How to Run Gym Ads That Actually Work in 2026

Struggling with paid ads for your gym? Here's what's actually working in 2026.

Today on “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain CEO John Franklin sits down with Colm O'Reilly, Two-Brain's paid ads specialist, for a tactical breakdown of everything gym owners need to know about Facebook and Instagram ads right now.

In this episode, Colm covers the real numbers behind paid gym ads: what you should expect to pay per lead, what a client actually costs to acquire and how to know if your ads are profitable.

John and Colm explain why ads amplify your other marketing funnels and how Meta's Andromeda update changed the ads game.

Colm introduces a simple “BUT” formula for writing ad copy that speaks directly to your ideal client's goals and objections and breaks down campaign structure for both beginners and advanced gym owners.

The pair also discuss what to say on that first phone call, how to handle the pricing question and how to keep cold leads warm for months after they first clicked.

Watch this episode and walk away with a clear starting point for running profitable gym ads in 2026.

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0:00 - Intro 

2:51 - Ad math and budgeting basics

7:39 - What to expect from your ad spend

10:34 - The Andromeda update and creative strategy

13:03 - The “BUT” framework for ad copy

15:57 - Campaign structure for gym owners

22:15 - Lead ads vs. landing pages

24:13 - Lead nurture and what to say on the phone

32:24 - Troubleshooting ads that aren't working

34:01 - Should you hire an ad agency?

