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Alex Hormozi Explains How to Drive Revenue Online

Alex Hormozi

Alex Hormozi is the founder and owner of Gym Launch a business that helps gym owners build massively profitable gyms. Initially, he struggled as a gym owner but began a process of learning as much as he could to fix every problem with his business.

He transformed one struggling gym into 6 packed and profitable gyms and launched a business to help other gyms achieve the same success.

The Gym Launch model has transformed over 1500 gyms in four continents. He is also the author of Gym Launch Secrets and the host of the Gym Secrets Podcast

In this episode, Alex gives advice on making your business a revenue-driving machine, explains why accountability will be the key differentiator and lays out some top tips for mastering sales over the phone.

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Episode Link

This episode of The Fitness Founders Podcast can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you get your podcasts.

5 Key Takeaways From This Episode

1. Change Your Mindset

One of the key takeaways from this conversation is that there needs to be a change in the way you think about running a fitness business. The change in mindset should now be from a business that is offering a group fitness online to offering a one on one personal training style offering. 

The value of what your offering should now be one on one training for a group fitness boutique pricing; which is much lower than what you would charge for physical in-person one on one training sessions as a PT. 

2. Accountability Makes The Difference

Alex makes the point that the workout is largely the same for every online offering. The differentiator that will give your business the edge over everyone else is keeping members accountable. It’s important to overcommunicate with your members at this time. You need to keep them accountable so they hit their fitness goals. This is the value you provide over an online offering like Beachbody or Kayla Itsines.

3. Each Member Of Staff Needs to Generate Revenue

Each member of staff needs to have a function that ultimately drives revenue for your business. The obvious roles are planning and leading online classes and making content around this. 

However, for any surplus staff, you need to have them on the phones spending half their day following up on old leads, cold calling, or setting leads up for the final sales call. The other half of the day is spent on making accountability calls to current members.

4. Techniques for Selling Over the Phone

First point is that you just need to dive and make mistakes as you aren’t going to be good at it initially.  According to what he has seen it takes 25 attempts to then get the same level of closures they were experiencing when doing in-person selling. 80% of selling is how you say words; 20% is the words themselves

5. Insights Into the Hybrid Model of the Future

Alex makes a few predictions about the future of the fitness industry: 

  • Selling over the phone is a more efficient way to sell.
  • More people will stay online as they find it more convenient even when gyms open back up. 
  • However, there will be still a stronger market for actually physically attending a studio. 
  • This is a long term situation that you will need to adapt to.  Do not wait for things to get better or back to normal; you will need to have an online offering even when the gyms open back up

Transcript

Kevin:How’s it going everyone? Welcome to The Fitness Founders Podcast. I’m Kevin Mannion, VP Marketing here at Glofox. This week we talk to the great Alex Hormozi, author of Gym Launch Secrets. Alex talks about how to make your online business a revenue driving machine, creating value with accountability for your members and the key to mastering sales over the phone. It’s a masterclass so let’s get started.

Alex Hormozi, welcome to the show.

Alex:Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. 

Kevin:Yeah. You’re popular yourself. I really want to give you a platform for our listeners to get some key takeaways now the world has changed and how they can adapt to that. There will be businesses out there that are ahead of this and they are doing really well, and there’s other ones that are probably paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. I really like to start there or to start on maybe tell us a little bit around the mindset people need to have now that the sky has fallen in. How should they be thinking about their businesses?  

Alex:I see two major points. First one is whenever there is panic, panic is just an expression of pain. It’s just a larger pain within a marketplace, right. That’s what panic is. And so whenever there is lots of pain it means there is always lots of problems, and problems means opportunities to be solved. And so when there is always panic it means that you can make lots of profit if you are able to realign your services with what people want now. So if you are no longer able to fulfill in the way you are accustomed to the problem will still exist. Weight loss hasn’t change, right. People still want to be healthy. It’s just can you pivot the way you provide the services into a different channel. Most of us already have the skillset to provide nutrition coaching, accountability etcetera. If you can make the pivot you can actually meet and outsize demand where there is less supply of it. If you’ve looked over the last 30 days online training, depending on the source what you’re looking at, has turn between 5x and 9x just for the last 30 days. That’s because the vast majority of the general population is still behind the curve in terms of understanding online. I mean, many people have never been on a Zoom call until like this month. And so it gives us an opportunity as gym owners to kind of pivot our clientele in the marketplace that we’re in, local or beyond that, into a higher profit model which is one of the opportunities that exist because online training and remote training has far higher margins than in-person brick and mortar service. 

