How to Find Your Next 10 Clients Without Paying a Dime

When gym owners need more clients, most jump straight to ads, social media or complicated marketing campaigns.

Another path will produce much better results faster.

In this episode, Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper shares the zero-cost strategy he used to fill a new program at his gym in less than a week: affinity marketing.

Instead of chasing cold leads, use affinity marketing to leverage your best clients' connections: their family, friends and coworkers.

Chris explains how to organize your outreach with an Affinity Marketing Cheat Sheet, run goal reviews that naturally lead to referrals and follow up so conversations actually turn into clients.

Chris' personal results: One text produced 16 clients.

Don’t wait and hope members will refer their friends. Tune in and learn how to build a referral funnel that constantly produces hot leads and high-value clients.

Download the Affinity Marketing Cheat Sheet and other free lead-generation resources via the link below.

Links

Affinity Marketing Cheat Sheet

Gym Owners United

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0:01 - Intro

3:48 - The marketing bull’s-eye

6:37 - Affinity Marketing Cheat Sheet

8:49 - Goal review process

14:07 - Follow-up script

Transcript

0:03

Lately, I've had a little bit more time on my hands and people are asking me, well, what are you going to do with that spare time? And to me, that answer was easy and obvious. The same thing I've been doing for 30 years, coaching fitness and writing about gym ownership. But it had actually been a long time since my gym really needed me. And so when I asked my new partner, Ryan, hey, do you have any classes or clients that you can give me? He said, sure, you can have Wednesday at 7 p.m., but you got to go find your own clients. So I did. How did I do it? The same way I've always done it. I first turned to Affinity Marketing. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And today I'm going to walk you through the exact steps that I use for Affinity Marketing to create a brand new program from scratch at my gym in less than a week. Now, in times past, I would go through the Affinity Marketing exercise, which I have talked about before on this podcast. And we teach step by step by step in our mentorship program. I would go through this with my best clients in mind, but I don't have any clients at my gym now. So I put myself in the bullseye and I started working through the rings of Affinity in order. Now, if this is Greek to you, don't worry. I'm going to explain exactly what I mean. I'm going to walk you through the steps step by step, and I'm going to talk you through exactly how I built this brand new program. So I put myself in the center of the bullseye and I asked myself, you know, which of my family might become a client? Well, most of my family isn't local. And then I turned to my friends. Many of my friends already go to my gym, but there are a small group of people with whom I ride bikes every Sunday in the summer. And two of those friends in a group of about 12, they coach a group of teenage cyclists in the winter. And so I sent one a quick message. Hey, are the hellhounds training this winter? And he said, yeah, we're meeting once a week to ride indoors together at a local high school. And I said, well, what are they doing for weight training? And he said, nothing. Most of them don't know what to do. Some of their parents are scared, some work out at school, but I bet it's mostly bench press and curls, LOL. And I said, hey, would it help if we put together an eight week program and met at my gym once a week? I can give the kids some instruction on how to lift safely. I can give them some homework, a little challenge to do at home. And I can probably even send them a little video on how to eat, how to stretch, how to warm up, how to train in different intensity zones. And he loved it. He said, absolutely. Even if we teach them the lifts, they'll keep that knowledge forever. It's a great investment. And I think it'd be amazing for them. And I said, okay, well, where can I send a quote? And that was it. 16 kids signed up, the team paid out of their team fees for the year. And I got myself a coaching gig every Wednesday at 7 p.m. One of the parents asked me, is eight weeks enough? And I respond, hey, if I look at your race calendar, I know when your first race is. And if I work backward, we have 17 weeks until you're really hard into training on the bike again. So if we booked for 16 weeks, that would allow us to work on more advanced skills and really do the training justice. But let's commit for eight weeks right now. And then we'll roll right into a second block if the kids are showing interest and they want to do it and they're getting good results. Now our hourly rate for this training is $235 per hour plus taxes, they have to pay in full upfront, they get one hour a week plus an email with stretching homework, a short video on things like energy systems from me, and that's it. This is how you get clients, it's through conversations, broaching the topic, and working strategically from the people who are most likely to sign up. Now I'm going to walk you through this exercise and I do it every time