Transcript

0:03

If you're a gym owner that is struggling with paid ads, this episode is for you. I'm John Franklin, the CEO of Two Brain Business, and on this episode of Run a Profitable Gym, I brought on Colm O'Reilly, the paid ad specialist for Two Brain, to talk about what is working in 2026. Colm, how you doing, man? I'm great. I'm excited to talk about this. Paid ads is pretty much all I do all day. Yeah, what is it that you're doing with gym owners? You say paid ads is what you do all day. What do you do specifically? So I'll spend like six to eight calls every day helping gym owners set up their paid ads, largely on Facebook, and that's what we're going to talk about today, Facebook and Instagram, helping them set up ads at the lowest possible cost for the maximum impact, and then also analyzing it to make sure that it is actually giving them a good return on investment. And it is Marketing May. We have our four funnels. We have referrals, social content, in ads and you are closing out the show, ads are last because we think it amplifies what is already there. And we put together some visuals because I know talking about what's going on in ads manager can be dry. So if you are someone who is listening to this and getting a little confused, pop on over to our YouTube channel, run a profitable gym so you can see some of the visuals that Colm and I are speaking about. So when you say ads amplify what's already there, what do you mean by that? So I'll give you a great example. We had a client that is largely a yoga studio, but they ran more fitness ads. They jumped the goat, jumped too far in advance and ran fitness ads, but that didn't match their social media. But then when we ran yoga ads, that matched what they already had in place, what was on their website, what was in their social media, what their clients knew, And their lead cost dropped from like 30 bucks down to five bucks pretty much overnight. So you've got to build the other parts of your marketing before you jump into ads. And we've been talking about this a lot, right? Ads sit last because they don't replace the other three. Like there used to be an era in time where you could just run ads. And that is way harder to do now, right? Social and ads and media and ads and content and ads have all kind of meshed together. And the gyms that are winning are doing all three. They're doing the three first funnels and then the ads amplify the messaging that they're putting out into the world. Did I get that right, Colm? 100%. Yeah. You can't have like an empty IG page and expect your ads to do work. You can't talk about one thing and advertise for another. It's all got to be consistent because clients might react to the ad, but they will check out your socials. And that's where they're going to get a vibe for whether the gym is for them or not. And so as somebody who has been running ads a long time, I have paid my tuition at the College of Mark Zuckerberg, where I have just lit a bunch of money on fire doing ads incorrectly. So one of the first things we like to teach is ad math, right? And so let's talk about the actual budgeting because ads are one of the only ones where you can't do it for free. And what I mean by that is you can ask your members for referrals. That doesn't cost you any money. You can make a blog post. It doesn't cost you any money. You can create a post on Instagram. It doesn't cost you any money. You're paying in your time, whereas with ads, in order to get an ad out in the world, dollars got to be coming out of your wallet. So let's talk about budgeting because I'm sure you get that question all the time. Yeah, and I've never met a gym owner who wants to give Mark Zuckerberg any more money than is absolutely necessary. So this is what we teach them is get your target audience size down to about 50,000 to 100,000 people. And you'll do that by most likely dropping a pin on your gym or picking the zip code you want to target and then the age range you want to target. And generally we recommend somewhere in the region of age 30 to 60 probably no more than four to five miles and that will give you your audience size now if you're in a rural area you can go further out in a city obviously you want to go tighter and that will give you your audience size of 50 to 100,000 people and then you want to start at one dollar per 10,000 people per day so that's somewhere between five and ten bucks per day and that holds true whether you're in dollars or euro or pounds. We found that generally holds true across the world. And of course, all marketing is testing. So you want to test it for about two weeks to start. So basically we recommend starting somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 to$300 a month to as you're getting your sea legs on ads manager. Is that correct? Yeah. And then you can just check that against, okay, well look, how many leads am I getting? How many conversations am I having? How many no sweat intros am I having? How much are those converting? And ultimately, how much are they paying me? Okay. So you got your five to $10 in the machine and let's talk about the expectations of that. So you put a slide together of what we might expect. What are some of the things that we need to track when we're going through this? Just walk us through the different metrics that if we're just getting started, we should be tracking on ads manager to make sure that we're actually making money from the work that we're doing. Yeah. So set your ad up and let it run for 10 to 14 days before you jump into it. Don't be like the person who starts their diet and