The Secret Question That Unlocks Gym Growth: How Many Clients Can You Keep?

Does your gym really need more clients? What if you just kept current members longer?

In this episode of "Run a Profitable Gym," host Mike Warkentin sits down with Two-Brain mentor Brian Foley, whose gym Activate has over 360 clients and 27-month average length of engagement.

Brian walks through the full retention system that makes his client count possible, starting with marketing to the right avatar and running a No Sweat Intro that filters for fit.

He explains how his team uses a weekly review to identify at-risk clients before they consider canceling, as well as automated check-ins to keep individual goals front and center in a large gym.

You’ll also hear about his top client acquisition strategy—quarterly bring-a-friend events that add 40 to 50 new members per year at virtually no cost—and how referrals, organic social media and a modest ad spend work together to keep his pipeline full.

If you're tired of "filling a leaky bucket," watch this episode and learn how to increase your client count by building a gym no one wants to leave.

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1:22 - How to retain clients

13:46 - Client management systems

18:35 - New client referrals

24:23 - Where paid ads come in

27:05 - Why work with a mentor?

Transcript

0:03

My gym almost broke me when we got above 200 members, but my guest today has 300 plus clients and he's fine. He's running the place like a boss. You're going to find out exactly how today because Brian Foley of Activate in Ireland is going to share absolutely everything. This is. Run a Profitable Gym. I'm your host, Mike Warkin. And please hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening so you don't miss a show like this. On our most recent Two Brain Leaderboard, we excluded access only gyms. We can still help those gyms and one Two Brain client has 1100 members at their gym. So we still work with those gyms, but this leaderboard is all about gyms that sell coaching, not access. The top 10 runs from 311 to 450 clients. The gyms here aren't selling access for $30 to $50 a month. Some of the average revenue per member per month scores here are $235 and $326. Imagine having 320 clients at $320 a month. Do the math. That's what's possible if your systems are great. It's not all about client counts, but client counts are hugely important when you have great ARM. And great retention. So Brian, will you tell us how you acquire, retain, and manage 300 plus clients? Yeah, sure thing, Mike. Looking forward to chatting about it today. Yeah. And again, this is way outside my comfort zone. 200 just about destroyed me and I was pulling out my hair. You're well above 300 and you're doing it and you look just fine. So we'll talk about that and see how it goes. I'm going to ask you about the most important part, but it's not the most obvious part. What are the main pillars of your retention system? Yeah, absolutely. So retention is really what gets us to that number. And it's right now where we're sitting in around that 360 member mark, but we're planning our retention for 500 members. When we were at 200 members, we planned for 350. We're getting to the point now where our retention systems need an overhaul and we're always looking at them and we're always looking to improve them. So we've got some key pillars to our retention. And the first one starts at the very beginning of a client's journey. And we don't start the client journey when a client walks in our door. We start it when they become aware of our gym and what we do. So we make sure that we market to the right person and to the right avatar. We're not for everyone. And we're very deliberate about that. We speak to the right person, whether it's the busy moms and dads is really who we service. It's not the person going to the CrossFit games. It's someone who wants to get an hour out of the house, get fit, get healthy and get back home in time for dinner, really. So we're not trying to appeal to everyone. So that's the first pillar of our retention. We're very, very clear on who we speak to and who we market to. That's not to say that we're not going to have competitive athletes or we're not going to have the fire breathers in our gym. But we're very, very straight on who we market specifically towards. So that's the first thing, marketing to that right avatar. Because you can't hold on to the wrong people, right? If they're a bad fit, they're leaving no matter what you do. Yes, exactly. And we actually, we make it our mission that if someone is a bad fit, we'll chat to them pretty quick. It's fair for them and it's fair for us and the rest of our community. If someone is not the right fit, it's not going to be good for not only that one person, but it also can bleed into that whole group. Let's say it's like an 8 a.m. Session. If there's one person who sticks out in that group who doesn't vibe with everyone else, it's very, very obvious and it's not good for the rest of the group. So compatibility is a huge part of that. So that's, I suppose, the next step in our retention pillars. And it's that no sweat intro, making sure that it's an interview for them as much as it is for us. So we want to make sure that obviously, you know, we know what their goals are and it's our first act of coaching and we meet them where