sign up for the specialty groups, who bring their kids, bring their parents, bring their spouse as often as possible already. This tells us that they're willing to do that. And so under the dollar sign, I want you to list your top 10 clients who pay you the most. So just, you know, open up your booking management software, find the 10 clients who paid you the most last month and list them under this column. After you do that, here's what you're going to notice. I promise I've done this with thousands of gym owners, and this happens every single time. What they'll find is that three or four of the names appear on both columns, the people who make you the happiest and the people who pay you the most money. Those are your best clients. This is the left brain and the right brain talking. I want you to circle those best clients, and we're going to go to work with them on referrals first. Once you've got those best clients listed out, you're going to pull open a sheet like this. And you can sketch this out if you want to, but if you want a copy of this actual worksheet, remember you can just send me a DM after the presentation and I'll give you a copy of all the worksheets. We call this an affinity marketing cheat sheet. And what we're doing here is we're listing the people who are closest to our best clients, and we're going to be very systematic about this. So first you're going to list your best clients in that left column, one at a time. Then you're going to ask yourself, client by client, what do I know about their family? What's their spouse's name? What are their kids' names? How old are they? Are their parents still around? What are their names? And if you can only think of one or two names, that's okay. Just put that down. Then you're going to move to the coworker column and say, what do I know about this client professionally? Where do they work? Well, I know she's a hygienist at that dental office downtown. You might want to list their favorite coworker, you might want to list their workplace, you might want to list their boss or their employees. Put them right in this column. Then you're going to ask yourself, who is the friend that they talk about? Who do they hang out with on the weekend? You know, uh, who is their BFF? Uh, who is the person that they're always traveling with? Write that down too. And then finally, list their hobbies. Okay, what are they doing on the weekend? Oh, they're they're traveling with their kids, sports team, or whatever. Oh, they're golfing or they're skiing or whatever. Put that hobby down. And what we're looking for here are other people in your clients' lives who probably have about the same income. They work in the same place, or they're married to them, or they have the same hobbies, who have the same interests, especially in health, and who know, like, and trust and want to do more things with your best client. These are the incentives that you give people for referring their family and their friends and their coworkers the opportunity to do more things with people who they love and who love them. Secretly, though, we're doing something to really improve their health. If a client goes home after working out in the gym and all they hear about is, hey, you know, why are you paying so much for this gym membership? Ah, geez, you've been going for six months. I don't see any big changes. Or maybe it's just, why do I have to always get up at 5 a.m. to feed the dog because you're going to the gym at 5:30? Or why are you always so tired at night? Your client is hearing objections, sometimes from their family or their friends or their coworkers. Why are you coming back to the work sweaty at 1 p.m. every day? By expanding the people around them and getting those people into your gym, you build a web of support that will practically guarantee that your client can't fail and will stick around longer. And this is why when your clients refer their friends, your clients stick around longer at your gym too. It's also a retention metric. But let's move on. When you meet with your clients, review that affinity marketing cheat sheet first. You want to just ask about the highest affinity connection to them, the person who is closest to them on that sheet. So if you know their spouse's name, that's the name you want to bring up at their meeting. If you don't, and you know the coworker's name, you want to bring up the coworker's name or even the workplace. Okay. You're going to meet with these best clients about every three to six months. And these referrals tend to happen really naturally when the client feels supported and you're having just a natural flowing conversation and you're proposing bringing their friend in or their husband or their coworkers because you're trying to help them. So you can invite a client for a cup of coffee, or you can just even say, Do you have a few minutes right after class and start this conversation with them? The best place to ask for referral is in a goal review after you celebrated their success a little bit. So here's what you do: you sit down with them and you review your their progress. Okay. You say, like, here was your goal when you started. Has that goal changed since we started, or do you have a new goal? And then what is it now? This might also be a great time to measure their progress and say, are you completely happy with the progress that you've made? Okay. And after you said, are you completely happy with your progress? you're going to get one of three answers. The first answer is, hell yes, I love it. Perfect. We're going to celebrate them. We're going to make them famous. We're going to do a post about them, as I said earlier. If they say that, you know, I'm pretty happy with my progress, but I wish it was going faster, then you would just make a new recommendation, upgrade their prescription. And if their progress has stalled, actually, you know, I'm not really happy with my progress. Great. It's better than them quitting, build a new plan. But if they are making progress and