#21 How this gym turns “community” into a system (w/ Chris Travis)

One of the first questions we asked is some kind of variation of like, "Hey, what brings you in today?" Right? What are you looking for? And a lot of times during the course of the conversation, we ask more probing questions, right? We're trying to like kind of peel back the onion and see what they're looking for. It comes out in kind of that series of questioning. It's like, "Oh, you know, I used to belong to this gym down in California. That was really great. I love the community there. I'm looking to replicate that again in Seattle, because I just moved here for a job. Perfect, right? This person's a three, clearly they want to meet other people and be part of a community." And do all that. Chris, Travis, welcome onto the podcast. Thank you. Appreciate it. It's very great being here. Yeah. It is great to have you, your man, and I want to give a shout out to Nora Matthew, one of our previous guests for him recommending that I bring you on. I suppose I didn't intend on asking this question, but it just came to my head there, Chris. Why do you think Nora would have recommended you as somebody that may be good to talk to? You know, I've known Nora for a little while now. We're both part of a group called BusinessPrinacorns. She's obviously a great gym owner, high-level gym owner. We've been in the group for a long time together, and I know we've shared a lot of interactions. I'm hoping that it's just that she respects what we're doing and felt like I'd be a guest. So give the listener some context, context, and Chris, because you, you all be in the BF, you world are in very well known. You've been on their podcast. The majority of the listeners of my podcast are UK based and probably one of the culture work before. So introduce us to you and your gym. Yeah, absolutely. So Chris, Travis, I'm in Seattle, Washington in the USA, the northwest corner of the US. I own Seattle Shrink the Performance, which is a small group gym focused. We do basically small group personal training, which we do, I would say, in a semi-private format where everybody gets individualized programming. And then we do large group classes as well, very few during the day. One of the things we also do at some of our locations is we run a youth sports performance program. I opened my first gym in August 2020 right during the pandemic. We've since had pretty aggressive growth over the last five and a half years. We've gone from one to four locations. We've gone from basically zero to close to a thousand members now across the four. And obviously a multi-million dollar revenue business at this point. We still run a pre-lean organization of 15 staff across the four locations. So we can kind of get into that and how that works. But that's pretty critical to our model as well and kind of how we've had success. What problem were you motivated to solve when you opened SSP? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I have a non-traditional fitness background. So I come from kind of the corporate world where I worked in technology and business for about 15 years. Most notably I worked at Amazon corporate, which is based in Seattle for about ten of those. I'm doing a number of various roles across business development and product management and program management. I worked on a lot of different businesses at Amazon and grew things from scratch. For me, you know, my journey was when I first started at Amazon, it was a very intense place to work and it still it still is, although it's changed quite a bit. But I was working probably 80, 90-year-old weeks when I first started at Amazon. Meaning I was basically giving, I didn't have a child at that time. I was giving everything I had to that job. And obviously anybody who does that or has that experience realizes that you very quickly give up on your health. It's very hard to maintain healthy habits. It's very hard to maintain good nutrition during that time. And I did that for three or four years and after that I joined a gym and the gym I joined is modeled after what we do today. Small groups, community-based. It was the first time I really felt like I was getting really high quality coaching in a space where everybody was really supportive of me every time I walked into the gym. And that, it was really impactful for my journey. You know, and I spent four or five years in that gym environment learning and at some point I got really geeky about it. I was like, how do I help other people? Because I saw so many people at Amazon who were struggling, like I used to struggle in managing their health. And I thought, hey, how do I just solve this problem by running great community-based gyms? And that was really the start of it. And then from there I was just having the courage to kind of take the leap and go for it. Does being first a consumer of the product that you know sell to people, does that inform a lot of what you do and how you think? Absolutely. Because I think you have to put yourself in the mind of the consumer and what they're looking for when they walk in. And particularly if you're running a largely general population-focused gym where you're trying to help adults and a lot of our clientele I would say is, you know, you're looking 35 to 55 working professionals, right? If you put yourself in their mindset, you know, I always tell my team this and it's been kind of a core tenet since day one is walking into a gym environment. Any gym environment is intimidating for most people, right? Especially if they've ever been in one. And I know that when I walked into that gym for the first time, there's always a level of intimidation. You know, regardless of your, you have athletic backgrounds, you know, or doing anything. It's a pretty intimidating environment. You're walking into some other place. You see people working out. You're meeting with the coach. And so I think, you know, if you have that mindset and you think, wow, this is really intimidating for the person in front of me. My job when they come into my space is to make them feel as comfortable as possible, right? And I think from day one, we've always focused on that. It's like anytime somebody comes in to meet with a coach, our job is to make them feel safe, to make this feel welcome, to make them feel seen and acknowledged. And to set them up for success within SSP. And that's really where we've found success. It sounds simple, but I think it's a lot harder for people to do than they realize is really make people feel safe and seen in their spaces. Are there any things that you do specifically? Like I think there are some obvious things that a lot of small group gins are doing, especially if they've maybe listened to other interviews on this podcast, the full mark, fascia, the visit to the Fee Gems, Rayleigh. Their name is used when they