they're at and we ask them exactly what they'd like to achieve. But also it's, it's a two way street. We want to make sure that they are the right fit for us and that they're going to vibe with our community and you know, that they're going to fit in around here. It's a bit of a diagnostic. It's, it's less of a sales thing because if we've done our marketing really well, they know what they're stepping into. They know who we are. They know what we're about. That no sweat intro, it's we find out more about the person and what they actually want in their training. And like I said, it's a very, very narrow funnel. It's not just the scattergun approach where we're going to figure it out a year late. It's pretty obvious if we're a good fit straight away. I'm going to say one thing before you jump in. Listeners, Brian said something hugely important. I did this wrong. Might be doing this wrong as well. He is building his retention systems ahead of need. So he said like at two 50, they were looking at 300 at 300. They're looking at three 50, whatever at three 50, they're looking at 500. That's brilliant. And it's not, it's not obvious. I was like, okay, I got to fix something because I'm in trouble. That's the wrong time to fix it, fix it before you are in trouble. And Brian is a two brain mentor and can show you exactly how to do that. That's the point of mentorship, is that you build the systems you need to grow, not the systems you need to put the fires out. That's the wrong way to do it. So take what Brian's looking at and discusses here, and if he gives you some ideas, figure out how to build these systems in advance of need because if you don't, you'll hit 200, you'll slide back to 120. Then you'll hit 200, you'll slide back to 120, and you'll always be putting out fires. Keep going, Brian. This is great stuff. Yeah, for sure. So once the client, once they become a client, once the prospect becomes a client in that no sweat intro, the next step is a one-to-one on-ramp so individual structured coaching to make sure that the person is aware of what they're getting into i suppose and that they're a good that they're a good fit physically for group training because um you know it's not for everyone seven minutes of burpees might be everyone's uh you know kettle of fish not saying that that's what we do in our on-ramp but it gives people a taste and an understanding of okay there are some technicalities to group training that you might be better suited to, let's say one-to-one or a small group personal training. So we're filtering there as well at that one-to-one on-ramp. And that's just getting the right fit in place, right? And I get what you're saying. I, back in the day, we had group on-ramps, went to group training, a lot of people washed out. When you start doing individual on-ramps, retention gets better. Our data backs that across the board. It's not debatable. One-on-one on-ramps definitely improve retention, length of engagement. So start doing that if you're not doing it. And then from there, get the right product fit, right? So like if a client does, ah, I don't really like the group environment and I can't make the 8 a.m. Classes. And you're like, okay, I've got semi-private or small group, or I've got personal training. We could go at your convenience. You want to work out at 1042 on Tuesday morning? Yeah, let's do that. And you don't want to do burpees? Fine. We'll do bench press and bicep curls, whatever you like. That and that, you've just sold personal training, which is a higher value service. So Brian's ensuring that people get the right thing because if they want a truck and you sell them a car, they're not going to be happy, right? Sell them what they want, what solves their problems. Keep going, Brian. This is fantastic. Yeah, so that's exactly it. I mean, it all stems back from that help first approach that we are making sure that we're getting the right fit for them because there is nothing worse than an on-ramp just being a tick box exercise. It's just like, oh yeah, you passed, it's fine. Six months later, the person has some chronic injury because they weren't ever properly onboarded and they weren't the right fit for group training where group training is great. I absolutely love it. But you get slightly less attention than you would in one-to-one and similar private. So we've got to look at that as another filter. After that, it's funny, we're doing this call at lunchtime on Monday and my team is across the hallway and they're doing a weekly team review. So this is part of our retention pillar. We sit down every week as a team and we talk about our members by name, Even in a gym of, you know, 350 plus, we're going through like a traffic light system of where people are at. So we've got red, amber, and green. The green guys, I'm not saying that they don't have to be worried about, but we're obviously still putting them through a client journey. But the amber and red, we're looking at these things and we're automating that client journey. So retention, I suppose previously I would have been reactive to cancellations and retention. What we're trying to do now is make cancellations super boring, you know, that they should be really obvious. And there's nothing to cancel really because someone reached out before the thought ever formed in their head. So we're getting ahead of