they're happy, this is going to help us celebrate them. And then it's the perfect time to ask for a referral. When they say they're happy, offer to help the person from that affinity marketing cheat sheet. So look at the person who is closest to them on that cheat sheet. You know, their husband, maybe it's their coworkers, maybe it's their BFF, their bestie, or the hobbies that they do. Pick one person, the person's closest to them, and offer to help that person. So, for example, Betty Lou, I love having you at my gym so much. As a thank you, I would really love to get Dave in here. You know, I I want to kind of get a support network surrounding you so that you're not making two meals every night, yours and his. I want him to understand what you're doing. Do you think he'd be up for joining a personal training session? With you next week? Can we book them in? If it's if you don't know their spousal name or they don't have family in the area, you look at their coworkers and you say, Jim, dude, I'm so proud of you. You've made so much progress. I know this is a stressful time of the year for you at your attorney's office. Would it be helpful to you as a thank you if I came in and we did like a lunch and learn and I helped, you know, the other attorneys and their associates with some stretches they can do at the desk, maybe a little QA about what to eat or how to reduce stress? Would that help you? Or if it's like a friend or a hobby, plan something fun and inclusive. So if I've got a lot of parents at my gym who travel every weekend because their kids are playing hockey. And hey, as a thank you to you for being such a great client and staying true to your goals through all this travel, what if we brought in your kids' hockey team and we did like a fun Christmas party or a fun year-end banquet? We'll have a little challenge, we'll make it feel like a fun little combine. It'll look like Ninja Warrior, the kids will love it. It's on me. Bring them in. Just have every kid sign a waiver. Now, if they're receptive, you say, okay, great, look, I don't want to burden you with this. Do you have an email address or a cell number? I'll take it from here. So if it's their spouse, you shoot a text. Hey Dave, I'm sitting here with Betty Lou. We're just talking about you. And um, we were just saying I'd love to get you in to work out with her. Would you be up to coming in next Tuesday? If it's their coworker, just give me the email address for HR. Give me the email address for the manager. I'll take it from here. I'll send them an offer. If it's a friend or a hobby, hey, who's who's the coach of your kids' team? Okay, something like that. Take it off their hands because remember, these people are your best clients, but they're not your best marketers. They don't work for you. They're not going to do these steps and they're not going to feel normal. You need to take the ball and run with it yourself. Now, when a client brings in a new member, you give them a thoughtful gift, not a discount, not free months, not some kind of bribe. That'll make them feel cheap. Remember, they are bringing in somebody that they care about, somebody that they love. And here's, you know, 20% off your next month. It feels transactional. Give them something meaningful. So team merch from my gym is always super duper popular. Give them a local restaurant gift card. That shows that you put some thought into the gift and you went out of your way to get them something custom or even just a handwritten note if you can't afford to give them anything else. But offering them like, hey, here's 20% off if you refer your friend feels like they're selling out their friend to get the 20% off. It feels transactional. And that just doesn't feel good to me. If I knew that, you know, my wife gave my number to a financial planner because she would get like one free month of financial planning, I would be like, what are you doing selling me out for that? Instead, when my wife refers me to a new financial planner, it's because I know she wants me to get a great experience. That deserves a thank you from the gym, but it's not a bribe. It's not a transaction. They maybe shouldn't even expect it. It should be a surprise and a delight to them. I'll give you a secret here. When a client, a gym owner, refers another gym owner to TwoBrain, I am so overjoyed. Number one, because I just love working with more gyms, but also because it shows that the mindset of our client, the gym owner, has evolved to a place where they're not scared to bring their neighbors and friends into TwoBrain. It shows that they're thinking about the long game and they don't have a scarcity mindset anymore. And so we give them this amazing gift. This is a custom golden barbell from Rogue Fitness, and it's way more impactful than me giving a discount on mentorship or giving them a free month. This is custom, uh, it's it's like a gold color plated. It's got the two brain logo and the rogue logo. It's one of the best barbells in the world, and people are jacked when they get one. You wanna be this thoughtful about your audience and what they appreciate when you give them a gift. The key to success with referrals is not to take a one and done approach. And I'll give you a hint. I'm gonna say this about every single marketing tactic that I give you. You need to put the marketing tactics on repeat. So every month you're gonna block some time in your calendar. You're gonna sit down with this affinity marketing cheat sheet, and you're going to use downtime in between your sessions to book more goal reviews. You have to constantly be turning the wheel, working the system, opening the faucet, keeping the leads running in. You can't just quickly open it up and close it again by not repeating. The key to success in marketing is what you repeat, not what you learn, not what you do one time. Now, once every quarter, you want to host a bring a friend event. You want to keep it simple, no complicated movement. You're not showing off your ability to identify