walk into the gym, right? And they are greeted with a smile. They're basic things of that. But is there any other things that you guys do that you think make a difference here? You've had positive feedback on you've added in and recent months years that make a difference? Yeah, I mean, I think well, the first thing we do is we have SOP'd our entire member experience journey. So really starting from day one, somebody walks into the gym, what we want them to feel like. And a lot of that comes down to doing the basic things, right? So looking at their, making eye contact, shaking their hand, having a smile, saying like, hey, I'm Chris, how are you? Welcome to SSP, right? And that goes a long way. It really does. And that's a very foundational, very basic thing. But I can't tell you how many gyms I'd actually walked into where I walk in and I stand there for a good 30 seconds before anybody greets me. And then the coach that greets me doesn't seem like they want to give me the time of day, right? And so you really have to nail that. So even if the coach is on the floor working and there's only one coach in the gym because maybe at 6 a.m., we only have one coach managing their sessions in the gym. If somebody walks in off the street, they know not to ignore their clients, but immediately go over and say, hey, I'm Chris, how are you doing? Welcome to SSP. How can I help you and see what they're looking for? And even if it's like, hey, I just wanted to learn more. It's like, hey, great. I'm in a session right now. Can I take down your information? I'll follow up with you right after this, right? Just making them feel like acknowledged and seen. I'm like, oh, this is a welcome space. I'm excited to learn more about this space because this person was so friendly to me. And that goes for existing sessions too. Every time somebody walks in the gym, when the coach is there, our SOP is like, you need to welcome them, right? It's like, hey, Stuart, how's it going? Good to see you, man. You know, hey, how's it going? Great to see you. I think everybody that walks into the gym, they're greeted by name. And if we don't know them, the SOP is like, we go up to them right away. And so they, hey, I don't think we've met before. I'm Chris. How are you doing? It's great to meet you. And there's a big connection that you can build with that. And I think even going beyond that into like the community, once people are in the door, we actually, as we onboard people, we give them a community score. It wishes one, two, or three, right? And it's somewhat subjective in terms of like how we're feeling or what they say about answers to our questions about wanting to be in a community. But if somebody is like, hey, I'm here because I want to meet other people. I want to be part of this community. I'm new to the neighborhood. We say, great, this is a three. And how we do that in the session is if somebody is a three, we're making sure that we're introducing them to other people in that session, right? They were actually making the connections to them. Versus if somebody is a one or like slower to warm, right? But they're like, hey, they're one. We're not necessarily introducing them. We're giving them a high level of coaching. But we do think over time as they get more comfortable in the space, they will start to talk to other people in their session, right? But they might be looking at least in the near term or something a little bit different than like, hey, we're going to introduce you to everybody here. And that's just, you know, that's part of our onboarding and something that we'd like to do just to, again, meet people where they're at and help them feel as comfortable as possible. Interesting. And I have never heard anybody give a score to that, but it makes so much sense. I joined a small group gym and the summer when we moved back to Scotland, I've told this on the podcast, but one of the things I joined for, which feels like a different reason, but I think the more gems I speak to, the more common a reason this is becoming to me is I joined this gem because we wanted to meet people. And that sounds like a good way for me and my wife to integrate ourselves into a community of people that we knew would be pretty similar to, right? Yeah. And if I had been scored at that point by the gem, I imagine I would have been given a three. So what does this look like on the onboarding? How do you guys, do you ask any questions? What is this gives a bit more detail here, Chris? Yeah, we don't, you know, the big thing for us is not to ask crying questions about, we don't ask directly like, Hey, if you want to meet other people, like, you want to, you know, some friends, you know, you want some friends, but it naturally comes out in the course of the conversation, you know, so a lot of our, our, one of the first questions we asked is some kind of variation of like, Hey, what brings you in today? Right? And a lot of times in the course of the conversation, we ask more probing questions, right? It comes out in kind of that series of questioning is like, Oh, you know, I, I used to belong to this gem down in California. I'm looking to replicate that again in Seattle because I just moved here for a job. Perfect. Right? This person's a three clearly they want to meet other people and be part of a community and do all that. And so that's that's kind of where we're doing and what we'll do is we'll actually mark on their intake form a community score. And then actually after every intake that happens, the coach that does the intake has a template that they have to fill out that email is out to the team and says, Hey, here's who this person was. Here's what they're looking for. Obviously, there's injury history and health notes in there as well. And then there's a community score. And then there's a fun fact about them, right? It's like, Oh, this person likes to go on hike. So this person likes to so forth. So we can actually tie those things back into their training. So somebody says, Hey, I want to get stronger on hikes. We hit that on the intake. We understand there are three. What that might happen in a session is we're like, Hey, we're doing stepups today because we know that you're you're a big avid hiker. And this is really going to help your hiking. By the way, Stewart over here also does hikes. Stewart, which hike did you go on last weekend? Right? And then you connect the two people and then all of a sudden during that three week trial membership that they have, they're like, Oh my gosh, this is the best community ever. Like people see me. They know me, you know, I'm actually doing exercises that are going to benefit me for my goals. Of course, I'm signing up. That's it. It's like, it gives me goosebumps almost because there's like so much magic. There's so much magic to that. And there's so much thought that has