How Smart Gym Owners Beat the Summer Slump

Summer hits gym owners hard.

Revenue drops, leads dry up and members cancel.

In this episode, Chris Cooper shares five strategies gym owners can use to generate revenue during the slow summer months.

Coop knows the pain firsthand. In 2009, he was juggling two locations and the summer slump almost put him out of business.

He swore he’d never let that happen again.

Now, after working with over 3,000 gym owners through Two-Brain Business, he knows exactly what works.

The summer slump is predictable. But that means it’s beatable.

Tune in to hear the plan smart gym owners follow to stay profitable all summer long.

Want to earn $100,000 a year from your gym while working under 20 hours a week? Click the link below to access the free training. 

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0:00 - The summer slump that almost killed my gym

1:13 - The September revenue strategy

3:41 - A seasonal offer that brings in new clients

5:22 - The most overlooked summer revenue source

6:48 - Why members cancel in the summer

8:57 - The vacation plan most gyms never offer

11:05 - The real reason gyms don’t survive summer

Transcript

0:03

Nobody joins a gym in the summer and your members are canceling. They don't want to be in the gym either. You're down revenue, but your costs are still the same. This is the summer slump. It almost put me out of business years ago, but since then we've developed a solution. I'm Chris Cooper, the founder of Two Brain Business, the world's largest gym mentorship company, working with over 3,500 gym owners worldwide to help them hit six figures in profit, because yes, it is possible. And in this episode, I'm going to show you five things that smart gym owners do during the summer to generate revenue and set themselves up for fall too. In August 2009, I hit my lowest point. I had new costs. I just opened a second facility and the rent was due. My staff pay was due. I had less money coming in than ever. Clients were putting things on hold and quitting. I didn't even have enough money to buy my groceries. It almost put me out of business. And the worst thing was that I had to correct things and I almost lost hope. Today, I'm going to share with you what I've learned from that experience and from mentoring over 3,500 gym owners worldwide over the last 10 years so that this never happens to you. The first thing that you can do is to pre-sell a fall program. Now, if your fall program, like September's on-ramp, for example, usually fills, you can invite people to reserve their spot. You have to position this as something that will help them. The reason that people don't join gyms in the summer has nothing to do with budget and everything to do with schedule. The kids are off school. They need to be home with them instead of putting them in daycare. They're going on vacation. That's great. You know, they're taking the kids here and there. They just want to go to the beach. They want to go to the cottage. I'm in northern. Ontario. We have three months of summer. Nobody wants to be in the city. But what really people struggle with is getting on track again in September when their schedules tighten up again. So what we want to do is help them commit early. And so you can have an on-ramp reservation system where you say we're taking 10 people in September. We start right after Labor Day. Click here to book your spot and have them prepay or even just pay $100 deposit on your on-ramp. The other thing that you can do is pre-sell specialty programs in September. So maybe you've got a ski readiness program or you've got a football conditioning program or something like that. And you can pre-sell spots for that. Get the revenue in now. Help you bridge the gap over the summer and then deliver in September when your regular lead flow comes back online. You don't need five ideas here. You need maybe one or two. The thing that we always did was we ran our biggest competition of the year right after Labor Day weekend so that people would have to pay for the competition in advance,$50 or $100. We'd have time to get the t-shirts in. We'd have that revenue. And it would give them something to train for all summer. Price it high enough that they're scared to just lose the money and not just walk away from it. Make teams so that they're committed to other people and have them commit to something in early September so they keep training all summer. As a heads up, a lot of gym owners think they need hundreds of members to generate a good living. The truth is we've helped gym owners earn a hundred thousand dollars a year take home without working 60 hour weeks or chasing these massive membership numbers that gurus like to promote online. That's why we've created our free guide, how to make $100,000 a year while working just four hours a day. Inside this guide, you'll see the exact model that successful gym owners use to build profitable businesses that don't depend on them being in the gym 13 hours a day. Click the link below or scan the QR code to grab your free copy. Now, the second thing that I recommend doing to beat the summer slump is adding a seasonal offer like a couch to 5k program. This is a great one. I'll use it as an example. A couch to 5k program works for people who know that they should get fit. They see their friends running these little 5ks and they think, I want to do that too. Or maybe there's a fundraising 5k that really speaks to their heart, like for breast cancer or something else. We have a few in my community too. They want to do this, but they're a little bit nervous. They've never done this before. Maybe they haven't done it in a long time. Maybe they just want to do it faster. And a couch to 5k program is something that one coach can easily run. You have the group meet up twice a week for a group run. You give them a little bit of homework. If they're not members of your gym, you partner with these events and give them a little cut of the revenue if you want to, or at least you're pumping new runners into their event. It's a win for everybody. It's very simple to run and a $79 six week run your first 5k program gets people to run their first 5k. It's very easy for one coach to run and it's a great revenue boost. I think our best year of doing this, we had 34 people sign up half of which were not even members. And then we worked on segueing them into our gym too. So a summer specific program is pretty easy. You just look for other events in your area. High rocks is an example. The 5k running is an example for us. There's a local duathlon triathlon that we help people train for. There's also a hundred K fundraising cycling, like a bike ride that we help people train for. And like, that's it for the summer. That's enough of a revenue boost for us. But these other ideas are very effective too, and I've done them all. Gyms in Two Brain use them every summer to avoid the summer slump too. The third way to beat the summer slump is to capture revenue from off-season athletes by offering tailored strength and conditioning or summer team leagues. First, look for the athletes in your community. What sports are they passionate about but not playing right now? Hockey, downhill skiing, these are huge ones for me. But if kids are off-season for swimming or anything else, you can run an off-season strength and