Run a Profitable Gym
Run a Profitable Gym is packed with business tools for gym owners and CrossFit affiliates. This is actionable, data-backed business advice for all gym owners, including those who own personal training studios, fitness franchises, and strength and conditioning gyms. Broke gym owner Chris Cooper turned a struggling gym into an asset, then built a multi-million-dollar mentoring company to help other fitness entrepreneurs do the same thing. Every week, Chris presents the top tactics for building a profitable gym, as well as real success stories from gym owners who have found incredible success through Two-Brain Business mentorship. Chris’s goal is to create millionaire gym owners. Subscribe to Run a Profitable Gym and you could be one of them.
Run a Profitable Gym
Revenue-Generation Tactics From a Million-Dollar Gym With 600 Members
What does it take to earn the top spot on Two-Brain’s revenue leaderboard?
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” host Mike Warkentin interviews gym owner Brandon Stratton to discuss the upgrades and operational systems that have allowed Bell House Training Co. to gross $1.2 million annually.
Brandon explains how a strategic rebrand, smart price adjustments and the removal of outdated discounts produced an immediate 10-15% revenue jump with minimal member attrition.
You’ll learn how Bell House keeps churn low with strong client follow-up systems, proactive communication and workflows designed to catch consistency dips before they become cancellations.
Brandon also shares how community-driven marketing brings in high-quality clients, how he manages seasonal attendance swings and why mentorship gives him the clarity he needs to find solutions faster.
Tune in to hear about the tactics that support a top-grossing gym—and learn how you can use them to increase revenue and help more people in your own business.
Links
Gym Owners United
Book a Call
0:35 - Brandon’s revenue streams
8:39 - Causes of revenue increase
13:41 - Goal: help more people
18:39 - His biggest challenges
22:50 - Why get a mentor?
This is huge. On our most recent top ten leader board for gym revenue, the average monthly gross was$83,551. Push that out annually. That is$1 million,$2,000 a year. We're talking about a collection of million dollar gyms. Brandon Stratton of Bellhouse Training Co. in Michigan was number one on that list, and he's agreed to tell us exactly how he generates so much revenue. This is Runner Profitable Gym. I'm your host, Mike Working and please hit subscribe so you don't miss a show. Now we're going to get right into the cash flow. Brandon, welcome and congrats on topping our leaderboard.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thank you. Appreciate that.
SPEAKER_02:It's such a great number, and this is the first time that we've had the average for our top 10 be over a million dollars. And back in the day when I first opened my gym and we were struggling to crack like 200 grand, this would have blown my mind. It's such a great thing to see this. So let's just get right into it. I'm going to ask you so just give us a little bit of perspective here. What do you sell over there at Bellhouse? What are your main revenue streams? Like, do you have a breakdown of like what goes into that? What are we selling? How are we generating this?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so for us, we're a large group and a small group training gym. Majority of our clients sell our in our large group space. That's how our model works. Um, so it's kind of a lower entry. I mean, it's still pretty high cost compared to what's the average, of course. Our average payment for our large group is$39 a week, but we also offer semi-private small group training. We have some clients in there that makes up for probably about 20 to 30% of our revenue stream, all in all. So everyone's on a weekly payment over at Bellhouse. So that's how we just keep it reoccurring. We don't do monthly because when you do the weekly, you collect that 13th month, of course, when it's all said and done. So that's a big thing for us. And then, of course, having that revenue stream consistently week by week allows us to be a little more cash flexible, which is great too. Uh, we also do uh a good amount of supplement sales too. We sell probably about a hundred thousand dollars worth of supplements throughout the year as well, which is great. So, I mean, we got 35% profit margins on that. So that covers some things, you know, like our health insurance for the team and so forth. So just another uh add-on that we do as well.
SPEAKER_02:So big group training, small group training. Do you do any PT? Forgive me if you mentioned that.
SPEAKER_00:We do not do PT. No, if our small group training is one to six. Yeah, one coach to six people.
SPEAKER_02:Would you ever do P PT or is that just something that's outside your list?