to go in. You opened your first gym in 2020 Chris. How long have you been doing that level of like, for someone boarding and thinking about the member experience? Is this is this more? I mean, I mean, I imagine this has always been a part of what made you as a spirit must be part of your growth. Yeah, definitely always been a part of it. I think as we've grown, we've realized at scale, we have to systemize it a little bit more. You know, I think in the early days is a lot easier. If you're running a single gym and you're looking to get a hundred to hundred fifty members, you can you can largely manage that with the three to five coaches that you have, right? It becomes a lot easier to manage that level community. At scale, particularly if you have, you know, let's say like, I don't usually do a lot of coaching anymore, but let's say I have to sub on the floor, right? Because somebody called out sick and I have to go into a facility. I need to be able to look at paperwork and understand who this person is and what kind of experience it I want to give them, right? And I think implementing things like the community score, fun facts, that allows us as a coaching team across all of SSP to be able to have the same information so that we can seamlessly walk in and be able to deliver the experiences that we want to the clients based upon what they're looking for. Sometimes quite interesting than Chris is that you've you said you've almost got like a thousand members. How have you found like you used to be very much part of the coaching team. Yeah. You've come almost completely stepped away from what you just said. Are you doing any coaching? Just know do you do any gem hours? Yeah, I do just a little bit like four hours a week, but that's that's on purpose just to help me feel connected to what's going on still in the facilities. But yeah, I don't technically have to if I don't want to. I get that and I respect that and I think that's something I've heard from a lot of people who have gems where they could step away. They still like to be involved. But how have you found stepping into your gems and not knowing every person that walks in? Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. I think it's I've had experiences now where I've just been hanging out and people just think I'm another coach or they think I'm another or I'm a new employee. Right? And I don't I don't publicly announce who I am. You know, to people I just again, R so P is like anybody who's on the floor that I don't know. I'm going around and saying, Hey, I'm Chris. I'm, you know, what's your name? Kind of deal. And it's interesting experience for me. But you know, the one the one thing that I take away from that is I always like to do that to get a pulse for like are the things that we say we're doing. Are we doing those well? Right? So like does this person feel like the coach that was there? Did they say there that person's name when they walked in and greet them? Does that person generally feel like? Feel happy? Like they're going to have a good session. Like they're part of a community. Are they talking to other members? Right? Like I'm trying to get a pulse on that when I walk into my facilities to see, Hey, are we following our SOPs and the experience that we want to provide? Is it being pretty consistent across locations? And are we delivering the things that we want to deliver? You know, one of the things though that I do do is I send, you know, as far as email marketing goes, I sent the emails that are educational come from me. So if I'm talking about, hey, you know, a common question we get is like how to get your first pull up. Hey, it's coach Chris talking to our membership base about this thing, right? Or I send out an annual member letter. That's like a recap of our year and the things that we focused on and the challenges that we had and the things we're going to focus on the next year. Members get that in their respond to it. We also do a podcast, which I'm on. And so there are some people that actually are engaged in those things as well. And they'll meet me for the first time and go like, Oh, your Chris, so great to meet you. I have such a great experience here. Like really thank you. Thank you for coming to this community kind of deal. And that's also very gratifying for me. Have you had the the the challenges that were of like me because I thought some people was a lot of people. So I feel like have you met people that you've maybe met whose name you can't recall or have you got like a super power for less? You know, I feel like it's hard sometimes, but I feel like most coaches. If you're really good at connecting with people, you have a you have a superpower in remembering names and remembering faces. You know, it's just part of what you do. And it's surprising to me also a pleasant surprise when I walk in and I haven't seen somebody say in like a year. And I remember meeting them like a year ago. And I'm like, Oh, hey, Stuart. How's it going? And they go, Oh, hey, Chris. I'm like, hey, great to see you again. It's been a while. You know, and they're just like, it's like a delightful moment for them. And I think that goes so far and stickiness. If like the owner of that gym, then now I have four gyms. And I walk you into one of my facilities and I haven't seen you in a year. And I still remember your name and I still interacted you in a very positive way. That's a that's a that's a very pleasant moment for that member. And something that's like very sticky for them to stick around. Okay. So again, like 1000 members, four gyms, and a very short time frame. That's pretty incredible growth. Yeah. Why has that happened? Yeah. It's a great question. You know, and I've been asked this question before. And I think a lot of people always are trying to get out of me. What's the magic bullet? How do you do it? You know, like, what how does this happen? Because it's a very abnormal growth curve. And honestly, I go back to just really good execution. And and I think, you know, my background's a little bit different, right? I think a lot of people from in the fitness industry started fitness as a trainer. And then they say at some points, like the next logical step is I want to build a gym, right? I want to open a gym. And then they have to learn how to be business people. I think the benefit that I can leverage from my experience is that I was a business person for a long time. So I understood PNLs. I understood weekly business metrics. I understood, you know, the the kind of like business operation side of things. And then I had to learn the fitness side. So when I opened my first gym, the first thing I did was set in place a weekly business rhythm. Right? Well, we were reviewing metrics where we were looking at what was happening, you know? And that's been that's we've added iterations over time. We've