Chris Collins Unleashed: Episode 4 - How To Double Sales at An Equinox Gym

Welcome to Chris Collins Unleashed. All you have to do is listen.

Welcome, everybody, to Chris Collins Unleashed. Hope you're having a great day. How you doing, G man?

Doing good.

We. Today's topic is going to be fun. We're just going to throw out some stuff. We're going to riff back and forth. But today's topic is how you could double the sales at an Equinox.

Yeah, for sure.

So we go to Equinox and we know how all the time, the sales, nobody's asked us. No, nobody comes up and says, hey, how do we double our sales?

But dang it, we're gonna offer our opinion.

We're gonna tell you a couple things about that. One is we're gonna do it without adding any more traffic. So whatever they're selling now in new customers is the same whatever they have in memberships. Our focus is not going to be in acquiring new customers. It's going to be, and this will be interesting to everybody listening. How do you make more off of the customers you are already having coming in? And how do you convert. Convert more.

We'll talk about that. So I've actually been thinking about this one for a long time and so I'm excited to do it.

But.

But me being the best gift giver ever.

Yes, absolutely.

I gave gman for his birthday last year a bourbon of the month. So I drink tequila. I don't. I'm not a big bourbon fan, but GMAN loves bourbon. Before smoking a cigar. He's drinking the bourbon, I'm drinking the tequila. Actually, you'll cross over to tequila. But I have a hard time crossing over.

Yeah, you won't go that way. But yeah, I'll go the other way for sure.

So what is this?

So I haven't opened this one yet. I mean, even though the box is open, I haven't opened it.

If you're not watching the video and you're listening, this is a big black box with a. Is it a B on it?

No, it's the tc Is that Taster's Choice? So they all come in the same box. So the. The company that does it, Taster's Choice, that does the bourbon of the month, they just missed. They must unbox it and put it in their own boxes and ship it out. So every time it's the same box, which is kind of fun.

So it's a yellow, bright yellow label with silver lettering and it's a wiggle wiggle Pennsylvanian bourbon.

Wiggle.

It's crazy. So crack that dude.

Pennsylvania Bourbon. I'm not thrilled with the.

One of our ideas to double the sales at Equinox is not to start selling bourbon. But it wouldn't be a bad idea.

So the little label on it says, pull cork, lift spirit. Cute.

A little pop out.

Okay. So he's. He's poured it on a couple ice cubes, and now he's gonna taste it. And it tastes like oak.

That's pretty good.

Tastes like oak.

I like it. It is pretty woody. Oh, got it. So I'm sliding it across the table.

Slid it and spilled it all over the table. So I can try it.

Well, that's.

Oh, my God. Yeah, that's.

That's good stuff.

What is the deal with that? Why does it just taste like oak? There's not much else going on.

They. They put it in charred oak barrels. So they actually take them and they burnish the inside of them, then they pour the whiskey inside.

Yeah.

So what's your review there? Let's pretend like you're a bourbon master sommelier.

Let me get a little aroma. Smells like whiskey.

Was it a good year?

Wow. It's hot, but that's pretty good. Give that one a seven out of ten, I think. Aged 18 months. Small batch. Batch number seven.

Well, they could have fooled me. I'd think that thing was sitting in oak for about 20 years.

So it has notes of cinnamon, salted caramel, and maple syrup. I'm guessing you didn't taste any of that in there.

I tasted an oak.

An oak dresser.

It tastes like oak barrel and gasoline.

Yeah, basically. It's funny. It's a cool label, though.

Yeah. Yeah, Cool. Pennsylvania.

So the thing I want to do here, G man, is when we're talking about this, I want. I want everybody to understand the steps and the theories behind it. Forget that it's Equinox, really. Unless you. You run Equinox. Then listen to what we're saying, because we can double your sales. But if not, think about your business and how all of these lessons apply, because we're going to give you some real meat here. And most of the time, we can, in a very, very quick period of time, find a new stream of income for you in your business. And so we're going to try to do some things like that here, too, with Equinox. But it doesn't matter if it's a gym, if you own a furniture store, if you're a doctor, a chiropractor, you own a coffee shop. It's all the same in theory. Yeah, it's conversion. So the first thing that we have going on with Equinox is we have customers coming through the door that are new members and we have existing members. Correct. And so customers. Equinox does one thing right. Well, they do a lot of things right. So this is in no way an attack on Equinox. They do a lot of things right. We like that gym.