SPEAKER_00:Um I would love to. Our space, I mean, it's a blessing though. We're we're pretty much maxed out in our small group capacity to the space that we have allowed for what could be personal training. So it's it's kind of hard to add that additional space as of right now uh without bringing on an additional coach to do so. So it's not really uh something I'm against. I'm just not towards it right now for the business.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and the results are showing that it's working. What you've chosen is working. I was just curious because often when I talk to gyms with a lot of revenue, they're doing a lot of PT. Uh, but small group training is something that our recent state of the industry report showed is more and more important, and you've got it locked down. Uh, you said your large group stuff is about$39 a month. Uh what's uh what does a small group package cost?
SPEAKER_00:Sorry,$39 a week. Pardon me, a week. So like$160 a month.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So that's what that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so our large group, it just depends on how many um sessions they prefer to do on a month uh basis. So it ranges between$60 and$80 a week is kind of the average there.
SPEAKER_02:That's for small group.
SPEAKER_00:For small group, correct. Okay. And the nice thing too about our lar our small group is that we kind of give them like we're like, hey, you're you're paying for a small group membership, that's what you're getting. But if you want to jump into large group, large group's kind of free. Take it, take it if you want. It's kind of just a little bonus perk for people. It keeps the community strong. So I mean we have about roughly 580-ish members uh that we serve currently that are actively paying. So it just kind of helps with that community side of things as well when they have access to see some of their friends that are in large group and not just in small group.
SPEAKER_02:Now, in small group, I want to make sure listeners understand, are you doing the same workout with six different people modifying, or is everyone getting their individual workout in that group?
SPEAKER_00:The workout for the day is the workout for the day. But if someone has uh, you know, we put everyone through a functional movement screen prior to them coming in, we test, we retest. If someone's not supposed to be doing an overhead shoulder press, for example, they're not they're not doing that. If it's in the programming that day, we're gonna do something that's maybe an area of focus for them and try to get them better in that movement. Uh, we we work alongside of a lot of physical therapists in the area. So if there's something that's in their PT routine that's gonna help with that shoulder, we help that client. So there is individualization, but for the most part, the workouts, the workout, I'd say about 70% of the people are capable of doing the workout the way it's built. Then we make the adjustments uh prior to the sessions for the individuals.
SPEAKER_02:Excellent. And that's different from semi-private training where you've got a coach and one, you know, who's doing four, even six individualized workouts. There's two variations of the same principle. The idea is a low coach to athlete ratio, but in this case, they're doing the same workout with modifications for injuries and injury status and things like that. Yeah, so that's perfect. How long have you been doing this business model? Like how long have you had small group training in place?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I purchased this gym two years ago from I mean, I I opened it as a manager seven years ago. So 2018 is when we opened it. We've always had the so large group was there leading up until 2020, and then we added small group um after obviously COVID and everything like that. So we've had the small group model since about 2021.
SPEAKER_02:Uh-huh. So you're a bit of a leader on that one because again, like that that stuff has been out there for a long time, but very few people have been doing it, especially gyms that have done the large group thing. A lot of them, Chris Cooper's talked about this a lot of inspection in a CrossFit setting. People skipped. We opened, I did this, we opened a large warehouse and tried to fill big group classes when in fact at the original CrossFit gym, Greg Glassman started with personal training, and then he started with you know pairing people up into small groups, and we just forgot about that part. And a lot of us lost a lot of time and money with that mistake. Yeah, but you figured it out early. So 2020, you know, just after COVID, you got that figured out uh and purchased the gym and now you're rolling with that, and that's that you know, it I wish I had done that the the way you did. How has revenue increased over time? Like, were there any significant bumps where things were like, whoa, this automatic, this just jumped way up? Or how has things gone for you? Slow and steady?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So I like I said, I purchased the gym two years ago in February. Um, we invested a lot into some new equipment, redesigning the building, just learning things over the years from the large group side of things, how we can train smarter and large group. Uh, we come from the Fitbody Bootcamp world is where we originally originated from. And not saying that the programming that Fitbody Bootcamp had was bad. It's just we were on a different scale where a lot of the large group training gyms didn't really exceed 20 to 30 people on average. Our sessions have an average of 35, and then our early morning sessions will have 60, sometimes 70 people coming in every yeah, every 45 minutes. So that type of dynamic we had to restructure to make sure that we were training smart effectively. So, yeah, there was that initial investment for that. But uh sorry, going back to your original, what was your original question? I apologize.