added different things that we want to look at. You know? And so I think if you were to if you were to look at my business internally and how it operates as a business or like sit on our weekly business or you meeting, you would see like everybody on the team engaged in different ways and understanding our business at a very deep level. And it moves very quickly. Right? And so at this point, it feels very much like it's a machine. It's a well operating machine that just moves. And obviously it's taken a while to get to that point because we've we've iterated. We've added to the team. We've we've done a lot of things and added different metrics that we want to look at that optimize the business. But we just executed at a very high level every day. And there's a very high standard that we expect across both the coaching floor and the work that our team is doing off the floor. I think as a as a tangent to that, one of the things that I do do that's a little bit different is My staffing model is all full time folks. It's all full time trainers, meaning they're not only training on the floor, but they also have very distinct jobs off the floor. And that makes for a very different experience because a lot of small group gyms are hiring eight part time trainers, right? Who are covering two to four or five hours a week and kind of getting the schedule done. And they don't really have a lot of ownership on the business outside of that training time. And everything else kind of falls on the owner and maybe an owner plus a GM, right? Versus my model is, hey, every single one of my employees is full time. They're guaranteed 40 hours a week. They train 20 to 25 hours a week on the floor. And the other time off the floor, they have very distinct jobs that they're contributing to the business. And then those jobs are things that they report on in our weekly reviews. - I definitely want to get into the staffing site and I will get there because that's really interesting in a lot of ways. And I've definitely got questions about the, in fact, I'm just gonna ask this, which is in my head and I might be related. - Were you hiring staff full time at the start? - Yes. - So was your first hire, you're like, I'm committed to bringing somebody in who is going to be part of the framework of this business. - Yep, I've only really ever hired full time people. I've hired a couple of part time people here and they're based upon circumstance, but most everybody I've hired from day one has been full time in this model. - So it's hard to be concrete with this because so many businesses are complicated machines, right? And it's, you can't just say every gym needs to hire a full time staff member. But what does your advice look like in this sense? If there is a gym owner thinking, I hear what Chris is saying, I can see some of the challenges I have with part time staff members here. Or I'm thinking about my first hire, what should advice? - Yeah, I mean, obviously it has to make economic sense for the business, right? And I think you don't wanna put yourself in a compromised position, but at the same time, you know, a lot of gym owners I see sometimes get stuck in this rut of, well, I don't have enough money to hire full time person, but I'm doing too much, you know, and I don't have the time to like, spend on the business to grow it. And this is a chicken and egg scenario, right? So if you don't have enough time to spend on the business to grow it, you don't have enough money to hire full time person, you're kind of sitting in a situation where your business is just not gonna grow, right, it's gonna stay the same. And I think we have to be honest about that. And so my view on this was, you know, I don't know, access to capital could be different for different people, right? But I think you have to be willing to invest a little bit ahead of growth, knowing like, okay, well, if I can hire somebody full time who has ownership over this business, who believes in it, who wants the same things as me and is aligned with the values, can take on things off my plate that allow me to then focus on growing the business to the next level, that's ultimately going to benefit you, right? If your goal is growth of the business, because if you don't have somebody like that in your business where you're able to like lean on them and they have ownership and belief in what you're doing, then I think it's gonna be really hard for you, 'cause the owner can only do so much, right? And the chance of burnout is very real. And I've seen it over and over again, a lot of different owners. So you just have to, you know, and that's really what I did is I started, you know, I had one other person who was full time, who did, I called them an operations manager and they took on a lot of kind of the early stage, kind of funnel reaching out to prospects, doing that kind of work, right? And that allowed me to focus a little bit more on the marketing side and other things that I wanted to focus on to grow the business. Once that person, and we got to a certain scale, I was like, well, I have enough budget now where I can start to hire a second full time person, right? And we just kind of grew it incrementally that way. But there's always a little bit of risk involved with hiring somebody else because, obviously there's gonna take a budget, but I think there also has to be a certain amount of belief in your ability to then leverage that person and that resource to be able to grow the business again to the next level. - Okay, okay, so I'm gonna come back to the staffing section and a bit, I love that we're jumping around here. So going back to the marketing, the increase, what you said was completely valid. I know there's no like magic, do like that. You're like, we just did this amazing referral campaign or we ran this fantastic front end offer and we got 1,000 people signed up, right? But what have you been doing? What are you doing just now? What are a few of your most successful methods for bringing in people to the gym? - Yeah, I think if we were to look at like, we go to the well, which I tell the team, it's like, we're gonna go to the well here because these things work. Email marketing is number one for us. - That's the thing, I did not expect you to say that. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So building your email list is critical and then particularly using that email list in a very strategic way, making sure you have a bucket for prospects and past members and current members and hitting those people with different offers at different times, right? So when we talk about referral campaigns, we have an evergreen referral campaign that will run constantly, right? Which is very simple. It's just $30 off the trial membership to the incoming member. It's $30 credit to the existing member. That's always on. So somebody wants to refer us, they can always use that. Twice a year, sometimes three times a year will run something called a VIP plus per referral campaign. Which is, I like to call these types of promotions, rad promotions in a stands for rare and delightful, which is my acronym that I made up. But the idea is like these are rare. Members don't know when to expect them. They come into their inbox, their short lived, right? So they have to claim it within 24 to 72 hours. And what that promotion does is it says, hey, if you give us anybody, right? You can give anybody that you know, friends or family members a free trial, three week free trial, come in the gym. All they got to do is sign up for that trial and we'll give you 50% off your next payment. It's a highly, you know, you think about these things as like highly attractive, highly, highly attractive, promotion where it's almost like the member can't say no to it. Right? So when you run this two to three times a year, you're getting, I don't know, for us, we get somewhere between 25 and 50 people every time, right? And when we look at that particular promotion, we're saying, hey, I actually think based on historicals, we'll convert at about 50% of these into recurring memberships. And if you think about converting 20, let's say you're converting 12 to 25 people into recurring memberships, the lifetime value of that is enormous, right? Which makes up for the value of the promotion that you're getting up on the front end. Similarly to like prospects, we'll run a dollar promotion, dollar trial promotion. Again, two to three times a year, this is rare and delightful. Same thing, we're looking at the conversion measure stuff of that. Let's say we're getting 25 to 50 people every time, we can give over 50% of those into long term recurring memberships that are paying on average, somewhere between $400 and $500 every four weeks. That promotion pays for itself. And so I mean, those are two of our like go-to's in email marketing. But I think those tend to be our kind of like highest performing things in terms of promotions and how we run them and the calendar of which we run them every year. I think beyond that, we obviously do do some digital ads, mostly on Google. For our locations, we do do some meta ads as well. On the meta side, honestly, it's mostly boosts, promotional boosts. And these will be done depending on location two to four times every month. They're run for somewhere between five to seven days and they're all what we call member appreciation posts so testimonials. So pictures of people with quotes, real people, people looking like our avatar that are boosted to very specific zip codes around our gyms and our locations. And those produce very well, right? And one of the things that we do do off Instagram specifically is we're sell by chatting everybody that follows us. So we get a new follow in off of one of those posts. We say, hey, thanks so much for the follow, how'd you hear about us? And we open a conversation and dialogue with them. And our goal there is, if we can convert even five to 10% of those new follows into new assessments and do new intakes on them, that's well worth the money. 'Cause again, to boost a post on Instagram for five to seven days, you're looking at $15, $20 a day, it's not a huge spent, right? But you can get, if you do it right, you can get an overwhelming amount of follows. Let's say 20 follows off of that post in that part of time. You're then chatting 20 of those people. Let's say you're getting somewhere between two to four of those people to sign up for assessments. Bingo, right? And I think this is the game that a lot of people don't play, which is they think, oh, well, two to four is not that many people. But if we're playing a game where our goal every month from a net member acquisition standpoint is to get three to five members at every location, net, right? Meaning like new memberships minus cancellations. Net new members, if you're consistently hitting those numbers, let's say you're getting five new members a month net, at the end of the year, you've added 60 new members to your gym, which means 60 times $450 a average revenue per member, you do the math, right? That's where you win this game in small group gyms. And I think a lot of people don't, they think too big, like, well, how do I get 50 people in the gym? Don't think about 50 people. Think about getting five people a month new, right? Maybe if five people a month and reduced and keep your churn at a very manageable rate, let's say like sub three percent, you're going to win this game along run. Thank you. That was so tactical, which is exactly, I think, what people want. Okay. Okay. So there were some really, really useful things there. So I want to jump on the email marketing thing for a second. I think, interestingly, I think in the US, this feels like a more common marketing, just like a gold standard. Everybody should be emailing, right? And Mark Fisher has been teaching this for since he's been helping gyms. Yes. Yeah. I don't think in the UK, anywhere near is effectively used as it should be and as it can be. And I use email marketing for my business. And it's a fantastic use of my time. How do you, what do you look like on a week to week basis? What are you sending out? Yeah. Roughly. Yeah. I think it's a good question. So obviously from a promotional standpoint, we've, we've mapped out our calendar of what promotions we want to run in what months? And a lot of this is based on seasonality. Some, some months, we might be running two promotions, but we're never running more than two promotions in a month. And it's largely separated by bucket, right? So, so most people are only getting usually one, one big promotion per month. Most of the content you send out should be value added content. And so for us, what that looks like is talking about exercises, talking about common issues that people have that we hear in the gym and how to solve them, talking about our values and like what matters to us, right? Those are the, those are the three topics that will usually rotate and send out. And you want it to be relevant to your avatar, right? So the people that likely are subscribed to your list are very interested in you in some way or express interest in some way because they've already looked to your website. And they are just kind of lurking on the outside, right? And at some point with some email, you want it to resonate with them. You want it to be either like, oh, they're talking about pull ups. I've been trying to get a pull up or oh, they're talking about inclusive, fitness spaces. Oh, I've really been looking for a gym that's like going to make me feel safe. Or whatever the topic may be, right? You want them to keep getting those messages over and over. So eventually, once you send out that promo, they go, ah, I've been meaning