I find myself asking the question, how can I get another client this week? So let's start with the marketing bullseye. If you think of your marketing strategy as a bullseye target made up of concentric rings, then each ring represents a different audience for your service and you always start from the center and you work outward. You want to start by talking to the people most likely to actually sign up and the people who are closest to the center of the bullseye, that they're the people with the highest affinity. Okay. Affinity is how much they know you, like you and trust you. It's like measuring your magnetic pull in the center of the bullseye are your best clients. They're the ones that you want to clone over and over. And if you don't have clients yet, then you just put yourself in the center dot like I did. Then as you're moving outward from the center, the first ring of the bullseye is the family of your best clients or yourself in this case. So these are the people closest to your best clients. It's their spouse, their parents, or their kids. It's probably the people who live with them. The second ring working our way outward from the bullseye are their friends, the people they hang out with on the weekends, the people they do activities with like their golf buddies or the people that they play rec sports with. These are the people that I cycled with on Sundays through the summer. And the third ring, as you're working out from the bullseye, are their co-workers. These are the people who work with your best clients. So it's their lunch buddy, their favorite co-worker, their boss. And then the fourth ring, working our way out from center, is their acquaintances, the friends of their friends, the people with one degree of separation, right? Like they might not be very close friends with them, but they kind of know them because their kids play hockey together or they meet them in a meeting once a month or something like that. You probably have another person in common between you and them. But the key principle here is really simple. Who is most likely to join your gym right away? It's the people closest to the clients that you already have. First, their family, then their friends, and then their co-workers. Because those people have similar schedules to your clients. They have a similar income to your clients. They probably have similar hobbies to your clients. they might even be able to carpool to come to your gym together. So instead of going straight to Facebook ads, you need to start with the highest affinity, the people with the highest likelihood of signing up and work outward from there. So here are the steps. First, identify your top five clients. Before you do anything else, you want to know who your best clients are. So ask yourself, if I could have more people like Ted, what would my gym be like? And these are the ones that you want to clone. You want five more Ted's. If you don't have any clients yet, that's okay. Put yourself in the center of the bullseye and think about your own family, your own friends, and your own former coworkers. And that's exactly what I did when my partner Ryan told me to go find my own clients. I put myself in the center of the bullseye. I said, well, most of my family either lives out of town or already belongs to my gym. Most of my friends belong to my gym, but there's this one group of cyclists that I ride with. The step next is to fill out the affinity marketing cheat sheet. So we give this to you in the two rain mentorship program. I'll, I'll show a sample on screen for each of your top five clients. You want to fill out this cheat sheet. This is just a way of organizing your thoughts. It's a simple grid with five columns. First, the client's name, second, their family, third, their friends, fourth, their co-workers, and fifth, their hobbies. And before you meet with each client at a goal review session, which you're going to book, think about who they've talked about in conversation before, right? Who's their spouse? What's their spouse's name? Write that in the column. Who do they hang out with on the weekends? Their friends, write their names down. Who do they work with? Where do they work? Who have they mentioned from the office? Is it a lunch buddy, their favorite co-worker, their boss? What activities or hobbies do they do? Now, you might not be able to fill in every category on the chart, but if you can think of one or two specific names before you sit down with the client, then that's going to make the process really powerful later. Now, stop for a minute. I know you're thinking, I don't need to fill out the sheet. I can name some people. Let's think about the people in my gym whose spouse I know. No, go through this step by step. This is a thinking exercise and having the worksheet. Helps you develop disciplined thinking. And instead of thinking like, who do I know? What spouse's names? And always going back to the same well, you need to put in the time of identifying your best clients and going through this step by step. This is a good example of what a mentor does with you. Because on your own, you think, okay, I need to ask for referrals. Who do I know? And you don't work through this in an objectively measurable step by step focused process the way that you