jumps on the scale every day, expecting miracles. Cause that's unfair. Generally what we see is like industry standard cost for a fitness lead is about 15 to $25. Now we obviously try and beat that. So we want your leads to be costing about 10 to 15, 10 to $15. And if you get it underneath $10, that's great. Overall at a 10 leads, you get five, 10 leads to buy. And so what you're saying is you're seeing gyms acquiring clients for somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred to $150 in 2026. Yes. One of the points that I wanted to make is that some people in certain markets will see that number and say, that's ridiculous. That is not in line with reality. And that is fine. We acknowledge that different markets have different costs, right? Like if you're in a rural town versus a major Metro coastal area, you can see a 15 X variance in those numbers, meaning that, you know, your leads may cost $150, but you can still run those campaigns profitably if you understand certain downstream metrics. Colin, this is something where you and I actually disagree on. Uh, you think it doesn't necessarily line up with major metros. You think it's just kind of like, uh, some markets are more expensive. Some markets are less expensive. Is that correct? Yeah. So you can be quite lucky and you just have a market that has more people online, less advertisers and boom, you're going to get lower cost leads, even though you're in a big metropolitan area and you can be unfortunately unlucky and just have no one who's online. So your leads go up quite a bit as well. And now don't put it down to look, test it and again, check the math, which I think is what we're going to get on to next is ultimately you want to ask yourself is, did I make more in front end revenue than I spent on ads each month? There's your number one marker of success. And later in the show, we're going to go into the different strategies, the campaign types. So, you know, we just want to make sure that we're hitting on the point that you got to know your numbers on the front end before you set any type of campaign. Before we talk about strategy, we need to know what the outcome is, because if you don't know if it's working or not, there's there's no point in even starting. Right? So let's talk about like a higher CPL example, maybe somebody who's in the $50 lead territory, right? So their daily spend is going to be a little more aggressive in the $20 to $30 range, you're looking at $35 to $50 leads. And if you assume similar conversion rate, they're going to get a client for, you know, on the high end 500, right? And so some of you may hear that and say $500 a client, there's no way I could run ads and have them be profitable if I'm paying $500 to get a client. And we can show you how someone who is spending $500 to acquire a client can still make money. So let's assume that a membership at your gym is $250 a month, and you keep someone around for 24 months, the lifetime value of that customer is $6,000. And so if you're paying $500 to acquire a client, but you're making $6,000 over the lifetime of the client and you're a little patient, while maybe you're not making the$500 on the front end, that's still a very profitable funnel for you and one that personally I would turn on. Colm, how do you coach people who are maybe not making a positive ROI on the front end, but are still seeing, like still have very positive looking numbers when you look at the lifetime value of the client? Yeah, so ideally we want the front end revenue each month to outstrip ad spend because that's brilliant. You're not losing money each month acquiring clients. But if we take that example of some clients worth $6,000 and we're spending $500 to make it, we're still below 10%. So provided the rest of your numbers are good, you're not overpaying rent, staff or yourself, you can afford that and still come out profitable in the long term. Sure, you might be down $100, $200 in month one, but you're going to recoup that over time, over the lifetime value of the client. And again, this is why we talk about, you know, marketing being one section, you've got to have your retention on as well. And that's a great point. The better run gyms from an operations and retention. Standpoint are going to be at a huge advantage when it comes to marketing. Because if a member stays longer and pays more at your gym versus a competitor's gym where they pay less and stay for a shorter period of time, you're going to be able to spend more to acquire a client, which is going to provide you with a large advantage. So retention matters, right? I always tell clients, like if they don't keep clients around, gym owners, if they don't keep clients around for longer than one month, they have no business getting on a marketing call. Yeah, if they're not keeping clients for one month, we got to, there's some, there's some other things we need to talk about. Fixes in place first. Yeah. All right. So in 2025, there was the Andromeda update, which changed the way Facebook delivered ads. And we've made some changes to the two brain ads curriculum to reflect that. Maybe you can go into some of the differences between the old way and the new way of thinking about ad creative. Yeah, absolutely. You could just put out the same ad and maybe you have a red version, a blue version, a green version, but it's the same thing. We want to get you fit. And Facebook will find the most popular one and just pump that out nonstop. Now what it does is it knows off user behavior what a certain person is more likely to respond to. So, John, you'll respond to a