If you're not unbelievably rich yet, this is why

Why your business isn't growing. And so we have our inputs, we have efficiencies, and we have an output. And so this output most the time for a business is money. Right. The issue that I continue to see is that people aren't clear on what the inputs are. And so taking to this extreme, I could say, okay, if no one knows that your gym exists, will you make money? No. So we have to get people to know that you exist. All right, step one. People have to know you exist. And so right now, part of some of your problems is that not enough people know that you exist. And so what do we do to increase how many people know that we exist? We get traffic or we advertise. Now, if advertising is the thing that we're going to do to get more people to know about our stuff, what is the primary method of advertising that you have right now? Now, for those of you guys who here read Leads, by the way, the book. Oh, neat. Thank you. Appreciate it. So you can reach out to people that you know or don't know. You can make content, you can run ads, or realistically, you can get an affiliate partner who does those things for you, but for everyone here. So we can make this interactive. Who here is only uses ads to get customers or primarily uses ads to get customers? Okay, so that looks like about a quarter, quarter to a third. Okay. Who here uses outreach to get customers primarily? Oh, less. Okay. Like 10%. Okay. Who uses making content to get customers? Interesting. That was higher than I expected. Who here has referral partners who refer you business on a regular basis, and that's the primary way you get customers. Okay, not a ton. Okay. So the reason this is so important is that if your business is struggling or you're struggling to grow your business, then it means that if the first step in the chain for you making money is that people find out about the stuff, a lot of you guys aren't letting people know, and you haven't boiled it down to the inputs. So I'm gonna come back to this page. If we have content as your primary way of getting customers, if we have paid ads, if we have outreach, and if we have referrals or referral partners, then we have to boil this down to the activities that we need to do in order to do more of it, right? So you're like, okay, I make content. So then the question is, how much are you making and how good is it? Now, I personally believe that for local businesses, the purpose of content is not to get customers. It is to convert a Higher percentage of customers, because most of the algorithms on these platforms are global. And so if you make content and you're in Idaho, and the vast majority of people who see your content are not in Idaho or not even a five mile radius, who cares? Unless you want to go in the online thing, which is a totally different game. And so I see the purpose of making content as a local business owner as something that when you do reach out or if someone does get referred to you or you do run an ad, people click over to your page and they see if you're legit or if you look friendly, you look nice. They look at the equipment, they look at the facility and say, oh, this place looks cool. Oh, it's right by where I live, or it's right on my way to work. And then they make a decision to move forward. So if you're currently making zero content, super light lift, make some like one a week so you just look like you have a heartbeat online, really high ROI for like one piece a week. Beyond going above that, then you get into the. I wanna make content as my primary marketing mechanism. And now you're driving volume and quality through that. So this, then if content is your primary way, which I'm still amazed by, for those of you who that's what you do, is that you want to start thinking, how do I make. And for context, we make about 400 pieces of content a week posted. It's a lot. And so you're like, wait a sec, you're like doing the math. You're like, that's 55 pieces a day. It's a lot. It's more than two an hour. So a lot. And so as a baseline, let's start with like two a day, something that you can do. And the reason I want to boil this down this way is that if you're like, I can't grow my gym, I can't grow my business. And the thing that grows my business is that I make content, then do a shitload more of that. I know crazy. What I'm known for, the very deep insights. All right, so paid ads, which was, I think, the largest percentage of you here, still a minority, which half frightens me for you, but we'll keep going. Paid ads. The thing that you do when you run paid ads is that you're spending money every day. So the actual platform does the distribution of the content for you, does the distribution of the offer for you so that you can generate leads. But the work of making paid ads that you do every day is in the creative, it's in scripting out the ads, thinking through the hooks, doing research on other ads that are working in the weight loss space, and thinking, okay, how can I emulate that? Part of that might be I have to learn how to use one of those phone editing softwares. Yeah, that's the job. That's work. That's how it works. And so for each of these activities, I'll give you my rule of thumb we, which is that