cancellations. Obviously, on a long enough time frame, everyone is going to cancel at some point. But in our team meetings, we're looking at trends. So if people are utilizing less sessions in the previous four weeks than they were in the prior four weeks to that, we'll look at their trends. Is there any particular reason that a person's adherence is starting to slide? And we're looking at these things early and discussing it as a team so that our CSM can then reach out to these clients proactively as opposed to waiting until it's too late. That's so key to what we do and then we obviously look at anyone who hasn't been in the gym for seven days that's another automated checkpoint that we have so my CSM gets a download every. Monday of everyone who's sliding everyone who hasn't been in the gym for seven days and then later on Monday morning she also gets a report that tells her anyone who hasn't signed in for the week ahead so we're also looking at you know what people's trends are like for the week coming so it's we're all over that so you've got a huge system running and it's running right now as you're speaking to me you've got people across the hall taking care of all this and that's i'm going to say listeners if you want a big client count that's going to be a huge part of this is having the systems and the people to run them because you cannot manage personally 300 clients it doesn't work i could manage 150 personally when i got to 200 everything blew up in my face and i started to forget like what's your name what's just what do you do who you know like i. I didn't notice when people weren't showing up, none of that worked. But if you build the systems to automate what you can and they get the faces and humans attached to that, then you have those personal connections. And the other thing that Brian said is proactive, not reactive, because when someone cancels or starts to say, I'm thinking about canceling, it's probably too late. Like you can have those awkward conversations wherever you might be able to save a few people, probably not like when it starts to taste bad, they start to leave. But if you talk to them ahead of time and say, Hey, I noticed the last two weeks, you've missed four sessions. They can say, Oh, you know, geez, I just, I, my job changed. My shift changed. I can't make that slot. And you're like, I do have semi-private training available, or I can solve this a different way. And that solves problems and holds onto members before they think about canceling. But if you don't have those systems set up, what do you do? You just wait. And all of a sudden you're bleeding out. You're back to 120 members and wondering what happened. Anything else you want to talk about with retention, Brian, or should I move on to the next one? Yeah, I guess like with the retention, like the umbrella overall of that is obviously a very, a very watertight client journey. So it's like I mentioned, it starts with the no sweat intro and we want to know what the person's goal is. So if, for example, a person's goal and like typically most people's goals or something around body composition or health, let's say it's they want to drop 10 pounds of fat. If they start to slide in their adherence will relate the check-in so that you know that Monday check-in back to their goal because some people just need to be reminded of what their goal is so we're always keeping the goal in front of them so that they're not just showing up and you know. I'm making my 12 attendances this month it's more about what they actually want to achieve in the gym and we're trying to make sure that we're keeping the individual's goal front and center in a group training gym we're not just going to assume that everyone just wants to do snatches and burpees they've all got a goal and we want to keep that in front of them listeners do you know your client's goals and if you don't you got a problem and you can sort that out now brand's talking about a lot of stuff here and we're just on retention this is upper level stuff so you start to think well how can i handle all this stuff well the answer is like two brain can teach you to build all this stuff all these systems very very fast it isn't that hard if you have a mentor to say, build this now, build this now, build this now. So Brian can teach you how to do your 90 day client journey, create your on-ramp, create your marketing. All this stuff can be shown how to, you can, you can learn how to do it very fast if it sounds overwhelming. But the thing that I'll tell you is like, build these systems when you're in that a hundred to 150 client range or even lower as you're coming up, build them now. And if you do that, then you can scale them up and make them better as you get to more clients. But if you try to build them at 200, you'll never do it. Like you, you can't backfill the systems that will retain 200 people fast. It's just going to be a calamity. That's why we tell people, you know, target 150 clients first. If you can get all the systems in place that support 150 clients, then from a position of strength, you can scale up and add clients. But if you try and do it without the systems, I did this, it blows up in your face, everything goes wrong. And you slide right back down. I got, I think I got to 230. All of a sudden I was back at 180. And then I was like fighting for 150. Then we got up a little