SPEAKER_02:I was just no, that's fascinating. Yeah, but I'm gonna ask you just before you hit that, what what kind of space, like how much square footage do you have?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so the gym itself is just shy of 10,000 square feet.
SPEAKER_02:So okay, so that's big, but that's but still for 60 or 80 people. Like that's that's incredible. So and what kind of equipment is is what's your go-to equipment in there? Like I'm guessing in that space with that many people you can't use barbells, you're probably using something else.
SPEAKER_00:No, we we do barbells. Um our yeah, so our workout space for large group, we have the kind of like the, I don't want to call them gymnastic mats, but the carpet squishier mats that we have on 50% of the room, and then the other side is just gonna be your traditional rubber flooring. We keep a lot of our equipment on the perimeter, so like our rigs or storage rigs, our landmines, things you can hook up, TRX, Fitbands. Um, I have seven cable machines that are on the outside of perimeter, uh, impact walls and so forth. So that way, if we need to clear the space to run our sleds and our tanks, do sprints, we can do that up the middle. So there's about 4,500 square feet roughly dedicated to that large group training space, maybe a little closer to 5,500. But we do everything, hence bell house, where do kettlebells, dumbbells, barbells. That's our primary go-to. We do have our um our hex bars that we play with quite a bit, trap bars, but that's kind of our go-to stuff on top of our cables and and so forth. So okay.
SPEAKER_02:I'm gonna assume that you guys are just masters of running of uh of running huge amounts of people through this place and programming appropriately. I won't get into it because it's probably outside the scope of the revenue generation, but you know, that is that's all that's a big space, but it's not a monster space and to run like 40 people through. Man, I was struggling in 6,000 with 20. So you're doing an awesome job of organizing that. And I'll just assume that you guys are all great coaches. The the original question was just has revenue increased? Were there any big like big jumps like hockey sticks where all of a sudden things went up, or was it just a slow, steady climb, or what did you see?
SPEAKER_00:Yep. So one of our biggest revenue increases uh right after COVID with restructuring, then of course opening as Bellhouse. We we had people from OG prices back in 2018 that were never increased. We had people on couples rates that had no business being on couples rates anymore. So for us, we were able to kind of do an audit of all of our 600 members, um, increase our prices, increase our value as we did our remodel under Bell House. So that was a pretty big spike in our overall revenue. It's just like, hey, this is the product and the service that we offer. And we increased it probably by about I don't know, 10 to 15% all around. So that was a pretty big jump just to establish the baseline. We didn't really lose a ton of people. You know, there was a lot of people with one foot out the door already. That was kind of like their way of, hey, see ya. But all in all, that was our biggest revenue increase. But outside of that, we've been doing pretty well for a while. Um, our attrition's been really low in small group, which has been a big just profit point for us over the years. I mean, we have currently about 100 members back in our small group space. They're paying on average about 70. Well, you average everyone out 71 uh 50 per week on average for all those people. So that's a good uh revenue stream that comes in for that for very little overhead, which is great.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. So you've said a couple of things that I'm just gonna pull out for our listeners here. One of the things you just said is you just you basically eliminated discounts or adjusted them in that case. Like you said, there are a lot of people in couples discounts who, you know, maybe it wasn't a couple anymore, things like that. So you address discounts, and I can tell you that just what any gym that has discounts, if you get rid of them, that's essentially a rate increase, and that revenue drops all to the bottom line. Uh one mentor, I think he's done, I want to say it's close to a hundred rate increases with gym owners, and not not one single gym has lost all their clients. And you're another one on the list where it's like I raised my rates, didn't lose all my clients. And yeah, you lose a few people, but it's almost always like you said, the people that were just looking for an excuse. It's like, oh, I stubbed my toe and I'm leaving. You know, that's a good thing. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, yeah. And it they're not the and uh we everybody's a good person, but they're just not the good members that are gonna stay there long term and like they were looking for an excuse. So you've done uh those two things, which is great. The other interesting one is billing weekly, and we've talked about gyms that bill weekly and bi-weekly versus monthly. It's often more convenient for members because it matches up with pay schedules of every two weeks or something like that, as opposed to like it's large bill once a month and I got paid at the wrong time. Like it sometimes works out easier, but you do collect some extra revenue. So it's an extra for your case, essentially an extra month. So these are all keys to revenue that listeners, if you're not doing this stuff, these are some simple changes that you can make. And again, rate increases are best done with the help help of a mentor, eliminating discounts. Start with new people coming in. That's an easy one. They don't even know there's a discount. And then you can work on these things, but changing billing, all these things can equal more revenue, and they're fairly simple in concept. The execution is a little bit tricky. With help, you can do it no problem. Uh, you so you hinted at this, and I'm just gonna ask you this.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, while you're on that, another another big another uh pointer that I I just thought of that we we switched because we we changed CRMs about a year ago. Um and when we did that, obviously when you do the weekly increase or sorry, the weekly rates, what we did is we encouraged everyone to go to ACH. Like ACH, we're gonna charge you zero dollar increase for that or zero percent increase for that. But then anyone that was hesitant to go to that, then they're getting hit with a 3% charge. Um so that's just another thing to help offset some of those costs. Because I mean, when you're running that, I mean you're over a million dollars, that$1.2 million that comes in at the end of the year, you know, that's a you know, even a couple percent, that's a lot of money. So yeah so yeah, so we're we're avoiding that now, which is great.
SPEAKER_02:And we've recommended that in one of our uh Chris Kruger's free guides for gym owners. We said exactly that. If you could offer it as an option, and it's like this option doesn't cost you anything. And again, with the ACH, I believe it's a little bit slower, so you have to make sure you have the cash flow laid out, but it's still, if you're on that plan, it works out nicely. If you want to pay by credit card, cool, but there is a service fee that will pass on and people understand that at this point because you are giving them a better option. So that's a great one. And like, you know, even in a small gym, two or three percent is important because you don't have a lot of profit margin. If you could take two or three percent back on a$1.2 million gym, right, that's a huge deal. So that's a great point. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00:It's an easy sell to clients too, because it's like, hey, at the end of the day, that's three percent going out the door to someone that you don't care about, that's not gonna benefit the coaches, not gonna benefit the gym. So it's just an easy sell. And and we didn't have any pushback with that, which was great.
SPEAKER_02:No, and as things evolve, people are more and more people are understanding that, and no one wants to give that fee away. And exactly like you said, if you frame it like that, I can use this money to reinvest in my coaches in my facility. Of course, there's gonna be some profit in there too, but no one pushes back on that. And if they still want the convenience of the points on their credit card, that two or three percent probably doesn't bother them too much. So that works out, that works out just fine. So the big thing, and you hinted at it, but maybe I'm wrong, you have to focus on like you're you have to, you know, there's a lot of different stuff that goes into a big revenue number. It could be like sales and marketing, it could be retention, it could be average revenue per member. What are you focused on? What's your big thing?