it's four hours a day, and some of you are gonna be like, gulp. Four hours a day. Yeah. Trying to grow. Right. Like, I just, I don't. We'll get to this in the second half of this, this talk. But if this is the input into the system that makes everything go brrr, then this is the thing that makes you money. And everything that you're doing that's not. This is not making you as much money as doing more of this. And for most small businesses, if you're under $100,000 a month, you just need to let people know that you exist. And some of you guys are concerned about your brands and things like that. The brand is 100% going to be delivered based on the quality of the product, quality of the service that you give. So let me give you a quick little hack here and then we'll come back to this. So brand can only be built in three ways. One is what you say, the second is what other people say, and the third is what people experience themselves. And so what ends up happening is in the beginning, you have no customers. In the beginning, it was dark, right? So you say stuff. You say, hey, my stuff's awesome. Look, it's clean, it's stuff. It's. It's in the neighborhood that you like. It's safe, whatever, you won't get hurt here. You'll look nice and skinny. You want to be skinny? Look at me, I'm skinny too. You could be like me. So you say these things, great. Then somebody will buy. And then if they have good things to say, they leave you reviews. And then the person who's considering buying is like, okay, well, I like what they were saying. And other people seem to be saying nice stuff, so then maybe I will buy. But then as soon as they do buy, they actually have an experience personally. So here they. These two things are approximations. These two things are advertising. This is product. Because somebody can come out with the coolest, most premium, sweetest looking brand in the world. But if you buy the shirt and it has holes in it, not the Holes that are cool. Just holes. It's gonna suck. And you'll be like, these guys are full of it. If you go to. If you wait in line forever for this swanky new restaurant because they say they were really cool and expensive. And I. Other people say they're really cool and expensive. And then you go there and you're like, this is not cool and just expensive. You're like, I hate this place. And so immediately, there's a promise that you're making here, and then you deliver it here. And if you deliver based on the promise you make, that reinforces the brand. And then these people become these people, and they say, nice shit. And that is how you build a brand in a local business. That's it. It's all about the delivery. And the reality is, the vast majority, I'll say the average person here is mediocre, just waiting for that to hit, but maybe it didn't. Anyways, half of you are below average. I know, but the real real is, like, everybody here, Most people would say, no. Our gym, like, the amount of times that I heard my gym's amazing, if people just came in to experience it, I'd be like, do you have customers? And they're like, yeah. I'm like, and they're not getting you more customers. Not amazing. You're not that good, comma. And that's okay. But the problem is when you think you are good and then don't put any attention to it because you delude yourself into thinking that you're so good that no one talks about your shit. I'm so good, people just want to keep me a secret. Sure. It's like, I love you so much, baby, I just can't bring you in public. Okay, so back to advertising. All right, so you're making two pieces of content today. If that's what you're doing. If you're doing running paid ads, you want to commit to a certain dollar amount per day. And I can't impress this upon you enough, is that, like, you spend this money before you eat. Like, this is how your business eats. This is not. This is not feeding your child if you don't spend this money. Because this is how you distribute your message. This is how people find out about your stuff. This is the input into the system that goes burned and makes money. So you spend the money and then your four hours for this is about how to make ads, and that's the skill. If you do that every day, guess what? You'll get way better at making ads. And so I'll give you a little hack that I do. One, whenever I see an ad of any kind. So one, I'm not premium on anything. I want to see the ads. If I like an ad, I save it, I screenshot it and I have an album. That's all the ads that I like. Then when I go to start making ads, which if it's you, you're going to be doing this every day. I go back, I review my all time greatest ads and I like to drink them in. So I'm like, okay, these are the words that I was saying. These are the hooks, these are the settings that I was using. Okay, these are the pain points I brought up. And then I look at the new ads that I've seen that week that I thought were kind of interesting and I say, okay, what elements from this can I merge with the stuff that I already know to create something that's kind of new? And so then I make a whole bunch of those and I take my winning ads and I just make them again. Like, same words, same. I just do it again. And then I run them and I see how they're doing. And if I want