bit and it was just, I didn't have the systems, but then when we built them, everything stabilized and everything moved forward. So Brian, that's retention like that. Like you were, it sounds like your whole thing is like, if I would summarize it, just like you said, it's a 90 day client journey. And then beyond with staff, people backing up rigid systems that identify problems and fix them before they're a fire. Is that accurate? That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's the first one. I went hit retention first because everyone says I need more clients. I got to market better. It's not that marketing's a part of it. And Brian mentioned it, but the key to huge client counts is really retention. If you bleed people out faster than you add them, you create this high energy marketing cycle that costs you money, bleeds people out, ruins your staff, and you still don't have the clients you want. If you hold them longer, you earn more, there's less intake, there's less advertising, everything gets better. So focus on retention first. And if I'll give you a tip to do today, look at your client list who hasn't showed up in seven days, send them a text message. Hey. Tom, where are you at? Just noticed you hadn't been here. When can you see in the gym next? Still thinking about your bench press number. Let's get that up. Whatever, something like that. Do that today. You'll get some clients back in the gym and you'll improve your retention. Let's talk managing clients. So I said I had 150. I, uh, my systems just imploded when I got above 200. What are your critical systems? We've already covered retention, but what are the critical ones when you get above 300? Yeah, I was the same, Mike. I guess 150 was probably my critical mass, and that comes from Dunbar's number, how many people that we can keep in front of mind. And the old kind of adage of businesses will grow to the size of their marketing, contract to the size of their systems, always comes to fruition. And typically what we'll see is that ratchet effect where you'll grow, but you want to stop that backslide. So if you go to 230, you don't want to come back to 180. So what stops that is those systems that we've got in the background. So typically what breaks when we start to see the retention system burst at the seams, the first thing that breaks is visibility. So at 150 clients, you typically know most people by name, you'll know their cat or their dog's name, or if they've got kids, you'll know a lot of that stuff at 150 clients. At 300 members, you're doing snatches and burpees and the person next to you goes, how long have you been coming here? And you're like, and that has happened to me and it's happened to my wife. And it's great when that happens, but at 300, you just need a lot of infrastructure that gives you that visibility artificially because you just can't know everybody. And then you can't manage what you can see. So if I don't know, if I don't have the opportunity to introduce myself and find out everyone's dogs and cats names, I've got to know that somewhere. And we've got to have a centralized repository of information. So that's the first thing is visibility and knowing everyone's core wants and needs. And that's got to be written down somewhere. So that visibility is key. And that flows to the second point, which is communication flow. So we've got a team that works on a shift basis. So we've got a morning crew. We've got an afternoon crew and they'll spend about maybe two hours a day with each other. And it's, it's important that there's communication flow across that. So when someone joins the gym, we take all their goals and we put it on their profile. So the key thing at the top is their goal. The next thing is their, their forward. We use the forward acronym. So family, oh man, I can't even remember what it is. Occupation. You got stuck for that. Yeah, exactly. It's family, occupation, relationships, and dreams. So we want to know those things about that person. We want to know, do they have kids? What's their spouse's name? And that comes down to referrals later on. They're, you know, things about their jobs. Do they work shifts? Do they work a nine to five? I want to be able to look at my, my, you know, CRM system. And if I don't know who the person is next to me, I'm very easily able to see it. If I'm coaching them at 8am, I want to know what this person's goal is because. I want to relate what we're doing in this group fitness back to that person's goal. So we're doing snatches today because X, Y, and Z, and this is how it relates back to your goal. So that's that, you know, that's the system around communication flow. And then the last system that we've just locked in really is just finding an early win. And this is somewhere where a lot of gyms missed the mark. They wait until, let's say their first member check-in at 90 days. We make sure, and it's a part of our system that we send a postcard within 30 days with a client win and find something that's, you know, relatable to that person, whether it's the first time they squat below parallel, it mightn't be a big deal to, you know, the fire breathers in the room, but to, to the coach to recognize that is hugely important. So we've got those systems locked in to make sure the clients, you know, are, are aware that we care for them. I said in the intro that we sell