Yeah.

But there's money there to be made.

I think the thing that we recognize sitting there every day is we can see the potential and it just, you know, it's understanding what they do and, you know, kind of. And we're also problem solvers, so we're always working the problem, you know, so it's not an indictment on them. We like that, Jim. Yeah.

And also we only go to that. That one. So we don't know what it's like. We've gone to other ones when we're in other parts of the country, but we've never experienced the signing up membership part.

Right. Other places. So true.

We don't know. So we're just assuming that they're all the same. But who knows if. If they are or if they.

I've been in other gyms before, though, and it's been a similar type of experience, so I'm sure this applies across multiple. Multiple spaces.

Oh, I would say our buddy that has Fit Body Bootcamp. Oh, yeah, sure. It's all the same. So we have two types of customers. We have customers coming in new and then we have existing members. And so what the one thing that they do that is a good idea is they have a free workout with a trainer when you join. So you get a free workout with a trainer when you join, Right?

Yep.

So we're. We're going to try to increase their sales and we're going to try to increase their. By increasing their conversions. We're going to increase their sales is the first part. So there's a couple things going on that happen when. And we just had a bunch of people that we know join there and none of them bought personal training.

Right, Right.

And so the, the money is in personal training. And I think if they had. I would you guess how many trainers they have there? So the funny thing with trainers is. And I'm. I'm. The funny thing with trainers is a lot of trainers are kids just waiting to find the next thing.

Yeah.

And so would you say they had 30 trainers?

I think so. I'm just thinking about the wall, because they got that one wall with all the pictures on it. I was just kind of doing the math in my head. I'd see it's between 25 and 30 trainers.

Okay. And at any given time, how many of those trainers do you see there? 10?

Yeah, probably 10.

So I'm going to guess they're at half capacity for what they could sell. Right?

10 to 15. Right.

But I think some of those trainers are probably part time, I'm guessing.

Yeah, for sure.

But they're in about half their.

But then they're bringing in new trainers all the time. Like, you always see those guys coming in the blue shirts, then they're graduating to the black shirts. Like, it seems like they're constantly recruiting trainers, so there's must be some sort of demand for that.

So here's the, the biggest mistake that business owners make is this one, this one that we're going to talk about right now. So you have all these new clients coming in and you have a great thing set up. You have.

A free workout analysis with a trainer.

Right.

So the one thing that they have going on is I think about 30% of the new customers coming in actually take them up on that free training.

Right.

And of that 30% buy a training package. And most of the time it takes them a while to do it. They don't do it right up front. So the, the training thing is optional.

Right.

The first thing that I would do is make that forced. So I would force the training session.

So before you could get your membership card, before you could do any of it, we need to do an analysis and we want to get to know you.

Sure.

So in, in some industries, we call it needs analysis. But it's like kind of there, it's like, hey, here's your, here's your id. Go work out. I wouldn't, I would stop that. And as crazy as it sounds, I would try to get to know my clients. So the clients would like this more. But it's like, hey, why are you joining a gym? So at the time of selling, you're going to start the needs analysis, but then you're gonna instantly hand them over. So there isn't a gap between, when they sign up for the membership. I, I would be giving them to the trainer right then to do the analysis. Like I would say when you come in to sign up, bring workout stuff, because then we're going to do your, your analysis. So there's no gap in between. So 100% of the customers get a free analysis with a trainer.

Yeah.

So we're gonna, we're going to up our conversion ratio just because we're getting everyone to do it. And it's a forced. Yeah, you know, forced transaction, you know.

Is really good at that is the. The dentist, right. So the dentist office, they make your appointment for you. So when you're there at the dentist office, before you leave, they write it all down, they book it. They don't want you to leave until they booked it for you and they. And then they hand it to you. It's almost like even though it's not mandatory, you can still, you know, you can still fire your dentist to move on. It feels that way. Like by booking that appointment and setting it up ahead of time, it makes it feel like you gotta be there, you know.