to learn an effect, I Google how to put this effect on a video. And then we put the effect on the video and then the ad starts performing or it does it. And guess what you do tomorrow? You do it. A fucking game. And like, I have had a lot of conversations with gym owners in my life and I'm not going to get to the second part of this talk because otherwise I'm going to, I'll get more offensive. So I'm going to wait. I'll complete this thought process. So, okay, please, please spend money on ads, please, so that people can find out about your gym. And if your stuff sucks, then how are you gonna get better? Besides kind of like bringing people in so that you can learn that you suck and then getting practice so that you can get better. Cause you can spend all the time in the world trying to imagine how good your customer success is gonna be until you have like 20 new members and you're like, oh my God, everything's broken. I don't have any process for anything. And like I suck. And my trainer was late and wow, what a terrible experience. But you can't have that learning until they walk in the door. So you're running paid ads if you're doing outreach, which was like 10% of you guys. I'm going to say it again, but the rule of 100, it just works. It's Consistent as gravity. It works. Problem is, most people don't work. And so that's why they don't make money. They like to think about working and they like to come up with excuses for other things that became, quote, urgent that never are. In a gym, there's basically no emergency. I had. I remember I got a call at like 4:30 in the morning when there was a water main that broke, pouring over my floor. And my trainer called me and he was like, hey, we have an emergency. He said that? And I immediately assumed, someone's dead. I was like, heart attack, Someone's on the floor. And if that's the case, why are you calling me? Call fucking 911. So he said that, and he's like, are you ready? And I was like, yes, just tell me. He was like, it's a water main. It's like, well, what are you calling me for? I'm not a plumber. I was like, call a plumber. And I could have slept a couple hours. I wasn't gonna change anything. What do you want me to do? What do you think you should do? Work out outside. Great idea. Do that. Why are you calling me? There's no emergencies. Like, unless you're in healthcare and you're in shock trauma, there are no emergencies. And so I say this to underline one point, which is that many of you become distracted by things that you perceive to be emergencies, but the real emergency is that you're not doing the shit you need to do to grow your business. Thanks. With the music. There you go. It's a real bar. Okay, so last one's referral. And I'm gonna say, when I say referral here, I mean a referral partner, meaning you have a chiropractor, you have a doctor that you helped out, and they have a huge practice and they start sending you and you create some sort of relationship that you still do these things to attract this person. And if you're like, man, if I only. I've got this one guy and he sends me like half my customers. Well, how amazing would it be if you had 10 of those guys or 20 of those guys? Well, you know how you do that? You ask them, you reach out to them, you give them gifts, you bribe them. Really? That's how it works. And, you know, you bribe another business owner, you send them business. If you want someone to send you business, send them business. First. Little rule of life, it works a lot better that way. Okay, so we have our inputs and our outputs in the system, right? So it starts with Advertising. And for the vast majority of you guys, you are not advertising enough. That's it. Who here spends four hours a day, six days a week advertising, doing one of those four things? Does your gym make money? I don't have a gym. Yeah, it's like, I don't have a gym, but, yes, I make money. It's like, what are you doing here? It's called GymCon. All right, I promise you, if you spend four hours. Like, four hours a day is not much. Like four hours a day. I don't know. What are you doing? Why? Your business isn't growing? You're not trying to grow it. All right, cool. Well, I mean, we could just stop there. None of you are even doing it. All right, well, let's talk about efficiency while we're at it. It doesn't matter because you're not putting anything in the system anyways. But let's talk about it. So fundamentally, I'm being dead serious. It's just like, it doesn't. If I were to spend a full day with each of you, I'd be like, oh, okay, well, what are we gonna do with the rest of our eight, you know, seven hours and 40 minutes that we have for this day? Because that's the problem. But okay, let's talk about efficiency. So fundamentally, you gotta let people know. Fantastic. Now they know. You gotta get them to give you money, which is gonna be the conversion process. All right, cool. Conversion is gonna be the next step in this efficiency. I'll give you. I'll give you a little spoiler. The next ones, then you've got your price, and then you've got your churn. And I'm saying this specific to Jim's because it's recurring business. Okay? So if we think about what a business is, you get more customers or you make them worth more. It is