coaching here, or these gyms sell coaching. You have to connect with these clients, right? You can't coach them if you don't really know what their goals are, right? You're just randomly handing out workouts. They don't know. They don't understand why they apply, like all these different things. They get lost. And that happened to me. A lot of my clients thought, oh, I'm training for the CrossFit games. And then they like, why are we doing these workouts that don't have muscle ups? And they all got upset and they left. And I was back down to 180 clients. Like we just had a, just not the right market product market fit. Brian talked about that, but also I didn't know the goals of everyone. And I certainly didn't tailor things to them. So if you grow to how to log goals and be able to connect with people, and that's going to require staffing and systems, we won't dive into the depths of that because it's more than we can go into here, but you have to have people that help you connect to your clients the whole time throughout that journey. So Brian laid out exactly how that happens for him. He's got this excellent CRM. He pulls it up. Bob's goal is a 400 pound deadlift. All right, here's Bob. Here's why we're doing squats today. It's an accessory movement to the deadlift. We're going to help you get to your goal. I know you're only 20 pounds away. Brian hasn't coached him in like three weeks, but he knows this because he's looked in the. CRM. Do set up these systems and do it when it's small so that when it's big, it works properly. Let's move on to this one client acquisition. So everyone thinks it's all about ads, but I'm going to ask you a better, a better source for long-term, excellent, high value clients. Do you have a referral system to get new clients? Yes, it is our number one source of new clients. I figured. Talk about it. How does it work? We love referrals. You know, they are just the best clients because they already know, like, and trust us in a lot of instances. So our, uh, referrals, we don't do it to kind of like, you know, it's, it's a supplement, uh, sorry, ads are a supplement to our referrals, our referrals are our number one way of, of gaining new clients. Because if we want to just make sure that people love the place so much that they'll just bring their spouse, they'll bring their kids, they'll bring their co-worker. And it's really that is like a net promoter score. The more referrals you get, the more you know that you've got your finger on the pulse of how you're coaching and how your product is actually performing. So how we actually do it we have quarterly referral events so we run a bring a friend day every quarter a lot of fun we'll do them typically on a saturday morning make it a good fun workout pretty accessible pretty sweaty and then have some like coffee fruit and croissants afterwards so everyone can just hang and have a bit of a chat and we make it that social social aspect as well so quarterly referral events is absolutely huge for boosting referrals for us these people. If someone comes to your referral event, I've heard this time and again from people on the show, our top gym owners, they have a referral event. They put them on the calendar at the beginning of the year and these people show up and they bring a spouse, a best buddy, a teammate, a colleague, anything like that. They're almost a hundred percent likely to join. You actually have to screw it up because they're, they came with a friend who loves you that says, I think this place is awesome. You should join. And all you have to do is connect with that person, do the no sweat intro, ask, book a no sweat intro. You can even do it on the spot, ask them what their goals, prescribe the solution. And in many cases, it's going to be working out with your friend, right? And put them through their on-ramp, start their 90 day client journey. These things, the hottest leads you'll ever find, they are exactly like your current clients. So they're high value people who have the time and money to spend at your business. They're likely to stay a long time because they have a friend in there that's already like linked to them. And the best part, Chris Cooper's talked about this a lot. The people who refer clients are likely to stay longer because now they're invested in the success of someone else. All of this costs you some coffee and a workout. That's it. You pay your coach for the hour. You buy some coffee and donuts. That's that. And all of a sudden you have this huge, huge referral. At these quarterly events, Brian, what's a, what's a, like, do you have an idea of how many clients you acquire each time? Is it a kind of a standard number off the top of your head? Typically we, we acquire about 40 to 50 clients per year through these quarterly events. So like 10 to 15, you know, each time. And this is no advertising. This is just bring your buddy plus 10 plus 15. And then Brian has the retention and onboarding, onboarding and retention systems to hold onto these people. They're going to stay for years, right? Like Brian, your, your length of engagement. I didn't ask you for this number ahead of time. Do you know what off the top of your head? 27 months. Way above the industry average, that's more than two years. That's incredible. And these people, so high value clients staying for 27 months, Brian's advertising costs on