More Leads in 60 Minutes: He Found the Leaks Most Gym Owners Miss

Don’t let potential members slip away! Get the free “1-Hour Marketing Audit for Gym Owners” here. 

Joe Rouse ran Two-Brain's  “1-Hour Marketing Audit” on his gym and uncovered gaps in his funnels—even after 12 years in business.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Mike Warkentin sits down with Joe, owner of Breakaway Fitness & Performance, to find out what he discovered using Chris Cooper’s free marketing audit guide.

Joe thought his funnels were dialed in. The audit proved him mostly right: His lead follow-up, Google Business profile and website all earned top scores.

But the audit also revealed a few critical gaps: His social media posting schedule wasn’t being followed consistently, and his sales process needed better documentation for staff handoff.

In under an hour, Joe walked away with a clear action plan to improve his lead generation and sales—so no more potential members slip through the cracks.

Even experienced gym owners find problems when they audit their marketing. Joe plans to use this guide quarterly to keep his funnels and his sales process running smoothly. 

Get the free 26-page guide via the link below and fix your gym’s marketing funnel today!

Links

1-Hour Marketing Audit for Gym Owners

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

2:12 - No. 1 audit discovery

5:08 - What he’s doing right

8:33 - Getting recommended by AI

12:48 - Post-audit action plan

15:40 - Sales process improvements

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Joe, are your marketing funnels working?

SPEAKER_00 0:05

They are. How do you know? Because I did the marketing audit with Two Brain Business.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Did it actually take one hour?

SPEAKER_00 0:12

It did.

SPEAKER_02 0:13

And did you find any issues that you're addressing right now to improve lead flow?

SPEAKER_00 0:17

I found a few issues.

SPEAKER_02 0:18

Hmm. So we're gonna fix your funnels, which are already running well, but we're gonna make them A plus and get some greasy leads sliding down into your gym so you can help more people change their lives. Are you ready to share what you learned with our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Yeah, happy to share.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

All right, Jim Owners, this is Joe Rouse of Breakaway Fitness and Performance. He used our new guide to unclog his funnels in less than an hour. He found a lot of good things. He found a couple things he wants to improve. He took action, his lead flow is going to improve quickly. It's 26 pages of do this, check that, log that. It's gonna produce more leads and sales. Do you agree with that, Joe?

SPEAKER_00 0:50

I'd agree 100%.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

All right, so we're gonna find out what Joe did in his audit. But first, if you want a copy of this guide, click the link in the show notes. It's 26 pages and it's gonna come with a done-for-you video with Chris Cooper where he's gonna lead you exactly through everything step by step. 26 pages, less than an hour. Chris found some clogs, Joe found some clogs, they both fixed them. Their lead flow will improve, you will get more clients, you will earn more, you will change more lives, you'll fulfill your mission as a gym owner. Get this guide. Link is in the show notes. This, of course, run a profitable gym. I'm your host, Mike Workenden. We're gonna dig into this with Joe. Ready?

unknown 1:23

All right.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

Let's do it. First question to help anyone decide if they want this guide. Did you find this to be a valuable exercise? And you can throw this right back in my face if you did not, because you were the very first person to fill this guide out for us.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

As somebody who has used the marketing audits as a client of TwoBrain, as somebody who's been in business for over 12 years, I was I was surprised how much value I found in it, to be honest.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Ah, this is good. I'm excited about that because we put this thing together. Chris submitted, he's like, I think this is going to really help a lot of gym owners. And we always test stuff. So I want to throw it by you and get your opinion first. Then we had Chris record the entire walkthrough. And Chris, as a gym owner, said the same thing. He's like, wow, I can't believe what I found, even though I've had my gym for 20 years. If I fix this today, which he did, it's going to change my lead flow immediately. So let's go into this. And I want to know the number one thing that you discovered in your marketing funnels. Like, what action are you taking right now to address the big thing?