Yeah.

Increases accountability.

So I, I would make it, but I would actually, I would have the trainers, when they're there, they would almost, you know, they would almost be on call and I could find a trainer to do it if I had to.

Like to do a consultation and it would even.

And so I've kind of done their numbers in my head, doubling their sales. So if they were doing, and let's just say a hypothetical number, if they were doing $200,000 a month in personal training, I think we could get it over 400,000 and we could pay for somebody who's really good at converting. Because here's the next part that they lose.

It is.

And this is the lesson that I want everybody to understand is they dole those leads out. So somebody comes in and signs up for a membership. They dole those leads out evenly. And so they try to fit people by personality. They do not give the leads out by who closes the most to training sessions. So you have all these new young trainers that work there that are part time or full time. They have no clientele, they have no history of converting anybody to anything. And it's the biggest turnover. You see those young trainers come and go. Then you have these trainers that are veterans that have been there a long time that look at it like a career and have tenure, and they have a higher closing ratio of getting to know people and turning them into actually buying a package of workouts. And they get the least amount of leads. Right. And so you want to understand in your business, and I learned this in car sales is whenever I gave a lead to the new kid, the. The car never sold, whenever I gave it too much. So what I used to do is I'd walk up, I'd see who's number one or two on the sales board, and if number one was there, they got it. If number two was there, they got it. But the Car was sold. So it's a hard thing. You want to be fair. But actually, in business, a lot of times success is in making the younger employer, the fresher employee, earn something and go out and get fresh stuff before. How much better would a trainer be if they had to go out and get their own clients and not just have them handed to you?

Yeah.

So if you could build a clientele of 10 customers on your own that are buying training every week, then you would qualify for leads. But you. I would not ever dole out leads evenly and make anything fair.

Right.

Nothing's fair. This is capitalism.

Yeah.

And that's communism in a lot of ways. But that's what businesses do. They're trying to be fair. But if you flip that script and you make it on performance, then all of a sudden those leads have a value. Yeah, they don't seem to have a value. It's like they do the analysis and it is what it is. But the conversion is terrible. The conversion should be closer to 50%.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

And so. So to just those two things right there would increase sales dramatically is if when you bought the membership before you could work out, you had to have. You had to get certified on the gym, and we had to get to know you and we had to put you in the system. So you just make it like we can't even create your membership card yet until we've done a needs analysis and we know what your plan is. Right.

Yeah.

And then at that time, the trainer then is going to do the analysis. Now, the second part is the analysis that they do is not humiliating enough.

So I've been through an analysis before for workouts where you had the cutest girl in the world have you take off your shirt, strip you down to just your shorts, and do a bunch of physical exercises to prove that you're terribly out of shape. Right, Right. So if. If. Let's just say, for example, and tell me how you would feel, because when I felt this, I was. I was humiliated. But this was the process. And part of the process of converting a customer is the bigger the show, the more you're gonna sell. There has to be some sort of show and there has to be some emotion involved. Right. So the one analogy that I that has always stuck with me is if you're selling fire alarms or you're selling alarms to somebody door to door in a house, what you want to do is tell them all about how many crimes have happened, how many crimes have been prevented, how many houses have burned down. You want to show pictures of the house getting ransacked. You want to show pictures of the houses that are burnt down.

Right.

And so those emotions, and it's automatic for the customer. They're going to feel like, oh, that could happen to me. And then the sale is going to stick. Right. Your conversions are going to be really, really high.

Right.

But just asking somebody like, oh, well, what are your goals? And, oh, we're going to measure your body fat in here way. It isn't enough. They got to go. That, that needs analysis, needs to be an emotional experience. So the things that I experienced in one that was really good was they took pictures of me. They don't take pictures of you. Before and after pictures in the gym world is everything. Those pictures should be uploaded to their Equinox app.

Right?

And so take your shirt off if you're a guy. If you're a girl, just get down to your workout stuff. We're going to take pictures, then we're going to put your measurements up there. And then now we're going to talk about your goals. Right. And have it tied into the app and then do some agility tests. So show how.