Kevin:Yeah. I think that’s really interesting. You know, I will just kind of really dig in there a little bit deeper taking the idea of in the future being potentially a more profitable business model. If we start with operations and then maybe retention. What are some people that you’re working with doing to cut back on what they are spending and retain the people that are already paying them? 

Alex:Yup. First thing is that any business when they are in a constrained environment have to focus on revenue generating activities, and so every employee… Remember, if you’ve changed the model you can never have the mindset of I have to create work for someone. You have to create a business model and then people either fit in that model or they don’t. Right now, if you are in a remote setting people are either retaining your existing customers or they are generating the revenue from new clients from sales. That’s all there is. Honestly, a remote gym setting is actually a more operationally simple model than an in-person model. The difficulty is in online acquisition. But if you crack the acquisition part then you actually have a very, very sound model because the compensation structure for remote, the way that we promote within our community, is an 80-20 split. So the coaches will get 20% of the recurring revenue from the members that they are maintaining and 80% goes to the business. And so the difference is that if you are fulfilling online then you don’t have the rent, you don’t necessarily have the front desk girl, you don’t have the cleaning, you don’t have the toilet paper, you don’t have the variety of things that come along with that; and so you can actually run a very high gross margin business. So that $200 from what you used to get in person you may only collect 12.5% which is the industry average in terms of profit. But instead of that go to a much higher 50%, maybe 60%, 70% margin in terms of what you actually can take home after the smaller processes, with staff, etcetera. 

Kevin:Yeah. I think there is obviously lots of immediate things you can do to cut the money that’s going out of the business. But some people I think are still struggling with how do they keep people paying them. Just at the very basic 50 people paying me $100 month and they were coming in and things were fine. Now, I don’t know. Should I put them all on pause or what should I do?

Alex: I’m not a lawyer and these laws differ by country and state by my recommendation to our community has been don’t pause people. You just have to shift what you’re fulfilling. It’s ultimately you said you’re going to help these people lose weight and that promise has not changed. You’re still even delivering the services in a different manner. And so the primary thing, and this is what everyone who is in the fitness space has to understand is that you’re not going to be Beachbody at online workouts. Not in 7 days on your budget. It’s not that. You’re not going to be Precision Nutrition on nutrition, right. You’re not going to beat them on like the quality of your nutrition plans. So what are the competitive advantages that a small business owner has in a local or super local marketplace? It’s accountability, right. It’s service. What we do is not selling Zoom workouts. You can have them so that you can fulfill on it. You know, at Gym Launch we provide 16 hours a day of 1-hour workouts that we do for our community. We decided to essentialize that for us so that all of our gyms could even cut more things off their plate. And so that if you would have to simplify the business model you have marketing, so lead generation. You have lead nurture which we automate. And then you have your sales appointments. Beyond the sales appointment, the only thing that’s happening in fulfillment is just one-on-one reach outs. One-on-one reach outs so it’s accountability. The primary value that the fitness professionals are providing in a remote setting is the gap between what people think they should be doing and what they are actually doing. Everyone knows you need to stop eating. I don’t know, am I allowed to cuss on this? 

Kevin:Yeah, you can say what you want. 

Alex:Okay. It’s like people know they need to stop eating shit and move, right. They all know that. They can Google nutrition plan. They can Google free online workout. So you are not going to differentiate or provide value in access in that way. What you are going to be able to provide value is getting them to do the thing that they are not doing. People pay for you to pay attention. You need to shift your mindset from I was in-person and then now I’m remote to I was doing group training and now I am one-on-one. If you can make that pivot in your own mind that, “Oh my gosh! I’m giving personal training essentially personal coaching for dramatically less than what I provide one-on-one coaching for in-person setting.” Then you can start seeing where the value discrepancy creates something that’s make them want to pay the same amount that they pay for their gym membership in a boutique setting for $150-$200 a month. 

