While You’re Arguing With Competitors on the Internet, Everyone Else is Getting Better

A competitor once took an entirely unprovoked shot at my business on a hugely popular social networking platform. I was pissed.

I initially responded emotionally, stomping around my house ranting and acting as if more than a couple dozen people would see (or even understand) the less-than-subtle attempt at mocking us. What can I say…I’ve got a short fuse.

Here’s what I didn’t do…

• I didn’t engage with the post
• I didn't create a reactionary post of my own
• I didn't call anyone out publicly or privately

When the initial rush of animosity wore off, the rational side of me realized that this was a good indicator of where CSP is positioned within our field. I want our business to be such a player within our niche that “the competition” ends up spending valuable time concerning themselves with getting a rise out of us. Meanwhile, I can continue to focus on delivering endless amounts of value to our current and potential clients; we didn’t capture so much market share by losing sleep over what other people were doing or saying.

Owen knows better than to argue on the internet.

I’m not telling you to ignore the slight entirely. When someone takes a public shot at your operation, they are highlighting a potential misconception about your business. While you may not agree with the message, we live in a world where perception is reality, and it is important that we adjust to ensure that current and potential clients don’t perceive us to be flawed moving forward.

Instead of engaging in endless internet arguments, try this: Constantly pursue personal and professional development opportunities that will allow you to remain at the leading edge of your niche. Make product or service improvements as often as you can. You’ll eventually drown out the competition with optimal results.

Don’t ask me to disclose the competitor in question. If you’ve made it this far, you should know that I have no interest playing that game.

Your Broad List of Service Offerings is Killing Your Credibility

My wife has family in Connecticut, so we head south for routine visits. Not far from my mother-in-law’s home, there is a breakfast place that we enjoy. Every time we attend this establishment, I can’t help but notice the hair salon across the street that features the most outrageously paired service offering I’ve ever come across.

“WE RENT BOUNCE HOUSES”

You read that right. For some reason or another, the local hair salon owner came to the conclusion that renting bounce houses was an appropriate alternative revenue stream. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that this establishment was no longer open for business when we made our most recent trip.

While this example of mismatched service offerings is obviously a little extreme, I don’t see it as all that different from fitness facilities that bit off more than they could chew with a massive space, and now offer kickball tournaments and birthday party rentals during down time to make ends meet.

Much like my wife will never pay to have her hair styled at the place that rents bounce houses, elite athletes are unlikely to take your training business seriously if they visit your website and see combine-prep listed alongside off-hours laser tag or dodge ball leagues on your services page.

When it comes to adding additional or complimentary service offerings, remember this: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Save Money on Your Next Gym Lease With This Simple Tip

Very few gym owners are fortunate enough to own the space out of which their business operates. One of the certainties in life (along with death and taxes) that we brick and mortar fitness entrepreneurs need to come to terms with is paying rent. The long-term viability of our business is closely tied to keeping overhead as low as possible, and this begins with negotiating a favorable lease.

We’re currently in the late stages of negotiation for another five years in our current space in Massachusetts. This is the fourth time we've negotiated a lease with our current landlords dating back to 2008, and I am thrilled to say that the relationship is amicable, transparent, and always productive. This being said, I realize that landlord/tenant relationships aren't always as pleasant as ours.

There are complexities of lease negotiation that I may never master, but I do have a quick tip that is likely to help you in part now, then even more so when the time comes to renew your lease three, five, or even ten years down the road.

Be wary of early savings in exchange for late increases

Let’s imagine you’re in the process of securing 5,000 square feet of space for your new gym. To keep things as simple as possible, we’ll say that all of the operating expenses associated with the property will be built into your dollar per square-foot cost (AKA this is not a triple-net lease). Now let’s assume that you’ve done your homework, and come to the conclusion that $10 per square-foot is a fair market value for the area you are considering.

Next, the property owner presents a proposal for a five-year lease:

• Year 1 – $07.00/sq-ft
• Year 2 – $09.00/sq-ft
• Year 3 – $10.00/sq-ft
• Year 5 – $12.00/sq-ft
• Year 5 – $12.00/sq-ft

She’ll then say “I want to do everything I can to ensure that you succeed in the early stages of your business, so I made sure to keep your costs as low as possible in years one and two while still maintaining an agreement with an average annual cost of $10 per square-foot.”

Sounds enticing, right? You get a chance to build that client roster, create some great cash flow, and allow your business to find its groove in year one while paying a monthly rental fee of $2,917 as opposed to the $4,167 you’d be shelling out every month if you were attached to the aforementioned $10 per square-foot cost. That $1,250 in monthly savings would be huge for you to reinvest in the growth of your business, right?

The obvious catch is that by the time you find yourself in year four of this agreement you’ll be paying $5,000 per month in rent, but assuming you’ve capitalized on the savings in years one and two, this will be no problem at all. After all, you’re going to spend $250K on rent over the lifetime of the lease regardless of whether you agree to the terms proposed above, or a scenario that features a flat $10 per square-foot annually, so why not get creative with the structure of the agreement to ensure success in year one?

What we tend to forget

Sometimes we get so caught up in the excitement of signing that first or second lease, that we lose sight of where we are left when we return to the negotiating table. Assuming that business is strong enough to justify signing another lease at that point in time, you’ve established a starting point of $12 per square-foot. Your landlord isn’t about to voluntarily move backwards.

Instead, she’s going to say: “I’m going to do everything I can to keep you at or as close to where we have you right now because keeping your costs from increasing is of the utmost importance to me!”

She’s counting on you losing sight of the fact that the $12 per square-foot you’re paying today is inflated thanks to the savings you experienced in years one and two of your last agreement. The playing field is far different coming out of a $12 per square-foot year five than it would be if you’ve been cutting checks to the tune of $10 per square-foot up until now.

With this in mind, I would encourage you to target an agreement that will maintain a manageable variability in cost per square-foot between the start and end of your lease term to ensure that your end point is a reasonably accurate reflection of the state of the market. The discount that feels like a huge favor today is likely to be a detriment to your negotiating position a few short years down the road.

Do you enjoy my fitness spin on business concepts?

I publish my “Friday Four” newsletter at the end of each week featuring links to useful articles and insights on applying concepts from each to your own fitness business endeavors. Check it out here!

Supplementing Your Continuing Education Book Habit

I'm buried under a pile of summer internship applications this week. I've reviewed more than 100 apps and scheduled 15 interviews to take place between Monday and Friday. With this in mind, I know better than to think that I'll find time to write a blog of my own. Thankfully my friend and former CSP intern, Kim Lloyd, has prepared a great guest post for me to share. Enjoy! 

Full confession here - I’m the oldest person on staff at the gym where I work. Every time another pop star from the 80’s dies, I have to explain why clients are suddenly coming in to the gym teary-eyed and requesting that we listen to the Wham station on Pandora radio.

While my knees sound 40 years old, I don’t often notice the age difference.

But I have noticed my extra decade of perspective (ahem) creeping in during our staff meetings. For the first few months I worked at the gym our standard homework was to read one book a month, discuss what we got out of the book, and apply those nuggets to our business model and clients.

Great idea, right?

Sort of.

As a relatively new coach who transitioned into this industry in my late 30’s, continuing education is a priority for me. Books, blogs, the Personal Trainer Development Center, and workshops are my lifelines to knowledge that will help me get the best results from my clients. I know I’m never going to stop learning in the profession, and I need all the help and good ideas I can get.

But in our relentless pursuit of bettering our businesses, and ourselves, we developed a bad case of professional whiplash.  We would get fired up, spend a few days trying to apply the strategies we’d carefully studied - only to abandon them once we dived into the next book with its shiny new ideas.

Sure, we learned a lot, but the constant consumption of books and business strategies came at a cost. If you’re overwhelming yourself and your staff with theory, without ensuring they understand clients’ communication or learning styles, are you creating better coaches?

There’s a great scene in the movie “Good Will Hunting” where Will confronts a snotty Harvard history major in his pursuit of a girl (note: my co-workers have never heard of Good Will Hunting). The guy spouts off some rhetoric about history, when Will rightly points out that all he’s doing is repeating what he read in a book. He’s not bringing his own experience in to influence his opinion.

But Will does it with a great Boston accent, and then gets the girl’s number and rubs it in Harvard-dude’s face.

Reading self-help books is great, especially if you’re the analytical sort, but think critically about the return on investment. I’ve read a lot of those books myself, always with the secret hope that this would be the one that would make me more confident, reduce my anxieties, and calm my inner critic. But all the time I spent reading books was time I didn’t spend learning to trust myself, and developing my confidence in building genuine relationships with my clients and co-workers. Most of what we do, day-in and day-out, is try to connect with other human beings, determine what’s important to them, and do our best to help them out. Being effective requires empathy and compassion, and it can be easy to undervalue those critical skills in the face of a brand-new business plan.

My co-workers and I have begun to wean ourselves away from our security-blanket of outside advice, and talk more about developing skills from within. Purposeful introspection, examining what stretches your comfort zone, and practicing good communication skills provide a foundation for the occasional self-help type of book.