to do this. I'm going to do it. Right. I got to claim this is 24 hours. I'm going to do it. And that's the game that you want to play with email marketing. It's just lots of value, pump them with value, pump them with messages that hit your avatar, that are the type of person that you want in the gym. And then once they hit the promo, boom, they're taking action. Well, you said this a couple of times. You said it with the referral stuff, which is like, there's a, there's a very specific time element. You've only got like 24, 40, 72 hours to take advantage of that. So why, why is that such an important piece for you? It's, it's honestly just marketing psychology, right? You want people to look at an email. Somebody's looking at an email and you look at the timeframe and you're like, oh, this looks like a cool offer. Oh, I have a week to claim this. I'm going to think about it. Right. First is you open the email and you say, you, okay, this is a limited time offer. I have to claim this in 24 hours. If it's even a remote interest to you, you're going to claim it because you realize that if you sit on it, you're going to forget about it. And so you want people to have to like want to take action. The other way to do this is let's say you do a 72 hour one, you put it in 72 hours, you'll get some people right away claim it and then you can run a last call and say, Hey, last call for the, for the, you know, by midnight tonight, you have to claim this and you'll get those other people back in. So those are the two different ways that I would run it, but you want some time sensitivity to it. You want the offer to be highly attractive where it's very hard to say no to. And then you want some time sensitive to be to make sure that there's urgency behind their, their want to claim the offer. So what does that look like this month or if you're, I mean, and are you running something specific this month and SSP that you can tell us about? Yeah, this month we're just running a, again, we're going to the well, we're running a dollar trial to prospects. And that's going to go out next week. And so they'll have 72 hours to claim with the last call. It's going to run on a Thursday and then it's going to expire on a Sunday. And particularly from the promotions like that, at least in the US, I like to run it over the weekend. And we'll see this activity too when we run, say, like boosted posts is during the work week, it's a lot harder to get people's attention sometimes. When you run something for saying that Thursday, Friday over a weekend period, they're doing a lot more scrolling. They're doing a lot more catch up on their email. And all of a sudden they're thinking about, oh, yeah, I've been meaning to join a gym. This looks like a great offer. I'm going to claim it. And so that's, that's where I'm planning to run in January. But again, in January, you definitely want to capitalize on the interest. But there's already a lot of organic interest or there should hopefully be in gyms, right? So you're going to get a lot of people signing up for just regularly price trials that come into your gym. But I think the difference is you still want to capitalize on that small section of people who are still thinking about it. And so you can get a huge amount of interest off of one promotion. But seasonally, if I'm going to run something even more aggressive than that, I might look at seasons that are going to be a little more down, right? So for us, it's like the summertime July, August period tends to be a little bit lighter on organic traffic. A little more people are on holiday traveling around. They're not willing to join a gym. So we're going to run a specific offer at that time to try and get more people in. Same thing we think about November and December, right? Same thing holidays, people are traveling. So we're going to be a little more aggressive during that time. January, we don't have to be as aggressive because we know there's going to be a high amount of organic traffic already. And with that, right? Like you don't have to be as aggressive, but you're running what on the surface sounds like quite an aggressive promotion. Right? What does this $1 give me access to? Give you three weeks of unlimited training. So if we say unlimited personal training and group classes, yeah. It's like a, it's an incredible like if I'm in Seattle, I'm like, I'm chewing your hand off for that. Is this just going out to warmly? It's going out to unconvert what we call as like unconverted prospects. So people have already raised their hand and said, I'm interested, but they haven't pulled the trigger for some reason. This is where this email is going. There's people in our industry that would say a promotion like that is only likely to bring on clients that are time-waisters. What's your perspective on that? I think my perspective is I was concerned about that as well, but the data says otherwise for us at least. We, a lot of times when I think about low barrier offers, and obviously our low barrier offer is $200, right? It's $199 for three weeks of training. So it's not really low barrier. It's like you're still having to pay a good amount to get into the gym. Because our next memberships are, you know, the lowest cost membership at that point is 3, 14 every four weeks that they would have to go into. So I think, you know, we do want to make that cost appropriate. But I think sometimes for people to come into your space, there needs to be even a lower barrier. And I think, you know, my take on this is, all you're trying to do with a promotion is just lower the barrier enough so that people who have been on the fence actually take the jump. Because it's likely that the people that have already expressed interest are still your avatar. So they still have the financial means to pay for a gym membership. And the idea is you just want to lower the barrier enough to get them in the door. Right? And then once they're in the door, the experience should take care of itself. And sure, there's going to be some people that, you know, okay, like they don't want to pay the membership or it doesn't quite fit their budget afterwards. But again, if you can convert at, you know, 40, 50% of those promotions that come in the door into long-term recurring memberships, you're winning. And you know, that promotion is, is well worth it. And the revenue is going to show that. So obviously, we take a close look every time we run that promotion to make sure that we're hitting the benchmarks on that promotion that we want to hit. But assuming that we do, we continue to run it. And those promotions work very well for us. How are you getting enough people onto your list? Then you've got enough unconverted leads that you're like, this is a worthwhile promotion. Yeah, honestly, I mean, it's just grown over time, right? So we have a few thousand