and correct the second pull of the snatch. You want to keep it simple and light and community focused. You want to have lots of opportunity for photos, high fives, celebrate wins, and book intros with people before they actually leave. This is not a free trial. It's free, but the goal is that you have a conversation with every single person who comes in and that you're very, very prescriptive when it comes to the process. So some gyms, you know, historically over the last 20 years, would run this free community workout on Saturday. So people would come in, they would work out, they would leave. And the gym owner would be standing there with their hand out, like, aren't you gonna sign up? Where's your Visa card? Thinking that their product will sell itself. It will not. Having a great product is necessary but insufficient to sign people up. What you want to do is run a bring a friend event that's very intentional. So first you advertise it to your clients. Do you have a spouse? Do you have a friend? Are you tired of explaining what you're doing at this gym? Are you tired of apologizing for being tired at night? Okay. Keep it simple and light and fun. Have one specific date. On Friday, the 12th, you're going to bring your friend in. We're going to do this fun little workout together. You're going to have the friend sign up in advance. You know, you can do it under the pretense of signing a waiver. You need their information anyway, but you're also adding them to your nurture sequence in your CRM. When that client or future client signs up, you're going to say, Do you have time to chat for 15 minutes before our fun little workout? And you're going to chat with them about their goals and you're going to frame your service for them so that you're overcoming objections to sales. After they come in and they do their fun little workout, they are on a high from your gym. They're ecstatic. They will never be more open to signing up than they are right that second. And so you need to ask them. You can't just wait for them to leave or somebody to walk over and say, how do I sign up? You have to invite them. You have to coach them into taking the next step, and that is to making a long-term commitment. If you want to build a pipeline for referrals, you can't just wait and hope. You can't stand there and get clients good results and just hope that they'll tell their friends all about you and bring their friends in. That is not enough. You have to take control of the referral funnel and turn it into something that's always flowing. So you need to start by identifying your best customers first, finding their one-degree connections, their high affinity links, you know, their friends, their family, their coworkers. Then you need to meet them for a goal review session. You can do that over coffee if you want to. You can update their plans, you can make them famous, and then bring up the referral connection. Bring up the name of their high affinity connection. Offer to help that person. Not an open invitation. Do you know anybody who might benefit from my service? That doesn't work. How can I help Dave? That works. Would it help Linda to bring her in for a stretching session? Can I help Bill's golf game by bringing him in and I'll teach him five stretches he can do on the course while he's warming up? That is how you do referrals. You offer to help that person. So you take the lead, you reach out to the new lead. You don't wait for your customer to do your marketing for you because it won't happen. Then you reward the customer with something bespoke, a custom gift that shows that you really appreciate them, not just a blanket 20% off bribe for selling out their friends. Then you repeat this every month. You have to do this over and over. It gets natural feeling, it gets easy, it gets simple, it gets fun. Clients actually appreciate it. They will thank you for asking them for a referral because this is how you change their life. And every quarter, you can run a Bring a Friend Friday event as long as you're intentional and it's not just perceived as like a free trial. The second funnel is a content funnel. Last year, I wrote this book about productivity and focus. And I wish I had had this when I was a struggling gym owner. It's called The Golden Hour. And in this book, I outline how you can consistently create content, even if you're busy and you don't know where to start. I'm gonna walk you through it. And if you want to scan the QR code, you can sign up for the Golden Hour Challenge and you can get step-by-step instructions. But really, the importance of this book can't be understated. The number one reason that most gyms are not doing well, it's not ideas for marketing. It's not their programming, it's not their equipment, it's not their coaching or their certifications, it's their focus. The gyms that grow the fastest in two brain, and I'm talking like they're growing eight times as fast as everybody else. We measure it. Those gyms have the power of focus. And those gym owners have a practice that's called the golden hour. You probably have something similar to this in your life, right? A morning routine. You get up and you do your daily stoic, you get up and you do your cold plunge, whatever that is. What I want you to do is get up every morning and do one thing to grow your business before you do anything else. That's the golden hour. Here's how the golden hour looks in practice. First thing in the morning, before you're distracted by email, before you start scrolling around on Instagram or whatever, I want you to go to a place where you can focus. This probably means a place with a door that closes, right? An office, a basement, somewhere you're not going to get disturbed. Open up your mind by just doing a brain dump. You know, get a blank sheet of paper or open up a tab or a Google Doc, whatever, and just barf out all the distractions that are in your life right now. Rant if you want to. Just, you know, brain dump. Get everything off your mind. Because