While by no means an exhaustive list, I have also found these to be helpful supplements to continuing education books:

1. Personality tests

I’m a fan of the Meyers Briggs Personality Test (MBTI) as a way to help understand yourself and your co-workers. The test has four different categories that offer insight to how you get energy and inspiration, how you process information, why you want to punch your co-worker in the face when she procrastinates on everything, and why she wants to punch you when you’re breathing down her neck three months before a project is due.

The MBTI is just one option. I know a number of businesses that have opted for the DISC personality test, which is a little quicker and less intense. Either way, presenting your staff with an opportunity to understand themselves is a step towards enhancing the soft skills they need to better engage with clients and co-workers.

2. Understanding and practicing communication skills

There are lots of directions you can go with building your skills in this area, but I would start with developing a basic understanding of direct versus indirect communication styles. If you have a client who is an indirect communicator, and you approach her in an abrupt or challenging way, she’s going to think you’re rude, never come back to your gym again, and let her friends on Facebook know that you’re a total jerk.

Meanwhile, you’re probably not actually rude - you just communicate in a very direct way. And you have no idea what you did to piss her off. You don’t necessarily have to change the fundamentals of how you say everything, but you could probably do a better job of tuning in to how different clients prefer to receive their information and coaching.

3. Get a little non-traditional

Of all of the staff meetings we’ve had in the past few months, one of the best ideas was not fitness-related at all – we brought an improv instructor to run us through some exercises. We were all thinking it would be a bunch of awkward amateur stand-up, but mostly what he did was put us in various situations, and push us to handle the scenarios in unscripted, spontaneous ways.  Something like improv (or wilderness leadership training, or volunteering with Habitat for Humanity) can push us to take the over-thinking out of interactions with clients.

4. Practice being more sensitive to non-verbal cues

We spend a lot of time watching a client for technique, level of fatigue, and risk of injury, but may not be paying attention to whether she seems nervous, intimidated, or frustrated.  Understanding how best to address that space is arguably more important than teaching her a solid hip hinge.

Because if you can’t do the first, you’ll never have the opportunity to do the second. 

About the Author

Kim Lloyd is a former Cressey Sports Performance Intern, and current strength coach at Spurling Fitness in Kennebunk, ME. She has a Masters in Sports Leadership from Northeastern University and is a proud graduate of Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania where she played lacrosse. 

Kim maintains a fitness blog on her own site, www.kimlloydfitness.com.

Gym Owner Musings - Installment #4

I’ve accumulated a boatload of random lessons learned in (nearly) a decade of operating a fitness facility. Some warrant entire presentations, podcasts, and blog posts; others carry plenty of value but can fit within the confines of a 140-character Tweet. 

Here are three quick insights that fall somewhere in between Twitter-friendly and ”blog-worthy”:

1. A Story

It appears that my own brand of creativity tends to strike in conjunction with Dupuis Family excursions to the grocery store. This time around, I wasn’t able to make the trip. A 24-hour bug ran through our home like a freight train this past weekend, and when it came time to buy food for the week, I was the one on the couch at home curled up in a ball. My wife was left with the unenviable responsibility of knocking items off of a grocery list with a toddler and a 5-month-old in-tow.

In order to make this happen, she had our big guy situated in the standard shopping cart seat, and the little man comfortably resting in his car seat inside the main basket of the cart. Space was tight, meaning that the rarely used bottom shelf was being put to use as she transported groceries from store to car.

Just steps into the parking lot, a gallon of milk went rogue, bouncing off the bottom shelf and onto the pavement. A passerby kindly stopped to pick it up and assist my wife, who clearly had her hands full. It took just a moment to realize that the container had broken, and milk was leaking on to the pavement.

“I’ll be right back! I’m getting you a new one.”

My wife was floored. “Wait. What? You don’t have to do that.” That didn’t stop her. She was gone before Katie could convince her otherwise. A few minutes later this woman managed to track her down in the parking lot and deliver a fresh gallon of milk with a smile on her face. “I had young kids too, once.”

Katie told me about how this experience made her day, and here I am telling the story to you. We could all stand to be a little more kind at unexpected moments, as the ripple effect of a nice gesture can be immense. Apply this mentality in both your personal life and your business and you’re likely to feel a whole lot better about the world around you. As Mother Theresa once said: “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

2. A Tip

Look for opportunities to involve your employees in setting their own goals

Liisa Joronen, CEO of SOL Cleaning Services once said: “People are ambitious and unrealistic. They set targets for themselves that are higher than what [we] would set for them. And because they set them, they hit them.”

In mid-January we on boarded a new CSP Strength Camp Coordinator named Frank Duffy here in Massachusetts. During our first weekly “State of the Strength Camps” strategy meeting, I told him that my big vision is for him to 3x our participant headcount between now and January 1st of 2018.

“I’m going to do that by July 1st,” he declared. “In fact, throw me a little bonus incentive and I’ll make it happen by June 1st.”

Frank’s goal initially sounded ambitious and unrealistic in my head, but may not be so far out of reach after all. After just a shade over two weeks of his hard work and networking, Frank is already 20% of the way to his target. Whether he makes it there in the proposed tight window or not, the lesson I’ve learned is that I need to stop assuming my employees’ potential, and start asking them to outline it for me.

3. A Clarification

During that same aforementioned State of the Strength Camps meeting with Frank, we came across the discussion of free trial sessions. He was quick to point out that he was aware of my policy on not offering free consultations at CSP, and that it wasn’t his intention to utilize that selling tool in building his program. I stopped him there.

When it comes to our Strength Camps, I am open to the occasional free initial visit.

There’s a dramatic difference between our semi-private training model (featuring individualized program design), and our morning group-training service. The nature of our morning supervision format allows for us to offer the occasional free trial session without compromising our ability to maximize the profitability of a given hour. More specifically, CSP Strength Campers don’t eat up the same resources on day one as our semi-private clients do during the afternoon and evening hours.

An initial assessment during our afternoon hours typically locks down a full-time coach and an intern for upwards of 90-minutes. This reduces our promised 5:1 client-to-coach capacity dramatically. In order to justify the limitations this places on our athlete capacity during a given training slot, we charge a $99 initial assessment fee.

I should also note that we occasionally allow a potential Strength Camper to pay a one-time $20 day-pass fee to give our program a try before committing. If they choose to sign on for a full month, I apply this initial payment toward the initial trial month fee.

Free sessions and day-pass trials are just two of the many tools I can use to convert leads to a group-training program. I am not married to any single approach given that every sales pitch is unique. Until we are operating close to full capacity as we often are in our semi-private model, I can be okay with the occasional freebie if it allows me a better chance to enjoy the lifetime value of a client.

Do you enjoy my fitness spin on business concepts?

I publish my “Friday Four” newsletter at the end of each week featuring links to useful articles and insights on applying concepts from each to your own fitness business endeavors. Check it out here!

Forget the Athletes...I Want to Coach Everyday Joe's

For the first time in over a year, my wife and I have snuck out of town (and the country) for a little bit of R&R. With this in mind, I've arranged for my friend and colleague, Frank Duffy, to prepare a guest post for this week. To date, Frank is one of only a handful of CSP intern alums who have ever said to me that their preference would be to coach our general fitness population clients over the athlete crowd, so I've asked him to explain why in this piece. Enjoy!

Baseball has been a part of my life since I was old enough to wear a glove. While I didn’t play at any level further than college, I consider myself extremely lucky to be an employee of Cressey Sports Performance, where I get to coach ballplayers at all levels on a daily basis. It’s not every day that you can walk into a gym where you have a high school varsity pitcher setting up in the squat rack to the right of a former Cy Young Award winner. I’m in at atmosphere that makes me feel like I’m back in a clubhouse, but it’s not my favorite part of the job.

It’s important to keep in mind that the athletes we train are usually not between our four walls while they’re in-season. Athletes will come and go based on the time of year. I find it easier to build relationships with general population clients that don’t temporarily leave our community because their sport of choice is in-season.

When I’m not on the floor during the afternoon shifts at CSP, I serve as CSP’s Strength Camp Coordinator. I train folks from all walks of life beginning as early as 5:30 three mornings per week. Our client roster features teachers, hair stylists, accountants, and even a handful of firefighters. You name it, there’s probably an individual from our program with that occupation.

You’re probably asking yourself, “what exactly makes this so great?”

Behind each individual that I work with in the Strength Camp program comes a unique story. Different personalities with various interests align under one roof as a cohesive unit to accomplish one thing: leave the gym better than they did prior to arriving. Some of our clients have made training a main staple in their life, while others have never picked up a dumbbell before stepping through our doors. My job is to create a common ground between these two individuals by developing confidence and camaraderie shared amongst all involved.

One of my mentors and good friend, Todd Bumgardner, has hammered home the importance of three simple words from humanistic psychologist, Carl Rodgers:

“Unconditional positive regard”

These three words have changed the way I train my clients, regardless of their background. With a general population client, our job is primarily to cultivate motivation in order to create consistency. A genuine, encouraging, fun and safe training environment has always been a sure-fire way to develop motivation amongst the majority of your clients. With athletes, your approach is quite different.