different ad than I will, even if we're both interested in Hyrox training. You might want to do it to compete. I might want to do it because, like, everyone else is doing it. And that's an idea of, okay, well, it's still a Hyrox ad, but now you're talking to people about what they're specifically interested in. So you've got to give Facebook more variety than just one ad repeated again and again. So what you told me is you should speak to different personas. What does that mean? So again, we've got our online or on screen, we've got our three personas. We've got the dad who may be low energy. So dad is one persona and mom is one persona. A gym hater is another persona or someone who's going to the gym and not seeing results. Could all be a different persona. And the next thing then you've got to do is speak to their desire. So the dad low energy, it could be, you know, lose a dad bod, obviously. Get more energy. Play with your kids. Reduce back pain. Feel younger. They're all ways of speaking to the desire in a variety of ways. And that's what Facebook will pick on and then pick whichever version best suits the end user. So you basically need to make a bunch of different varieties of creative. You want it to be broad enough that all the collective creative can scale, but specific enough that they can serve the ad to someone and that person will say, hey, this ad is for me. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, my ideal client is Linda, but I'm not going to be like, hey, Linda, are you age 46, mom of two who wants to get back into exercise, but is nervous about the gym? It's not that level of specific just yet, but we can say, hey, are you a busy parent who needs to get in and out of the gym quickly to get on with your busy life? And then, yeah, that's more broad appeal, but we'll speak to your ideal client. And you call this the, the, the butt framework. So this is like your, your rubric for creating ads and ad ideas. So talk me through that. Yeah, that's the B-U-T butt. And it's basically, do you want to achieve a goal, but a common objection or fear? So we'll say like, do you want to lose weight, but not sure where to start? Do you want to get stronger, but you're worried about injury? Do you want to increase energy, but you're intimidated by gyms? So any goal your clients have with a objection or a fear is just a great way of getting their curiosity, getting them interest in the ads that you're speaking to them. And then you're offering them the next step, which is, Hey, get in touch. Let's have a chat. And we've been talking a little higher level now. But let's get down into like the ad level. So what might that look like when the rubber hits the road? We gave you like, you put together three different type of creative types here that they could run because, you know, there's images, there's videos, there's a headline, there's the description, there's just a normal video, there's an image with a call out. Like, you know, if you're like overwhelmed with the amount of options, what are you telling people to do when they're starting? And a lot of gym owners don't like to record videos because it can take a long time and they fluff the lines, they mess up the script. So you can get great results with just static images and people will click on static images. What we recommend is a mixture of just photos of people smiling at the camera, not working out. I can't stress this enough. You don't need to show a heavy snatch or someone tearing their hands doing a complicated gymnastics movement or any action shot. Even light dumbbells can sometimes scare people off. So have people smiling at the camera. They're great. You don't need to put any text on some of those because some users like to discover things and not feel like they're being advertised to. So just have people smiling directly at the camera. Works great. The flip side of that, the other end of the spectrum is just a block of text or maybe with a simple graphic that says something like beginner-friendly personal training or are you looking to get in shape but nervous about joining a gym? Asking a very simple question. They appeal to the type of person who's like, you're not wasting my time. You're being very direct. I'll click on this ad. And then finally we have a mixture where you'll put a photo up and you'll put a bit of text on it as well to kind of catch everybody in the middle between the two ends of the spectrum. So the first one's just kind of like the Trojan horse. It looks like an organic post that someone would make on Facebook. Doesn't feel like an ad. The second one is basically like your billboard. It's very simple, direct. You kind of get to the chase and don't waste anybody's time. And the third, looks and feels like an ad, but you try and make it in this wholesome way that gets to the pain point but displays kind of the value of going to your gym. Did I get that right? Yeah, 100%. Okay, so we know how much we're spending. We understand our ad math. We talked about the personas that we wanna target. And we have a general understanding of the creative we wanna make. Next, let's talk about campaign structure. How are we actually setting this up? So starting off, don't overcomplicate it. So Facebook has this thing called dynamic creative, where instead of you trying to like spend hours guessing the perfect image, the perfect headline and the perfect text, just give Facebook a variety of these and let it just constantly shuffle and recombine to find which one works best for you. So we'll set it up with the campaign structure, get me leads, leads ads. Your ad