Ep 13: How Much My Gym Cost To Run & Why I Closed It Down

Going on. Team Matt here from PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle show here for another awesome episode with you. I'm getting some really good feedback team from my other episodes that we've been doing. We've been having a few guest guest speakers come on board, which is awesome. So I'm glad you guys, you guys are loving the different perspective. But I'm back for a solo episode today, so this one is going to be a juicy one. Going to talk about why I decided to close my gym. So I'm going to give you guys a bit of an insight into what it's like to actually buy your gym. And yeah, I don't even know how much it really costs to manage a gym because my gym is only quite small and a lot of personal trainers have this inspiration and motivation to open their own gym, which is all well and good. I have the same operations. Before I was even a pt, I actually was looking at franchise gyms, wanted to buy my own gym and I was looking for an investment opportunity. I tried drop shipping in the past FBA through Amazon and I was like, yeah, I need to own my own gym. At the time I was looking at a group fitness gym. Now Pit Stop, actually Pit Stop plc, which is kind of closed down now, but was on the radar back then. But you know, franchises these days are, you know, half a million dollars compared to, you know, when I bought my gym, I think it cost me like 80k cash. Paid my gym in cash, 80 grand I think it cost me to open my gym. Like I'm putting the fit out everything, like I didn't buy the building or anything anyway. So I'm going to go through what it was actually like and why I actually decided to close down my facility. So let's just quickly go back and recap. For those who haven't heard this story before, I'm going to briefly share how I actually got to the point of owning my own gym so quickly because I've only been a PC for four years and I had a gym for three of them. So not many PTs can say they open their own gym after less than a year of being in the fitness industry, but it happened pretty fast. So I started at an enzyme fitness club and I absolutely crushed it when I first started. So I got fully booked in two weeks. So there was about 35, 40 sessions per week. After two weeks, fast forward another couple of weeks. I hired two trainers, so I had one and then two weeks later hired another one, had two trainers. Within three months we were doing 100 plus sessions per week between the three of us now expanded into a jets facility, hired another two trainers and got them fully booked as well. So doing about 150 sessions a week at this stage. And then things became a bit toxic at the anytime. Fitness environment. Long story short, I'm not going to go into too much detail this part. I want to mainly talk about the gym part. I find one of my trainers for being toxic, which therefore turned into the club sub manager being toxic, which therefore wanted myself to get out of there. And essentially the club manager essentially ganged up on me with my, my trainers that I fired against me and she forced me to give clients to my trainers that I fired to try and keep them around. Both of those trainers actually aren't in the industry anymore as far as I know they are. Good luck. Hopefully you're doing well as far as I know. I don't think they did too well from memory, but needless to say, no regrets on that experience that obviously one thing led to another. So essentially how this came about is as I said, it was a toxic environment and I wanted to get out, I wanted to leave, I wanted to take my clients with me and yeah, I wanted to move on. So anyway, what I did was I wanted to, I was, I was kind of looking for other opportunities and I was like, oh well, maybe I can just open my own gym nearby in the, in the community. Like I grew up around that area as well, so I had a good reputation. So I was looking at gyms, hadn't quite signed the lease just yet, but I wanted to give my notice to make sure everything was completely fine. So I had to give 12 weeks notice. Anyway, I had the conversation with the club manager, I said, look, I hate the environment, it's toxic. It's like to you guys against me, which is fine, but I'm, I'm out. I told my clients that I was leaving and that I was opening my own gym. So anyway, I gave the notice, I signed a lease and I was like, cool, I got 12 weeks to get it all sorted, get this fit out done, etc. Etc. So I was obviously brand new to this, so I was trying to organize the city out on my own, get equipment, etc. Etc. Anyway, had an issue with this. Of course she didn't know I was actually opening a gym, but she cracked it, cracked the shits and essentially caught a meeting with me that I couldn't make in time and I told her I wouldn't be able to make it by that time I could make it At a different time. Anyway, she just left a letter on my desk to say I was terminated immediately and I had until the end of the week to get out of the club and that was it. So I was like. So I was born my eyes out. I was like, I don't even know what to do. I've got nowhere to go. I