As Pete has said in the past, your clients don't need to play sports professionally to qualify as inspirational. The athletes that step onto your training floor are intrinsically motivated. They don’t need you to get them fired up for training. Why? For starters, professional athletes depend on strength and durability to earn a living. Additionally, your collegiate and high school athletes who take their goals seriously will walk into the gym with their programs and give 110% effort every single day. Sorry, but you telling them how great they’re doing rarely has much of an effect on their work ethic.

Athletes are driven by results. The main focus with your athletic population is to help develop certain attributes that will give them the slight edge on the field. Outside of the summer vacation and the occasional wedding, what real deadlines do you come across with your general population? I can't think of any. This gives us more time to focus on building rapport with our clients, and gaining their trust by showing them they can execute certain exercises pain-free. Rapport equals retention, which is imperative if you want to keep your lights on.

It’s much easier to connect with your soccer moms and desk jockeys that need your guidance, versus the athletes you train that have a desired end goal. When dealing with athletes, if they see results on the field, they’ll keep coming back to you for their off-seasons. A general population client is much easier to lose to a local competitor. Accountants aren’t concerned with gaining 5 miles per hour on their fastball. Instead, they want to train in an environment they feel welcome in. If you over-deliver to your 9-to-5ers by attentively coaching their training, reaching out to them on off days, and devising a plan to help them reach their goals, you’re greatly helping your chances to keep that individual around.

I absolutely love training our athletes here at CSP. It’s incredible to see some of the feats these guys are able to accomplish just by slapping some iron plates on a bar. However, you need to remember that the majority of minor leaguers live well below the poverty line. With this in mind, they are rarely an ideal target market for your gym if you plan on covering payroll and other business expenses. The presence of professional athletes can definitely help you attract younger athletes, but at the end of the day, your recurring general population clientele is what’s going to keep you happy and in business.

About the author:

Frank Duffy is the Strength Camp Coordinator at Cressey Sports Performance - MA. He’s a New Yorker who proudly (and dangerously) publicizes his allegiance to the NY Giants on a daily basis while coaching a steady stream of Patriots fans. Frank publishes fitness content on his personal website, www.frankduffyfitness.com.

Believe It Or Not, CSP Isn't A One-Man Show

As far as public perception goes, Cressey Sports Performance (CSP) has been a Strong-Link Business since the day we decided to put one individual’s name on the wall back in July of 2007.

Unfamiliar with the concept of Weak-Link versus Strong-Link Networks or Businesses? I was too, until I stumbled upon it while listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s new podcast, Revisionist History. It was the episode entitled My Little Hundred Million that introduced me to the idea that the games of soccer and basketball can be categorized as weak-link and strong-link, respectively.

More specifically, a strong-link game or network is one where the team as a whole can thrive thanks to the presence of a single super-star. The example Gladwell used was that of LeBron James leading a marginally talented team all the way to an NBA title to demonstrate how influential a single athlete can be in a strong-link game. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have a game like soccer, where scoring opportunities come few and far between, meaning that the mistakes of the below-average players are considerably more likely to impact the outcome of a contest than those of your fourth or fifth man on a basketball court.

Categorizing CSP as strong-link is inaccurate

Earlier this week my Facebook application was kind enough to remind me that “on this day” in 2014, I made the following declaration:

"Over 2,800 athletes have trained at CP. That means 2,800+ assessments, some multiple of that number in individualized programs, and just a shade under 100,000 supervised training sessions have been executed since 2007. Now, keep this number in mind when I tell you that roughly 96% of the emails and phone calls we receive start with either "Hi Eric" or I'd like to speak with Eric." Lesson to be learned...don't put one individual's name on your performance enhancement center when it takes about ten of you to keep it moving smoothy. Ooops."

While the number of athletes and sessions completed has crept up considerably since this original posting, the takeaway remains relevant and important. Strong-Link fitness facilities cannot thrive upon introduction of a second location. Similarly, the Cleveland Cavaliers couldn’t shift LeBron James over to their JV squad and expect that the varsity team would continue to thrive simply because the systems and philosophy didn’t change.

Scott Meyer put it best in this article when he said: “A small core of strong-link leaders can help a company get off the ground and lead it through growth, but a sustainable company has a skilled team. If someone leaves or is added to the team, the team maintains its standards and continues to develop its expertise.”

This is exactly why CSP Massachusetts kept chugging along profitably in Eric’s absence upon opening the doors in Jupiter, Florida back in the fall of 2014. Additionally, the walls didn’t come crumbling down when our Co-Founder Tony Gentilcore moved on to pursue his own personal endeavors. In the past 2+ years we’ve added new personalities to our employee roster, but continued to focus on the same standards for coaching development and the accumulation of useful skills and knowledge that were in place long before our superstar staff members transitioned away from being a full-time presence here in Massachusetts.

If your objective is to take your single fitness location to two or more, a considerably above average team will be far more successful than an average one with a single superstar.

Application to YOUR fitness business

All is not lost if you’ve made the decision to incorporate your own name into the title of your business. However, you’re operating an entirely unscalable model if you’ve done so and failed to concern yourself with developing your team. The next time you make a hire, focus exclusively on identifying a coach who fills a gap in your company skill set instead of recruiting the individual with the biggest web presence. Rock-star coaches are rarely the ones who are looking to be the hired gun that improves a team as a whole; they’re searching for the best-equipped space to coach their clients, and record their next tutorial video to drive traffic to a personal blog or website.  

Attract quality candidates by emphasizing a focus on continuing education. At CSP we offer a continuing-ed stipend as part of the employee comp package, weekly staff in-services, and opportunities to be featured on the presenter roster of our annual fall and spring seminars.

We’ve empowered our team, and you can benefit from it...

I’m excited to announce that we’ve created a product titled CSP Innovations, the first ever collaboration between our entire coaching staff. This collection of 11 webinars not only showcases an in-depth understanding of complex and immediately applicable fitness concepts, but it also clearly illustrates that the operation of CSP is anything but a strong-link game. Eric Cressey is as smart as ever (as you’ll see in his presentation, Scapular Control: Implications for Health and High Performance), but he’s backed by a team of thought-leaders that I’m truly proud to have helped to assemble.

If you enjoy my take on running a gym and building a unique team such as ours, you’ll appreciate my presentation, Empowering Your Fitness Team. In it, I take you deep into the mentality and strategy behind our system which allows employees build personal brands and thrive as team members simultaneously.

Check out www.CSPinnovations.com today to learn more. Early bird rate now through Sunday saves you $50!

Getting Your Foot In The Door With Local Youth Programs

If you operate a fitness business that primarily caters to the performance-enhancement crowd, attracting youth athletes will be the difference between survival and bankruptcy. Thankfully, there are a whole lot of kids who fit this mold. The daily challenge we face is getting in front of these athletes in the fastest and most cost-effective manner possible.

One of the best ways to fast-track your way onto the radar of an abundance of pre-qualified leads is to align yourself closely with an elite travel team or organization. Their athletes are specifically focused on showcasing their skills with the intention of playing their respective sport at the collegiate level. Every one of these organizations is looking for competitive advantages or selling points that will draw elite talent to their program; your training and conditioning services could be the exact differentiator they are seeking.

Here are three quick and practical ways you can get your foot in the door with a team or organization of this nature:

1. Host an open-house for players and parents

My business partner Eric is fond of saying that fitness professionals need to give their audience as many opportunities possible to perceive their expertise. What better place to showcase your knowledge and service offerings than on your own turf?

Ask the athletes you currently work with which team they’ll be playing for this summer and politely request an email introduction to the coach or program coordinator. We have had success in opening our doors to players and parents for 60-90 minutes of exposure to our arm-care protocols, discussions relating to game-day warm-ups, nutritional habits, and an informative Q&A relating to our service offerings.

If you really want to up the ante, ask one of your higher-profile athletes to hang around to serve as the demonstrator of proper exercise technique. This better showcases your service, and also allows interaction for the parents and young athletes who aspire to play at an elite level one day.

Make this service free of charge, and remember: they don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.

2. Make yourself available off-site to assist at practice or tryouts

Use the same email address you’ve acquired using tip #1 to reach out and offer to send a coach or two out to an upcoming tryout to warm-up the athletes. This ensures that no one goes down with an avoidable injury at a time when they need to perform at a high-level to make a team. You think the guy who organized a 100+ athlete tryout wouldn’t like to email parents in advance informing them that he’s bringing in professionals to deliver additional supervision that will benefit their kids? That’s right… he’ll be all over your offer if he knows what’s best for his program.

Once you’re standing there on-field, in front of dozens of impressionable athletes, their coaches, and the parents lingering behind the chain-linked fence, it’s time to bring your A-game. Deliver the most thorough and well thought-out warm-up these kids have ever been exposed to.

After the kids are appropriately prepared to test their 60-times, verticals, or whatever metric it is that they’ll be evaluated on, you conclude by reminding them how you can be contacted with future inquiries before heading into the stands to mingle with parents. If you can’t sell yourself in this environment, you have no business expecting an entire program to embrace your services.

