Hello, my friends. In today's episode, I'm speaking with Mark Fisher, and we're giving you our tried and true playbooks for generating more referrals in your gym. So whether you're just building a referral system or you want to make some improvements to your existing work for you. So let's dive in. Welcome to the Business for Unicorns podcast where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their business. I'm your host, Michael Keeler. Join me each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym. Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry. Let's begin. Hello, fitness business nerds. What's up? Welcome to another episode of the business for unicorns podcast. Today I am here with Mark Fisher. What's up, Fisher? How are you, sir? I am a little under the weather, but good. Yeah, thanks for joining us, even though you're not feeling 100%. We promised you listeners, we're going to give you 100% of what we got today. It's still going to be great. Before we dive in, I just wanted to do a quick shout out. I haven't given this shout out in a little while, and I think it's well deserved. We're putting out a lot of great email content at Business for Unicorns these days. We have the podcast about twice a week. We put out some content from Pete once a week, some content from Mark once a week. And so we're putting out, I think, really actionable advice and a lot of best practices in our email content. So for listeners, if you're not on an email list, go to our website, enjoy our email list. There's a lot of great stuff happening there. Mark, you're doing a lot of epic work on there as usual, marketing is one of your strong suits. So you just want to say a little bit about what people can expect from our email content. Yeah, I think for people that prefer to read some of this information, I think people absorb information differently. I think this is a take what views a gym owner when you're thinking about how you are sharing content with your current and future clients. And some people reading in their emails the way to go. Now I'm the first to admit I'm an email person. Some people are not email people, but I think part of the benefit of the Business Unicorns email particularly is it becomes one stop shopping because we will share not only exclusive content that's only available in the emails in either short or longer form, written content, including Pete DePris famous Seth Godin like emails. But you will also get notified when new podcast drop, you'll get notified when there's new podcasts, things happening. We'll share when we are guests on other podcasts. So if you're interested in what's going on the Business Unicorns universe, you want to be on the email list and I don't want to brag, we get really good open rights. We do. So thank you for all of you who are already on it and opening those emails. Please keep opening them. And if you're not on it yet, wait for my friends. Go to our website and go join the email list immediately. We'll include a link down below to make it easy. So today's topic, this was a requested topic by one of your dear listeners. It was a while ago and I don't have a name for who requested it, but we're going to do it anyway, which is we're going to talk about referral programs. What are our, what's our best thinking and tips for how to get great referrals from existing numbers and for all of you who've listened to this podcast at all, wherever we talk about referrals, we talk about it as being really a cornerstone system that you need in your business. That you know, so much of what grows a business like ours is referrals is that kind of word of mouth, people knowing about you and talking about you to their friends, coworkers, family. So you really got to have a system to make this consistent. Fisher, let's start with you. What's what do you, what's the kind of overall approach to referral systems that you think really is the best practice? Yeah, I'll start with what I think is an okay thing to do, but the least effective or actually generating needs. And that is if you sell one of your friends on three years and $9,000 investment in my business, I'll give you $50 off your next or a free month. Ultimately, I don't think that's a bad thing to do. I think it's nice to be gracious to thank people for driving business your way, but I wouldn't ever expect that to meanfully nudge the need on any meaningful way because the somebody that's going to refer to it right is going to be doing that anyway. They're not doing it to get the 50 bucks. And ultimately, you can't really on command make people get their friends to sign up for a really big agreement. And again, even if you have a lower price month month option, the still the same thing is holding true there. So again, I don't think that's wrong to do that. I just don't think that actually actively drives more referrals. And I think there are other things you can do that can more proactively actually get contact with the very least to grow your list of individuals that you're able to market to. And at a high level, we can dig into some specific examples of this. It's give them something free, give them something it's actually valuable they can give to their friend. And I think that's used. You're going to get better results for proactively driving some leads now rather than if you sell 10,000 hours of my services, I'll give you $50. Yeah, I think you're right. Then you know that most people who are going to talk about you to their friends or loved ones are going to do it because they want to not because you've offered them some sort of incentive. But incentives can be helpful. We're not saying don't do incentives, which I the message here is just that can't be the only thing you do. Yeah. And so when I think of this, we talk about it with unicorns, I mean, there's often there's three major pillars here. I think most people should have kind