would with a mentor. So hit pause, get the cheat sheet and actually work through it step by step. Even if after identifying your five best clients, you realize, I don't know anything about these people that is assigned to you that you need to start having these conversations with your best clients. Okay, back to the exercise. So after you have step one, identified your best clients and step two, broken down all of their connections in an organized way, step three is to book goal reviews with each of those best clients. Now, a goal review is a 15 minute quarterly meeting where you review a client's progress and you adjust your prescription. They should happen about every 90 days and they're the perfect opportunity to practice affinity marketing. So here's the goal review process. Now you're sitting in front of one of your top five clients. You should be doing this with all of your clients, minimum twice a year, ideally quarterly. But you start with their bright spots. Okay, so you ask them, how are things going with your fitness? What are you most proud of accomplishing in the last three months? And then you measure their progress. You put them on the in-body or you do the caliper or however you're tracking progress in your gym. Third, you ask the critical question. Okay, are you happy with the progress that you've made? If they say, no, I'm not happy or kind of, then you make them a new prescription. You adjust their program, you help them get better results and that's it. You don't ask them for a referral yet because they are not the person that's likely to give you a referral. But if they say yes, they are totally happy with their progress, now you move to affinity marketing. You congratulate them, you tell them you're proud of them, and then you move to the next steps. And this is step four, the affinity marketing conversation. This is where most people screw it up. We put the decision on who to refer on the client who is not a salesperson, not a coach, has no real incentive to start the conversation with the person that you're trying to attract. So we say stupid things like, hey, do you have any friends who might like to come to my gym? That is way too passive. And passive is slow, and slow is death. It's a myth that your results speak for themselves also. Like, people are not just going to walk down the street and do the whole, whoa, look at you, you're looking great. what trainer do you go to? That's not going to happen. You can't wait. If it does happen by some miracle three times in 20 years, great. You know, that's a bonus. It shouldn't be your strategy. So you need to actually speak for yourself and drive these referrals. So you capture their story. The client has said, yeah, I'm really proud of my progress. Wonderful. You pull your camera. what's one thing you wish somebody had told you about my gym before you join? You capture that, you film it, it becomes content on your social media. Then you say, who has helped you most in this journey? Now this gives you another high affinity name if you don't already have one. So if you haven't done the cheat sheet and you just say, who has helped you most in this journey? That's how you're going to get a name of the person who is most likely to join next. Okay. The person with highest affinity to your client. Then you pull out your affinity marketing cheat sheet. Now, look, I'm not saying plop it on the desk between you and your client. You should have reviewed it before the goal review and you should know a name in advance. But if you just write a name on a sticky note and put it on your laptop, when you're talking to your client, that's okay. Okay. You need to be specific. You need to get very specific, use actual names, start with the closest ring on the bullseye, the family ring, and then work your way outward. Here's the script. So this is if you're talking about a family person. Hey, Ted, I know you've mentioned that your wife is doing a Pilates class. How is she enjoying it? And if he's like amazing, she loves it. Great. Okay. Move on. Right. But if they say something like, well, she's enjoying it, but she wanted to lose weight and she's not, then ask about her nutrition. Hey, is she on a specific plan? And if she's not, then you say, would you be willing to link me with her on email or bring her in at your next session? I can give her some tips, a free guide, maybe do a measurement. And then I can show her how our nutrition could work, uh, in conjunction with the Pilates that she likes. Or you could even go one better and say, Hey, Ted, you're doing amazing. The next step in making these changes permanent is to help you change your lifestyle. What would it take to get your wife, Sarah in here? And the more that you know about Sarah, the more likely you are to get her into the gym. So that's how you deal with the family conversation. If you do the affinity marketing cheat sheet, you've done the exercise and you realize that your best bet is to get one of Ted's friends. Here's what you say. You go through the goal review process. Then you say, Hey, Ted, I know you've been golfing with Dave every Saturday. How's his back doing? Has he mentioned anything about it? And then, you know, you let Ted answer. And then you say, do you think Dave would come in and do a