3. Consider a blanket discounted rate for the team or program

If you have a pricing structure that allows you to do so, offer the program director a discounted pricing format that is only available to his organization. As mentioned above, coaches are looking for any angle they can find to attract players. That advantage can simply be a relationship with a local strength and conditioning facility that exclusively offers free initial assessments to players from their program.

We’re affiliated with one program that is eligible for comped initial evaluations, another whose athletes receive our standard training services at our discounted family rates, and a rugby team that we allow to train during off-hours in a group format at a modified price-point.

The point is that your service offering and the pricing structure attached to it does not need to be set in stone. Take some liberties with it to attract a new audience and make a club or organization feel as if they’ve achieved some level of exclusivity with your business.

Don’t necessarily limit yourself to team sports

While each of the scenarios outlined above are specifically geared toward enticing teams of athletes to engage with your business, there is great opportunity with any organization that assembles individuals who could benefit from structured strength training. Consider approaching the owner of a local dance studio, golf academy, or even something as unique as a mountain biking club.

Every physical activity that has the potential of consistent and predictable overuse injuries can serve as a target for your business. Your first initiative should be to identify these teams, populations, and clubs. After doing your research, begin crafting your pitch for presenting yourself as a service that compliments their desire to stay healthy and competitive.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to positioning yourself as an informed expert with a unique skillset. Show organizations what separates you from the rest, and reap the benefits while funneling tomorrow’s future through your doors.

What Kind Of Substitute Teacher is Your Fitness “Classroom” Prepared to Employ?

This image should spark a feeling of elation if you went to public school in the 80’s or 90’s.

Nothing screamed substitute teacher quite like seeing the television on wheels squared up at the front of your school classroom. Sure, a National Geographic documentary probably wouldn’t be your first choice if you were sitting at home on your couch, but you had to admit that it beat another day of algebra, right?

Now let’s take a trip to the other end of the emotional spectrum. I’m talking about the moment when you caught word in the hallway that Mrs. Smith was out sick and there would be a substitute in Algebra that day, followed by the dreaded warning: “but he’s actually taking us through chapter 6 in the textbook.”

As I remember things, there were two types of substitute teachers back in the day:

1. Those who hit “play” and turned off the lights.
2. And those who took us on a deep dive into the prescribed curriculum without missing a beat.

The former was a minor dream come true, while the latter was the swift kick in the nuts that no one like myself looked forward to. When we were younger, we always hoped to see that TV roll in to the classroom. In hindsight, it was in my best interest to work with the properly prepared substitute teachers. Similarly, it is in your business' best long-term interest to prepare your team to think like substitute teacher number two outlined above.

How does this apply to gym ownership?

I want you to imagine that you’ve been running a reasonably successful gym for 2+ years, managing a growing team and client roster, and generally following a desirable growth path. You’re in the middle of coaching a personal training client who happens to be an executive at a business just down the road that employs a couple hundred people, when he hits you with this:

“We’ve decided to take our corporate wellness initiatives up a notch in 2017 and will be outfitting a state-of-the-art gym in-house where we’ll subsidize top-notch fitness instruction for our team. All we need is the perfect coaches to come in and deliver this service, and I was thinking you and your team would be the right fit.”

He’d then go on to tell you that he’s not concerned with monetizing the relationship, so the space would come rent-free so long as you provide ample training time options for his employees at a fair market cost. All he is concerned with is improving the quality of life for his team, and the working environment he provides.

You’ve got to figure out a way to make this work…right? I mean, come on – free rent AND a list of leads sitting in their cubicles just upstairs?!?

This is a situation similar to that which my buddy Matt is experiencing as he operates his fitness business out in the Midwest. It’s a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.

The reality of growth opportunities of this nature…

When an opportunity like this presents itself, it almost always comes with the caveat that you, the business owner, are being specifically targeted to deliver a service elsewhere. After all, this executive approached you about the gig, and not your employee or intern. He’s not excited about you outsourcing these coaching responsibilities. Instead, he wants you, and that means that something’s got to give at location number one.

It becomes time to ask yourself: Are my systems tight enough that I can step away from my current setup and know that the rest of the team will execute “the curriculum” without missing a beat?

By systems, I’m not talking about your assessment strategy and training philosophy. Assuming you’ve hammered those concepts home with your team during a typical hiring, onboarding, and training process, they will be the least of your worries when expansion discussions arise. What I am talking about is the nitty-gritty of running your business; the components of your day-to-day operation that are so ingrained in your entrepreneurial DNA that you execute them on auto-pilot.

Have you taken the time to document things like:

• Your script for answering the phone?
• How new clients are greeted at the door?
• Proper articulation of your training model in layman’s terms?
• A clear breakdown of your unnecessarily complex pricing structure?
• What temperature the gym gets set at overnight and during operating hours?
• Who gets called first if the person scheduled to open at 5:00am is out sick?
• Contact information for the building repair guy, or your landlord?
• Where the tools are kept in case a piece of equipment malfunctions?
• The email address for your buying rep at the local fitness equipment wholesaler?
• Who do you call if the credit card processor starts acting up?
• What comes out of petty cash, as opposed to expenses that should hit the company credit card?
• Employee management structure in your absence?

I could bang out 100+ similar bullet points by the end of this week if I wanted to, and I’d imagine that your internal to-do list is similarly extensive. If this is the case, you’ve got a long way to go before your gym is actually prepared to jump on the next expansion opportunity.

Unfortunately, these reminders aren’t only applicable to those who are fortunate enough to be blessed with growth opportunities. Imagine, God forbid, you suddenly learn that you’re seriously ill and need to step away from your business? Or, maybe you’re like me, and your wife unexpectedly delivers a child two full months early, causing you to miss extended periods of time managing the business.

Whatever your circumstance, it is important to remember that life is unpredictable. One thing you can count on is that rent is going to be due on the first of the month, and your employees are going to continue to expect that their paychecks will be delivered every other week. It’s time for you to systemize even the most basic of tasks related to being the boss to ensure that all of your commitments are met in your absence.

After all, rolling a television into the staff lounge and firing up the VCR isn’t going to cut it if you’re concerned with profits.

Understanding Influencer Marketing & The Value It Can Bring to Your Gym

“How do I secure a relationship with a footwear and apparel company for my gym the way Cressey Sports Performance (CSP) has with New Balance?”

— Roughly half of the gym owners I connect with

If I decided to add a “Frequently Asked Questions” page to my website, you could expect to see this one close to the top of the list.

I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you…

The bad news is that there are only a dozen or so manufacturers such as New Balance that you likely have in mind as a fit for your gym. Additionally, there are a thousand other gyms just like yours who are probably looking for the same type of relationship.

The good news is that the CSP-New Balance relationship is the perfect illustration of the power of influencer marketing, a concept that you can apply immediately to build awareness for your business. As a matter of fact, there are probably influencers in your gym right this minute; you just need to identify them and appreciate the fact that the quality of their connections is far more important than the volume.

What, exactly, is influencer marketing?

According to Wikipedia, “Influencer marketing is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individuals) rather than the target market as a whole.”

There are a number of extremely successful influencers out there who have identified the growing popularity of specific social networking platforms early in the game and quickly accumulated a follower base that would allow them to command dollars in exchange for brand exposure. While you may have your own opinions about her, Kim Kardashian is the perfect example of profitability resulting from influencing the masses.

Fortunately, you don’t need to set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars for Kanye’s wife to wear your gym’s tee shirt in an Instagram post to get the right kind of brand awareness. Instead, you need to understand your target audience, and identify the people or brands they identify with and trust.

What is CSP to New Balance?

I don’t imagine there was a meeting at New Balance in 2012 where executives sat around the conference table discussing which gym they’d like to arbitrarily throw a bunch of free gear toward. As much as people consider Eric Cressey to be a nice guy, that in itself isn’t enough to justify partnering with him, or his business. Instead, CSP happened to hit the New Balance radar at a moment when they were launching a baseball-specific product line.

At the time, we had more than 100 MLB-affiliated athletes hailing from all 30 MLB organizations who qualified as members of the “CSP Family.” These clients would serve two purposes for New Balance Baseball: First, they are athletes who need baseball cleats and apparel (AKA the “target market”); Second, they are the influencers toward whom amateur ballplayers from the youth and amateur ranks aspire.

In a way, CSP influences many of the high-profile influencers (pro baseball players) that New Balance wants to get in front of. We’re a shortcut to the affiliated athletes who offer the targeted exposure to the right kind of consumer (impressionable young baseball fans). By working with us, there was no need to chase individual athletes in and out of clubhouses, or back to their hometowns during the off-season. New Balance identified CSP as a business that had already rounded up the people they wanted to see using their products, and basically said: “let’s be friends.”

How is this a mutually beneficial relationship?

Just because you want a bunch of free Under Armor or Nike gear for your employees doesn’t mean that your business brings value to said sponsor. Our colleagues from New Balance asked to build a “Powered By New Balance” tagline into our logo because we are partners in the pursuit of a mission to improve athlete performance in the baseball community.

Examples of CSP helping New Balance:

• We routinely gather high school, college, and professional athletes for in-depth focus groups discussing tastes in footwear, emerging trends with the baseball community, performance and durability concerns relating to products, and more.