this are zero. So this is all good, right? And they're going to, in the best case scenario, the referred person refers another person, right? And the whole chain of, it's just incredible how this thing works. There are gyms out there in the Two Brain ecosystem. Daniel Purrington is one in Woodslawn. Fitness in Oregon. He has zero marketing costs. He just runs referral stuff. People come in, his membership is capped. He only takes four new people a month to replace like people who move away or whatever. His space is full. He's making huge money in a tiny space and he's just getting referrals. No marketing costs like that. It's incredible. I'm not going to beat that funnel to death because it's an obvious one. Brian, anything, any other funnels that you've got working actively to help you with this before we get to the ads one? Yeah. So outside of our referral funnel, I mean, my team does a great job of organic social media. Yes, there it is. So they do a great job of consistently staying in front of people. So, you know, my team posts every day. We schedule it for a month in advance. So we've got like 30 days of content. And again, this is part of the systems we're future proofing. We're now looking at how we can improve that with a more of a hub and spoke approach of create one big piece of content and then have smaller pieces. Exactly. That speak to a specific avatar rather than, again, the scattergun approach. But like I said, the team do a great job of creating content. So we rely on organic social media and also content. So we do long form content in blog posts and emails. Yeah. And I link those two funnels exactly like you do. I think they're the exact same funnel. I think you're just taking one big thing and then disseminating it smaller across different channels. So it's more palatable to the audiences on those things. We're doing about a 40 minute podcast here. This will get chunked up into some very small clips of Brian saying the most Brian saying the most brilliant stuff in a 30 second clip for Instagram. And that's the, those are those two funnels. If you keep doing those things, what you're doing is you're connecting with your broader audience and this might be the first thing they see, right? And then eventually you keep nurturing them. Eventually they go to your website. Maybe you get them with a, you know, Google pixel eventually, or a Facebook pixel, or maybe they ask for a lead magnet or they get on your newsletter or whatever, but this is all part of that long-term nurturing cycle. In some cases social media is now the sales place many people are selling directly through social media my wife does this uh her business she has no advertising costs all she does is she puts up stuff on social media people messenger that's where she talks to people that is a valid marketplace now and you can do that just with organic let's move on to the next one though brian this is an interesting one i don't know the answer because i haven't chatted with you a little bit do you use ads in any way at your business? Yeah, we use paid ads and we have never turned off any paid advertising in nine years. Okay. So that's who you're constantly running. Yeah. Constantly running, but they're not this, you know, they're not the be all and end all. They supplement what we do. So I always talk to people about, you know, paid ads and particularly people who are weaning themselves off only paid ads. Paid ads is like protein powder. It's a supplement to your protein intake. Whereas, you know, your chicken breast and social media is your steak. It's a supplement. It's good to get you to the numbers you need, but it's not the be all and end all of everything. And that's our Instagram clip right there, Brian. You just, you sealed it right there, but they'll chop that into 30. So I had to send that out, but that's exactly right. So your advertising, do you run like lead ads or is it just, you know, kind of awareness stuff where you're brand new or what do you do? Yeah. So we change it from time to time, but mostly lead ads. And we just keep those running consistently. So we've got evergreen lead ads running and then every now and again, we'll run awareness campaigns. So for example, in the last two years, we've split our facility into two. So we've got group training and semi-private and PT. So we had to run some awareness campaigns to make sure that the market understood what that was. Right. Large spends on this, or are you just kind of just keeping it going? No, keeping it going. Typically in the region of somewhere about 300 euros a month. Yeah. So that was like, what, 10 euros a day, something like that or whatever. Right. So, yeah. So that's again, and that's the way to do it. Once you've got all these others funnels set up, you use the, the, the paid funnel to supplement the rest of them, but you don't have to like spend $800 a day or something like that. Right. Like if you do it right and you're, you're building a gym, especially if you're building a smaller gym, Brian's going big, but you don't have to carpet bomb all these things. If you have these other funnels going, we teach gym owners how to build and operate four funnels. And that's the ones we've laid out here. We've got referrals, paid ads, social, uh, social media and organic content. If you have all those running all the time, they're always going to keep your