with a clear mind, you can actually take action on your marketing. But you have to get it rid of all those distractions first. Lead with the marketing rep. So before you do anything else now, you've got an open mind, you're 10 minutes into your golden hour. What you're going to do is one little piece of marketing. I'm going to break that down for you in a moment. Then after you've done that thing, you're going to start working on the big project, the thing that's actually going to make a long-term difference in your gym. At the hour you end, 60 minutes, time, you're done, right? Even if you're in the middle of doing something, you'll save it for the next day, and the next day we'll have a really easy running start. And then you're going to make a checklist of what needs to be done so that you don't forget anything. That's the golden hour. It's very simple. And it's one of the foundational concepts that we teach in TwoBrain because we know that the gym owners who do the work in TwoBrain get eight times the results of everybody else in the industry. Okay, let's break this down. You need to find a quiet place. This for me is a place with a door that closes. You can't do this at the front desk at your gym. You can do it at a home office. If you're not distracted by noise, or if you have like big headphones, you can go into a coffee shop or somewhere else that you're not going to be interrupted. Focus starts with the environment. You have to control your environment if you want to have focus. Start each session with a brain dump. Get all those distractions out of your brain. All the stuff that you woke up remembering or woke up stressed about. Oh, I got to respond to that email. Oh, I really need to book a no-sweat intro. Oh, I really need to book a career roadmap with this coach. Get all that out onto the page, right? I'm mad. I feel crappy because I ate too much sugar last night. Get that out of your head. Write down anything that might be distracting you. This clears your mental clutter, making room for productive work. I use this app called 750words.com. That's what I've got up on the screen here. The first 15 minutes after you clear your head should be spent on marketing, the things that will actually grow your gym. That's publishing content, that's checking in with your clients, that's lead nurture. These are the things that actually drive growth. Look, I hear this from gyms all the time, and I swear I've heard it a thousand times. I'm very, very busy, but my gym isn't growing. That's because the work that you're doing lacks focus. You're doing busy work. You're getting up at 5 a.m., you're driving to your gym, you're coaching the 5:30 a.m. class. After that, you've got a personal training client at 6 30. And then after that, you run out for breakfast because you've only got 30 minutes, and then you come back and you know it's it's 9 a.m. and you've got a staff meeting or you've got to do your own workout, and then you got a personal training client at 10. And before you know it, it's 9 p.m., you're laying your head down on the pillow and you think, what did I actually accomplish today that's gonna change anything in my gym? And the answer is nothing. You were busy, but your gym didn't grow. And that means tomorrow is gonna be exactly the same, and the day after that is gonna be the same, and the next 10 years are gonna be the same if you don't change. This is what most gym owners struggle to see is that if they're not doing one thing every day to grow their gym, their gym will not grow. You don't have to do everything every day to grow your gym. You can't win the game all at one shot. What you can do is win the day and then win the day again tomorrow. So the marketing tasks that I want you to do are these. On Monday, you're gonna create some content. You're gonna create a short little video or a quick 10-minute little podcast just talking about your programming this week. It might be a blog post. There are new AI tools that can help you with all of this right now that's never been easier. And trust me, I've been recommending this for 20 years. Create some piece of content. That's it. In that hour, that's your job. Tuesday, you're gonna distribute that content. So you're gonna publish it on your website, you're gonna share it on your social feeds, Instagram, Facebook, maybe LinkedIn, Google My Business maybe. Then, once it's out there, your task is done for the day and you can move on to the next thing. But you've done some marketing. Wednesday, you're gonna check in with five clients. This is how you book those goal reviews that lead to the referrals that I talked about earlier. So you're gonna send your clients a DM. How's it going? Can we get together? Here's a link. Get on my calendar, book a goal review. Thursday, you're gonna open up your CRM or your spreadsheet or your you know little sticky notes, wherever you're keeping your leads, and you're gonna go back through them. Hey, why didn't that person book a no sweat intro? I better send them a message. Why didn't that person show up? Maybe I should check in. Okay, that's what mining your leads is all about. And don't forget, former clients are also leads. They're likely to join again. Friday, you're gonna schedule your social media content for a whole week. This is easiest done in batches. And tools like Kilo can make this really simple for you. If you know you're not scared to use the Facebook meta platform, you can schedule out your Facebook and Instagram ads that way if you want to. These aren't ads, by the way, they're social media posts. I said ads, but I meant posts. You want to publish these in advance so that you know that they're done. And so next week, you know, like I don't have to open up Instagram. I don't have to feel divine inspiration or figure out what to say or find the perfect picture. It's done. That's what you're gonna do on Friday. Saturday, you're gonna go into your gym with your camera. At my gym, it's the funnest, biggest class of the week. You're gonna take some