• We serve as the voice of the fitness professionals in sharing feedback on product development and the needs of the training community.

• We eagerly align ourselves publicly with a product line that we know, like, and believe in, staying true to our business’s unique voice and story.

• Eric is a brand ambassador of sorts, serving as both an advisor and an educator at the New Balance Area Code Baseball Games.

Examples of New Balance helping CSP:

• Provide ample apparel and footwear for our staff and internship program, allowing for a consistent and professional look that is standardized from one CSP facility to the next.

• Allow for co-branding opportunities that increase the credibility of our business. (We know we’re small-potatoes in the grand scheme of New Balance’s existence).

• Creating what I think may be the only minimalist shoe (or shoe in general) that is specifically branded in alignment with a specific fitness facility (set to hit shopnewbalance.com during Q1 of 2017):

What we have here is a relationship that compliments the needs of both parties. Everybody wins.

Questions to ask yourself…

You’re going to need to be able to answer “yes” to one or more of these questions before approaching the New Balances of the world with a favor request:

• Does my business provide a product or service that does not exist elsewhere?

• Do we allow for exposure to a unique and desirable audience?

• Does your brand possess a social media presence with a large enough reach to influence a specific target market beyond the confines of your existing training space?

• Are you prepared to set aside the time and resources to help a potential partner in their pursuit of feedback from you and/or your clients as they continuously seek product improvement?

If you can’t confidently say yes to a few of these questions, you’ll remain a gym owner who has  to pay for footwear and exercise apparel.

We seek influencers the same way New Balance does

400+ tee shirts.

That’s the rough number of CSP tee’s we handed out to clients on the day of their initial assessment during our first year of operations. Every person who walked through the door had the potential to be an impactful influencer. The way we saw it, those shirts were going to find their way into HS gyms and locker rooms, onto the sidelines of baseball practices, and in the line of sight of hundreds of other potential customers. We made sure to slap our web address on the back of each shirt and built the cost of the apparel right into the $99 initial assessment fee.

It worked. The captains of local high school teams were roaming Massachusetts in our shirts and showcasing our brand to the underclassmen that looked up to them. Teammates began tagging along to observe training sessions and see what we were all about. Our business grew.

Thankfully we didn’t need an early partnership with a big name brand to build visibility for CSP. All it took was a memorable product and a handful of influential athletes who were willing to align themselves with our business.

One last funny story

Less than a year ago I found myself standing in line at a restaurant behind one of the aforementioned first-edition CSP tees from 2007. I tapped the nice young lady on the shoulder and politely asked her how she came across the shirt. She explained that she’d been given the shirt by her older brother, who had inherited it from his college roommate...while at a school in Hawaii.

Think about that for a second…I handed a shirt to a 16 year old almost a decade ago that had changed hands three times and made it’s way to the southern Pacific Ocean before coming full-circle to my line of sight. I can’t even imagine how many eyes have seen our logo and web address in this context over the years, but I know it is a big number.

Don’t be afraid to put your brand out there in a similar fashion and see where it roams.

16 Tweets Worth Revisiting From 2016

One of the lessons I’ve learned in 2016 is that Twitter is a fantastic place to float ideas to gauge interest in fitness business concepts. Occasionally a 140-character tweet sparks far more engagement and discussion than I initially expected. Here are 16 tweets I published in 2016 that resonated enough with my audience to justify their retweets and likes:

1. Owners of healthy gyms will spend more time today worrying about how their summer is projecting than they will on lead-gen for this week.

I put this one up on February 2nd following a discussion with a consulting client who’d wasted hundreds of dollars promoting a New Year’s Resolution promotion that he’d dreamed up and launched on January 4th. Barely anyone signed up, and it wasn’t because of a lack of service quality. There is far too much competition in the fitness industry for you to get away with last-minute pitches. As the old saying goes: If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. And if you’re late, don’t even bother showing up.

2. I may be missing out on a good intern, but I can't bring myself to select a candidate that uses "LOL" & "TTYL" in our email correspondence.

The painfully low barrier to entry in the fitness industry is to blame for an incessant lack of professionalism, but that doesn’t make it okay. Treat every job or internship inquiry as if you were a high school student corresponding with an admissions officer at Princeton University and you’ll instantaneously set yourself apart from roughly 75% of the other applicants.

3. Nobody appreciates a leap year as much as a business owner who realizes it means 1 extra day of cash collections to improve your February #s.

The calendar giveth (as outlined above), and the calendar taketh away in a month like December of 2016, where I have to run a third bi-weekly payroll...ugh.

4. Welcome to the fitness industry. There's going to be opinionated competition. Learn to act on logic and not emotion and you'll be just fine.

I can’t emphasize this enough: If you have settled on a training philosophy of your own, you officially have haters. Don’t waste your energy on arguing with internet trolls. Instead, focus on being better than yourself and advancing your cause.

5. Your goal should be to make running a gym look so easy that everyone can do it. Your responsibility, then, will be to talk most out of it.

At least three out of every four incoming interns at CSP will raise their hand on day-one when I ask: “How many of you would like to own your own gym someday?” If you’ve read my material in the past, you’re aware of the fact that gym ownership isn’t for everyone. We’ve begun integrating business-specific in-services into the internship curriculum to ensure that our coaches have an appreciation for the fact that there’s a lot more to filling your gym with clients than simply opening the doors and turning up the music.

6. A baseball dad just described CSP as a "mass marketing machine." Apparently our 1-man marketing department with a $0 ad budget is effective.

This might have been the biggest compliment I received in 2016. The key to spreading brand awareness on-the-cheap is identifying trends in social media and then inserting yourself into the conversation. We’ve accumulated more than 50,000 followers between our company Twitter and Instagram accounts by focusing on delivering information-packed (and relevant) content. Find your voice, be consistent, and stay in your lane if you want to establish “mass marketing machine” status without spending additional dollars.

7. Assuming the competition sucks is lazy. If they weren't good at something, they wouldn’t be in business. Identify that thing, then be better.

Underestimating your competition is a dangerous game. As Bruce Lee said: “Never take your eyes off your opponent...even when you bow.”

8. Occasionally a HS athlete calls to inquire about our services, asks thoughtful questions, and gives me a little hope for HS kids everywhere.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that the athlete who inspired me to post this tweet has since been accepted to play baseball at Harvard University. The over-parenting I am exposed to on a daily basis is overwhelming. My two sons will be educated early and often on the importance of being an advocate for oneself.

9. You have roughly a 0% chance of getting clients to love your brand if your employees don't love it as well.

If you serve in the military you have “brothers and sisters,” while in the working world you have “colleagues and co-workers.” My goal as an employer is to see my staff love each other and the brand they represent as much as our nation’s military personnel love their peers and the country they’ve decided to serve.

10. Just had a mom say that her 18yo kid "sits 85/86 and pumps the strike zone with command for days." Gotta love a mom's passion for the game.

The best way to connect with your target market is to learn to speak their language, on their level. If a mother of a teenager can do it, I sure as hell better be able to figure it out.

11. Convincing my 1st son that he'll love having a brother is the equivalent to converting personal training clients to a semi-private model.

We’re all naturally resistant to change, and this analogy is one I’ve learned by doing in 2016. Turns out there isn’t a whole lot of difference between convincing your personal training clients that they’ll enjoy sharing your attention, and helping a two-year-old come to terms with the idea of no longer being the center of attention in his home. In the long run, clients realize semi-private training environments are fantastic, and little boys realize that having a brother to raise hell with is far more fun than playing alone.

12. Aspiring (and new) gym owners need to stop outlining their ever-so-important internship program and actually earn the right to have one.

If you are on the cusp of opening a gym and your business plan features the word “intern” even just once, that is far too many times. The primary objective of an internship is to provide a comprehensive learning environment in which the participant will be exposed to a variety of coaching, assessment, and programming scenarios. This type of environment simply doesn’t exist in a start-up.

13. The kids with the best work ethic in our gym are rarely the ones whose parents schedule all of their training sessions and speak for them.

This tweet reinforces the message in point #8. If you’re old enough to train in this setting, you’re old enough to speak with my Office Manager Stacie regarding your next visit or the fact that you’ll be due for a new program soon. We get far more out of the high school athlete who demonstrates independent tendencies than the one whose dad is leaning against the wall watching his every move in the gym.

14. Just convinced an athlete that the black lab walking around our gym is a therapy dog assigned to help people bounce back from missed lifts.

Our athletes are impressionable...almost to a fault.

15. Learning that prospective clients who hammer home "money is not an issue" are all but guaranteed to be more trouble than they're worth.

Albert Einstein used to say that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again with the expectation of achieving a different result. If this is true, I am definitively insane, because I keep falling into the same trap of getting excited when someone says this to me. These clients almost universally qualify as high-maintenance from the moment they walk through the door.  

16. Your personal brand is more than a logo. It's what people say about you once you've left the room. Sometimes character outweighs creativity.

No elaboration needed here, people...just a message that bears repeating.

