Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/

Weird title, I know. Here is where it came from.

Back in 2019 I was coaching a lot of gym owners and almost all of it was built on assumptions. I would ask somebody a specific question about their numbers and nobody had the answer. It is the same thing we all deal with on the training floor. The client who is 40 pounds overweight tells you he eats eggs for breakfast and salad for lunch. Business owners do the exact same thing. They give you the highlights and leave the rest out.

So I went looking for a small group of brave people willing to open the whole thing up once a quarter. Financials, KPIs, team, org chart, all of it. That became the CEO Mastermind, and this is the first time I have ever talked about it publicly.

In this one I walk Tom through how it actually works. The 16 page document they have to fill out before every meeting. Why they have to print a copy for every other person in the room. What happens in the hour they spend in the hot seat. And the one thing I was certain would kill the whole idea, which has still never happened once in seven years.

I also get into why I almost refused to let one guy join, what he is doing now, and why the majority of people who ignored my advice about opening a second location ended up in trouble.

5 Key Takeaways

1. The hardest part of the document is the part nobody else asks for. Every member copies and pastes their real profit and loss statement from their accountant, prints it, and hands it to all nine other people in the room. The first time I asked for that I could not believe I had the guts to do it. What it did was move the whole group off the bench press number. Revenue is top line chest beating. Profit is what you take home to your family. Those guys have gotten more profitable every year since because they know which number they have to stand behind in 90 days.
2. Nobody has ever forgotten the document. Not one time in seven years and over 100 meetings. I was sure guys would have a bad quarter and conveniently leave it at home. Zero. The only people who miss are the ones who had a baby or a wedding.
3. A guy came to me doing 10K a month and the cost of this group was 80% of his monthly revenue. I tried to talk him out of it. He insisted. He just reported $85,000 a month at his last meeting. He is an anomaly and I will say that plainly, but it is the reason I do not gate the room on revenue alone.
4. The reason the room sees your business better than you do has nothing to do with being smarter. It is that they are not emotionally attached to it. When they tell you to raise your prices, Mrs. Johnson who has trained with you for 12 years never enters their head. When they look at your org chart, they see a wrong person in a wrong seat where you see a good dude who has worked hard for you. That is a board of directors, and almost no gym owner has one.
5. Your KPIs tell you where the leak is and most owners are working on the wrong one. Guys walk in blaming their agency and their Facebook ads, and then somebody in the room points at the sheet and reads out that they converted 3% of their leads to a consult. If you have a 10% attrition rate you are not going to outmarket that. The financials tell you what already happened. The scoreboard tells you why.

Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/

Click Here to get a custom local marketing plan for your gym, completely free: https://www.vincegabriele.com/helpmemarket

Big Tom and I did something different this week. Instead of picking a topic, we took the questions straight from my SPF group. Five of them. All the same problems I hear every week on deep dives and coaching calls.

We start with pricing, because Mike Williams from Florida asked how often you should actually raise your rates. That turned into the bigger conversation about why gym owners refuse to do it. I just spent an hour on this with a gym owner from New Hampshire who was dead set against raising prices on current members. His reason had nothing to do with his business. It was that he did not want people to be upset with him while he was standing on the floor with them.

Then we get into the question four or five guys asked in different words: I have 13 employees, 12 of them are great, and one is making my life hell. I walk through the four people issues, and the one that is most common in our industry is the high performer everybody loves who is quietly poisoning your team.

From there it goes into when to hire your next trainer, how to build a scoreboard with only four numbers on it, and how to tell the difference between being busy and actually moving your business forward.