pictures, take 10 client pictures of their face, smiling, working out, having fun. And ideally, two client videos. Hey, just I'm just wondering, what do you think about that workout? Or, you know, what brought you to Catalyst in the first place? What's your favorite part about my gym? What advice would you give to the person you used to be? That's a great one. Okay, get those on your phone and you'll use them next week when you're planning out your social media calendar. And then Sunday, you want to do something for your staff. Remember that staff retention is just like client retention. Staff recruitment is just like client recruitment. And so what you want to do is send your staff a weekly preview. This is probably just a voice message. Here's what's coming up. This client is coming back after giving birth to her first child. Here's what the programming looks like. Here are the coach's notes for Tuesday. Here's what to focus on. By the way, Mike had a 500-pound deadlift last week. Make sure you celebrate that in class. That's it. That's the weekly preview. These are the marketing tasks that actually grow your gym. The first marketing task of the week is to create some content. And this is more important than it's ever been right now, especially in the age of AI, because Google doesn't just search results and send the searcher to a website anymore. Google searches results and tells people the answer. If you have the published answer online, people will find you faster than ever before. It is critical now. It used to be a nice to have, then it was like a very important thing to have. Now it's critical to have a blog or a quick cast or YouTube or all of the above. So should you write a blog or should you do a quick cast? A quick cast is like a 10-minute podcast and you can record it on your phone. It's very, very simple. What I do is I look for like the top five fitness themes that my clients or leads might be asking about. And this is where I'll use ChatGPT. Hey, what are five hot topics in fitness right now? And ChatGPT or Claude or whatever will say, uh, everybody's talking about cold plunges. Okay, great. Let's do a blog post or a quick cast on cold plunges. That takes about five minutes, my thoughts on cold plunges. Then I'll take five minutes and preview my group's workouts for the week. That's comfortable, that's easy for me. I can talk about our programming all day. Then, you know, you can um you can do whatever topics you want next week. I usually record two or three of these a week at a time, and I give you 30 topics in the golden hour book. If you want to get the golden hour book, there's some topics in there to get you started. It feels like you're being interviewed, it just makes this whole process really, really simple. By the way, if you want to get these 30 topics, you can get them in the golden hour book, or I've got a copy of it in the worksheet package that I'll give you if you just send me a DM on Facebook. You know, you can look at these topics, pick one. Number, number 12, how do we support our local community? Well, let's hit record and let's talk about it, right? Just as if you're being interviewed by me. Now, after you've done your marketing for the day, lead with your marketing is the L in golden hour. You want to tackle your big projects. These are the things that you know will move your business forward, but they often get pushed aside. Sometimes they're a one and done, like writing your playbooks. Sometimes they feel boring, like checking your PL when it comes back from your bookkeeper. But these are the things that actually make the big strides forward in your business. Planning a new program, you know, looking at your annual calendar and saying, boy, August is usually a slow month. Maybe we need to put a sports-specific conditioning program in there and planning that out. These are like the big rocks, right? These are the things that are important, but not necessarily urgent. So if we're looking at this, you know, this quadrant, we can say, what are my priorities? Well, your marketing is urgent and important. You have to do that. Do that first. Then, second, you want to do the not urgent tasks, the things that you've been putting off, the things that your mentor has assigned, the things you read about in my book, and spend some time copying those things down, you know, doing the work, writing your SOPs. The first time this ever happened to me, my mentor said, You got to get your entire business out of your head. Write down step by step every single thing that you do in your business. And so I started by, you know, how to open the gym in the morning. So I had this piece of paper and a pen, and I parked my truck and I walked across the parking lot and I wrote down where I parked because I parked where I parked for a reason. Then I wrote down, okay, I unlock the door and I open it up. Oh, I've got to chip ice off the doorstep. Write that down. Okay, chip the ice, salt the doorstep. Okay, the next thing I do is turn on the lights. Here is where the light switch is. And this thing spiraled and snowballed into this massive playbook. And I've never rewritten it since. I've updated it, but it's been 20 years, and I'm still benefiting from that one action that I did sitting at my coffee table over a long weekend back in 2005. Stick to the one-hour limit. This keeps you focused, it eliminates burnout, and it gives you a running start the next day because you can just pick up where you left off. If you have a project that isn't finished, great, tomorrow's gonna be real easy because you know where to start. As you're working, new ideas are gonna pop up. Oh, gee, I can't forget to do that. Write them down immediately. Get them out of your head, but don't let them derail your focus. I use Google Tasks for this, I keep the app on my phone. And as I'm working on one thing and something else pops up, oh geez, I got to pick up, you know, the cleaning. Just put them on Google Tasks and get right back to work again so they don't distract