SPEAKER_00:You know, it's been interesting, especially with us being a larger gym over the years. You know, I've had a lot of mentors, a lot of different people that are like, hey, you need to change up the business structure. And, you know, if I could do it differently, sure I would. But we've been in the game for so long. We've developed such a tight-knit community that I don't want to disrupt the community just to make a couple extra dollars or potentially lose a lot and disrupt the community. So for me, I'm just focusing on, you know, we have our gyms in our area. We I mean, I'm in the same parking lot as the Planet Fitness. And that actually helps us more than anything else. Uh, but we have like our very high like strength coaching gyms. And, you know, I I look at our type of gym as like, you know, you look at the majority of the population, the majority of the population doesn't work out, they don't know how to work out. I mean, you get your people that go to Planet Fitness, they don't know what they're doing. And our goal is like, I'm not trying to, you know, increase revenue so much and and make it unobtainable for people to come in. We want to be able to help every single person that's just looking to finally figure out how do I deadlift properly? How do I how do I know if I'm actually making progress in this? And we we have a nutrition aspect as well. So I'm you know, I'm focusing on getting as many people through the door that we can help. So as far as marketing goes, I'm trying to get people in just to get a taste of it. Because I think a lot of people that are used to paying, you know, a planet fitness rate of$30 a month, and then they find out we're$39 a week, they go, that's insane. It's like, well, is it like how long have you been at Planet Fitness? Is it making you any progress? Are you confident you can even do it? Are you confident you even know how to do a deadlift properly? And and majority of these people are like, no, they have no idea what they're doing as far as programming. So, you know, we we do different charity events throughout the years right now. We we're a part of a nonprofit called the Big Gifts. We're raising money for kids for Christmas. So I'm giving away an entire month to our entire community. So we've got currently to date, uh it's November 19th, we just started it. So this is our third week into it. We have about 55 people that are coming in for a free membership, essentially. They donate and give to these kids, which is great. But it gives them a chance to get a taste for like, hey, what does it look like to actually have programming done for me, coaches that are willing to correct my form on everything that I'm doing, versus just walking around a room clapping, saying, Great job, like we're we're in the trenches with them. So we focus on just just doing as much community-driven marketing as possible. Some people, you know, you know, they don't like to give away stuff for free. And I'm just like, give people a taste and get people to work out with their friends, with their with their spouses, and so forth, and they end up falling in love with what they what we're doing. So, yes, we do market pretty heavily towards the different programs that we do on a seasonal basis, but um, I'm all about any type of community-driven aspect that we can get as many people through the doors and feel better when they leave, it always ends up being in our favor to help us.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, I mean, so so listeners like think about this. Brandon is operating from a real position of strength here. He's got a gym with a ton of momentum, a ton of members, long-term thing that's going really, really well. And he's figured out a community aspect with donations and so forth to get people in the gym. Now, that's advanced technique from a very successful gym owner. A starting point that's very, very easy that you could do next week is a simple bring a friend event. It could be a workout, it could be a seminar, it could be just a lunch and whatever, and you're gonna make it simple. You're gonna get people's contact info when they come in the door, you're gonna put it into your CRM, you're gonna talk to them at the event, try to book a consultation right there, or if not there as soon as possible. And if they don't do that, you're gonna follow up with them through your in per you know, on the phone or in your CRM. That's the simplest way that you can do a version of that, and you can do that at your gym. We have gyms that use this as their prime marketing technique, and it works really, really well. So that's a really fascinating one that you can do. And the other thing that's really cool, Brian, that you were saying is like you've got this planet fitness across the parking lot and you're 4X the price, and you found a way to tell people who wander across the parking lot why you're worth it.
SPEAKER_00:So a lot of people come over from Planet Fitness and they, you know, they ask what we're all about. And I always ask them, I'm like, hey, tell me about your training history. Tell me about how long you've been working out, what do you like to do? Why do you go to Planet Fitness? Like, okay, how long have you been doing that? And how, you know, how has that been getting you closer to your goal of X, Y, and Z weight loss or getting ready for this wedding and so forth. And a lot of times people are like, it's getting me nowhere. I'm like, okay, um, well, there you have it. And then I tell them a little bit about our systems and how we approach getting them from point A to point B. Everyone's got a little bit different way of going about it, but we try to meet them where they're at and and get them there. And it's it's really an easy sell because they they tee themselves up right for the the the easy sale every time. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So okay, that's fascinating. So I gotta ask, like, what are the challenges of running like a monster operation like this? Like it's I got my my my brain blew up at about 230, 40 members. You've got more than double that. What are some of the challenges? And you know, what are you working on with your mentor to make this place even better because you have a long history of success?