of an evergreen system for always asking for referrals a way that's always available that anyone can refer and give away something for free and maybe get something in return. There needs to be some not evergreen, maybe an ideally kind of quarterly changing promotions for referrals that kind of keeps it fresh. Even if it's not quarterly, once or twice a year doing something fresh and new to engage with your current members with referrals. And I think the third thing that I think is a third pillar here is you've got to role play and practice referral asking conversations with your team on a regular basis. Those are the three for me. So I'll repeat it for listeners. So it's like an evergreen way that you're always offering a chance for your clients to give something away to their friends and family. And when they say those people sign up, they get something in return as a thank you. That's always available. The second thing is some sort of exciting offer that changes maybe quarterly that incentivizes a different kind of referral ask. We'll give examples of all of these. And then the third thing is your team's got to know how to ask. Your team's got to recognize the opportunities and moments when your clients are having a great time, they're having great experience. They just hit a milestone. They've been loving life. And you can do that in a lot of ways. But those moments where you have to actually ask in person, if you know anyone else just like you, who would love to come and join this community, get the kind of results you're getting. So I'll pull up there, but Fisher, do you want to fill in some examples for each of those? Yeah, I think certainly the an evergreen one to my mind's us can have two pieces. One is what we already talked about, which I guys said is not going to drive things, but I think it's still nice to do. The other one that we've used in MFAP that admittedly works a little bit better the class-based facility, but you can do this with small group is just giving away a free something, a free workout, a free consultation. I think you could give a free report. I think that's the story brand recommended move. I'm not sure these days that's as valuable. But I think giving, having them something they can give to their friends for free, I think is a really awesome thing. And you probably want something like that can be done all the time. Yeah. I think to the second category of something that changes, I would even propose probably going hard for dedicated periods, maybe two times through, you maybe three times per year, with a more generous, free thing you're giving away perhaps, and/or some kind of give to get campaign. And with this, you can get as complicated as you want. And I would again probably describe it as you're going to get too complicated. But you could do things like create a point system where people get points for submitting contact information for friends, for friends that are brand new, your gym that have never been there before. Perhaps you give points for reviews, perhaps you give points for checking on social media. So I like, there always is a low simmer of a cool thing. And you do have to continue to market it. In the places I would say you always got to market that evergreener, probably at point of sale, during onboarding. And then occasionally throughout the year, maybe two or three times per year, just make sure everybody's reminded that it exists. Because people just forget and you tell them the first time, it's not the right time. That kind of is what it is. But I think there's something to be said for periodically really putting a lot of messaging, attention, and energy and marketing the hell out of some kind of give to get a promotion of some kind where you're really finding ways to incentivize people to bring in leads and/or trials and/or, of course, ultimately new members. Yeah, I think you said, yeah, is you've got to make it sound sexy and new once in a while. If on an ongoing basis all they hear is, hey, every member gets five free passes to give to a friend each year. And so if that's your evergreen offer and every time someone signs up, they get $50, that just becomes a wallpaper. It's like very generous of you. It's like cool that you're doing that. But every once in a while, as Fisher's saying, you've got to spice it up and then mark at the shit out of this new special thing you're doing. Or at the very least, mark at the shit out of thing that's always available. Just remind them that it exists because people forget about these things. It just becomes like background noise. Yeah, I think that the other thing too that is worth keeping in mind is, admittedly, there aren't different strategies I think. And I know this is one of my constant talking points here, but it's none the less true. And I think we're uniquely situated and we deal both the class-based facilities and smoger. Yeah. There's just different animals. They're both fitness solutions, but the price points, the delivery, the everything about it is different. The one extreme, if you've got really big capacity class-based, with an example, being most of the class-based fitness franchises where their low-bearer offer is a free class. And a lot of them expectations around at point of sale, you're going to get five of the new clients, friends, then and there. And there's a lot of it is built around point of sale asks, right? Where, who are you going to bring with you to your free assessment, and with this