the only way that you will make more money. Fundamentally, that is it. There's no other way. Get more customers, make them worth more. If we double click into each of these, getting more customers means you need more traffic and better conversion. And so if right now you're not getting enough customers, it means you need more traffic or better conversion. If you need to make your customers worth more, the only thing you can do to make them worth more is you raise your prices, you decrease churn. That's what you have control over. And so if you're like, okay, how do I make my customers worth more? Raise your prices, get them to buy more. Times. That's what decreasing churn is. Get them to buy for 10 months rather than five months or three months. And so the idea here is that once we feed the machine, this is the raw input. This is eyeballs. This is the activities that you do that get people to find out. Then it's about how many of these things can we turn into money and how much money can we turn it into? And so the most efficient gyms are ones that convert a very high percentage at a very high price and get people to buy lots of times. And so this is from a constraints perspective, figuring out what's wrong with your gym. And for everybody who didn't raise their hand, which is literally everyone here, it's this. But we'll talk about the other three, is that you have steps within this conversion process. You have to get them to schedule, you have to get them to show, and you've got to close. So who here sucks at sales? Can I get a hand? Some of you suck at sales. That's fine. It's helpful to actually, it's like the first step is being like, hi, my name's Sarah and I can't close a door, so it's okay. And so if you want to get better at sales, if that's the problem, you're getting leads in the door, but you can't close, then you practice closing, and you do that for four hours a day. And so there's probably a meta takeaway here, which is that whatever the big problem in my business is, that's what my first four hours every day are spent doing until I solve that problem, and then I change what that four hours is spent on. But that four hours that I spend in the morning before everyone gets there, or if you're a late night person, the last hours of the day when everyone's asleep, that is what moves the business forward. The vast majority of people skip those four hours and go straight to firefighting all day. But the thing is that if you look back on last month or two months or three months back, the only thing that you really will have to show for progress is what you did in those four hours. It's something that it took me a little bit of time to realize. I was like, oh, if I don't do it in that four hours, nothing big moves forward. But what I can promise is that I don't remember any of the fires that I put out last month. The fires are going to happen and they will get put out. You'll also find that if you ignore them, they tend to also go away. Real talk. And so if you're Having a conversion issue from sales. You practice sales. The way you practice sales is you role play. You do it with somebody else. Play with a friend. That's how it works. And you want fast feedback loops. You need to be able to breathe the script. And the secret to making sure that you don't sound dumb in the sale is you make them sound dumb in the sale. And you do that by asking questions so no one can oppose you. This is a little pro tip. No one can oppose you if you make no statements. So whoever answers questions in the sale is the one who's losing. And so you can even address this with every single obstacle that you ever come in contact with. Well, what certifications do you guys have here? Which ones you looking for? They don't know. This is a question their friend told them to ask. They have no idea. And then they're like, you know, what are the workouts like? Well, what's your dream workout? They tell you, and you're like, well, it's not that. If I really want, I'd be like, well, how's that working for you? Well, I don't do them. Okay, that's why you're here. Cool. Well, then why don't you do our workouts? So the thing is, there's always a way to sidestep objections by just asking what they're trying to get out of the question that they're asking you. And most of the time, they have no idea because you should know the answer to their question better than they do because you've had this conversation before. Imagine having the same conversation over and over again and sucking at that one conversation. Mind blowing. It's also like not advertising your fucking business anyways. So you've got show rates, you've got schedule rates, and you've got close rates. So that's our conversion efficiency. And so whichever one of these is below benchmark is the one that you spend your hours on. I'll also promise you that schedule rate and show rate, if you actually spend four hours a day on it, will not be a problem at all. But everyone just wants this to just go away magically and wants everyone just, like, show up ready to close. Like, my leads suck. All leads suck until they become customers, and they're amazing. But then, like, the process of taking a lead and making it to a customer is work, and everyone's afraid of doing that.