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you know, the biggest struggle is obviously we go through the seasons, and and I'm sure a lot of gym owners go through similar seasons where for us we're we're very community driven. Our our main demographic, we've got probably 40s through mid-50s. You've got a lot of people that have school-age kids still. So, especially being in Michigan where the weather's kind of eh here and there, that when summer's here, people typically don't spend as much time in the gym. So that is our slow season between, you know, kids get out of school, we're slow. When we pick up is when kids go back into school, slow down right around the holidays when people get a little busy, and then pick up, obviously, just like everyone else in that January, February range. But our biggest hiccup is making sure that as we go through these ups and downs with as many people as we have is keeping them consistent with their workouts. And we always know that, hey, if we're gonna go into this summer flow or we're going into the holiday season, because you get some members that if they fall below three workouts on average a week, we start to see the trend that when they get hit for four or five, six weeks of payments at$40 a week, that they're like, hey, I'm I'm not coming in, I'm gonna go ahead and submit a cancellation request. So we do whatever it's possible through email marketing. We have our coaches follow up, we have you know workflows that are set up that if people dip below that line for weeks on weeks on end, that we're either getting on phone calls or setting up game plans to make sure that they're staying in for a minimum, or at least understanding that, hey, like I know you're normally a five or six times a week workout person, but it's okay that you're only doing two or three right now. That doesn't mean that you're just gonna throw up your hands and quit. Like it's a season, you're gonna get back into it, everyone's busy through this, and sometimes people just forget that's that's life. It's funny how that works every single year, it's the same situation, but they they they forget. Um, so that's our biggest thing is maintaining attrition is with that follow-up. Um, I I you know a lot of gyms might not do that, but we try to get on phone calls with people that have that haven't been in for a while to maintain those big numbers. And then of course, coaching and staffing, we've we've been blessed to have uh a really consistent coaching staff uh for the years. You know, we've had coaches there now for eight, yeah, going on eight years, three to four of them. So that's pretty good. But a lot of them now are getting, well, I'm not much I'm I'm 33, but we got a lot of a lot of our guys that are getting 31, having their first kid and you know, second kid, and we're we're starting to lose some coaches here and there because you know it's it's it's a hard job for those that are that are in it with multiple kids now. So it's it's trying to maintain a really good coaching and staff culture, and we try to invest a lot in our coaches as well. So whenever we do that and we're just we're transparent with our clients and and and getting feedback from clients on a regular basis, our clients really bought into what we do and believe what we do.
SPEAKER_02:So what I'm gonna pull out of what you said there is like I heard a lot of systems and processes and all sorts of stuff. And I I I I couldn't imagine running a gym with that much revenue, that many clients without uh just locked-in systems. Is have you got just an airtight playbook that you're updating all the time, or how do you manage all this?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we have systems. Um the systems aren't perfect, you know. We we try to manage it. I mean, it's just it's certain seasons they hit us harder than others with cancellations. I mean, we had a it just unpredictable. We had one one month where we we lost an additional 10 people outside of the ordinary. Five of them are moving, two of them, you know, unfortunately go through divorce or whatever else. And it's just like we do what we can to try to save people. And so we do have seasons like that. But our systems, yeah. I mean, we uh we we review our systems on a we have Monday meetings for an hour. We pretty much go through our systems. We go through our trial systems, we go through our retention systems, we go through our uh client communication. Like, how are we doing as a team is making sure that every single day when people walk through the doors, if someone's brand new, are we aware of their um their injuries, the their their goals, their forwards, and things like that. So we we try to stay on top of that on a on a weekly basis.
SPEAKER_02:So here's the big question. You've done a ton of stuff over the years, successful gym, lots of momentum, things going in the right direction. Why sign up for mentorship? What are you trying to get out of it now?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think it's just seeing different perspectives, right? Like you're we're in our own community, we're in our own bubble here in West Michigan, and it's just good to get fresh perspective on a lot of situations that you may think you're doing right, or sometimes you may think you're doing wrong. There were some things that I thought I was maybe doing wrong, and it was nice just talking with a mentor, and he's like, dude, you're not you're not the only person in this boat right now. And that's also nice to hear in this mentorship. It's like, look, you you you try to do all the right things, and if they sometimes fall apart, uh you're not the only one right now in those situations. So that's great. But yeah, I think just getting clarity from a mentor that's been in this probably just as long, if not longer, than I have, and also being very successful in his own style of gym, just getting different perspectives when it comes to marketing, how to handle the team, how to handle client situations. Um, and and the nice thing for us, because we're such a community-driven gym, and my mentor's gym is very community-driven as well, is just getting different, fresh ideas from community initiatives. Because sometimes after being in it for so long, now eight almost eight years, you kind of do the same thing-ish year after year. And it's nice to get fresh perspective and find things that worked really well. So that way I don't have to go through the, oh, I'll just try it. And if it fails, it's like, well, I'll I'll lean on him because he already tried and either failed or it worked, and then I can take some of those best practices. So that's been a nice, a nice thing to learn so far.