You can find me at @pete_dupuis on Twitter (and Instagram) if you'd like to keep an eye on more of the random business-related things I have to say as we head in to the new year.

Happy New Year to all, and best wishes for a prosperous 2017.

What Nobody Told You About Rapid Facility Growth

None of us gym owners opened our doors with the intention of just getting by.  Sure, we got into the game of fitness to help people, but we’re also here to make a living. Here at Cressey Sports Performance (CSP), we’re very fortunate to have seen our business scale larger than any of us three co-founders initially imagined it would, or could.

This past September we introduced our 4,000th client to the CSP system. In order to accommodate the introduction of this amount of athletes in a 9+ year span, we’ve added space, added staff, and reassessed (on many occassions) our primary goals and objectives for this business.  While improving the bottom line and the visibility of our brand within the world of fitness has been fantastic, there are a handful of “deal with the devil” realities that came with rapidly scaling our business.

Here are three cold hard truths of accelerated facility growth that caught me by surprise:

1. Not all clients are dying to see you expand

Who wouldn’t want a bigger space to train in? Would any of our clients actually say no to a building with immaculate restrooms and amenities such as a cafeteria? How about more parking? They’d want that too, right?

These are some of the assumptions we made as we moved out of a grungy 2,000 square foot space, and into a shiny new “showcase” facility during the spring of 2008. We were upping our game dramatically with the intention of improving the client experience. After all, you need to spend money to make money, so that is what we decided to do.

Instead of thanking us profusely, more than one of our most dedicated clients expressed extreme disappointment in the decision. Despite the fact that we’d upgraded the training space and also positioned our business in what we determined to be a more convenient location, some people were unhappy.

We’d failed to realize that the cozy little garage gym environment we’d pulled together in our first location was one of the idiosyncrasies that some clients truly appreciated. In fact, some clients loved the authenticity of the space. They also appreciated our perceived accessibility, which they were convinced was sure to disappear as soon as we upsized our business and “went corporate.”

Moving to a larger, more professional space was 100% the right move, but dropping it on our dedicated clients as a surprise might not have been the best approach. Thankfully, we eventually proved to all of them that our values and accessibility would not change, and that you can still get strong in a gym that does not require a tetanus shot to set foot in.

2. You’ve just become the Vice President of Human Relations

Imagine you’re standing at a podium waiting to slap the big red button while Steve Harvey guides you through a live recording of Family Feud…

“Name the number one reason people choose to open their own gym.”

I’ll venture a guess that you could list the top fifty responses before coming across an individual who answered: “Because I’m excited to manage employees!”

However, just because this answer didn’t show up in any of the responses, doesn’t mean it is a component of gym ownership that can be ignored. If you want to increase your foot traffic with the intention of driving profits, adding employees is a harsh but necessary reality. Increased staff size means increased management and leadership responsibilities for every business owner.

Start wrapping your head around annual reviews focused on both performance and negotiating wage increases. Understand that you will be the disciplinarian expected to lay down the law with interns who can’t seem to show up on time for their coaching shifts. Get ready to be the bad guy when an employee asks if he can take a day off for the seminar that you’ve already granted permission for two other staff members to attend.

You show me a gym owner who claims to be excited about these responsibilities and I’ll show you a liar.

3. Your definition of an “ideal client” will change dramatically

When CSP was in its infancy we were just three guys trying to blur the lines between making a living and loving what we did. We had the freedom to hand out freebies and discounted training left and right. The goal was to increase visibility for our business, so we compensated training for athletes who were projectable, minor league baseball players willing to align themselves with our brand, and just about any friend of a friend who wanted to drop in on staff lifts.

As time passed, and business began booming, we traded a shortage of brand awareness for a shortage of training capacity. The gym was suddenly full and our limited staff could only handle so much program and coaching responsibility. The only solution was to add employees, and the increased overhead associated with suddenly having a payroll. My focus on perceived busy-ness faded into the background as I began paying far more attention to operational efficiencies and revenue-driving components of my job.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that we needed to downsize the hand-outs. Gone were the days of helping out the local high school soccer phenom who aspired to play professionally but had no money in his wallet. It was time to turn our attention to the pre-teen athlete that looked like a baby giraffe taking his first steps each time we introduced him to a new movement. After all, his parents had dollars they were looking to spend, and we needed cash flow more than we needed another body taking up resources but generating zero revenue.

Be careful what you wish for…

Building the big business of your dreams will feature far more pros than cons, but there will undoubtedly be occasional bumps in the road. These three lessons we learned by doing should stay top of mind as you make the jump from lean startup to “going all corporate.”

Retention Trumps Acquisition

Take a week away from chasing new leads and put all of your eggs in the client retention basket to see huge results.

Let me tell you a quick story...

In the fall of 2014 Eric Cressey transitioned away from CSP Massachusetts to coach in a full time format at our Florida facility for the duration of the winter. This was worrisome for us up here in the northeast because October through March happens to be our busiest time of year. One of the areas where we anticipated losing business was in the one-time consultation (OTC) category. During the calendar year leading up to this point, OTCs accounted for 17% of our revenues.

The way we saw it, if someone was going to reach out to us in search of a short-term visit of this nature, and the service would be available in both our Massachusetts and Florida locations, the combination of warm weather and the opportunity to be assessed by Eric Cressey would be enough to draw a great deal of these leads south.

We were correct. OTC numbers dropped by more than 90% during that six-month span here in Hudson, MA.  

So, after losing 90% of the leads that once accounted for 17% of our gross revenue figures, you'd imagine that we were in trouble, right? You would be wrong. The first six months that Eric was gone ended up being the most profitable six-month period in the history of CSP.

What?!?!

Here's what happened...

The first thing you need to know is that here at CSP, there is no type of client that is higher-maintenance than one who is visiting for a one-time consultation. When you bring a brand new client in for a 24 to 72-hour window of time, they are inevitably going to call for a great deal of one-on-one attention. While this isn't ideal in a semi-private training facility such as ours, we are ok with it because the price point we have in place for this service model reflects the increased coaching resources consumed. Additionally, the lifetime value of this type of client can be huge if we effectively monetize him in a distance-based program design format moving forward.

We could have lost sleep over the fact that these OTC leads were all but gone, but it didn't take long for us to realize that their disappearance meant that we'd freed up a great deal of coaching moving forward. Scheduling less coaching-intensive supervision scenarios meant that we suddenly had an additional staff member available to float on the training floor and focus purely on client interaction. We suddenly had an opportunity to over-deliver more frequently with our semi-private training clients.

Casual conversations about food consumption habits led to more scheduled nutrition consultations. Once-a-week clients who fell in love with the coaching interaction began increasing their training frequencies to a second, and sometimes third day each week. Client referrals began to increase ever so slightly.

The concerns surrounding a 90% decrease in scheduled OTC's soon got lost in the realization that existing clients were sticking around more, and spending more dollars with us. We were learning on the fly that you are dramatically more likely to increase the spending habits of an existing client than you are to recruit and convert a new one.

Here at CSP Massachusetts, we saw a 26.2% increase in revenues during October through March of 2014/15 compared to the corresponding period the year before. While some of these additional dollars were a reflection of consistent and anticipated growth, it is evident that improvements in client retention and increased word-of-mouth referrals were allowing us to survive and thrive in the wake of disappearing potential OTC clients.

Statistics from www.RetentionScience.com

You don't need to wait for 17% of your revenues disappear before getting started

The takeaway here isn't that we needed to decrease our OTC work-load moving forward; this segment continues to be immensely profitable. Instead, we chose to add an additional full-time staff member and slightly increase the size of our internship program. This ensured that we could return to accommodating the short-term clients that would inevitably return when Eric made his way back to Massachusetts in the spring without losing focus on delivering quality client interaction during our training sessions.

I encourage you to take the next week off from fine-tuning your 2017 marketing calendar and put some thought into how you can improve the training experience for your existing clients. Stop worrying about generating your next 5 leads, and start thinking about how you can ensure that you lose one less client during the coming month. You'll be pleasantly surprised to see how much improving retention will positively impact your bottom line.

Do you enjoy my fitness spin on business concepts?

I publish my “Friday Four” newsletter at the end of each week featuring links to useful articles and insights on applying concepts from each to your own fitness business endeavors. Check it out HERE!

First-Mover Advantage Isn't Everything

(1-minute read)

So, what are you passionate about? I ask new and aspiring gym owners this question almost every day of the week.

The good news is that I’ve yet to find a fitness professional who is unable to answer this question. The bad news is that a whole bunch of them wont ever pursue their passion in any capacity because someone else arrived at that space in the fitness industry first.

An observational guest at Cressey Sports Performance (CSP) recently told me that his dream is to be a thought leader in the realm of performance training for golfers. I agreed that this is a massive market and insinuated that I also saw opportunity in this segment. Instead of diving further in to the discussion, he hit me with this:

“I’ll never do it, though. The Titleist Performance Institute already owns that niche.”

Consider this: Google was the 27th search engine to pop on to the scene. Do you think that they were afraid to get in the game with the first 26?