Kevin:I think what you are saying at a high level is there’s a lot of people that still trying to figure out how to get the Zoom workouts perfected. They may be afraid to get them started. But they are maybe missing a trick in starting from first business here and thinking why are people paying me $250 in the first place. And maybe the workout is obviously going to be a big part of it. Maybe the workout isn’t the most important thing that I can offer while I’m in remote. 

Alex: I would even make the argument that it was never the most important thing that they offered. It’s just most people don’t know that, even the people who are in the business, right. If they wanted group workouts you can go to the YMCA or the Globo Gym. And they have group workouts on the hour, every hour in large groups for probably one tenth of what you’re charging. So it’s never been the workouts. It’s been the service and the community. But you can’t sell community, right. You sell the results when someone walks in the door. But they stay because the relationship that they have with you, the coaches, and the other people who they workout with, right. And so all we are doing is fast tracking and be deliberate about our actions to intensely create that relationship and make sure that the communication that we have operationally matches maintaining that relationship and then growing it so that the bond there still feels even more intimate than it was in the in-person setting. 

Kevin: I think the first thing people to know is primarily going to be weight loss but thinking why are people coming to me in the first place and then really thinking how can I create that accountability, how can I to a certain degree keep that community aspect going as well. And just I suppose to recap for everyone like, what are people doing to keep that accountability going? 

Alex:It’s a communication cycle. What we recommend is that you have to have some things that are expected of the client and some things that are expected of a coach. The coach is there to make sure that things that clients are supposed to do are actually getting done. And so fundamentally you want the client to have to do as little as possible because if you have them have to fill out a 17 questionnaire, likely that they do is very low. They are not us. They actually don’t care. So it has to be as minimally invasive as possible. I would even go too far to say you don’t even mean the special apps. You don’t need to worry about that stuff because you can just text people. You don’t have to be fancy with this. Because that is the vehicle that the customer is most accustomed to communicating with. So all you have to do is be structured on the backend so that you know that what they are required to do is text you every day, their morning weight and the supplements that they were supposed to be taking. And then, boom, by the way [unclear – 10:14] and revenue into your business because right now supplements are up 30% as a category. People want to buy products. Opt them to do that. They are doing it anyway so they might as well do it for you especially from a recommendation from an authority. 

So have them send their weight, and the reason you want to do it daily is for a couple of reasons. One is, it keeps them honest, right. Because if they only weigh in weekly, one, you have massive variability from week to week, from weigh in to weigh in. Because if they weigh in the morning or the afternoon, or they drink a glass of water, that can be super varied. But if they do it first thing in the morning after they pee it’s going to even out and you are actually going to have way better data. That’s number one. But from a psychological standpoint they know that if they are looking at the big sleeve of Oreos when they are hungry at night and they know they have to weigh in the next morning, even though calories and fat loss don’t work that way. They are as a general population going to not do it or be less likely to eat the whole sleeve, maybe one or two, knowing that they can’t get away with it because their coach is going to see their weight in the morning. Now for you as the coach, because that’s what they are required to do, all you need to do is acknowledge that you received it on two of the days of the week, and then, the other three days of the week you are going to be proactive in you reach to them and ask specifically catered questions, right. 

Now, what are the three aspects that we want to look at with a client? Typically, you are going to be looking at their fitness. So you are going to say, “Hey, how did we do this last week on our workouts?” Remember, workouts that are defined in a remote setting is movement. If you really want to have like long term sustainable weight loss intervention, getting someone to walk for 30 minutes away is probably better than them over a [unclear – 11:44] than anything else anyways. So don’t be a purist about this. It’s just getting them to move. So asking whether they actually did the thing they committed to. That’s number one. The second time you reach out that week, maybe it’s Wednesday, doesn’t matter. We have our clients separated, the clients on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. That way it decreases their reach out load per day. The second reach out is going to be about nutrition. So it’s going to be like, “Hey, how are you doing with your food? Are you eating 10 bags of Oreos every day? Did you finish all the bag of chips?” Or we relatively say to where we need to be. That’s the second piece. The third reach out is going to be about their energy, their headspace, their sleep, kind of how they are doing overall to make sure that they know that you are a human being and that you know that they are a human being. Now you’ll ask the same questions, right, you got to be a person. But if you ask the questions along those lines that gives you very easy fodder to work off of to create an organic conversation that allows you to have a one-on-one relationship with the clients at scale. 