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Well, I took a little bit of action like while I was doing it, and it still took less than an hour. So I wanted to make sure I said that. I updated some of the automated texts that follow up and things like that. But the biggest thing that I need to take action on is I realized or brought to my attention, maybe more mindful of the fact that we have three main people that post consistently on our social media business channels. And it's led to a lot of workout content, which I need to mix up. But even though we have an SOP, even though we have a content calendar with specific days for posting specific things between three of us, we are not all following that schedule consistently because there's just not any accountability. I mean, I have great employees, very trustworthy, but we have specific nutrition content. I do specific blogs, and then I have another coach who runs our semi-private program and our youth program. And there's not enough communication between the three of us to get that stuff consistent.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

Okay, so right away, so we have this this guide takes you through everything from the very like we're gonna help you look at your gym as an outsider, find out what Google shows you, find out what AI shows you. We're gonna look at your social media, your lead nurture, your sales and closing, all in less than an hour. And you found that your major problem was just in social media consistency, even though you that you have an SOP, you just need to get you know back on track with it.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Yeah, I mean it's I guess consistency is not really the right word. It was more it was more following the schedule. It's getting posted, but not on the schedule, not with the actual schedule that we have in place because we're not communicating enough as a team specifically on that. I've never considered that that's something that should be communicated more in a team meeting or in its own meeting, is like our social media posting. So that's the biggest thing it's it's gonna lead to, is probably an established at least a monthly meeting.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

Yeah, and this is incredibly common. Uh you build a process, or first of all, you don't have a process. That's what I did for about 10 years as a gym owner when Tubrain helped me out. I built these processes. Then I let them rot, or they weren't followed to the letter and they were built perfect, but they just didn't get implemented or they didn't get updated. That's very, very common. So you found a spot where I have a thing, we could just do a better job of following that thing. And there's other stories like this. One of our mentors, uh Kenny Marquart, I remember he was on vacation, he was watching like a pot of dolphins off the beach in Mexico or something. He looks at the gym's social media, he finds that no one's posted in two weeks. His social media happens, manager happens to be his wife sitting next to him, and they have a little bit of a disagreement in paradise or something like that. That happens. Chris has SOPs for everything at his gym. He looked, and I'll I'll tip my hand a little bit here. He looked at his Google business profile and found that the reviews were not consistent. He hadn't been responding to reviews and he hadn't made a post in a few months. And he was just like, whoa, like this needs to get fixed immediately because Google business profile is a huge part of SEO. And if you're active on there, things are going to go better. So he did the same thing. Less than 60 minutes, he walked through this entire thing and he found a couple of places where he could improve. Let's talk about things that the guide confirmed because you work with a two-brain mentor, you've gone through a lot of this stuff. So you were able to check a lot of boxes and say, perfect, perfect, perfect. What are you doing right at your gym that this guide confirmed?

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Uh the thing that comes to mind, there was a few things that were good. And it's partially because I've done these, I've done an audit similar to this before with my mentor, TwoBrain. But uh the biggest thing that's probably the tightest for me is my lead follow-up systems. A lot of it's automated, but leads aren't going to fall through the cracks for us.

SPEAKER_02 5:37

Yeah, and I saw that. Like when I looked at your at your guide, it's your follow-up is A plus. You've got automations, you've got all the stuff that comes that comes in, and people are get they get a response. And that's something that you know Chris checked his funnels as well. He uh literally on camera, he he clicked into his funnel, he uses a kilo website, so everything was perfect. He got a text on his watch right away saying, hey, thanks for contacting us. He called his gym and he knew the guy was there, but he also got to the machine. But again, that's realistic in many gyms because a lot of calls, I think, as you said, calls are often spam. We're not we don't have people sitting by phones every single time. But the follow-up for a message or a phone call has to be quick. And that's something that's another place where gyms will find out. Like I had a phone at my gym and someone checked the machine monthly, maybe, and that's a huge mistake because we check it, and there was literally someone saying, Hey, how do I join your gym? You're like, Well, that was four weeks ago. They've clearly joined another gym. But your follow-up, uh, it was very fast. It was like two to five minutes or something, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Yeah, always. And and if somebody calls, we we're not great about getting calls either because it's a gym-specific phone, but it's set up to automatically text them right after they call. And it it if they leave a voicemail, it shows up in that, you know, that messaging thread, so we can answer that. But it also just texts them and says, Hey, sorry we missed your call. How can we help?

SPEAKER_02 6:50

Yeah, and it's the phone is super important in in gyms, but at the same time, communications are shifting into like DMs and texts and things like that. So it's not the end of the world if you don't have a person sitting next to your phone. I would suggest it's a really horrible thing. If your phone rings, rings, rings, rings, rings, you never get a good message, you never get a message that tells you how to take the next step, you never respond to messages, and those leads just move on to the next thing. And that might often be the older demographic 50 plus, or it might be someone else who just prefers a real chat with a real person. So, you know, fix the phone thing. What else are you doing right in there? Your Google business profile, I believe, was excellent as well. Am I right?