set is the targeting we talked about a little bit earlier. That's the 50 to a 100,000 people, generally the age range within about three to five miles of your gym. And you just turn on dynamic creative. That's where you get to give Facebook up to 10 images. You can get away with three to five, but if you want add up to 10. Five primary texts, just the long form texts that they'll read. And that can be anywhere from three sentences to three paragraphs or a list. And then five headlines. And then headline is your punchy thing like lose weight, feel great. And so what this looks like is there's basically one campaign, one ad set, and it's literally one ad, but you're just jamming a bunch of different variants into the one ad and Meta is gonna mix and match them a gazillion different ways to find the most effective structure, correct? Yeah, and this is the simple version works well on low budget, works well without you having to put a lot of work into Facebook as well. And one thing I'll say, this is a made up stat, but your image is like 80% of your ad. It has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It's gotta be visually appealing and inviting. And then because Facebook won't often show the text or the headline. So that's why you need your image to be really clear for your market. The other nugget I would provide is on your primary texts and headlines, make them as simple as humanly possible. We see a lot of people trying to reinvent the wheel or over complicate their offers in a way that confuses prospects and column. Confused prospects don't buy. Yeah, clear beats clever every single time on social media. Now, if you're someone who's maybe more of an advanced gym owner and you've reached a point where you're spending north of a few thousand dollars a month, a more advanced structure for the Andromeda era would be one campaign, an ad set per gender, and within each ad set, 15 diverse creatives. And so that way you can get a lot more targeted on your goal, but statements. So you can talk about the different variants of people you wanna target in the men category and then create variants for each type of objection that you'd have in the following category. And then you would repeat that for the female ad set. And so that way the call-outs can be more gender specific and the actual ad creative can hit on those different pain points in a way that you just can't in dynamic. But if you're a gym owner who is just starting out and you're only running, 10 bucks a day, five bucks a day on ads manager, I highly recommend you start with the simpler dynamic creative that Colm was talking about. Now, let's talk about the different types of ads, Colm. So what are the different campaign types and the objectives that a gym owner could run? Yeah, well, if you're looking for leads, there's two main types you'll do. You'll do one where you capture the information directly on Facebook and then another where you'll send them to your landing page or your homepage and try and capture the information. There, Facebook or Meta generally prefers the lead ads because it keeps people on the ecosystem. So you're gonna get more exposure most of the time there. The benefit of having a landing page though, is someone who's gonna jump off Facebook, read a little bit of text, maybe watch a video sales letter and then enter the information, they're gonna be a hotter prospect. So we recommend starting with lead ads because you get more reps, you get more people into your ecosystem. But over time you might decide, you know what? I wanna filter people out more before I talk to them. So when you go to make your campaign, they're gonna give you a bunch of objective types. And so we're talking specifically about the one that says lead. Is there ever any reason why a gym owner would wanna run like a traffic campaign or something along those lines? Or do you virtually always recommend starting with a lead campaign? Starting with definitely you wanna start with a lead campaign. Over time you might say, I'm gonna build out an awareness campaign to warm my audience up or a traffic campaign to send people to a particular page. But if you want leads, you just tell Facebook, get me leads. If you want more people to know you exist without pushing a sale or pushing a call to action, that's where awareness comes into it. I will say just from my own experience, I find it way harder to track the outcome and the results for some of the more higher funnel stuff. So traffic, awareness, objectives, that kind of stuff. Or it's much easier to say like, hey, I got this person's email, it's attributable, to the campaign, did this person buy? Yes or no? From a like, if our goal is to grow our gym profitably, it's much easier to track, is this working when you have a lead objective versus some of the others, so. Yeah, fully agree. I always say that lead ads, they're kind of like your Coca-Cola vending machine or refrigerator. It's like buy Coke now, like buy your Coca-Cola now. And then it's easy to track. Whereas awareness ads and traffic ads, you've gotta treat them more like your billboards or your media. You might be able to directly attribute a new client to it. And it's worth experimenting and testing, but not an issue. Don't over-complicate it at the start. We pulled an example of each here, if you're unfamiliar. So like Colin mentioned, lead ads is something where you click the ad on Facebook and the actual lead form will be on platform. And one of the things that we like about this is that the form fields are auto-populated. So Facebook already knows your name, email, phone number, and