people on that list now because every prospect that hits off of our website comes in on a form. We take their information. We're following up with them. Per our follow-up SOP, right? Trying to get them in the gym. If after 28 days, they just haven't responded, we move them into our kind of long-term marketing email bucket, right? And so if you think about, you know, just just general percentages of people that convert, you know, let's say an average gym is getting 30 prospects a month or 30 new leads. You know, I think if you're getting 40, 50% of those into some kind of intake or assessment, so let's just call it 15 for easy math, right? You have those people who, ideally, are going to go into trial memberships and you're going to have a chance to convert them in. But that other 15 that didn't sign up, those people are going to go into a long-term email marketing, right? So if you do this consistently over months, you're going to build a pretty large list of people that are already interested in your gym that you can hit with offers. Next. So we're, I'm just going to wrap this around a little bit for a second. Yeah. So when we started this little marketing section off, we talked about So email being one of your KPCs and that's used across the board. Yeah. Especially the referral one being a big part. You've got an evergreen offer that you run all the time that members can access. You run these rad promotions which I love and I'm definitely going to steal that. The time bound element is a big thing and I think that's something I will be recommending to the people that I work with because I can see, even just sometimes people say these things, Chris, and you said that there and it's like, that's so obvious. Yeah. But it's not often done. I think these open-ended referral promotions that last seven, thirty days just don't have enough urgency behind them. So why not just shorten it to a day, two days, three days? Yeah. Hit the heck out of the marketing of it. Really make sure people feel like, wow, this is a great opportunity for me to bring that friend I've been thinking about or that family member. You've got the sale by chance strategy. That was interesting because I was glancing at your ads library before the interview and that was the only poster I saw was a boosted poster. I had that nutty down and it's a testimonial. And from what I read, it doesn't even have a call to action on it. Does that. So it's just a, do you just boost that and people that follow you then sell by chance? Sell by chance, those follows. Yep. Nice strategy too, I think is underused and then we talked about the email stuff. Is there anything else on this kind of topic of bringing more members in? Yeah. I mean, the only other strategy that we run pretty frequently is, you know, we have four gyms. So we're across the add-on on different neighborhoods. But I always like to tell the team that our goal here is to be a community gym, meaning each gyms focus should be being three mile famous around their location. And so what that means a lot of times is actually talking to other businesses, you know, doing other partnerships with businesses, being in a chamber of commerce, you know, getting on the local blog. So I mean, for instance, like the local blogs by our communities, we did, when we opened our latest location and ballard in October 2020, actually last year, 2025, you know, leading up to that location, there was just a small local blog called My Ballard that posted about us opening up. We got 80 leads off of that one post. And I think people underestimate the power of kind of like that local community marketing. Right? Like actually getting out there with flyers, going to farmers markets, talking to other businesses, making friends, being in the chamber of commerce. That kind of stuff goes a long way and it spreads goodwill. You know, we've even done promotions with local coffee shops where they said, Hey, can we just, can we just pay for coffee for all your customers for one morning up to a thousand dollars or 500 to a thousand dollars? Just say the coffees on SSP. Here's a QR code with a flyer and just hand everybody a flyer with their coffee. That's it, right? And you know, like we measure stuff like this and we'll do social promotions and collaborative posts with that business leading up to it to like really highlight that. And that gets us in front of people that we would have never gotten in front of, right? And there's a QR code that links to kind of a free personal training session, just trying to get them into the door. And we can see based upon these things, we can see traffic spikes, you know, in direct traffic coming to us directly. And we also get emails off of that that we can then follow up with those people as prospects. So it's just like, you know, it's it's being creative with stuff like that. But but at very minimum, it's going into your local community and just making friends, making sure that you know every single business that's around you that you're spreading good will, that you're just being a part of the community that you're in. And that becomes really important for us. I absolutely love it. Just just the curiosity that the, have you tried the coffee shop thing? Yeah, yeah, we've done it a couple times. Yeah. How did it go? It's gone really well. I mean, I think the one thing that I, I preface with this is you are, you're kind of casting a wide net there, right? So like you're spreading good will in the community and you're like planting a lot of seeds. And I think what we've seen over that is, you know, direct leads from that promotion, I would say it's going to be fairly small. You're probably talking about maybe five, five to seven leads that will come in, which is still great. Often if a promotion like that, you're spending only spending 500 bucks or getting five to seven leads. Great. We have seen people off of that promotion come in six months later, come in 12 months later, right? Because they're like, oh, they have this flyer sitting on their counter. They've heard about SSP. Oh, they bought me coffee a while ago. Cool. I'm going to hit this QR code and come in for my free session. So there's a lingering effect there. I think the other thing that we do see, which I talked about in the BFU presentation I gave, I think in Toronto last year was off of that promotion, we saw a huge amount of traffic spike to our website, right? So you, especially off of the collaborative posts that we do with the coffee shop combined with the flyer in person. We're seeing a lot of traffic off of our Google Analytics to our website. And there's a huge spike during those promotions, which means like more eyeballs on us, more people kind of understanding who we are. And eventually again, planting those seeds so that when they're looking for a gym down the line or they're thinking about a