Just wanted to stop by and drop some of what we’ve learn over the last 10 months at BLG about gyms and gym owners.
Life is all a series of feedbacks so I thought you all might find it useful…
1. Fitness is dead. We aren’t selling fitness, we are selling structure, recognition, mentorship, status, sense of belonging, personal growth, and mission. If you can fulfill on just 4 essential brain chemicals you will attract and keep them forever. These are the things that fulfill on them. Remember, we are monkeys that are just running towards pleasure and away from pain.
2. 98% of gym owners have spent years standing in front of groups competently teaching but are still scared of putting their face on a camera and demonstrating their expertise. If you can do this and give it away you will have no competition because it’s very likely the gym owner down the road will never do it.
3. The reason ads and particular offers stop working and rise in cost is because you do nothing, run an ad until your saturate you’re market and it dies. The ads and offer that have worked over the last 5 years haven’t stopped working, you have. See point 4. 
4. If don’t publish content regularly, you’re of low relevance to Facebook. Your competitor, who is publishing useful info pays less when he runs Ads because he supports what the platform (FB) is about, relevance. Plus, he has an audience. FB is going to show his ads to them because they pay attention and it’s relevant. Someones ads are working and are cost effective, it’s just not you.
(And no, I’m not talking about your $50 canned content you bought from a digital marketer)
5. Don’t run ads without intent and data. Awareness campaigns to cold traffic especially. For two reasons: A. Conversion data is minimal. B. No one cares that you simply exist, Facebook is what’s called interruption style advertising. We should not interrupt people without intent to make an offer or give value worth paying attention to. Kill your evergreen FB ads and focus on high value publishing daily. The only exception here might be remarking.
6. It’s 2020, quality is expected, which means it’s not relevant to talk about your process, person and pieces. Talk about payoff and tell stories instead. Try to say the words “you” more than “I”. And don’t talk about being better or best. People are attracted to new and different, improvement offers have a low success rate.
7. Being self-employed sucks. Be a business owner instead, own an asset that cranks out cash. Take that cash and buy other assets, the average million has 7 streams of revenue. Most of them passive. How do you know if you’re self-employed? If you don’t show up and coach class this week does your business survive? No, then it’s not a business. It’s a job that owns you.
8. Systems thinking is something everyone loves to talk about but few actually do. Focus for two seconds, build a system, put $1 in and get $5 out, take that $5, put it back in and get $25 out. Do it again until you have enough to hire people, hire people to fire yourself from the roles you don’t want to do.
9. You have to give value to your staff the same way you give value to your members. It does not matter that you pay them, if you want them to overperform than you need to over deliver as their leader. Especially if they’re part-time, they don’t need this, they are coaches not just because they like fitness but because they are taking in increase in status in your community. It’s a form of personal growth. After a while it becomes very redundant for them, nobody wants a job where they don’t evolve and grown personally.
10. Most people focus on BIG efforts that have small outcomes, most of us operate way this from the conditioning of the “miseducation” system that teaches us to look for the hard answers just to pass tests when the answers are sitting in front of them. I would say the average gym owner suffers from this to the Nth degree. It’s often further clouded in a fog of trying to do everything they hear all at once. 1 inch in 12 different directions is still only 1 inch of movement, 12 inches of movement in one direction is 12x the progress.
That’s all, hope you guys took something from it.
There is a lot more than that to it of course, this just scratches the surface of what we’ve learned so far and the comments section can be a great place to further that discussion.
After 9 years of owning gyms and 17 years as an entrepreneur it’s been a journey. It’s not a linear one, it requires a ton of personal growth which we become more and more averse to the longer we’ve been in the game and the longer we’ve been alive. You become the bottleneck.
If you have a vision then the change starts with shifting your environment and then your behaviors. Only then can you develop new capabilities and become the person you need to be to build an empire.
Many do it backwards and seek the tactics and strategy first. But because environment and behaviors don’t change they just spin their tires. The environment externally may not change but I’m talking about the internal environment that is in your head.
Gym owners suffer this more than most because of the nature of our trade being a very tactical service. Inputs and outputs when training people is different than inputs and outputs in business.
Thanks to taking the time to read and talk to some of y’all soon!
https://biglittlegyms.net/beta-application