SPEAKER_02:Nice, and that's Ryan McFaddy over in Ohio, correct?
SPEAKER_00:Correct, yep.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he's a good guy. I'm gonna ask you this on the way out the door here. So other gym owners are listening, and let's say they're in that realm of like 200 grand and they want to get to 300 grand. What would you toss at them as an idea to get them moving in the right direction?
SPEAKER_00:Oh man, I'd have to know their gym. But I'd say, you know, you gotta have your systems. Um every single thing has gotta be system driven. We are, you know, from the the time the doors open to the time the lights are automated turned on, from the experience of how the front entry and lobby looks to who's cleaning, when they're cleaning, how the team cleans, what the team's expectations are or your expectations are as a gym owner, when people walk through that door, where are you in the building? Like, what are you saying? What are you doing? Because as soon as those lights turn on for us at 4 50 a.m. on the dot, that door is open, we are front-centered and focused. We're not sitting there organizing weights and stuff like that. We are we're dialed in communicating with our clients. And it and if you don't know the step-by-step play of like, I mean, I can run this thing sitting here, like not even thinking, like I can run you through the whole system. Like, you have to know all those things. And when you're not there to be at the gym, you need to be communicating to your team if things start to fall off your communication line of how your systems run. Even little things for me, like our cleaning closet door, drives me nuts. Sometimes they leave the cleaning closet door open. And I'm like, clients don't need to see that. Like, like it's kind of a production, they don't need to see behind the curtain. Even though it's a small thing, during the week, you got to send them the photo. Like, hey, another reminder, shut this door. They don't need to see this. Or if something's missed, you gotta be, you gotta be on top of that. Or at least I, you know, I've got two guys at the gym that, you know, they're very similar-ish personalities to mine when it comes to detail. And and if there's something that's falling, you know, when I'm not there, they're able to pick up that, which is nice to have that, those type of team members. So I'd say, all in all, dial in your systems, know your target audience that you're working with, and just be all in on communicating clearly, not only with your team and your processes, but also your your members. Like our members, they they know my processes. Like that's that's how much we communicate it. Like when kids come in, they know that their kids take their shoes off when it snows because I'm not having them run through the building. They know that, you know, they know the types of things because we communicated even clearly with them with our processes and expectations. And our long-term members, when something doesn't feel right or something seems off, they'll reach out to me and be like, hey, I just saw the other day that that that so-and-so did wasn't doing X, Y, and Z. I'm like, well, hey, I'm glad you ratted on them. But you know, I appreciate that you know my standards as well. So um, if your clients know your standards, you're you're in good standing.
SPEAKER_02:And you're doing all this with almost 600 clients. So that's incredible that you can communicate that because 300 usually breaks most gyms. So what you're doing is incredible. Listeners, I didn't say it. It was Brandon. If you want to get to an extra 100 grand in revenue or even reach that million dollar mark, you need to have business systems. They are the foundation of everything. You can't build a skyscraper without a foundation. So I'll tell you get this little stuff in place. It's not about uh you know, bait and switch marketing, crazy offers, or all this other stuff. It's systems and then you scale from there. A mentor can help you do it. Brandon, thanks so much for being here and sharing your secrets. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, thank you.
SPEAKER_02:That was Brandon Stratton, our top revenue generator at TwoBrain. I'm Mike Working, and this is Run a Profitable Gym. Please hit subscribe on your way out the way door. And here's TwoBrain Founder Chris Cooper with a final message.
SPEAKER_01:Hey, it's TwoBrain Founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I'd love to have you in that group. It's Gym Owners United on Facebook or go to gym ownersunited.com to join. Do it today.