Kevin: If we are to summarize this overall blueprint of I suppose that’s called keeping the business going we’re talking the cut back the cost where you can, stem the tides of you pauses and cancellations, and fill that in with obviously certain amounts that are going to be online workouts. But you have to dedicate time to keep that one-to-one, one-to-many relationships going with the goal to keep people accountable, keep them engaged with you. In the end of the day, that’s going to be worthy for them because they’re still going to stay on the same path for their fitness goals. 

Alex: So if you’re looking at your staff, right. I mean, you have a front desk person, and you’ve got two trainers, and you. If you were to allocate the way you are attempting to go you probably don’t need the front desk person. I’m just giving you real… like let’s be real, okay. You probably don’t need that because there is no front desk, right. So that’s number one. Now, the trainers, can do split shifts. They can do four workouts in the morning and four workouts in the afternoon. That works. They both should be, if you want to know relative client load for remote is about 75 clients, that’s about a full-time remote client for a coach. If they have 75 clients it should take them about three hours a day to all of the remaining reach outs and responses. Beyond that, the remainder of their day should be on cold reach outs. That means messaging people, making posts, responding people who comment or like, and asking them if they know anybody who would be interested in not gaining Quarantine 15. So when they do that they become revenue generators, not just revenue maintainers or preservers. And so they are actively maintaining revenue for you by keeping your existing customers happy, delivering a higher level of service. This is something that every gym owner has to really truly believe in their gut. So they don’t feel they like they are taking advantage of people like you are providing me a one-on-one solution where you did not have a one-on-one solution before this and you’re doing it at a fraction of what one-on-one coaching would typically cost. You need to make sure that from a maintaining of your gym membership communication needs to stay high. So if you are used to sending out a weekly email, you got to be thinking about daily. Not necessarily just emails but texts, Facebook group posts, and you have to be more active on social media because everyone is on there. Everyone is bored at home cooped up waiting for people to respond to their comments and threads, right. And so you are going to be more active with that. 

Now as the gym owner, right, as the proprietor your primary goal is revenue generation. That is what you need to be doing. So the last thing you want to do is stop sales and marketing for a variety of reasons. One, the moment you stop acquiring new customers is the moment you start the ticking time clock of when you’re going to die because attrition is going to happen no matter what. Even when you are in-person attrition happens. But if you are not filling it back up eventually your gym will die. You don’t know how long is this going to last. So number one, you don’t want to stop sales and marketing. Number two, we are in a place right now where remote is selling like hotcakes. And the vast majority of people hate change more than they hate losing and would rather just lose. Because they were so burned out of being gym owners that this gives them a perfectly acceptable excuse, right? They could look at their parents, they could look at their life and they are like, “You know, I tried my hardest.” And everyone is going to say, “You’re right. Who has going to guess corona was going to happen. It’s not on you.” And so if you want to quit this is the absolute best opportunity to quit. But if you are not that person and you want to win this is how you do it. And you can do it now because the people who actually execute right now lead cost are 50% off right now because no one is marketing especially other gyms in your area. We are talking to 5% of gym owners who are actually even marketing right now. Here’s the good news, if you are the top 5%, guess what happens when half of the gyms go out to business in 90 days because they only have 14 days of cash flow in hand. All those members get released back in the marketplace and you swallow the whole thing back up. By the end of this you can reopen your gym and then still have people who stay in a remote setting because believe it or not there are a lot of people who actually like working out on their own convenience and not having to leave and go places. It may actually work better for your customers and that’s okay because it’s a higher margin service. And so what happens is you start to adopt what’s called a hybrid gym model. You have both remote services and you have in-person services, so you have a dual revenue stream. And the secondary revenue stream, the remote revenue stream is not geographically confined and is higher profit. 