they'll put that in the fields for the prospects. So all they have to do is click submit. The downside of that ease of use is that they don't really have to think about it. So, you know, what is the difference in lead quality from a landing page versus a lead ad? Do you have any statistics you can provide for us, Colm, or any feedback on, you know, how much harder someone is to close from a lead ad versus a landing page? Well, I'm always cautious when people say lead quality, because you've got to put the work in on lead nurture and qualifying leads yourself. Like if you're expecting any platform to do all the heavy lifting for you and just have perfect clients come in and say, here's my credit card details, I don't think you're gonna be very successful with marketing. You've got to put work in to nurture them. So you're giving a non-answer. You're like, it doesn't matter. You're gonna be a bulldog no matter where they're coming in from? Well, 100%, I think you should be, you know, leads are like newborn babies. They need constant attention and consistency. They need consistent intention. And you've got to pleasantly and persistently pursue your prospects. Most people have never really enjoyed fitness. They know it's something they have to do. And our first job as coaches is not to give up on them and reach out enough times. So they say, okay, well, this person actually gives a hoot about me. And based off of the data we're seeing and the data we've published on the state of the industry, most gyms are not getting a lot of leads. They're getting less than one per day. So you want to really optimize for at bats. And that's why a lead ad is such a great starting point. One, you don't have to design a landing page. So it's faster to get started. And two, the more opportunities you get, the more likely you are to increase your sales numbers. For me, if someone was asking me, I would tell them to move over to a landing page once they get to a point where they can no longer handle the volume of leads. And we're seeing that less and less often now that ad costs are higher. And that's not something we expect to change, right? Like we think ad costs are gonna continue to go up as time goes on. So Colm, you talked about your problem with the word lead equality, and you brought up lead nurture. What are some of the best practices for lead nurturing when you're dealing with cold traffic? So 100% we can tell is the sooner you follow up, the more likely you're gonna get them to convert. Because people are so quick on Facebook and Instagram to forget what they even saw or clicked or go on with their day. So we want you to follow up ideally within five minutes. Now, some markets do better if they send a text message first, some markets do better with a phone call, and then some people will respond to email a day later. But we definitely know that you wanna try all three channels. So for example, I'm in Ireland, everybody uses WhatsApp, we don't really use iMessage. So we have an automated text message that goes out saying, thanks very much, this is an automation. One of our coaches is gonna call you within a couple of minutes. And then we'll call them from our personal phone. And if we don't get them, we send them a WhatsApp. Again, from our personal number to get like, there's an actual real human here from something you filled out online. Then we'll have emails, send out semi-regular intervals for the next couple of days to try and nurture them. So long story short, reach out quickly and make multiple attempts across the different channels is so important. What you brought up there is an important point. Automation is helpful. We understand that sometimes leads are gonna come into the funnel while you're on the floor training people and you're not gonna be able to call them every five minutes or within five minutes. But what Colm said that is important to understand is that while he does use automation, he goes back and adds that personal touch. He sends them an email. He'll do a call from a private number. So that way they know, hey, maybe this first one was automated, but there's a real human behind there. Someone actually cares about me. Yeah. Going back to my example of Linda, she gave me her husband's number about after a year of being a member and said, he's screwed now. You're never gonna stop calling him. I said, Lindy, what do you mean? She goes, you rang me eight times before I came in. So I was like, why didn't you just answer the first time? And she goes, I wasn't ready. I was nervous. And it was only that I continued to follow up with her. And now she's with us three plus years, loves the place, staple of her 7 a.m. Class. So if I didn't follow up with her, I wouldn't have gained a great thing. Client who then refer it on a family member. And a lot of people get nervous at this idea of picking up the phone and calling people. Like their biggest fear is like, what happens if they answer? Which is obviously the best case scenario because they don't know what to say. Now, good thing we have Colin the expert. Walk us through what that first conversation should look like. First of all, I'd say the mentality is that you're going to help them. Like, I genuinely believe that if you join my gym, your life's going to be better. I genuinely believe that. I have a whole bunch of examples that could say, yeah, I've improved this person's life. So when I'm calling them, it's like I can help their life. Second thing is then we'll generally just go with a, hey, John, it's Colin here from the gym. Is now a good time or did I catch it a bad time? So I'm