you. Remember, if you want a copy of this, this is your golden hour challenge checklist. Uh, you can just send me a DM on Facebook and I'll send you a copy of all the worksheets from this presentation. All right, now I want to talk about organic social media. This is the one that everybody knows they should be doing more of, but you have to be intentional with your social media. You can't just put up, you know, the one weird picture of somebody with like torn hands and think that's gonna attract clients. But by the, you know, another token, you don't have to overthink this stuff. You don't have to plan out your social media in advance and make the perfect post. There's no single one post that's gonna get you clients. It's really the accumulation of multiple posts that build trust and care and a sense of knowledge over the years that really counts. First, let's start with the frame. Here's what you're trying to get across when you're on social media. When visitors see any type of media on your platform, especially, they should be able to immediately fill in the blanks in this sentence. This business helps this type of person achieve that result. That gym helps people lose weight. That gym helps people get fit for basketball season. That gym helps people feel great about themselves. Okay. So, you know, as an example, this business helps busy parents achieve weight loss. Think of social media as your free sample. Make sure that your prospects like the taste because they will want to put themselves in the shoes of the person who's in the picture and say, does it fit? Now let's talk about what to post where. This is a sample recipe that you can follow to make the decision-making process easy. The reason that people don't post enough on social media is because they're always trying to come up with the perfect post and they think, oh, I've got nothing to say. This it will help you just get something out there. It's way more important to be consistent than it is to have the perfect post. As I said, your posts tend to snowball and you're creating a body of work instead of like one perfect reel. So what you want to do here is just get something out into the world. Here's my, you know, uh, here's my idea, here's a concept, follow this framework, it'll help. Monday, do something about momentum Monday. Okay, so hype a reel or something like that. Um, show lifting, show a client succeeding at something. Then you can do a Tuesday technique. Hey guys, it's Coach Chris, and today I'm gonna teach you how to do a proper squat. Uh winning Wednesday, it builds motivation. You're gonna highlight a client. Here's where they were before, here's their favorite part of my gym. Testimonial Thursday, right? This is where you take a bright spot with your client's permission and you share that. Or you say to your client, hey, can I just grab you after class? I want you to tell me your favorite thing about my gym. And then feature Friday is talk about your business. What's your mission? What caused you to start a gym? What was your history? What was your first workout like? And then Saturday, you want to have something about um just positivity. Oh, I love my gym so much because here's the best thing I heard this week. Something like that. Again, like you're not trying to be perfect. There's no secret recipe. The recipe is bake the bread every day and just keep doing it. Now, what turns your social media from a brochure into new clients is how you engage with people who engage or interact with your social media. You want to contact everybody who engages with your social media really quickly. You want to reach out repeatedly, you want to start chats, you want to get DMs going with them. And the goal is to get a response and start a real conversation and just move down the funnel. We call this process sell by chat. Here's how it works. Here are the steps to doing sell by chat. I'm gonna break them down in detail for you. The first step is to engage with the person, right? Just say hello. So, as an example, you can say, hey, thanks for the follower. Thanks for hitting like on that post. Are you working out right now? Right? Remember that like a question mark is kind of like an upside-down fish hook. When you ask a question, people usually bite and they want to continue the conversation. After that, you want to start by qualifying them, right? So you ask them about their goals or their habits. So you might say, like, well, what are you doing for fitness these days? Now think about meeting somebody brand new. You're standing in a very long coffee line, and uh you notice that they're, you know, they've got their workout bag or something like that, and just say, hey, I'd notice the workout bag. You know, do you belong to a gym? What have you been doing for fitness these days? Make it feel natural, right? What would you say to a friend that you just ran into after a long period away? The first few times you do this, it's gonna feel awkward, but you just get better and better and keep in mind that you're trying to help this person and you're eventually gonna coach them into joining your gym and change their life. Third step is to validate their answer, right? Make them feel like they're doing something right. I used to, you know, try to always tell people they were doing something wrong. And I would think like, oh, that's gonna talk them into my gym. Uh what are you doing? Well, I'm jogging. Well, jogging is so bad for your knees, you should join my gym instead. You know, uh wrong. What you want to do is validate, right? So you want to say, oh, that's great. So you're jogging because you want to what? You want to build your endurance? You know, you're jogging because what? You're you're trying to use the shoes that you got for Christmas, whatever that is, you want to validate what they're doing and ask their reason. Then you want to offer to help them. You are a professional coach. That means that you will offer to help them first. We call this the help first philosophy. And so you