didn't just sign the lease, got nowhere to train my clients and I didn't know what to do. So what I did was that was literally on the Friday afternoon. That afternoon I called my mom and dad and I said hey, this is what's happened. I need some, I need somewhere to train my clients. Go live at Narangar, can I use your garage? And I'll buy some equipment and I'll train them there until my gym is ready. Which was meant to be three months away. So what I did was I bought everything they had in stock and gym equipment, everything I could and I picked it up on the Saturday, hired a trailer and a ute actually I borrowed my, my wife's sister's ute and picked it up, set up the gym in my parents garage and until the fit out was done which about a month later. And then I went to the gym and took like so many clients followed me, they canceled the things I'm fitness I opened literally 10 meters from them and as you can imagine I went too pleased with that. But at the end of the day bit of karma went their way and anyway then I started the gym. So I started the gym. It's only a small boutique little studio mainly for one on one personal training but it was 247 as well. We had group classes. So this is what it's actually like and how much it actually costs. So I'm sure people want to know how much it actually costs to, to run aging or run my gym. So I'll give you, I'll give you guys some, some numbers in terms of what it looked like. So for rental based pts, which is most of my network, you guys would pay anywhere between maybe 150 to 300 a week. Just the rent for this place. 76 square meters in a shopping center was it 1100 per week. So 1100 per week plus electricity, plus staff, plus if you need a manager, which I did have a full time manager for a while. So full time manager was costing me about a thousand bucks a week, 1200 bucks a week. Electricity would be 50 to 100 a week, insurance on 50 to 100amonth plus obviously some people need to lease their equipment so it's another expense. So like my break even was probably like if I, if I had trainers plus a manager, plus the lease, the promotional stuff you need to pay for it at the shopping center. So you better pay the lease which goes up 4% every year. Plus you've got to pay percentage of the variable outgoings which is like the cleaners for the shopping center promotional stuff which they didn't really promote anything for my business. But you have to have your share promotional costing for the shopping center. So I think it was about 700amonth, I think. So to actually run this is a small boutique gym. It's probably, you know, 17, 1800 a week, probably up to 2 grand per week just to actually keep the place running. It doesn't include any wage for me by the way. There was a long time ago I wasn't even paying myself a wage, couldn't pay a wage. There was some sometimes where I didn't even have enough to pay the manager. So although from the outside it looks like I was crushing it which like revenue wise it was great but sometimes it got a little bit, a little bit full on because you better have all these things covered for expenses and then you know, something happens then yeah, it's on you. You can't just not pay your team type of thing. So anyway that's, that's a bit of an insight into how much it actually costs to run. And like we were crushing it. Like I got that. I got my gym through like 80 sessions a week just in that facility. I had three trainers running sessions at once, group classes, you know, people using the gym 24, 7. Not sure how many members we had but majority of them were like 90% of them were doing PT with us. So at one stage I had a full time manager who did PT as well, plus two other trainers, plus myself doing some sessions. So like we weren't doing well. But sometimes when you've got all those expenses, when you're trying to build up, sometimes it gets a bit tight with cash flow. But you know, every business experiences that when they do scale. So no issues there. So let's get back to why I decided to close it down. So there's a couple of reasons in upon reflection and hindsight is a wonderful thing here. On reflection, I feel like if I didn't like I, I did say that I've always wanted to own and run a gym but if I told myself what it was going to be like if I was to go back to myself now and say this is what it's going to be like to run an operator gym. I wouldn't have done it because what I was trying to avoid is having to rebuild my existing clientele because I had already lost 2 1/2, 3 1/2 K per week in recurring income by having to be forced to give these trainers some clients because they had no idea how to sell for themselves or market themselves. I didn't want to lose another two and a half K per week because at that location we were doing, you know, 5, 6K per week in income. You can imagine what that's like when you take that big of a hit income wise and then have to, you know, fork out all that money for a gym and then you're like, oh well, it's not going to cost you two grand a week to keep the place open. You know what I mean? So in, in hindsight I feel like if I knew what it would be