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One Of The First Mistakes I Made In Business

Name: One Of The First Mistakes I Made In Business
Uploaded: 2025-10-02T20:00:07+00:00
Duration: 46 s
Channel: Shanli Liu, CPA, CTP
Description: In this brief personal anecdote, the speaker recounts his early attempt to market a new gym by copying a mentor’s flyer strategy. He printed and…

2 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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0:46

In this brief personal anecdote, the speaker recounts his early attempt to market a new gym by copying a mentor’s flyer strategy. He printed and distributed only 300 flyers, received a single complaint about a damaged Mercedes, and concluded the campaign failed. When he reported back, the mentor asked about the test size, revealing that successful gym chains test with thousands of flyers (5,000 per test, scaling up to 150,000 per month). The speaker realizes his mistake: treating a small distribution as a full campaign rather than a proper test, highlighting the importance of adequate sample size and scaling in direct‑mail marketing.

Chapters

When I started my gym, I talked to a mentor of mine and I said, how are you advertising? And he was— he had 22 locations. He said, I use flyers. And I was like, okay, I'll use flyers. I'll try that. I printed out flyers and I put 300 flyers out on cars or whatever. And, you know, I waited to go collect my money. And one guy called and he said, are you the guy who put the flyer on my car? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, you dinged my Mercedes. And then I was like, oh, and I hung up and I just like— and he never called again, thank God. Called my mentor back and he was like, hey, how'd the flyers work out? And I was like, I was ready to, like, give him, like, a talking to. I was like, it didn't work, huh? You know, like, what are you going to say about it now? He was like, what was your test size? And I was like, I put out 300. And I was like, 300? And he was like, we test with like 5,000. It's like, and then after that we do 5,000 a day. He was doing 150,000 flyers a month and I thought that 300 was a campaign.