Kevin: That makes a lot of sense. I just want to move through the sections here so I think summarizing on the retention. It’s actually a very good point that for in the time it takes to do a 45-minute of one-on-one training session that maybe do 45 reach outs or one-on-one communications and really think about time and how you are paying your trainers and what value you can get out of them when they are not flat out doing this training. Moving in to the sales and marketing, a lot of businesses now probably are shutting down their sales cost, shutting down their marketing cost. But getting into the mindset of actually growing and not just grow to grow but grow to survive because there is definitely going to be some attrition. That’s really important point. But, I think it comes to the next question that I have which is you would be very well known in the industry for constructing sales pitches, constructing offers. We often associate you with high value, high price introductory offers, all this kind of stuff. What is the playbook now? 

Alex:Prosperity doctrine is grow, thrive, etcetera, like transform, all of that works in every type of normal economy. As soon as you are in a recessionary economy the mind behavior flips and it goes through preservation. If you look at any of the advertisements we have right now, I’m not talking about showing your gym. I’m talking about saving and surviving etcetera because right now surviving is what people believe is possible. What’s interesting in a recessionary economy the buying demand on survival is twice as high as the desire to buy for growth is during a normal economy. And so the actual buying demand is 4:1 for preservation in a recessionary economy versus 2:1 for growth in a normal economy. So if you flip your language you will be able to convert more people. That’s number one. 

Number two, in terms of constructing the offer, you still absolutely should be selling I would say “higher ticket” upfront. Now higher ticket in a recessionary economy right now, what we are seeing is $299, is a price that’s converting to cold traffic in a local market for remote services. And so we present a very simple A, B offer for someone to do in 21 day or 28 day or doesn’t really matter but a front end challenge of some sort. And then with that $299 or you could become a member today. Very simple and the down-sell for that is just simply starting them on a weekly billing cadence. So you start them at $49 a week or $39 a week. And that’s very swallowable for a lot of people and it’s a lower trust environment so it allows you to gain their trust. You don’t want to stop there for sale.

So what you are saying earlier about like choreographing sales experiences is definitely what we’ve been and I’ve known for is that there are three sales that should happen. This happens whether you are in a recessionary economy or not. You should always build the mousetrap so that you can maximize the value to provide and then also the value that you get can from the business. And so the first is going to be your service sell. This is a front end service sell. So that’s what I just said the $299 versus the down-sell for $49, $39 build weekly. The second sale is going to happen in 24-48 hours later where you go through a nutrition consultation. We use this as an onboarding experience to provide more value, walk them through make sure they understand everything, who their coaches are, where the groups are, who they contact for billing, teaching them how to be a client. But also providing value in their nutrition especially right no on quarantine people are going to want to know what they can do within their current environment. This is the point where you then also have a staff recommending for supplements. For us we offer to $200 per head in supplement sales and most guys make a 40% commission on what they sell on supplements. You are talking $80-$200 a head in profit per person in additional within the first 24-48 hours. Now, that alone can definitely cover the cost of acquisition for a customer which means your front end service revenue was a 100% gravy. Right, it’s profit on top. And then on top of that, so we’ve gotten the first two sales – the service sale and the nutrition sale. The third sale should happen at Day 14, alright. So when you are doing a 28-day you are half way through, if you are doing a 21-day that would be two weeks in. So at this point you should have gained a certain amount of trust. You should already have had at least 7 or 8 exchanges with this person one-on-one, keeping them on track, make sure they are doing a good job. And this point you should be able to talk to them in a real way with true rapport, you will be able to talk about their long term goals. And then that point you can sell at the real price points that you are accustomed to selling to and even get repaid $2000+ sales. Now remember, this is my recommendation to is continue to sell in the remote setting. You don’t need to sell for when they come back because then you are still selling at disadvantage and you don’t know what’s going to happen. So continue to sell for the one-on-one remote experience that this person is already enjoyed and has got results for. 