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And so now we get into ltv. So you advertise more, you work on these things for conversion to increase the conversion rate you have in the business. And then you've got price and churn. Now, Kale, I'm sure talked about pricing at some point. Yes. Okay, you're probably priced too low and it's not because we want to destroy your gym. You're priced too low because at that price you will not make a profit. The amount of times that I had gym owners who were like, my gym's full and I'm not making money. And I was like, do you see a problem? Like, you can't service any more customers, but you don't make any money? Get where I'm going with this. Like, something has to change. And if you're already full, we just need to increase the price. You're mispriced. And that's okay. Like, that's how you learn. But for many of you, you just need to send an email and send a letter and let people know that from this point going forward, this is the new price. Grab your big boy and big girl pants and say, like, I'm going to take this risk because the other way is guaranteed to never work. That's the thing is like, we want to stay in the same boat and be like, you know what? Even though all the math makes sense with this higher price, I'm afraid, and I'm going to let that stop me forever from getting the business to be where it needs to be. That sucks. So don't think that. Make the bet and then deliver. Like, that actually is your price and do a really good job on the back end. And the way that you do a good job, which Jim Launch has already given you, but you have exit interviews with people on the way out the door. You can save half of them by saying, oh, you're right, I didn't give you enough support. You should go into this hire thing. That's what actually gives you the support. You save half your customers. Awesome. You reach out to them every two weeks or so as though you actually cared about Them that was a joke, but no one laughed at that one. Anyways, so. So you reach out to them every couple weeks, and you just make sure it's a touch base, it's a pulse check. You don't even need to talk about fitness. It's just to make sure that they know that you know that they exist. You track attendance. When someone says that they're actually going to show up for a time, you make sure they show up. And if they don't show up, you say, hey, Marley, where were you? I missed you. We actually track this and we could watch people go from three times a week, three times a week, two times a week, one time a week, cancel. You can just watch it if you track attendance, but if you implement that, you go three times a week. Three times a week, two times a week. Marley, get your ass in here. Three times a week. Three times a week. And she keeps going. They have to know that they're missed the next one. And this is something that happened later in my life that I learned is about onboarding. So when somebody comes in the door and you do sell them, the next 24 hours are absolutely crucial to setting all the expectations of what their experience is going to be. And so right now, if your onboarding process is show up on Monday, tough, very hard. And so if there's ever a time where you invest more resources into a customer, it's in that first 24, 48, 72 hours. So that they know exactly where they're gonna go at what time, who's gonna talk to them, who reconfirms. They're showing up because they're petrified, because they haven't worked out in six years, and they feel terrible. And they used to be a high school weight and they can't look at the sky skill now because it makes them feel terrible. Whatever, right? And we have to deal with this by over communicating in the window of time that makes the most sense. And so even if it feels like it takes a little bit more effort, I promise you, you will get 2, 3, 5 more purchases from this person in terms of months by just making sure that they know when they're supposed to be there, who's going to be there to welcome them, and who's going to show them around a little bit in the beginning so that they don't feel like they're completely lost. Okay, that's churn. Fantastic. So right now, if your business is not growing as much as you want, you're not advertising enough. If you're advertising enough and People are finding out about it, you're getting leads. They're either not scheduling, not showing, or not closing. If it's one of those three, then all of your effort in that first four hours of the day is to getting them to schedule, getting to show, getting them to close. If you're getting all of that stuff, you've got lots of people and you're closing them all, but you're not making any money, you're mispriced. And if you're getting all of this and you have a high price, but everyone falls out the back door, you have to make your stuff better. And this is how you walk through it. This is how you figure out what the problem in the business is. And so who here has capacity in their gym right now? Okay, start there. So that is part one of my talk. Everyone feel good about that? Okay, thank you. So part two of the talk is reverse engineering your goal. And so the reason that I broke down the activities that you need to do into those four things is because we have to figure out how many custom or how many activities equals one customer. So if you know that on average you post, let's say 30 times a month. So you post 30 times a month, and from those 30 posts that you make, you get five customers, which for most of you is not the case because you're local businesses and this doesn't work that way. But since that's what 20% of you are doing, we'll talk as though that's what happens. So if you make 30 posts, you get five customers. You could say for every six posts, I get one customer. Okay, so I need to make more posts and any better posts. And if you're like, okay, I want to get to 25 customers is my goal. This is the goal. Then I need to 25x this. So you make 150, which means I need to do five a day. Okay, this is something I can control. Is this making sense? This is literally what I do with the businesses that we buy. I just say, I just boil everything down to like, what do we do that makes us money? Not all the stuff after that. What do we do that makes us money? And they're like, okay, we have an outbound team. I'm like, okay, so what are the outbound activities? It's like, well, we haven't tracked it well yet. Well start. So let's say you do 100 reach outs and that creates one customer. Okay. And currently you're getting 10 customers. Currently. Fantastic. And so that means you're doing 1,000 per month, which means you're doing 30 per day. Okay, well, if I want to.