want to do something that will help them. So, what you might want to do is offer some value or advice inside your service. Hey, I happen to be a fitness coach. Um, while we're standing in line here, can I ask about your program? And then you want to segue into, you know, some of the clients that I've worked with have had great results by doing this. Some of my clients tie their shoes differently. They make a loop in the top holes and they feed the string back through and then they tie them tighter and their shoes fit better on people with small heels. You know, have you tried that? Something like that. Help first, give them some advice that builds on what they're doing instead of contradicts what they're doing and makes them feel bad. Suggest a quick chat to personalize their help. Now, this is the awkward part for most people, but it's really, really simple. Hey, do you have time to chat about this a little bit more? I mean, this coffee line is not really the best place for it. Am I right? You know, or if somebody comes up to me at a hockey arena where we're watching kids play and they're like, oh, you're that guy that owns that gym, I'll say, Yeah, you're working out right now. And they'll say, Yeah, you know, I'm going to good life. And I'm like, how's that going? Well, you know, I try to get there three times a week, but it's tough. I say, Yeah, you know, a lot of my clients find the same thing. And the reason, honestly, that my business exists is because people make an appointment. We know that they're going to be there. And they'll say something, and I'll be like, you know, this isn't really the time or place to chat about it. I got to go. Are you open on Tuesday? Maybe we can have a 15-minute chat. I can call you or you can come in and take a look, right? It's that simple. Make it flow that easily. And remember, you are coaching them to make the decision that's going to change their life. So you can say, let's book a quick call to plan your results. Does that sound good if you're in social media and you're sending this as a text message? Let's book a quick call to plan your results. Sound good? Notice again that I'm ending with that fish hook, that question mark so that they feel like they have to respond. Now remember what I said about lead nurture. You want to schedule a call right away, not well, let's let's talk after Christmas. What you want to do is get them into a sales conversation within 24 hours. And if you can, and you're DMing them, you can say, hey, I got a couple minutes right now. What's your number? Or hey, look, I'm right between clients right now. Is this a good time for you? I'll call you right away. Continue the conversation and it will feel more natural, and you'll be more likely to get them to take the next step. If they say, no, I don't have time right now, or no, I'm not ready to chat, or no, I'm not ready to switch gyms, or I'm already working out and it's going great. No worries. Hey, um, can I add you to our email list? I've got some other great tips that I think you might really find valuable. That's all you got to say. Continue to add value, set them up for long-term lead nurture by getting them into your container. Keep the conversation going. You want to make it feel like it's not a monologue or a marketing advertisement, but it's a conversation. And so if you haven't heard from somebody for a while, follow up. Like give them a week and then just ask them as you normally would. Hey, did you wind up trying tying your shoes differently? Did you wind up trying that diet book that I gave you? Did you wind up trying a longer warm-up or those stretches that I sent you earlier? You know, a lot of people who read my book, Help First, think that good marketing is just giving away free information. It's not. Free information builds a little bit of trust, but you're not going to change a person's life with information or even knowledge. You're going to change their life by getting them into your gym. And so you need to continue this conversation and continue to coach them into coming in and signing up. Their lives will not change until that happens. Now, look, I've got a worksheet for this too. And if you want a copy of all the worksheets put together, just shoot me a DM on Facebook. I'd be more than happy to send them over to you. So that you've got a script to start from. Practice the script, follow it verbatim at first, and then if you want to change it or customize it later, great. But if you try to invent this stuff from scratch, you'll just get paralyzed. You'll just procrastinate and it won't get done. Follow these step by step at first, get some momentum, and then tweak it later if you want to. All right. The elephant in the room is paid ads. A lot of gym owners hate doing paid ads, but they do still work. We deliberately teach ads as the last funnel inside two-brain business or mentorship practice because the other ones are fast to get set up. They require little to no money or investment, and they multiply the results that you'll get from paid ads. If you get one lead in from a paid ad, and then you use referral marketing on that person, that can turn into two people in your gym and you double the ROI that you get from your paid ads. The goal of running ads at TwoBrain is to get you qualified leads as quickly and as cheaply as possible. And so when you are working with TwoBrain and you get on a call with a marketing specialist, they're gonna have an ad set up for you already. And they're gonna teach you how to keep running that ad, and they'll even follow up with you to make sure that you've got it. It's really important to me that you understand ads. Before you go out and hire an ad agency, you need to know the basics yourself so that you know if you're actually. Getting good results, or if you're just getting ripped off. Unfortunately, not every ad agency has your best interests in mind. And all of them are incentivized to spend all of your money, whether you're getting results or not. I want to teach you