giving you the chance to say no straight away, putting you at ease, I'm not putting you under sales pressure you say yeah I can talk I'll say cool you're interested like to just ask a couple of quick questions to see if we're a good fit if we are we'll invite you in for a chat if not I'll point you in the right direction again building that trust and then the three questions I like to ask are just number one is our location convenient because if it's not convenient to home or work they're never gonna and stick with it long term then I'm into the point where I can say what are your goals. Generally people, it's lose weight, get strong, et cetera, et cetera. Finally, I'd say, okay. And like long-term, would you think in more one-to-one or group? Once they've answered that, then I'll relate all the answers back to them to show that I've listened. And if it's a good fit, I'll be like, perfect, John. So our next stage is to invite you in for a chat and offer some times. What do you do if someone's like, just tell me what the price is? I saw the ad. I want to know what the price is. Yeah, it's a great question. And I'll let you know our prices as soon as I know a little bit more detail, or I'll say, I'll send on our price list. The last thing I want to do is say no to someone and ruin that trust. So if you say what your price, we've got a list of options, John. So we think in more personal training and group, we're thinking more training on your nutrition. And then when you give me the answer, then I can say, okay, well, looking at what you're looking for. I think our three times a week membership is perfect for you. And that's 195 per month. So you won't like some tactics or, you know, don't give pricing over the phone or play hardball. You're generally in line with continue to build trust with the prospect. If they want to talk pricing, ask some qualifying questions and give them a general ballpark. So you're not wasting their time in yours. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I think the worst thing you could do is, oh, we don't give the prices out over the phone. Again, it's going to erode that trust very quickly. And you haven't built any trust yet. And we are seeing a move towards pricing transparency in the broader industry with all the changes that Google is making. They're certainly prioritizing gyms that provide more information on their website. So if you were someone who was previously gating pricing, our stated best practice now is to list pricing or at least list ranges, like a starting at X amount of dollars. So Google has something that they can ingest and they can spit that out whenever someone's talking to LMs and asking, hey, what are the best gyms for me within X amount of dollars? So Colm, we talked about campaign structure. We talked about our ad math. We talked about the creative. We talked about what happens once we get those leads. We talked about what to say to them. In a lot of cases, actually in most cases, you're not going to get your leads to respond, right? They're not going to respond to your texts. They're not going to respond to your calls. They're not going to come in for a consultation. How do we, how do we keep these people warm? How do we get the most out of these dollars we spent to get these email addresses, even if they are not responsive? Yeah, it's, it's long-term nurture, John. And so what we do at my gym is once a month, generally we'll pick down on Saturday and we'll just sit down and go through last month and the month before and the month before leads. Now, it's not the most fun thing to do, I'll fully admit as a gym owner. I'd rather be coaching people one-on-one, but I'll just put my headphones in and start making calls. And I might make 50 calls and maybe only have five actual conversations. I'll send a WhatsApp after all those calls. So maybe you'll hear back from people a day or two later. But every time. I've sat down and just rang old leads, I've got a new client. And that was what happened with your friend, Linda, right? It took you eight months. Is that what you said? No, no. Linda, it was eight calls over the initial starting point. But I have had people definitely who filled out a Facebook form back in December and then Christmas and New Year's and all that roll around. But I called them in March and now it's getting a bit brighter. They're like, okay, I can do something. Because most people don't solve their fitness problem without us. So it's very simple. Hey, John, let's call him from the gym. You inquired way back when. Just checking in to see how it's going. And that's it. Simple. It doesn't sound particularly salesy to me. And it works, right? You might get someone at the right time of life and they may be receptive to that. So it is the blue collar work of the gym industry, lead nurture and reactivation. But it pays well. And hey, you sit down for two hours to possibly make six grand. That's worthwhile. That's a good return on investment. For your time of sitting down and making a whole bunch of phone calls. And why you say that is because you're talking about LTV, right? So if you get a new member and the average person who comes to your gym is worth $6,000, you spent two hours calling leads, but you got$6,000 in lifetime value from those two hours. Yeah. It's a pretty good return, I'd say. $3,000 an hour. I'll take that. Now let's talk about troubleshooting because probably one of the things you hear a lot are my ads aren't working. When someone says, hey, Colin, my ads aren't working. What's kind of the conversation you have? Like, where do you go from