I also tell the story about the email I got two weeks ago. My dad’s municipal bond firm folded in the late 1980s. Forty years later, 40 to 60 people are still getting together for a reunion. Both of my parents who owned that company are dead and they are still doing it. That email made me take a hard look at the culture I have built, and I did not love what I saw.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Your value judgment on price is irrelevant. Vanessa drove 45 minutes and paid $444 for our daughter’s first birthday cake. To me that makes no sense. To her it made perfect sense, and hers was the only opinion that mattered. The gym owner who will not raise his rates is pricing his gym out of his own wallet instead of his customer’s. One caveat: if you are sitting at 12% attrition, fix your churn before you touch price. You will make a bad problem much worse.
2. There is no single right frequency on price increases. Two schools of thought. Cut deep and cut rarely, which is what we just did at GFP with a $50 per month increase, roughly 12%, and we will not do that again next year. Or build a smaller automatic bump into the membership agreement so every October it climbs 3% to 5%. Pick one. Just stop doing nothing while your rent and your payroll go up around you.
3. When you have one problem employee out of 13, all your mental energy goes to that one person and the other 12 get taken for granted. Run them through the four people issues first. Right person right seat means invest harder in them, not ignore them. Right person wrong seat means find them a different spot. Wrong person right seat is the one that eats gyms alive, the coach the clients love who is a cancer behind the scenes. Do not fire that person on a Tuesday and watch your business implode. Fire him in your head today and build a 30, 60, and 90 day plan to absorb the damage before he actually walks. And the number one leadership tool you can own is a mirror.
4. Stop waiting until you have enough clients to justify a hire. Bring on a part time trainer at $25 an hour, hand over 10 sessions a week, and that costs you about $1,000 a month. What you just bought is 40 hours of your own time. For most of you, three new customers covers that entire investment, and you only have to get those three once. You have 11 more months after that. If you cannot find three customers with 40 hours, the hire was never the problem.
5. Your scoreboard only needs four numbers. Leads, consults or trials, new members, and attrition. Every one of them needs a weekly goal, because without a goal you are just reporting what happened and you have no idea whether you won. When a number is off track, ask one question. Why did this happen? Block 30 minutes, write the answer down, and commit to one action step. Not a full rebuild. One step, then check next week whether you actually did it.

Click Here to get a custom local marketing plan for your gym, completely free: https://www.vincegabriele.com/helpmemarket

Most gym owners are grinding on the wrong problem for the stage they are actually in. Take the 5 minute audit and find out what deserves your attention right now: https://fourstagesquiz.com/

Dustin Bogle is a former pro wrestler who trained in a backyard ring built by his buddy's dad. Those buddies turned out to be The Young Bucks. He wrestled for ten years, set himself a hard deadline of age 28, and when the big contract never came he walked away cold turkey and went all in on his gym.

What happened next is why I wanted him on. He opened six gyms in six years. He sold all six. Three of them are still running today and three are not, and he tells you exactly why. Then he moved into brokering and has now sold 30 gyms plus a handful of other businesses.

We get into the stuff nobody talks about on stage. The fight with his brother over a water jug delivery that ended their partnership. The cease and desist that forced him to rebrand a year in. The gym he opened in what the locals called leisure land, where every person walking past his window was 70 years old and headed to the deli next door. He had the money, he had the systems, and he still picked the wrong corner because he stopped knowing his market the way he knew his first one.

Then there is the part most of you need most. Dustin runs Gym Reinforcements, which does nothing but lead nurture, and they have collected $40 million for gym owners since 2020. He gives up his actual numbers and the exact mechanics behind them. If you are generating leads and nobody is showing up, this is the hour.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Three of his six gyms survived and the difference came down to two words that both start with L: location and leadership. He had six gyms and hired maybe eight managers in that whole stretch, versus 50 trainers. He got world class at hiring coaches and never built the reps to hire leaders. One bad manager can kill a location on its own.
2. His manager test is three questions. Do I trust this person with my keys, my cash, and my kids. Then: are they magnetic enough that my team and my clients crave being around them. Then: are they coachable, meaning do they actually act on what I tell them. He walked away from people who were great talkers but only closed the lay downs and refused to do follow up or ask for the sale.
3. He moved six large group gyms to small group and raised the price from $49 a week unlimited to $89 a week for three sessions. He did not do it in one swoop. Year one was a hybrid where small group members got large group as a free add on while he quietly cut the boot camp schedule from six slots to three. Year two it was small group only. Yes he had churn. Revenue stayed flat or climbed and profit went up because every member was worth more.
4. He built a free coaching pipeline out of two nearby colleges. Kinesiology students need 40 to 60 hours of field work to graduate, so he got on the department's approved vendor list and the head of kinesiology mass emailed every new student twice a year. Every fall and spring that handed him four to six intern coaches for six to eight weeks at no cost, and he hired a lot of them.
5. A $10 charge to book the consult takes his show rate from 60% to 85%. He calls it a starting point session and it gets credited to the first month or refunded if it is not a fit. On top of that: at least eight appointment slots a day in 15 minute increments including weekends, a confirmation text that makes them reply with a Y instead of just reminding them, and a 30 to 60 second video sent after they confirm. He calls those trailers. The workout is the movie, and almost nobody sends the trailer.

Most gym owners are grinding on the wrong problem for the stage they are actually in. Take the 5 minute audit and find out what deserves your attention right now: https://fourstagesquiz.com/