Strength in Numbers: The 8-Step Marketing System That Scaled His Gym to $1.5M

If you're like me, you got into this industry because you didn't want to sit at a desk all day, you wanted to work out all the time, and you love training athletes.

I started my business in 2014 as a 24-year-old fresh into the workforce. I played division 3 football and I fell in love with the performance side of training in high school. I was told I wouldn't make any money as a strength coach so I graduated college and took a job in medical device sales.

A year in, I hated it and decided to go pursue my passion. I quit my job, enrolled in a masters program and locked myself in my room for a good 3 months to study for my CSCS, I am not exaggerating either. I didn't have a kinesiology background so I read the book cover to cover and studied for about 8 hours a day to pass the course ha!

Now it was time to find a job and I soon realized the job I wanted didn't exist.

I originally planned to become a high school strength and conditioning coach, however there were no jobs in my city and I was tied to living in Indy. I saw working at a commercial gym as my option and decided I would do it myself.

With the remainder of my savings I leased a 1,000 square foot, former law office, signed a personal guarantee, and went to work.

I started with a tire and two barbells and was eventually able to add equipment I would find at auction as I added clientele.

While I was running the gym and pursuing my masters I received an opportunity to train my former high school's football team for $15 an hour. I thought I had made it!

I used the school as a referral source and soon was able to add clients, pay my rent, take home a little money, and I thought I was living the dream, that is, until football season started and I lost all my clients.

This was the moment I realized that taking certifications and posting shirtless workout videos on the internet wasn't actually going to bring people in the door. I had to start running this thing like a business.

For the first 5 years I floundered along and was able to get to around 25k in monthly recurring revenue by sheer word of mouth and will power. I wasn't doing a whole lot outside of training, showing up at my athletes games, and providing the best service I could.

You know the drill, I was starting my day at 5am, ending at 8pm and didn't have time for anything outside the gym.

When I met my now wife I knew something had to change.

In 2020 I teamed up with a competitor and was able to gain majority ownership.

Then Covid hit. We lost half our revenue in a month and I started scrambling to do anything I could to keep the business alive.

Zoom workouts, renting out our equipment, virtual gym meetings, calls to my gym members every day, email check-ins.

Looking back I value the hardship because it helped me assume many of the practices I still utilize today for retention.

In 2021 I began to experience growth as people were hungry to get back into the gym.
I hired some great mentors and I took Wednesdays off to work strictly on marketing the gym.
This pivotal moment led to a 251% growth over the past 4 years.

In 2021 we did 427,000 in gross revenue. We are on pace to hit 1,500,000 in gross revenue this year.

I started by implementing a few marketing strategies and I have honed our system over the past 4 years to the point where we can replicate our marketing plan month over month to gain 80-100 leads and 20-45 new members.

This system has allowed us to grow year over year and has allowed me to expand to 3 locations across central Indiana.

I am going to share with you the exact step by step framework we utilize every month to market our gyms.

First we begin with a front end offer each month. This front end offer is a specific program we market to our audience. A big mistake I was making when I first started was using the same generic marketing. "Come join my sports performance program to improve your speed, strength, and power." The problem is every sports performance owner with a pulse is saying the same thing.

I started marketing programs with tangible results and more people became interested. Instead of saying “join my sports performance program” it became "apply for our 8 week speed program where we guarantee you increase your speed by 1mph and vertical by 3 inches so that you can start varsity this year." The caveat here is everyone is still sold into my monthly recurring sports performance program. I just advertise it in a way that is more appealing. I often formulate the front end offers around whatever trait the current off-season athletes are looking to improve.

Second, we deploy an email campaign to our list every month. Our email campaign consists of educational emails that are based around the front end offer. For example if we are offering a speed program we gear the education towards developing speed. We end the month with sales emails, which are formatted with the goal of getting our audience to take interest in the upcoming program.

Third, we run a text campaign to our whole list of former leads with an offer for a free week trial of whatever program we are running for that month.

Fourth, we reach out to all of our former athletes that we know are in the off-season or were training with us at the same point the previous year. We reconnect with their parents and invite them back into the gym for a free week.

Fifth, we post front end offers in 5 facebook groups a month and engage with commenters to get them into the gym for a consultation. We have found the best groups are parent groups, neighborhood groups, and specific sports teams or sports travel groups.

Sixth, we look internally for referrals. We have a three pronged referral program that includes guest passes, referral prizes, and bring a friend weeks. We have a 7 day guest pass that all new members receive at point of sale. We give our athletes a $100 bill for any athlete they refer to that signs up. We run a bring a friend campaign every quarter where we allow our athletes to bring as many friends as they want to our training sessions for 2 weeks.

Our seventh tactic is to connect with local sports teams and run a free speed analysis for the players. We like to connect with coaches we already have a relationship with and we offer them to bring their team in for a free speed analysis. We test acceleration, change of direction, max velocity and power. Each athlete leaves with an individualized report. We follow up with the parents of the athletes to go over their report and sell them into the program.

Our final tactic is running paid ads. We run paid facebook ads towards our front end offers. We run our ads internally through my facebook ad agency, Athlete Lead Engine. On my worst months I double my investment with point of sale cash from our ads. There are some months where we make 3 to 4x our ad cost. We sell everyone into a recurring program so whatever I make in point of sale cash it reoccurs for however long the client stays with the program.

So now that you have our 8 marketing tactics, let's dive into how this plays out every month.
For all of our leads, we have the goal of bringing them into the gym for an "Athlete Analysis". The athlete analysis is essentially a prescriptive sale where we test the athlete and prescribe our training model as a means to improve based upon their goals, strengths, and weaknesses.

My goal for our gym is to constantly build our recurring revenue so all athletes enter into a 2, 3, or 4x a week monthly recurring group training program.

When we look at the top of the funnel we will acquire anywhere from 80 to 100 leads per gym based on our 8 marketing tactics we utilize each month. Of the total number of leads 35% will book an athlete analysis. Of that 35%, 85% will join our program.

I track our numbers every month and adjust our tactics accordingly to ensure we hit our 35% booking rate and 85% sales rate.

The key to it all is to ensure that you institute the 8 tactics every single month and you do it with volume.

Asking 5 members for referrals or 2 members to reactivate won't cut it.

We have monthly kpis for each marketing play to ensure that it is performed with enough volume to elicit a result.

Utilizing this marketing framework, I have been able to scale my sports performance business to $1,500,000 in gross revenue. We still have plenty of room to grow, with one of our locations just entering its third year and another facility we acquired only last month.

If you're interested in implementing this exact marketing system, I'm giving away the complete campaigns and scripts for all 8 tactics that we are using in June. You can download them for free right here.

If you have further questions on marketing or scaling your sports performance business I would love to connect and see how I might be able to help. You can find me on instagram @grahamwilkerson51, email me at graham@genesissportsperformance.com, or shoot me a text at 317-450-3289.