like, I probably wouldn't have done it. However, I don't regret the decision at all about buying, yeah, all my gym in cash. So I had no overhead of the gym itself except the rent and actually the operating costs. It's not like I took out a loan for 150 grand to buy the gym and then it was payment off every month. That's not what it was like. So where was I? So let me, let me go through the part where it started to fall down a little bit. So this is kind of related to my whole PC business how I scaled from zero to six locations, 12 trainers in a couple years, you know, 250 sessions per week. So what, what I, what I had done essentially was I had huge key person risk. It was all reliant on me essentially. So I had, I had my, my gym of FBA had jets. I think I had another two anytime fitness clubs. I had a second jets club out of Snap Fitness. I think I had A plus fitness as well. Now for a while there it was just me doing the sales and marketing. For a while now I didn't do any sessions. I picked up people if they needed to, but for, for a long time there I didn't do any sessions and I had to bring on another salesperson, which I did. I brought on a guy called Shane and he was doing sales for me, which is great. He was really good at sales. And then I tried to manage myself out of, out of the business because I had winter loose about to be born to my first child or my first, first daughter was going to be born. So I wanted to have some time off. So I The whole process was trying to leverage me out of the business so I could have some time off with the family. So what began to happen was we had a lot of retention issues with clients. We're really good at getting new clients. We couldn't keep clients long enough for us to build it up. So we got up to 250 sessions per week. But then we're starting to decline, like, oh, down to 220. So when you. When you have that many clients, you can lose a lot of clients pretty quickly as well. But you can also gain a lot of clients pretty quickly. Like, if you think about, if you've got 250 sessions, 150 clients, roughly, you know, you lose 10% a month. That's 15 clients that you could lose every month if it's 10%, which is a good retention rate. So what began to happen was there wasn't. There wasn't enough accountability for the trainers, and we didn't have the required systems in place to sustain that growth even further. So what happened was Shea wasn't able to get all these locations, Travel here, travel there, trouble here. I wasn't able to do it because I was on my way out and I was trying to leverage my time, which I did do, but to the detriment of the growth. So what happened was, like, for example, when we went to Plus Fitness, we were there for a few weeks, and I was like, look, we. We just. We've got so much going on in these other locations. We can't. Can't do this. Meanwhile, I had issues with the. With the studio manager that I hired at Birken Gallery because I wasn't getting any return on investment. Not good at sales, not good at marketing, wasn't getting anywhere with. With lead generation, so weren't growing. I was paying an extra $1,200 a week for nothing, really. I wasn't going to get any return there. And then one by one, I just started closing down locations. I was like, let's just simplify it. I need to simplify it. So I think I scaled too fast. I think if I took my time more and I created really good systems in place, looked after my people a bit better, I think it would have been okay. But in hindsight, if I had my own gym, there would have been no issues at all. If I. If I just had that location, if I was solely focused on my gym, I think to this day, I still have it. I probably renewed the lease for another three years, and I'd probably, you know, I. Probably doing probably doing still pretty well. But because I've had this. Had had that experience where I had to close location, close location. It was like, we're still doing fine, we're still profitable, but we just weren't growing. And then I was like, well, not really getting any income here. So then what I did was, I think when we got down to four locations, I decided to make my sales redundant. So I took over the sales again and I just simplified it even more. I went down to three locations and I just kept it simple and went down to two. And I just had my gym and Jets. Jets is the club I'm still at today and which is, you know, probably been the best club I've been at this whole time. I've been there probably almost four years now. I think I was expelled into that club. That's six months into my PT journey. So coming to four years. But in summary, I just. Because I wasn't at the club, I just. I wasn't there enough to really enjoy it. And I just felt like there was. There was more pressure and more stress than enjoyment and fulfillment. And that's probably the reason that I closed the gym, to be honest. Upon reflection, I think I had no control of. It was just all hype, no systems and no, like, proper vision. Like, I had a vision, but it was all just made up. I think it was all just ego that I was like, oh, I just want to open gin. Open up another