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Yeah, Google Business is something we kept up with for a while now. And when you have the right software, you know, and you pre-schedule social media posts, you can add Google, Google My Business in there. So that's been really helpful for keeping that up to date for us. And I think, you know, that in collaboration with blogs and having the website the right way. I think that's led to us doing well even with newer stuff like Google AI. I showed up a little bit lower than I would like to show up with Google AI for gyms near me, but personal trainer was was great. But a good example is yesterday, like this literally happened yesterday. A guy messaged me on Facebook and he said, Hey, I'm looking for a male personal trainer who can either come to my house or maybe I can come to you. I'm 51. I'm looking to get ripped for the first time in my life. Like that's literally what he typed me. Nice. I said, Oh, great. How did you find out about me uh specifically? And he said, I just typed it into Google. He was a realtor, so he he appreciated this. And he said, I typed it into Google, and he sent me the screenshot, and he just typed in looking something like the best male personal trainer in Hampstead, North Carolina, and it listed AI listed it off, and then it had my name on there first, which was really, really interesting to see.

SPEAKER_02 8:32

Wow. So AI sent you a lead or client.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

What do you think it was? And I did see this post that you posted in our private growth group. What do you think it was that caused AI to select you? What have you been publishing and doing that gave like this? Isn't something we weren't going to talk about, but this is a huge deal. What do you think it was that gave AI the tip that said Joe is the man?

SPEAKER_00 8:55

I'm I'm I'm consistent with we blog twice a week. There it is. I know that supposedly that's not as important as it used to be, but we do blog twice a week, and that information gets shared to social media and gets emailed out. And we have a over, I think, 119 five-star Google reviews. Yeah. That's supposed to be that's important. And we post to our Google business page several times a week. Like every time we post to Facebook, we're also posting to the Google business page. So those I would say were probably the three most important things. We about a just over a month ago also set up kind of a baseline for we've started running Google ads, which we hadn't done in a while. I don't know that that affects the AI part of it or not, but those are the main things that we do with Google.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Yeah, and the the inner workings of search engines and algorithms and all and AI are like very closely protected unless people try to sell you the info that I know how to hack it. No one really does unless they work for the uh the companies and have signed all their non-disclosure agreements. But the reality is we know for sure that if you publish more stuff and it's good and people read it and like it and it's clear, you stand a better chance of being found by search engines and AI. Because they're first of all, you've given the signs of life that I exist and I am intelligent and I'm clicking things or I'm publishing things. People are clicking into them and reading them, that's always good. And then if the information is clear and it's certainly clearer than anyone else around you, you're going to start moving up on those rankings. Like that's not any search engine wizardry. That is just like the blunt thing where if you publish regularly and tell people clear information, you will slowly start to build your business. And Google and AI will help. And the prime example of this is obviously Chris Cooper's been publishing stuff for 20 years, built it into a major gym and a major mentorship company. That's the principle. It starts small, but this is part of that exercise. Like if you search, and Chris has this in here, if you start searching Google and use AI and you don't show up at all, but all your competitors do, you're gonna look at what they're doing and you can start saying, I need to do this too. So if you like Joe, you you came up, like you popped up in there and you said you looked a little bit higher, but again, some of that is like exactly the search terms or the location and things like that. But you popped up. Yeah, but if you found out, like some of the gyms you said ahead of you, I think were were they big box gyms or something, a different training style, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Yeah, the only ones that I recall, at least when I was reviewing the the audit this morning, the only ones that showed up had a higher than me for the gym near me type search was big box style gyms. So that's hard to beat in Google searching. I mean, just for that gym near me, they're really hard to beat. Um but personal trainer near me, we're always at the top.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

So that's a huge thing, right? So maybe you're not gonna beat uh, you know, good life is the big chain up in Canada. Uh what down down there, what's a big one near you guys? Cheating gyms.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Well, for us, it's actually local, they're local. The ones that are in my town. I'm in a very small town.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

But here you probably see like lifetime fitness.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

Sure. So stuff like that. It's tough to beat those guys in the overall rankings, but ultimately, most of those gyms are selling access rather than coaching. So when you search, if someone searches like personal trainer near me, group fitness near me, or stuff, you know, classes, fitness classes, if you start to pop up on those rankings, that's going to be a huge deal. And for you, that did. So obviously you're doing something right on your website. And on that website, you know, you've got a clear form, a clear call to action. Like when you, when I saw your page there, you just click through all the boxes, like, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Got this, everything works. You click in. So when a lead goes to your site, it's obvious exactly what they need to do, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's the the there's several places for them to click, but we also have it set where it pops up with the contact, with a box for them to fill out, and that goes straight into our software and has automated follow-ups immediately.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

So social media is going to be the area of focus. What are you going to do there exactly to make this like I'd suggest that you're at like an A level here. What would an A plus look like if you start addressing your social media? What's your exact plan today as a result of this audit?