I wont argue that TPI is doing something wrong, but I can guarantee you that they’re vulnerable just like any other brand that owns the bulk of the market share in their space. Capturing a big chunk of the baseball-specific strength training market from CSP in Massachusetts or Florida will be difficult, but if a gym comes along with better ideas or a more effective approach, it’s going to happen.

First-to-market can be a valuable advantage, but it doesn’t always equal best.

The Ideal Business Show (Podcast)

I recently had the opportunity to join Pat Rigsby in recording an episode of his Ideal Business Show Podcast. In this 35-minute conversation, we covered a variety of topics, including:

• How Eric Cressey and I first met
• The three distinctly different phases in the evolution of CSP to date
• My single best piece of advice to share with fitness business owners
• And a whole bunch more...

You can listen on your computer or download to your mobile device HERE.

Looking for Some Easy Leads? They're Right In Front of You...

Are you running a gym like Cressey Sports Performance? You know, the kind of fitness facility that drives revenues by training youth athletes?

If you answered yes, I’ve got some good news for you. I’m about to point you in the direction of so many pre-qualified leads that you could theoretically double your business with a series of properly executed simple sales pitches. Wait, it gets better…you’re going to get the chance to give 100% of these pitches on your own turf. No worrying about cold-calls or concerning yourself with creation of the most perfect Facebook ad the fitness industry has ever seen.

Instead, I want you to get up from your desk, take a step out of your office, and start up a conversation with the parent sitting on the couch in your waiting area. Assuming you aren’t too cool to coach an adult from the general fitness population, the parents of your current clients are going to be the gold mine you’ve been seeking.

Here’s the thing about parents…

Parents don’t just want what’s best for their kids – they demand it. Seeing as how they’ve already come to the conclusion that your business is the ideal place for their kids to focus on increasing athleticism and injury prevention, you can take comfort in knowing that they trust you. In fact, you’ve already banged out all four steps in the KNOW–LIKE–TRUST–BUY process with this person, so why not double down?

The parent patiently sitting in your waiting area reading an old copy of Men’s Health for the 8th time this month has already demonstrated a willingness to invest his expendable income on your fitness services. He’ll also never complain that he can’t find a ride to the gym on a given day. And, most importantly, he’s already in the damn building! Give him the opportunity to make his time more productive by mixing in some exercise.

Positive outcomes will follow

I’m not so naïve as to think that suddenly every single dad in your CRM database is going to bite on your training offer, but I am certain that converting even just a small handful will make a measurable difference in your bottom line.

By capitalizing on parents’ inherent interest and integrating them into the process, you simultaneously increase the likelihood that your youth athletes will make good lifestyle decisions outside of the gym. A dad who wants to maximize his ROI from training is more likely to fill the refrigerator with quality foods and practice what he preaches about drinking more water and getting plenty of sleep. Teenagers are anything but forthcoming with details about their lives when it comes to parent interaction, but fitness could very well be the common ground that changes their silent ride to the gym in to a meaningful discussion.

What could possibly make you feel better as a fitness professional than knowing that you’ve improved a father-son bond simply by having them hit the weights in your facility?

You’re still running a performance-training center

I understand your hesitance to focus on serving general-pop clients when your primary objective is to cater to athletes, but hear me out…

Who pays for these kids to train at your gym? That’s right, their parents do.

We all know that parents love to talk about their kids, but can you imagine how much they’ll enjoy talking about their kid’s strength-training regimen when they have a foundation of their own experience to back it up?

I’ve written about the power of word-of-mouth advertising in the past, and one of the important takeaways was as follows: If you truly want your customers to be effective brand ambassadors while outside of the gym, you need to equip them with more than just an understanding of how to execute your training material. Why not turn a couple of the dad’s standing in the bleachers in to walking and talking billboards for your gym?

Do you enjoy my fitness spin on business concepts?

I publish my “Friday Four” newsletter at the end of each week featuring links to useful articles and insights on applying concepts from each to your own fitness business endeavors. Check it out HERE!

This Was More Fun When I Was Poor

I can’t wait until I…

• Have an admin to do the busy work
• Employ more coaches to pick up the programming slack
• Have the money to upgrade my website
• Move in to a bigger gym
• Can afford to buy that Keiser equipment I’ve got my eye on

Everyone seems so intently focused on how big they’re going to scale their fitness business these days that they lose sight of the fact that the most enjoyable part of the process is passing them by.

Some tough news for the gym owners that are in a rush to grow up:

The first five years of building and operating Cressey Sports Performance (CSP) were considerably more enjoyable and rewarding than the next five.

Let that sink in for a second…

I’m not saying that my work has entirely ceased to be rewarding and/or enjoyable. Instead, I’m saying that once you’ve survived the emotional and exhausting rollercoaster of going from lean start-up to profitable business status, the bulk of the day-to-day that follows pales in comparison.

Sure, I make more money now. My gym is bigger and prettier than it once was. There are dozens upon dozens of professional athletes who are proud to say that they train with us. All of the perks of taking our business from unknown to industry relevance are great, but they come at a cost.

Today I have eight employees on the payroll in Massachusetts. That’s eight extremely different personalities to manage and eight people who count on me to make sure they can pay their bills. I’m also negotiating a lease proposal, evaluating alternative payroll and health insurance providers, and on the hunt for more affordable tee shirt and sweatshirt manufacturers. In short, my work isn’t limited to editing my next creative Instagram post and making small talk with Major League Baseball players.

I’m guessing you didn’t happen to notice that my list of bullet points at the top didn’t say:

I can’t wait until I…

• Get to see my health insurance costs more than double in an 8-year span
• Have to stress about pulling together enough employees to staff the gym on a busy holiday weekend
• Realize that heavy foot traffic leads to expensive equipment upkeep and replacement
• Have the chance to chase revenue goals that were set before an economic downturn
• Get to fire my first employee or uncooperative intern

Having faith in your own self to succeed is the easy part. The real stress kicks in the moment you realize that several other people have come to rely on you to earn their living. There will come a moment when the hobby-aspired-business starts to feel a whole lot more like a job. That moment may not be until you’ve finished your first lease, executed your first expansion, or cut yourself that first big paycheck. Nonetheless, you can be damn sure that day will come eventually.

Can't decide which hurts more looking at this picture...my hands, or my back?

Stop agonizing about your 5 or 10-year plan and attempt to enjoy the moment

Take pictures…tons of them; I always wish that we had more from our early days.

Throw yourself in to the tasks you resent. My fondest memories are aligned with the most physically exhausting moments of my life. You’ll know what I mean when you take your first shot at cutting rubber gym flooring with a utility knife.

Spend time getting to know your team outside of the gym. Once you’ve accumulated this social capital it will be the fuel that drives the personality of your business and brand moving forward. The bigger your team grows, the more difficult it will be for you to coordinate this type of social interaction.

In short, be present. The best part is happening right now.

Do you enjoy my fitness spin on business concepts?

I publish my “Friday Four” newsletter at the end of each week featuring links to useful articles and insights on applying concepts from each to your own fitness business endeavors. Check it out HERE!

Your Professional Network – More Important than Any Piece of Equipment in the Gym

No matter how smart you are, clients are going to occasionally walk through the door with needs that fall outside of your current skill set. I’m not talking about someone arriving with a broken wrist and asking you to fix it; I’m speaking of the client who falls within the grey area where you think to yourself, “I could train around this issue, but what this person really needs is some quality time with a physical therapist.”

A former CSP intern recently asked me what my first objective would be if I were in his shoes preparing to begin employment at a big box commercial gym.

I recommended that he spend his time working to accumulate a tight network of qualified professionals, and refer out when faced with scenarios that fall outside of his scope of practice.  The manual therapists, nutritionists, and other specialists that receive his referrals should eventually reciprocate by sending additional business in his direction. By putting his clients’ needs ahead of his need to collect immediate dollars, he would earn trust and quickly see his network become one of his most distinct assets.

There are little-to-no barriers to entry in the fitness industry. It seems that nearly every coach in our field knows just enough to be dangerous on subjects ranging from program design and corrective exercise, to aggressive nutrition advice, and everything in between. I’d imagine that most of us know a coach with second or third-hand knowledge of PRI protocols who is capable of correctly communicating the “what” of these complex concepts without being even remotely prepared to articulate the “why”.

The problem with being simply passable at each of these complimentary skills is that any measurable initial results you show to your clients will prove to be unsustainable in the long-term.  Eventually, we are all likely to be exposed when trying to be something that we’re not. It is time to abandon your reputation of being a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. 

Every fitness business owner and personal trainer in our field needs to add a collection of trusted specialists to their network if they are hoping to generate leads from an avenue other than Facebook ads and deal-of-the-day services such as Groupon. Here at CSP we have a three preferred physical therapists that get our PT referrals, an in-house manual therapist, and the contact information for some of the best orthopedic surgeons in the northeast. In short, we know that a strength coach can’t fix everything.

You have no business writing someone a diet simply because you read a blog post about intermittent fasting this morning. Your purchase of a treatment tool doesn’t suddenly make you a Graston practitioner. Your insurance provider is going to shit a brick if they find out that you’re giving back adjustments “just like the one you got from your chiropractor” on the training table in the warm-up area.