Kevin:I get it. Listening to you there like I see how you’ve changed the value proposition. I see how you’ve changed it from survival or avoiding going backwards… making massive gains. But you’re still talking big numbers in terms what you can earn in revenue. 

Alex:Before this our guys were selling $2000-$3000 upfront on the first visit so this is still significantly less. So typically what we would do is a diagnostic selling process at the first visit which is actually with that last sale I just described where you are talking about the long term goal and then selling a package to the goal. It’s like, hey if you want to lose 45 lbs. it’s going to take us 20 weeks to get there and then another 10-15 weeks to maintain it. Feeds you back up to a higher calorie intake so that we can maintain that lower body weight at a higher calorie intake, so you basically feed them back up. And so that total package might be let’s say 30-40 weeks. So we sell 30 weeks at $99.9, you have a $3000 package. You can say, “Hey, you can prepay today and save 20%. Now you are at $2400.” Person says, “No.” You say, “Cool, let’s do half down let’s do $1200. Can you do that?” And then weekly payments you spread it out. They can’t do that. You do $600 and then spread it out. And so you keep working your way down and the nice piece is that if you have a high pricing, by the time you get to $600 after saying $4000 for the people who are less skilled you are able to get yeses very, very frequently. So if anyone who is listening to this is like, “Man, I can barely close a $99 membership.” It’s because your value… Straight up it’s not because your market is weak. You lack the skill of closing high ticket. That’s all what it is. And you need to understand how to provide value to a person in that setting. 

Kevin:I think maybe to round off for somebody who is in the situation where they are not used to selling over the phone. They are probably running a business that people have been walking into and having got the experience, and maybe they are struggling at the $99 price point. What’s the fastest way they can figure out how to do this over the phone?

Alex:There is no fast way of doing it. I mean, fast, yes there is. But there is no way of like homeworking your way through it. You can only watch trainings for so long. At a certain point you need to dive in the water. You need to step in the ring and get punched in the face. You can watch all the UFC you want but it doesn’t mean you can fight. You have to. What we’ve seen is 25-30 exposures to a stressor which is general stress theory, it’s not just sales, gets people basically desensitized to the stress associated with a new selling environment. After 25 sales opportunities what we’ve seen is our gym owners are able to convert at the same numbers they were closing in person. It just basically takes 25 attempts of sucking to kind of figure out the flow of how the script works. I can give you the words to say right now but it’s not about the words. Words are 20% of it. 80% of it is how you say the words. It’s the tonality and the frame you can control on the sale. 

I’m going to just give you two examples really quickly because I think it would drive the point. So if I said before we started the sale, “Do you need to talk to your husband before we get going and make any decisions?” By asking that question the way I just did, you’re going to think, I should say yes to this. Now, if I ask the same question and then I said, “You don’t need to talk to your husband or anything before we get started.” You’re going to think, no, I don’t need to talk to my husband. I said the same words more or less, right, but the tonality will dictate what the response is. And so you can get the words but how you say the words matters more the words themselves. I’m sure maybe you’ve heard the same example of like, “What are you doing?” versus “What are you doing?” versus “What are you doing?” All of those things are different meanings to the same sentence. And so learning how to inflict your voice. I know this sound silly but in phone sales you don’t have the luxury of having your in-person body language so it allows people who are less skilled to be able to get away with shittier sales. And so selling in a new environment creates more disciplined salesperson. The funny note about this is that when you sell over the phone it tends to be less tiring than in person which is one of the advantage. You can take a higher volume of sales per day over the phone without getting exhausted. 

Kevin:I think the one thing we take away from that is the 25. Everyone has a list and really just got to start working it. Trial and error is probably the best way to actually get moving but it’s going to take a little bit of resilience to actually start doing it before you figure out the best path. 