there? Well, it's generally called into two broad spectrums is that like one is like, are you not generating leads on Facebook? Or is your lead cost way too high on Facebook? Because then we've got a Facebook problem. It's either down to targeting or messaging or budget. Generally one of those three things. If they're not converting, then of course, we're always asking, okay, well, let's go through your set, show and close rate. And many people are booking and many people are showing up. And many people are closing. If you're getting a bunch of people to show up, but not closing, that's a sales issue. If you're not getting a lot of people to book, well, then it's maybe either a speed to lead and volume of how much outreach you're doing. Or it's that initial phone call, you're maybe trying to rush that initial phone call, and not building up enough trust to get them to come on in for intro. So the first bucket, the Facebook problem, that's usually variations of my ads aren't working, or my ads are too expensive, or Facebook ads don't work in my market. That second bucket is the leads aren't good. The lead quality is bad. I'm just getting garbage leads. That's probably more the line of questioning you get when those are the downstream issues, right? Yeah. Okay. Now, one thing we always get asked is, well, why don't you know, this is complicated. You guys have been talking for 35 years, and I'm not really following. Why don't I just hire an agency to do all this for me? And so we have kind of a unique view on agencies in that if you're someone who's spending $5 to $10 a day, you're looking at $300 a month in spend. Most agencies in the space are going to charge you somewhere in the neighborhood of a $1,000 to $2,000 retainer on top of the ad spend. And so Colm was saying his hurdle was you should be making back in front-end revenue what you're putting out in ad spend. So if you put out $300 in ad spend, the hurdle is you got to make back $300. But if you have an agency and let's say you're paying $1,000 retainer in addition to$300 in ad spend, now that hurdle becomes $1,300 for the same amount of ad spend. You would need, for most gyms, around four or five X the amount of clients on the front end to make that make sense. And for some gyms, especially ones that spend a lot of money, an agency may make a ton of sense. But for the vast majority of gyms, especially ones starting out, you may want a DIY or a done-for-you solution that is like two-brain marketing, which is what Colm does. Now, Colm, you actually have an agency, so that's why I wanted to talk during this part of the presentation. But feel free to correct me if anything I said was incorrect. No, no, I can't object to you. I think the problem is that if we're in the gym space, and if someone promised someone a six-pack in six weeks, we'd instantly know that was nonsense. But a lot of marketing agencies will promise fully qualified leads, and your gym is going to be absolutely full by next month, and everything is going to work out perfectly. And that's totally unfair. All an agency can really do is save you the time and expense of creative testing, because they see more ads than you do. If you're just looking at your gym, you're not entirely sure what's going on if you see your costs rise or fall. Whereas an agency will be able to see that because they're looking at however many gyms per week, and they're checking the ads every week so that's all an agency can do and i again i say that as someone like it's totally unfair to guarantee anything you can't promise but an agency can save you the time and the money and the headache and again if you're starting off you want to save your money if you're building your gym and it's worth your time to outsource it to an agency then talk to them so we gave you all the pieces to diy it uh in this video but if you're getting frustrated or confused you don't have to figure this all out alone. All Two Brain clients get to work one-on-one with. Colm. He helps you build out all your stuff. He gives you the creative that works. He tells you the headlines that work, and you don't even have to use his agency. It's just something that you get in stage one of our mentorship program. In addition, Colm, you just redid the course, correct? Yep. Yeah. So we, again, simplified the course, updated the course, so it's relevant to how Meta in 2026 is working. And in addition, when you're in Two Brain, you can email me help questions, and then we also have office hours where you can jump on, and we can live troubleshoot things as well. So you get that support, so you don't have to waste your time fighting with Meta and trying to figure this out on your own. I bop into those office hours. If you're a Two Brain client, you're not taking advantage of those. They are absolutely fantastic. They're incredibly tactical. Colm is in the back end of people's business managers, and we're working through real problems that people are having. You get to see data from different markets and share best practices. It's incredibly valuable. Also, if you're a Two Brain client listening to this, you have access to the new course as well. So log into the app and go check it out. Colm worked hard to make it. If you are not a Two Brain client yet, go to. TwoBrainBusiness.com, get on the calendar, talk to our team, so we can get you working with. Colm. We can set up your four funnels, and we can get you some more leads. That is it for this week's episode of Run a Profitable Gym. Please subscribe, and we will catch you next week. Colm, thanks for doing this, man. You're most welcome. A lot of fun.