how to do it yourself, and then you can decide if you want to hire somebody to do it for you. So when you start with T-Brain, we we build your first set of ads for you, and then we teach you how to tweak them, and you can even have us continue to do them with one of our partners if you want to later. But the goal is to get qualified leads as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Time-based challenges have been the primary campaign for fitness marketers for the last 30 years for a good reason. They work. And even if you might not be attracted to this ad, chances are that your ideal client probably is. Now, we're not trying to set up a slimy bait and switch, and a lot of that went around our industry in 2018 when Facebook ads were cheap. What we are trying to do is use what works to get people in the door with what will work to change their lives. So the two-brain spin on these is that you are promoting a challenge through your ads, but your challenge is your on-ramp program and it's framed as a challenge to be more fun, more enticing, attractive, and can get people to like complete the whole challenge, right? So your challenges might be two-week on-ramp, it might be four weeks, whatever, but we're going to promote it with your ads as a challenge. Remember, in your ads, you can't write an entire book about what's in our challenge. We're going to teach you this and that. The ad is there to get their attention and to get them to take the next step, which is to book a call with you. That's where you can explain what the challenge actually is. Okay, now it is also still really important to refresh your ad. So every two to three months, change the name of your challenge to freshen up your creative. A caveat here is that advertising, especially on social media, is a science and not an art. You're not just going to create the most captivating, eye-catching, creative picture in history and automatically win new leads. What you need to do is run three different campaigns at a time, test which one is working the best, put all of your money into that campaign, and when it's not working as well, then you try something new. We teach you how to do all this stuff with mentorship and even build your first ads for you in TwoBrain. Look, I understand that if you've been around the industry for five years or more, you probably have this picture in your mind of running challenges and turning it into some bait and switch thing. We don't do that. That is not what TwoBrain is about. I want you to have a gym that you can be proud to run and never ever feel like a slimy salesperson. If you don't want to market your ads as a two-week challenge or a six-week challenge or a 30-day challenge, then you can run a similar campaign that draws on the same human psychology without saying the word six-week challenge. These are called 5130 posts, and you can try them for free as social media posts first. They also work great as ads. Here's how they work. I'm looking for this person who wants to achieve this one outcome in 30 days. I'm looking for five people who want to achieve 10 pounds of weight loss in the next 30 days or whatever it is. So here we go. Here's a sample for you. And if I look at the actual example here, you can see the 5130. Okay. I'm looking for five male doctors, five people who want to get in the best shape of their life, one goal in the next 30 days. That's what a 5130 is. And you can test these on social media for free and look at 46 comments, three shares. Then you start your sell by chat to coach them into your gym. If it works great, you can turn it into an ad. Put some money behind it, right? Pour gas on the fire. Look, if you're trying to get more people into your gym, you can't just wait until it's urgent. You have to build four funnels and have them flowing all the time. Then you don't get into these panicked emergency states where you're so desperate, you'll do anything to get a client, including cutting your own throat with discounts, including overpromising or feeling like a slimy salesperson. If you can nail these four funnels and just keep them going consistently, you don't have to be perfect and you'll never have to worry about lead flow again. Wouldn't that feel great? So thanks for making it to the end of this training. If you want help implementing these systems into your gym, here's what to do next. Scan this QR code and book a call with somebody on my team. We're going to run you through a business diagnostic and prescribe a custom plan based on your gym's metrics. That's why we're a coaching and mentoring company, because we're not just giving you blanket recommendation that works for other people. We're telling you how to fix your gym and what to do today to get started. Look, this is important to me because the reason most gyms go to business, nine out of every 10 gyms eventually fail. And the reason is money, and the reason is that you feel like you're out there alone. Like you're just not going to figure it out, you're overwhelmed, you can't do it all. We hear that all the time. TwoBrain exists to help gym owners. And we've helped thousands of gyms worldwide. So regardless of what you're struggling with in your gym, even if it's not marketing, we've probably helped another gym owner solve the exact same problem that you have. The first step is to talk to somebody on my team, make that first connection, let me introduce you, just scan this QR code, and then we're going to introduce you to hundreds of other gym owners who have had challenges that you've had, who are maybe going through the same things that you are. When we feel supported, we feel like we can tackle big problems, the big problems that will stop us from owning a gym that we love, from helping the people in our community change their lives, and from making an impact in our society as a whole. When you feel alone, you feel powerless to change things, but you're not powerless. It starts with one connection, and that is talking to somebody on my team about mentorship.