Alex:What is the expectation? You have a client who comes in and they watch some squat videos and then they come in and try to squat and it doesn’t look right, they are like, “God, squatting is not for me.” You know what I mean? Like, of course you suck at phone sales. You have never done it before. Why would you think you’d be good? You think after 10 attempts at something, you’ve only spent 5 hours trying to do a skill that you are going to be world-class? The highest we 4,000 hours over the phone. Sometimes it’s unrealistic expectations of acquiring a skill. That being said, it is 100% the skill you have to acquire in order to survive. You just have to toughen on. Because you can’t get new people without selling over the phone right now. So is this like, what are you going to do? You just got to confront him. You just got to get hit in the face and just keep moving.   

Kevin:That’s a good point there. Okay, the last topic for a couple of minutes is about the future. What do you see, 6 months’ time or whenever that is, when doors start to open again, what is the fitness business going to look like? How much this is going to be digital and how much is going to be in-person? What’s going to happen?

Alex:Great question. I don’t have the magic ball but if I were to be a betting person, which I guess I am because we are all in business. One, I think that this will fundamentally change the way that people consume fitness with technology. I think this will also fundamentally shift the way people purchase. The gym owners who learn how to sell over the phone will realize that selling over the phone is actually a more efficient way to sell. It is a more efficient way to sell. It’s harder but once you learn the skill you can actually convert a higher percentage of your leads no matter what. Number two, there will be some people who are going to stay online. They realized they got forced to overcome the hump of learning the new technology. But now that they are doing it they are like, “You know what, I like working out from home. This is actually more convenient for me.” And convenience will always win. That being said, there’s still going to be a big explosion of people who are crawling out of their skin when they go back to the gym. And there’s going to be far fewer gyms that are alive when this opens up. I think that the demand for fitness services in person will still outmatch the supply when this turns back on. I also don’t think it’s going to be as much of a boom as people expect because I think most countries are not going to turn their economies back on like a light switch. I think it’s be more like a dimmer switch. It’s going to be certain areas for certain people under certain ages for certain types of business. And gyms are going to be one of the last ones because we are not essential and we are highly contagious. We’re going to have to deal with this in my opinion for the foreseeable future. And putting your head in the sand and wishing and waiting for Superman to come is not going to solve the problem. If you are not doing something right now, you have to because you won’t make it long enough to get to the other side. 

Kevin:Sounds like things we’re learning now, the skills like phone sales and online relationship are the things that are going to be part of every fitness business for a long time.    

Alex:I mean, it’s my opinion. Nine months ago we started something called the Hybrid Gym Program which is basically a spouse of this exact thing which is providing one-on-one accountability services to your members and using it as an upsell for an additional $49 a week. And so what that did was allow boot camps, crossfits, etcetera to charge $100 a week, $400-$500 a month for the same services, and adding a high margin service on top to maximize profit, and retain customers for a longer period of time than group training does on its own. Now, that you’ve built the constructing, infrastructure, you learn how to fulfill a remote setting one-on-one, it opens a few phase so you actually can pull from other areas. So that’s one. Two, people who do come back you can add this as a full-time service on top of your existing memberships so that you can drive more profit. And then, third, you are going to have some people just going to prefer to do that and you just keep them at that $200 a month in a high profit service. 

Kevin:Yeah, makes a lot of sense. We’ve covered absolute ton of ground there today. And just my last question before you finish is, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in the last 2-3 weeks? 

Alex:It isn’t a lesson but a reminder – Winners win. Right now if you are listening to this and you are not sure what to do that includes you. And the only thing that separates people who don’t win from those who do is the ones who try. So as long as you continue to try you can’t lose because that’s really what it comes down to. I wish I had something sexy for you but that’s just what it is. And if you see any person who is succeeding right now as a gym owner and there are tons right now who are killing it. It means you can too. 

Kevin:Okay. Alex Hormozi, author of Gym Launch Secrets, everybody read the book, thank you very much for coming on the show. 

Alex:Appreciate it. Thanks!     

This podcast is brought you by Glofox a boutique fitness management software company. If you want to accelerate growth, work efficiently, and deliver a well branded boutique costumer experience, then find us at glofox.com.                                   

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Mehdi-Elaichouni
Mehdi Elaichouni
Owner at Carpe Diem BJJ

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