SPEAKER_00 12:50

The first step, the action that I can take today that I didn't really talk about was the top three pin posts on Instagram.

SPEAKER_02 12:55

Hey, there it is.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

That make the the that allow for the ability of the people that are checking us out to not necessarily have to go to our website to find out how to get started. So they can, you know, use those pin posts at the top of Instagram. Um and what's his name? Uh John Franklin. Is that his CEO? Yep. Yeah. He put up a good post about that other the other day about just what to put on those pin posts at the top about like next steps or who we are, what we do, how to take the next step. So that's the first action step for me was getting that done. And the second thing is scheduling a meeting between myself, the general manager, and then the other two people that post consistently. So our main nutrition coach, which is my wife, kind of similar to that. So that takes delicate communication.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

And then uh my evening, my afternoon coach who who is is owns the semi-private and the and the youth program.

SPEAKER_02 13:47

Okay. So listeners, let's be real here. When was the last time you updated your pin posts? When was the last time you right? Like they're probably old, right? Like we all forget about that. The highlights, those are also not just pin posts, but those little highlight circles on Instagram, right, below your bio. Have you updated those? Are they still current? Do they still have the services that you're offering? Check that stuff. How about the bio? Is your bio accurate? Does it tell people immediately what you do, or is it something kind of cryptic or cool or artistic, right? Like, does it tell you exactly in three seconds what you do and who you do it for? Click the link, click the link in bio. What does that do? It's incredibly common to find broken links in there where it's like, click link in bio to uh get more info. And it's like that goes nowhere. And so when people start clicking links that are dead, nothing happens. And again, I'll tell you that's incredibly common when we audit websites to go to a gym website, put in info into a form, and get nothing or the form is broken, right? So gym owners will be like, I'm not getting any leads. And the first thing our mentors will look is like audit your funnel, click in as an outsider, have a friend do it. What happens? Uh, the form's broken. Ah, so you are getting leads, you're just telling them 404.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Which is like the worst thing. Go, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

And the link in the bio is such an easy thing to do. You don't even have to pay for that service anymore because if you use any kind of CRM, you can create that in their like very, very easily.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

Yeah. So like these things are all just very simple. And that's why this guide is so great. It's so fast. You can literally like find a hole, and it's going to take you, like, you could just quickly pin three more posts if you want, or you could, you know, be a little more calculated, but you can fix this stuff really quickly. You audited your sales process as well. So we look at like you've got a good lead flow coming in, you've got a great nurture system, you've got your appointments booked, everything is clear. You said that there's a couple things you found in your sales process, which is good, but you're thinking like an upper-level gym owner now about maybe handing some of this off. So talk about what you need to do in your sales process.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Yeah, I've been our biggest bottleneck for sales for a long time. Okay. And recently serving jury duty for two days and doing this audit made a couple things more apparent to me that I was aware of, but just probably brought them more front and center because I had four appointments scheduled with potential new people, and then I had to go to jury duty. So I had to hand all those off to my to my manager. So our sales process is tight, but it's not easy for somebody to understand if they haven't trained in it consistently. And we've done some training, but I could create, I could simplify it and I could create an SOP to help explain it a little more effectively, just with some videos and things like that, so that it can be passed off. And I've gone through phases or intervals, if you will, of training our manager as far as role play goes in our sales process. So he's he's aware of it and he's good to go. He could he can do it, but it could always sales should be practiced all the time. And we don't do that consistently enough. So that was probably the biggest thing for me is creating uh at least updating or creating a a more simplified SOP and then making sure I'm regularly training them in that.