one, open up another one, open up another one. And I think I'd be a lot more happier and more fulfilled if I just had like one or two locations that I just bulletproof the system, leveraged myself out and, you know, just worked on the service a bit more. So in summary, there's a couple of reasons why I closed it. For one, probably like after two years. So about 12 months before the lease ran out, I pretty much was like, not really enjoying having it. Like, it was good to have my own gym. It was probably. It didn't really lose money until the last couple of months because I wasn't doing anything with. Was always. It was always profitable, profitable. And then it was like break even for a while. So financially it was like it was okay, but it was just a lot of stress and pressure that if I didn't have that, I'd be able to do other things better at the other locations. So, yeah, that's one of the reasons. The other thing is I stopped taking on new clients for the last 12 months because I didn't need them, didn't want Them. I've stopped all my Facebook ads, stopped all the marketing, stopped posting. If you see, if you see the Instagram page, I think the Last post was 10, 11 months ago, something like that. And I just, we got new clients from referrals or word of mouth. And then the other thing is obviously that I found more fulfillment in helping other personal trainers rather than helping people with their health and fitness. So my values have shifted a little bit. So health was one of my highest values for the last couple of years, but right now it's actually not in my top values at all. So for those who know me quite quite well, you guys might know, like, I don't train that hard. Like, I train three times a week purely just to maintain. Like, I don't really track any of my workouts. I just do what I like to do. But my values now is more coaching. So I love coaching, but I get more fulfillment out of helping people leverage their business and, but also, like, also leverage their business to spend more time with their friends or family. And then helping people make more money gives me more fulfillment and helping people like, lose some weight or get, you know, get stronger. I think I lost, lost fulfillment. Well, I don't know if I lost the film. And I think perhaps all that pressure and stress changed my value slightly. So I shifted my focus because I've been a pt. Sorry, I've been a business coach or a business mentor or PC mentor for coming up to 12 months now. And that's when I made the decision to close down the gym. So literally I've just been with the gym for the last 12 months or so just to count down to the day that I could close it down and close that chapter and then move on and go full on with my business coaching. So I'll still do PT face to face at jets only because I love the clients. It's a really good environment. Like, I mentor the other trainer there. Josh, who works for me, still does technically. So he was my trainer at Margin and I mentor him now at Jets. So that's pretty much the reasons why I don't have any regrets about earning the gyms, about earning the gym and, you know, scale into what I did. It led me to get to the stage where, because I had all that success, I had so many people messaging me for advice and tips and whatnot that naturally just become clear that, okay, well, I clearly know what I'm doing here. So, you know, what would it look like if I helped other people and I helped a couple of people and I thought, oh, this is really cool. This is really fulfilling. People got really good results. I was like, wow, this is awesome. I could really change the industry. So once I kind of, you know, got to the point where I was really enjoying doing the business coaching, I was like, cool. Yep, that's it. I'm gonna close it down, scan back down to pt and then, you know, work more from home. So at this stage, I do only 3 days a week doing PT and the rest is from home, and I find that's a really good balance. I can spend a lot of time with my family, so it's a really leveraged model that I've got now as well. I don't have all that overhead. There's a couple of things. The overheads. The overheads to actually run the gym, the fulfillment and that you couldn't really work from home. You could, if you fully leveraged yourself, leverage yourself out of the business, which I could have done, but it wasn't worth it for me with all the overheads that come with it. So that's it, team. That's the reason why I don't have the gym anymore. So no regrets. Heaps of lessons learned which I might share in a different episode. My top lessons learned, but hope they give you some. Gives you some insight into what it's like running your own gym. And yeah, glad to be on this path now, helping some other personal trainers. Absolutely. Crush it in the industry. I know a lot of personal trainers tend to struggle and to get clients or to retain clients and whatnot, so I can help a few people with that. Then it makes me really fulfilled and makes me quite happy. So that's it until the next episode. Hope you have an awesome day and I will talk to you in the next one.