gym, they go, hey, I heard about the SSP plays. Maybe you should go check them out. I mean, it makes sense, right? Like from the spike perspective of you, if I walk into my local independent to moral and any business, not a gym necessarily a personal trainer, any business pays for my coffee. That is like, I'm sitting down and being like, who the hell is this? Exactly. Yeah. Just just because I love this stuff, I'm probably getting involved in that business because of the level of creativity involved and the commitment to getting it into the local area. So I love that. Great to hear their word. Okay. I have a couple of fast fire, quick firecane of ones to wrap us up your Chris. So one thing every gym owner over complicates a European. Over complicates. I would say. That's a good question over complicates. I think, okay, here's a good one. I think they over complicate telling people what they don't want to hear. And so I'll say a lot of gyms will talk to people in a way. It's like, here's all of my credentials. Here are all the things that I can do that I can help you with. So don't you know, like I have a master's in exercise science and I have my CSCS and I have my strong first and I have all of this stuff. And the reality is that's not what the person wants to hear and they have no idea what all that means. All they want to hear is like, this is a safe space for me. This is a place that I can learn to exercise. This person seems really kind and helpful. And I think a lot of gyms, I see on their website all the time, it's like, we have the most highly certified coaches and here's what we're going to do for you. And it's like, that's not what your avatar wants to see. Nobody cares about that. So that would be my answer there. And I say in general system that are growing newer gym owner should belt or ensure that they have. Yeah. I think first thing is prospect follow up, right? So I don't care if you're getting one prospect a week or 70, you have to have a built-in way to follow up with them consistently. And I see a lot of gyms either really miss the mark on this or just like don't follow with people at all. And I think, you know, you have to have some system and it can start very basic, which is like, hey, I'm going to follow up with this person. The day to day, they write in and I'm going to follow up with them maybe the next day and the next day. I like to say, you know, we like to follow people once every 14 days and the first 14 days, I just use phone or email to try and get in front of them. And then after that, it's weekly. But whatever system works for you, you have to have it built out and you have to have it like systemized so that you're constantly following up with people because you need to take advantage of the people that are out expressing interest beyond before you even look at marketing. People will go, hey, I need more leads, I need more leads, I need more leads, but then they're getting more leads and they don't realize that they're just not following up with people that are getting in well enough to get them into the gym. And I think if you solve that problem first, it's going to really help you from a growth perspective. You're email marketing segment really, really speaks to that too. One or two books of Shaped, your leadership and your approach to gym ownership. Yeah. I think start with why Simon Sinek is one that's just highly powerful. I think for any entrepreneur or anybody that's looking to open your own business, like really, and even now, the business has gotten to a point where sometimes I really have to harken in on the signal versus the noise, right? And like, what is the why behind what we're doing? I think always harkening back to that is really powerful. The other thing, and I'll say is probably a set go to book. I would say either the dip or purple cow. I think both of those are impactful in different ways. But certainly from marketing perspective, as somebody who didn't grow up in my corporate career doing marketing as like an individual function, I did a lot of other stuff, but I never did marketing. Having kind of like marketing books and frameworks and ways of thinking about that was really impactful for me. Last one, Chris. One lesson that growth has taught you the hard way. This goes back to staffing. Because I think when you're running a high growth business that's scaling quickly, it comes down to the people. Right? And I think one of the hard lessons I've learned is if you're running a single jammer and maybe you're running two gyms, the people that work well in that environment may not work well at four gyms, may not work well at 10 gyms. Right? I think you, the type of person that you need to have in like a growing scaling business needs to be highly motivated, needs to be okay with ambiguity, needs to be okay with change, needs to be resilient in a way. And some people don't necessarily want that for their life or it doesn't fit where they're at. Right? And I think you have to be honest with people about that. So, I mean, one of the things that we do is we intentionally every, every annual review process, we reevaluate and ask the question whether SSPs a good fit for their life anymore, and whether we feel like SSP is a good fit for them. Right? So it's on both sides. And that's just a way for us to like do kind of a state of the union and do a check to make sure that we're both on the same page that they still want this level of intensity and growth in their life. And if they don't, you know, we can kind of part ways, I'm equably at that point, but I do think you have to be really discerning about this as you grow and scale if that's what you want to do in your gym business. I often see when I conduct these interviews, Chris, that if I have glanced at my questions, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but to me, if I don't do that at all, it's a signal that the interview has really flowed well. I think I only looked at my questions when we got to the quick fire section there. And we didn't even circle back to the staffing thing, we didn't get to the use athlete thing. So I hope that you've had a good and fixed experience here that you would consider coming back at one point. Yeah, absolutely. I would love to ask you. And if anybody wants to see hello, follow along with your journey, I'd be asked a question, say, thank you. How is it best for them to do that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, probably Instagram is the best thing. My handle is Chris dot Travis with three S's at the end. So you can happy to DM me. I'll respond to you and happy to engage. I love them. Actually, people engage with me on fitness business is kind of kind of geeky and fun. I also think if you want to check out our gyms, Seattle SP dot com is our website. Thank you so much for your time here. Thanks to it. I appreciate it.