workout with you? It's on me. I'd like him to see what you're doing and maybe get you some backup, um, for, you know, another time and, and help him kind of like support you in your fitness journey too. If the person that you're trying to target is a coworker, you say, Hey, I know this is a stressful time of year at work. For you, Ted, how are your coworkers managing the stress? You know, as an aside here, it's always a stressful time for everybody at work. So starting with that line is fine. So you can say, Ted, I know this is a stressful time for you at work. How are your coworkers managing the stress? And if there's a way that you can help the coworkers manage stress, then offer it. Hey, you know, Ted, I know all the doctors at your clinic are super stressed out right now. I'd really like to help. What if I came in and I gave a short talk on stress management? I got a five minute exercise that really helps me deal with stress. The key is this. You don't say, Hey, do you know anyone ask about specific people by name? Let's invite Dave. What would it take to get Sarah in here? Can I email you and your wife together about nutrition? Okay. The fifth step is to take action immediately. So after that goal review is done, you follow up right away. You don't take the next class. You don't go work out. You don't do anything else. You stay in your chair and you send the email. Or you make the call or you reach out to Dave or to Sarah or to the person that your client mentioned. So here's a sample script for that followup. Hey Dave, I was just talking to Ted and he gave a lot of credit for his success to you. Thanks for supporting him, man. I really appreciate it. As a thank you, he suggested a 30 minute session for you. When can we get together, all three of us? Okay. And then you send that email and you CC Ted on that, by the way, like you want his presence on that email to justify the truth of what you're saying. Okay. Now you always end with a question when you send that email or even better make a phone call. Then you send a link to book an appointment. Okay. Then you move on to the next client. And after you've gone through this process with one client, move on to the next one in your list. The first time you do it, you're probably following the printed directions that we give you as a client and to brain, you're probably keeping the affinity marketing cheat sheet, like underneath the desk in the drawer, but it gets, it becomes natural. It's just easy. And so when Ryan told me, yeah, you got to go get your own clients. I knew exactly what to do. I still pulled out the affinity marketing cheat sheet just to organize my thinking and identify the best prospect for me. But after you've done this once, you can move on to the next on your list and then the next and work through all five of your top clients. Here's the bottom line. If you need clients fast, don't turn to Instagram. Don't waste time on Facebook ads, turn to your connections, follow the affinity, look at the highest magnetic potential of the family, then move to their friends, then their coworkers, and then their acquaintances. Don't ask who you can help. Tell them how you can help and how. Take control of your referrals instead of just waiting and praying and hoping. Affinity marketing is not complicated. It's just looking for ways to help and then offering them. The more you practice it, the more opportunities you're going to notice. It's taking a passive process, waiting for your clients and praying and hoping that they're going to refer your friends and making it. An active one. The thing that stops most gym owners from succeeding with this isn't their knowledge. It's their fear. You overcome fear through practice. Go through this affinity marketing exercise at least 20 times in the next few days. Fill out the cheat sheet for each of your top clients. Practice the conversation. Practice in the mirror if you have to. If you don't have enough clients or you don't have any clients yet, put yourself in the center of that bullseye and say, which of my family members should join my gym? They're not joining your gym to get a discount. They're joining the gym to support you. They are the most likely people to join. Do not be ashamed of asking your mom to join your gym and pay for it. She wants to, okay? Don't be scared of charging your friends. They want to support you or else they're not really your friends, are they? Marketing is really just building relationships. It's meeting new people and offering to help them. The question I always ask myself is this, do I care enough to overcome my awkwardness and actually help this person? That's affinity marketing. You start at the center of the bullseye with your best clients. You work outward through their family, their friends, their coworkers. You be specific. You use names. You take action immediately. And remember, your results do not speak for themselves. You need to speak for yourself. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And if you want to talk through this, go to gymownersunited.com. That's our free group for gym owners. There's 11,000 gym owners in there. I'm in there. The mentors from Two Brain are in there. We give out free resources in that group every single day. And the conversation is amazing.