conditioning program. If you're doing young kids, you really have to have the right coach for this. But for me, working with teen cyclists was a great fit, and I don't usually enjoy coaching young kids. So having that specialty is great for you in the summer. If you don't have a kids program, you don't want to coach teenagers, you don't know any coaches or athletes, build your own. Start a summer league program. Have people sign up, create it like an intramural league, and for the summer, you're going to have maybe six weeks or eight weeks of intramural competition every Saturday morning, maybe every. Wednesday night, something like that. You're going to do workouts that are not just your normal thing, but you can have obstacle courses. You're going to have like a high rocks type race. You're going to do a big hill race, like run up a giant hill. Things that are completely different for your gym that you can only run in the summer that are not conventional workouts like Fran and Murph, things that people will really find interesting that kind of test their fitness, but are mostly just fun and team building. You can build a summer league like that. You can charge for it. You can have people sign up. It'll help get you through the summer slump. The fourth key to beating the summer slump is to meet with your clients right now and give them a summer prescription by talking about their attendance and goals. Hey, look, you've built this amazing platform of fitness we don't want to see you slip back from that. Let's build a plan to get you through the summer when most people fall off. Remember, you're a coaching business, not just a gym. Not everybody wants to be in a gym all summer. I don't anymore, but I do want to have a coach. So let's pivot what we're doing this summer to more coaching. You're going to be at your cottage. Great. Do you have a bicycle there? Let's build you workouts. Can you take one dumbbell with you? At our summit last. Last weekend, we had the folks from street parking share their philosophy that everybody should be able to get super duper fit if they only have one dumbbell. Take that philosophy into your client's programming. You're still able to coach them even if you're not in your gym. And so they can be at their cottage and checking in with you via text. They can be on the road going to Disneyland or somewhere else and you're checking in on them via text. Maybe you double down on nutrition coaching. Maybe you do something different. Maybe you customize. Maybe you apply their membership fees to drop-ins at other gyms that they've always wanted to visit. We do that. To avoid our summer slump, one thing that we tell people is that if you're going on vacation, please give us the name of three gyms that are close to your hotel. We'll get in touch with them. We'll share your plan with them. They'll know you're coming. We'll cover your drop-in rate. It costs me a little bit, but it sure beats the heck out of having people hold or cancel their membership with us. You're still coaching them, but you need to sit down with them and make a plan first, get ahead of this before they say, oh, I'm going to cancel. And then you jump in reactively and say, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I can still coach you. Let's make a plan. If they've never heard of it, they'll think that you're just scrambling and you're going to half-ass it. Show them that you have a plan and that the plan is valuable and it's still coaching before they say, I'm going to cancel for the summer. The fifth thing that you can do to beat the summer slump, if you don't have time to meet with your clients one-on-one, is to create a vacation plan. Now, this is pretty easy. What you're going to do is just send a message, an email, a couple of Facebook posts out to your client list. And you're going to say, hey, it's summer. Before you take off, I know everybody's going to have vacation and you should. Everybody's going to be doing exercise outside. The gym and you should. You're going to be pursuing these other interests. You're going to be stand-up paddleboarding. You're going to be kayaking. I want this for you. This is what you train for. Amazing. But we don't want you to go backward either. We don't want you to lose your fitness gains. And so if this is you and you're going to be traveling and you're going to miss a week or more, talk to me about a specific vacation plan for you so that you don't lose your fitness. Now, remember, you're still coaching these people. As I said in the section above, What you're doing though, is you're being a little bit reactive, but you're getting ahead of it just enough before somebody says, I'm out. What you want to avoid is your clients guessing at what's best for them. They pay you to tell them in advance what to do, what's best for them. And if they have to guess, they're often going to make the wrong decisions, like putting their membership on hold, eating crappy food. So you're going to give them what to do in advance. And that's where the value comes in because that's still coaching. So if you haven't set up one-on-one meetings or goal reviews with your clients yet, take this approach, send a message to all your members, do it a few different ways, a few different times. Hey, if you're traveling this summer, you're thinking about a vacation, you're going to miss the gym for a week or more, click here to come in and we'll build you a custom plan. If you've never done this before, don't worry, it's easy. But the reality is here, you should know your clients well enough to say, here is a plan. When they come in, you say, where are you going? How long are you going to be there? What are the biggest challenges you're going to face? Is it lack of equipment? Is it lack of space? Is it poor eating? Is it late nights? Whatever. And you're going to build them a custom plan for that. What's in the plan is not what gives it value. Having a plan is what gives it value. Checking in with them, tracking their results. Hey, where have you been the last few days? That's what gives it value. Don't forget that you are a coaching business, not just a gym. Look, the summer slump can be a killer. It's the perfect storm of less revenue coming in. You still got all of your expenses. You've got fewer leads coming in. People are canceling, quitting, and you can lose hope. But I want you to have a bright light at the end of the tunnel because what actually kills gyms is not lack of lead flow or lack of revenue. It's lack of hope. And if you have a plan, you know that there's a brighter future coming. You know September's coming if you can make it through. The thing that saved me back in August 2009 was not that I had this amazing idea for more revenue. I did scramble and I made it through barely. I was late with some bills. I had to rob. Peter to pay Paul in a few areas. But the thing that I said to myself was, I am never doing this again. And I immediately wrote my plan for the following summer to come 12 months later. And it included kids programs, sports teams, and a big event that became the Catalyst Games. And we ran that for over a decade. Sometimes failure is a forcing function. And failure to plan is what kills most gyms. Use that to force you to build a plan. Copy these things from me. Don't make the same mistakes that I did. And go out there and change people's lives.