SPEAKER_02 16:49

Yeah, so we call this the the hit by a bus test in two rain, where it's like if you vanish from your gym for a week or two weeks, would the whole place fall apart without you? And you got the two-day hit by a jury test where you had to go and sit there in a you know civic courtroom and try and decide if you're gonna be on the jury or not, and you had to say, okay, I got to pass off these appointments, which to your credit, you've made a guy, you've you're ahead of so many gym owners. You have a sales process, you've got this thing laid out, and you can pass it off and it works. But you figured, like, if I wanted to do this more efficiently and ensure a higher close rate or more success, we would make this a little bit easier, and then we'd have more reps for my backup guy so that when we put the, you know, when the backup quarterback goes in, he's not just handing the ball off, he's throwing some touchdowns too, right? Like that's that's exactly it. And many gym owners will find they don't have a sales process at all. They're not, it's not documented, they don't have it, they certainly don't practice it. That was me for a long time. You've gone the other way where you have all this stuff, now it's just refining it, tweaking the dials a little bit to make sure that it's perfect. And if you do that, I mean the result is like first, if you get called away for something, nothing changes. Second, if you wanted to do something else and maybe, I don't know, go out and take three weeks off, you literally could with no drop-off. And we've seen this with two-brained gym owners. When they build these systems, they're able to ensure exact A plus standards of delivery in every aspect of their business, even if they're not there for months.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

It was really important, it's important to point out with this guy that that was included, right? Because this is the one hour marketing audit, right? But the sales part was included, and I know early on as a business owner, I've had mentors over the years, but early on, and I'd say early, like the first five years or so, I didn't really understand what it meant to have a standard operating procedure and a sales process. Like I understood, okay, you got to meet with people, you have to get them into a membership, but I didn't fully understand that because I just didn't have the right guidance and the right training on it. So having that early on as a gym owner would be extremely helpful.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Yeah, and that's exactly it. And again, in two-brain mentorship, we teach you exactly how to build that stuff. So it's not like you have to come up with your own sales systems. We literally have a process for putting this thing in place. We call it a no-sweat intro, tell you exactly how to get this thing set up, how to build it into your uh websites and everything else, how to make a sales binder, how to talk about closing, handling objections, all the stuff that you need to do. It's not mystery science, it is step by step. And if you get these things in place and practice them, we've seen gym owners take close rates from like 20% to like 70, 80%, and everything changes at that point. Again, it's not all about the money, it's about helping people. Coaching, as Chris Cooper says, is the or uh sales is the first act of coaching, right? So if you can't get people to start in your business, you can't help them. You need to help them make the right decision. So I won't uh I won't, we're not gonna take uh more than an hour to talk about a one-hour marketing guide. So, Joe, I'm gonna wrap this up by just asking, like, then you give me your honest opinion here. How valuable would this be for a guide as a how valuable would this guide be for a new gym owner or someone who doesn't have a mentor?

SPEAKER_00 19:39

I think it'd be extremely valuable, mostly because it would help you grow your business faster if you don't have a mentor, because these are some of the things your mentor is gonna guide you through or hold you accountable to do. The just the layout, the visual aspect of this guide was really helpful for me. Like as someone who audits our marketing funnel at least once a year, it still brought things to my attention. Like I think it's valuable as a quarterly audit. And if you didn't have a mentor, this would this guide you through it in a simple enough way to where you can understand it and you could take action right away.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

Would you use this again quarterly?

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Yeah, actually, I plan to. It's uh yeah, it's gonna be linked into my marketing calendar where I have like like I have a calendar for my audits, my quarterly audits, and this will be linked into that for sure. Because it's quick, it's simple, and it's easy to use.

SPEAKER_02 20:27

Oh, that's awesome. So, this listeners, this is Chris Cooper's gift to you. You can get this thing, link in the show notes, you can get it for free and work through this. If you don't have a mentor, I highly recommend that you do this exercise. This is going to help you solve a ton of problems in your marketing. At that point, if you want to go further, this is just a taste of what a mentor can do. Book a call. Talk to TwoBrain, tell them what you want to do with your business. We'll tell you how to do it, step-by-step plan, and a mentor will guide you through that and help you do it. But the first step here, check out that guide. It's uh it's just Chris put this thing together as a gift to you to help you fix your marketing, get more clients, change more lives. Get it today. Joe, thank you so much for doing the audit, sharing it with us, and uh talking about it here on the show. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Yeah, man, happy to be here. It's a good time.

SPEAKER_02 21:07

Thank you all for listening. This is Run a Profitable Gym. I'm your host, Mike Warkin, and please subscribe for more episodes and be sure to click that link in the show notes to get that guide. And now here's Two Brain Founder Chris Cooper with a final note.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

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.