lead flow going. You're going to get great high value clients. You don't feel a lot of pressure. You don't have to start with paid ads. We'll teach you how to do that. And we'll show you exactly how to do it so that you can handle your own marketing, but you don't have to rely on it and say, Oh my God, my lead costs are out of control. I don't know what to do. I just, you know, you just do it in the background. Daniel in Oregon, doesn't you do any of that? Because he's kept Brian is growing. He does that just to keep that part of it going where people, It gets your face in front of people and you got to pay to play a little bit now in certain cases, but it's not more important than his referral funnel or his other funnels. It's just there with them. So that's exactly the point of all of that. Keep all four funnels running. If you don't know how to build them, a two-brain mentor can show you how to do it. Brian, I'm going to ask you this. You are a mentor. Why do you still have a mentor? That's an interesting question. I know you work with someone from two-brain. Why do you do that, even though you know all the stuff? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I've got my own mentor in the Tinker program. My facility leads, so my general managers in both gyms have a mentor as well, have a two-brain mentor. So I completely and utterly believe in the mentorship and the value in it. So I'll really get back to the thing that I'm most familiar with. So I'm a coach, and I understand that coaching works. If I don't have a coach myself, I'm a bit of a hypocrite, and I'm going to stop. You know, if I don't believe in my own product, I'm not going to get the results because I need someone to hold my hand to the flame a little bit sometimes. If I'm slacking off, that's the power of a mentor. I mean, you can have all the information. You can chat GPT or Google, whatever you want now, and you'll get most of the information that you need. But it's about accountability. It's about having that support network. And that's what a mentor does for you. And also, one of the key things is, another quote is, you know, you can't read the label from inside the bottle. Yeah, sure. You need that objective standpoint. You need someone else to look at your business from the outside and tell you, no, actually, you're not as good as you think. You might need to work on this. You know, you do often need that. And I certainly need that. And I love having that second pair of eyes that just looks at the business and says, this is what you need to work on now. Give this your energy. And there's so much power in that because it's freedom that you don't have to think about what you've got to do next. There is someone there that's holding your hand a little bit to tell you, forget about all the noise. Because, like, I work with gym owners myself. There is always a fire to put out. There's always something that needs to be done in your business. But it's not the thing that needs to be done in your business. And a mentor will tell you what that thing is. Yeah. And the way Brian talked about knowing his clients, that's how a mentor knows you as a gym owner. Whereas, you know, a mentor could say, Brian, we know you want to increase your client count right now because you've got such amazing retention and average revenue per member. We're just going to try and get some more clients in the door. Have you, Brian, booked your quarterly referral events already? And Brian's like, yes, I did them. Okay, great. Or sometimes the answer is, you know what? I'm really stressed right now. I was working on some other stuff. I didn't book those quarterly referral events. The mentor says, okay, let's solve that problem real fast. And let's get those events on the calendar. Because if you don't, you will not grow. We know referrals is the most important aspect of your business. They produce high value, long-term clients. We get that stuff on the calendar because your goal is to grow to this, you know, and I'm beating the point to death, but you get it. We know what you want to accomplish, prescribe the exact right thing at the exact right time to get the result that you want. Then you go on to the next thing. So Brian, as a mentor, works with a mentor to get the results that he wants at his gym. I want you to put your mentor hat on now, Brian. You're going to step into a different role and work. Let's say there's a gym owner out there and they want 200 clients or maybe slightly more than that. What would you tell them right now? Not knowing anything about their business, but what's the general advice if someone says, I'd like to get 200 clients in my coaching gym? Yeah, it's an awesome question. And it is definitely one that I get asked, particularly at the start of someone's mentorship journey. They're like, oh, how do I get more clients? And everyone asks it. Everyone asks it. Or how many clients do you have? I suppose a better question that I've asked my mentees now is how many clients can you keep? What is your gym designed to keep? They're two very different problems. And most people are working on the wrong problem all the time. You know, how do I get more clients in? They're just filling a leaky bucket. So you have to, you know, the key thing, the most important thing is design and build a gym that no one wants to leave before you try to grow it. So get