Make your list today

Sit down now and prepare a list of the professionals you know and trust. Identify your “go-to” physical therapist, registered dietician, yoga practitioner, sports psychologist, etc. If you aren’t currently aware of a candidate to populate each slot, reach out to your network for some introductions and begin extending invitations to grab a cup of coffee and discuss training and treatment philosophies with the intention of sharing business.

There’s no shame in knowing what you don’t know.

Gym Owner Musings - Installment #3

I’ve accumulated a boatload of random lessons learned in (nearly) a decade of operating a fitness facility. Some warrant entire presentations, podcasts, and blog posts; others carry plenty of value but can fit within the confines of a 140-character Tweet. 

Here are three quick insights that fall somewhere in between Twitter-friendly and ”blog-worthy”:

1. Blindly transitioning to a career in fitness doesn’t mean you’ve escaped “the race to nowhere”

Every day of the week, a whole bunch of people grinding it out in “the real world” decide to quit their job to chase the dream of a career in fitness. I get it. When your life is all work and no play, it’s pretty enticing to make your work feel a whole lot like play. The problem in this scenario is that very few of these career jumpers are prepared to answer some of the most basic questions I ask during a typical CSP internship interview:

1. What part of the fitness industry would you like to end up in? 
2. Is there a specific demographic you feel most comfortable working with?
3. Do you have a preferred coaching format?

More often than not, I get one of two responses:

1. Crickets. 
2. “I just want to work with athletes in a place like this.”

I’ve got some bad news for you, friend. There aren’t a whole lot of places like this, and the ones that do exist are rarely hiring. Additionally, there are only so many athletes out there to work with, and very few of them are looking to spend their limited dollars on premium fitness services.

There’s a decent chance that you burned out in a corporate setting because when asked where you’d like for your career to go, your only answer was “up.” Employers aren’t jumping at the opportunity to promote the guy whose entire professional objective is to have the biggest title and make the most money. Similarly, I have no idea where to start when attempting to help an outgoing intern find employment if they can’t tell me what athletic population they are specifically fascinated by or which gender they better connect with on the training floor.

If you don’t have a feel for where you’d like to end up now that you’ve thrown yourself into the world of fitness, you’re still smack dab in the middle of the race to nowhere. The only difference is that you can now go to work in sweatpants.

2. A tip for maximizing the productivity of your charity events

Raising funds for a worthy cause feels good, right? If you do it properly, you can support a good organization while simultaneously introducing new people to your business and training environment.

We host a Charity Strength Camp once every eight to ten weeks here at Cressey Sports Performance (CSP) where 100% of the donations are directed toward a specific charity. These events are open to the public, and typically serve as the perfect “bring-a-friend” scenario for our Strength Camp regulars.

As you might imagine, the best events are those that draw the most participants, as the training environment is at its best when we host larger groups (and donations are obviously higher). One lesson I’ve come to learn in roughly four years of organizing these events is that selecting a local charity to support will dramatically increase foot traffic on the day of your event.

When you pick a national organization, you immediately qualify as “small potatoes” in the grand scheme of their fund raising efforts. While they appreciate your donations, they are hardly mobilizing to put bodies in your gym on the day of the event.

October happens to be Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so we traditionally schedule a charity strength camp with this cause in mind. I could have picked one of the heavy hitters such as Susan G. Komen, but instead opted to go local. For the second straight year, we’ve pulled together to support the Virginia Thurston Healing Garden (VTHG), an organization that focuses on providing therapeutic services and educational programs to women experiencing breast cancer.

Great turnout at our october event

Since a couple hundred-dollar donation makes a bigger dent at a local organization such as the VTHG, they feel inclined to promote our event both internally (encouraging staff members to participate), and externally (sharing our flyer on their social networking platforms). When comparing your options, you can’t make the argument that supporting a national fundraising campaign carries any more merit than supporting a local cause, so I am always eager to keep our charities of choice local. In either scenario, we’re honoring the objectives of National Breast Cancer Awareness month.

3. Capturing a unique market segment requires embracing trade-offs

Michael Porter is a “strategy guru” whose name came up often during my time in business school. Of all of the strategy material covered during my time as a student, I distinctly remember his message that “a strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions.”

As I spend my non-CSP working hours focusing on delivering valuable content to other fitness professionals, I try to stay grounded in the fact that I am chasing expert status in just one place: the category of creating and running a fitness facility. My professional time allows for three things:

1. Running CSP to the best of my ability.
2. Learning from my experiences accumulated while executing #1 on this list.
3. Writing about said learning experiences, and discussing them with other gym owners.

My repertoire doesn’t feature extensive experience with Facebook advertising, so I don’t pretend to be the best at that. I have no experience launching a fitness product, so I wont bite on the request for a consultation regarding product creation and design. My managerial skills are still a work in progress, so I don’t preach about leadership.

In short, I only discuss the things I know inside and out at the expense of developing a skillset which will allow me to declare myself an expert in one of the examples I’ve listed. I’m okay with that trade-off if it means that I’ve captured some decent market share in the realm of my areas of expertise.

Unless the nuts and bolts of running CSP changes dramatically, you can expect me to stay on message with topics such as improving the client training experience, systemizing your business, hiring for fit, identifying operational efficiencies, etc. 

Do you enjoy my fitness spin on business concepts?

I publish my “Friday Four” newsletter at the end of each week featuring links to useful articles and insights on applying concepts from each to your own fitness business endeavors. Check it out here!

Why We Don't List Our Prices On the Internet

This past Sunday, as I was listening to the Patriots pre-game show in my car, Bill Belichick discussed the preparation habits of NFL teams. He explained that there are two categories into which teams can be slotted:

1. The teams that significantly modify their approach from week-to-week to capitalize on perceived shortcomings in the opposing team’s skill-set or strategy. We’ll call these “Game-Planners”
2. The teams that have a specific identity that they rarely stray away from. These are the organizations that say: “We’re going to line ‘em up and do what we do best…let’s see if you can stop us.” We’ll call these the “Do-What-We-Doers.”

A look at the Patriots box scores for the last two weeks will illustrate that they currently fall into the Game-Planner category: Against the Cincinnati Bengals, Tom Brady threw the ball 35 times, accounting for roughly 85% of the Patriots offensive output on the day “through the air.” Just a week later, the Patriots came out running against the Pittsburgh Steelers, handing the ball off more than 50% of the time and accumulating just a shade under 40% of their yardage “on the ground.”

They’re all but guaranteed to identify an opportunity to exploit deficiencies in your game plan and put it in to action each week. If your team has a “best player,” the Patriots are going to find a way to remove him from the equation when Sunday rolls around. In short, they’re the ultimate “Game-Planners” in today’s NFL.

When selling, I’d rather be a Game-Planner

When it comes to executing a sales pitch here at CSP, I like to think of the potential client as an opponent who could possess any one of many “best players” in their arsenal of counter-arguments against my pitch. Some are price-sensitive, others are skeptical of our skill-set and abilities relating to their unique training needs, and some just want to be made to feel like their son or daughter is our country’s next star Olympian.

By getting someone on the phone, asking a series of relevant exploratory questions, and gauging the content and tone of each response, I am able to adjust my selling strategy on the fly. This flexible and reactive selling method would fall under the category of game-plan-specific as opposed to first rolling out my list of prices and assuming they’ll convert leads on their own.

When you list all of your prices on the Internet, you are embracing the “Do-What-We-Do” approach, and missing an opportunity to effectively articulate the differentiators that your business possesses. As far as your website visitor experience goes, you are essentially declaring these are our prices and you can take it or leave it. You simply aren’t putting yourself in a position to counter any concerns of a potential client.

Many gym owners make the mistake of assuming the people they are trying to attract have done their homework on all training options. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. If everyone in our area were aware that personal training at the local Boston Sports Club is actually more expensive than our semi-private model that features 100% individualized program design, they’d be far easier for me to pitch. Instead, they get hung up on the idea that Planet Fitness just ran an ad offering a no-commitment contract for $0 down and just $10 per month.

How are you going to counter hesitation due to price-sensitivity without actually engaging with a potential client? Our services are not cheap, but they are reasonable and differentiated by the attention to detail we apply during the assessment and training process. The people that reach out to CSP possess a broad range of training needs, differing levels of expendable income, and varying levels of understanding of our training model. Some are best fit for one-on-one personal training or semi-private group training, while others are the perfect candidates for our morning strength camps. Each of these services comes at a different cost, and it is up to me to identify the best option for the person in question and then communicate the pricing structure effectively.

I can’t afford to let leads disappear due to generic sales copy or perceived high prices; I’d likely lose many leads before successfully converting them to clients if I didn’t first have the opportunity to explain what our pricing represents and why our offering is well worth the price. With this in mind, it doesn’t bother me when a caller says “I couldn’t find pricing information anywhere on your website.”

Getting them on the phone is half the battle, and they’ve called me.

Do you enjoy my fitness spin on business concepts?

I publish my “Friday Four” newsletter at the end of each week featuring links to useful articles and insights on applying concepts from each to your own fitness business endeavors. Check it out here.