your systems, like I mentioned at the start, get your systems locked in for a gym that's far larger than where you currently are and design your systems and your gym and your care network for a gym that's larger than where you currently are. Because if you're just designing it for, let's say you're at 50 members and you're only thinking of 50 members, design what it looks like at 100 and start creating a gym of 100 members before you get there and build the systems that can withstand that. Did you ever run six-week challenges at your place? No, we never ran those. Okay. I'll tell you what I did, and you'll laugh at this as a mentor, but after we got to 230 and then we went down to like 180, 150, and I was kind of desperate for clients because the bills weren't being paid and all that, I decided I'd try these six-week challenges because I wanted more clients. And they worked. All of a sudden, I had a ton of leads. I had a ton of people coming in the door. I completely overwhelmed my staff as they were dealing with all the lead flow. Then we ran these gigantic sessions of like, I want to say it was 20 to 30 to 40. 40 people who came in for these six-week challenges, and I split the gym in half where my normal clients were over there wondering what the hell was going on with all these people they didn't know. And then I had these other group of people who had not really been selected all that well. Like the ads worked really well, but they weren't like a perfect fit for my business. They had a great time over six weeks. Then almost, I'd say like 90% of them or more washed out, gone. So I got more clients for a six-week window. I was not equipped to hold onto them. And if Brian had said to me before that, how many clients? How many clients can you hold onto and serve properly? I would have said, I'm at 150. I could probably serve 180, and they have to be the right people. I can't just serve six-week tourists. And he would have said, okay, let's maybe hold off on this challenge. Let's build some systems to hold onto your clients better. Let's target some referrals to add some good clients that are a perfect fit at high value with low advertising costs. And I would have said, okay, let's do that. Then we would have got to 180. We would have addressed our systems. We would have gotten to 200. We would have gone further. And maybe at some point, we would have had the systems dialed in. And to the point where Brian's at, where I could have said, yeah, I can handle a six-week challenge right now because my staff is dialed. My systems are good. I know how to hold onto these people. We're going to screen properly on the way in to make sure we get the exact right people who are likely to stay. That's the difference in having a mentor and a plan as opposed to just saying, I need more clients, and I'm dying. Brian, have you seen that with mentees? Because I don't think I'm alone in this plan. All the time, unfortunately. And again, he's just asking the wrong question rather than reframing it. It's it's it's it's classic it's we got to think about are we really going to help someone change their life in six weeks probably not and like that meeting that should be finished across the hall right now one of the things they speak about at the start of it is anyone who is leaving and is there a trend to why they are leaving so you know we we want to know did they get the goal because if they got the goal and they stayed with us for that 27 months great happy days let them go express their fitness somewhere else we've done our job and and that's not to say i'm happy for people to leave but you know at least we've done right by our mission and we've gotten them to a better level they haven't just come in six weeks you know they didn't get these amazing results that we might have promised them and then left because that's just not what we're about so you know we look at every case even in no matter how big the gym is going to scale we'll look at everyone individually and look at did we did we do right by them and did we get them to their goal if you want more clients in your gym the first question i'm taking the words right from brian you have to ask is how many people can i hold on to right now and if it's not if your number if you've got 150 people and you can only hold under 150 you can't add more until you fix your systems you can build those systems with a mentor and build a strong gym that's profitable and stable that can handle as many clients as you want but you have to do it in the right order brian if someone wants to work with you what's the best way to get a hold of you or if they want to ask a question um yeah they can dm me on instagram probably uh brian.foley10 or email me at tuberinbusiness so brian.foley at tuberinbusiness.com the most important part of getting more clients is retaining the ones you have and building the systems to support them brian always a great show you're packed with info and stats i appreciate your time i hope you can go across and catch you into that staff meeting thanks mike thanks so much. That was Brian Foley. This is Run a Profitable Gym. Thanks so much for listening. Please hit subscribe on your way out wherever you are. And now here's Two Brain founder Chris Cooper with a final message. Hey, it's Two Brain 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 gymownersunited.com to join.