This is some of the clothes of who, what friend are you bringing to the free workout you're coming in to try out our facility? And when you've got that much capacity, you've got that much volume, you've got, you're just playing the numbers that way. Why not? You're just doing so much volume. Yeah, you've got tons of opportunities to do that. I'm not saying you should be any, I think, less assertive if you're doing it for a small group, but small group of different model. It's a little bit less intuitive, frankly, as a service, whereas classes, for better for the reality is people are often looking at as a workout. I'm going there because I want to work out because of the prevalence of class-based concepts in most markets. People know what it is. It's a class. We know what a fitness class is. Small group personal training in a lot of markets, I still think is not always obvious what it is. And because classes are as much about the experiences, anything else, you can take one class, oh, I get it. I get the experiences. I get it down, the music is pumping, that was hard, I feel very sweaty, which is hard to core training as we roll our eyes at these things. But these are things a lot of consumers are going to equate with. This is effective. And also for a certain kind of person, this is enjoyable. Small group personal training on the other hand because it's personal training, it's going to have a little bit more of a learning curve. So oftentimes, one session is a little bit weird. You didn't really have time to lock in. So I think that bears repeated visits. I still think it's okay to offer a free session if you've got the capacity because again, you're trying to get them in the door in the first place. But in most situations, they're not going to do one small group personal training and sign up for a year, whereas with class-based facilities, particularly if you have a month a month, you can totally pull it off. And that is quite literally the funnel for a lot of class-based, boutique fitness franchises. You come in for your one workout, we do a little, the first part of the sales conversation before, you do the workout, the coach drills in, oh, here's what you want. That's what we're doing this exercise. We do it like this for this specific physical result you want. You sign up, here's what I recommend is your coach. And then there's a sale that's made, at least as dense with it, should be sale made directly after that. It's a very lean funnel, but I just don't see this working as well for most small group training facilities. Yeah, I think that makes sense. And I think it's important for listeners to think about the distinction between the kind of way that you will offer a trial for referees if you're doing small group versus class. Because I think a good example of that is for class, it might be a single visit is all you need. And you can give your members the ability to give away a free visit to anyone they want. And for small group, you might need to give away, you might need to say that the offer is something like, you have the ability to give any friends you want 50% off, three visits. You need to be some way to like, you know, these coupons that you get to give to friends who want more, more like a personal training model. And even then, those could be examples of evergreen. And then once in a while you say, Hey, just for the next, just for the month of June, we're going to say that you can give away a week of free classes and 75% off a week of small group training, small group personal training. And so that's a way that you can build some excitement by just like turning the volume up of your existing referral strategy. Yeah. Yeah. And I would note, I think one important element of that is as I am fond of saying, if people can buy things whenever or get things whenever they'll get them never. So the classic version of this particular move where you really highlight and make something more attractive is the December free trial. You have some sort of paid trial, particularly if you build value for it, if it's a 147 or even $99, that's not no money. It's not a million dollars. That's not no money in some markets. So if you want to do a limited time only, spicy offer instead of a free class, now you're getting a full $99, $147, you're getting a 21 day program and you brand a little bit and package it and wrap it up in a container. If you give that to your members, and again, you can leverage for a limited time only. So the way that MFF does a version this most years is we'll do something like this in December. Basically what we're saying is you can give it away as a gift for the holidays. Your friend has to claim it by the new year, they've to claim it by the new year and they have to start by January 31 because we don't want them to be able to do it whenever they need to start at some point. But that tends to work pretty well because it gives them some incentive that's time sensitive. They want to get in on this that has some value. They can do it and a lot of them are going to come in the last week of the year because people aren't really paying attention to all. They're going to closer to the new year and they're like, "Oh, shit." And they start thinking about it. That can be very valuable. And those aren't sent in stone. You can play probably with maybe they claim by the end of the first week and they have to start by the middle of January. And you can probably do a similar initiative probably in the fall or in the spring because in fitness land, there was tend to be the three big seasons. So that I think is another move that is worth considering when you're not doing just the evergreen that's always there. If you want to heighten up the intensity, I think being generous with that can be a valuable thing to do. And furthermore, that's another advantage, I think, if you're in a small group because one, you're more likely to have a paid off of some kind that you could give away a free month, I guess, in the class. And two, you could probably be more generous because if you have a class-based facility, I guess you could do it, but there could be, I think, some issues if you give away a free trial to 700 members. So to some extent, you're a little better situated. You've got a deeper relationship with what's called 150 people that are paying north of $300, $400 per month. Those individuals are going to likely have other friends that can really afford what you're doing. So you're probably incentivizing that situation to be generous. And you've got the capacity because from a numbers perspective, you're just not dealing with quite as many people. It's going to be unlikely you're going to get hammered by 50 trials, but go with God. It's not the worst problem I've been sure you figured out. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I wish we would have that problem all the time. But I think the idea here is I think some people know that when they're creating some sort of sales promotion, that there has to be some sort of time-sensitive nature to it, but people forget to apply that same thinking to referral promotions and referral asks. Yeah. So I think it's such a great tip there. I'll add one more, which is one that I feel like maybe played around with it enough, but I know that we've had a lot of unicorn society numbers use this play, which is specifically offering some special referral gifts that your long-term, most loyal clients can give away. So like selecting some VIP clients who've been around for the longest, maybe have spent the most or been around for most number of years that you think are real ambassadors for the community and giving them some special superpowers to give away things to their friends, their family, their networks that no one else has access to. I think that can be a real superplay. And we've seen unicorn society members create like really fantastic, like metal business cards and give out to VIP cards. It feels very fancy, very elite. And what's great about that is that you're taking the people who know and like your business the most and really leveraging the fact that they're such great ambassadors. They have such great, often success stories for using in your community and giving them a job basically saying, "Let me give you these superpowers to go tell everyone you know what you're probably already doing about us and then give away some stuff that we're not going to need anyone else the ability to do." And that's really flattering. I think there's a lot of clients who are just so touched by the idea that you would trust them with giving away a free month of classes or whatever superpower you would invite them with. I think that can be a really successful play. Would you add anything to that, Fisher? No, I don't think so. Other than I would just highlight that, yeah, I think one thing that's really great is often, I think, considered to be an important part of this, which I do think is at least worth considering is having a physical thing to give away, whether it be a physical plastic card you make or, yeah, the metal card I love, shout out to Jesse, who's on our group who they're doing some construction out here. Because I'm in a gym. I'm a gym owner. So, I think Jesse actually had somebody who had already heard like five clients and I think he made not just like a customized VIP, but like a customized VIP for Karen or whoever her name was about like the said her name. I was like, that's such a baller. Because how cool do you feel? Like you're not only encouraging more that behavior, but you're at the very least what it balled retention move. Like I'm giving you a customized like metal cars that I made for you with your name on it. Like really cool idea. It's so great. It's so great because those folks are going to talk about us anyway. So why not give them better tools to talk about us with and network with and share with their friends and co-workers and then really incentivize the shit out of them, right? Because they're going to be your super connectors. So give them away at whatever you can afford to give away, right? Because they're going to go above and beyond for you. That's why they've been around for so many years. I think that's a good one. Let's wrap it up. Closing thoughts here, Fisher, if people are just getting started thinking about really structuring their referral systems, where do they start? Yeah. If you're going to start with one thing, I do think I'd encourage you just plan this problem out where you give away a free month or free trial or something. You can decide if you want to do it to a VIP quote unquote segment or if you want to do it to all of your members depending on the size of the gym. But if you start with one thing, I think that's it. Now, don't get me wrong. I still think you need an evergreen thing to come up with at some point. But in practice, again, it's good to have in there, but it's evergreen. So it's not really going to move the needle forward. So I'm always telling you to think about, okay, what's going to get you members this month? And I think that move is more likely. So that's the one that I would recommend probably looking. And it's not that hard to pull off. It's not that complicated. So I would encourage you to go dig into that. Yeah. I'll just plus one that. And I'll say that the place where I see people drop the ball when they do that for the first time is they don't give themselves enough lead time to communicate what this thing is. So if you're going to do a promotion or you're going to give all your existing clients the ability to give away a free class, there needs to be like probably a series of emails or a video you put out or maybe some signage in your gym telling them what this is. You got to market it even though it's.
This is an internal thing. You have to spend some time laying out the groundwork and talking about it. That's where I see a lot of folks drop the ball who do this for the first time. So listeners, don't do that. Plan some time in advance. You need a few weeks to know what it is, make the materials so that everyone knows what it is you're asking them to do. And then of course, make it time sensitive like in all the ways that we talked about it. Yeah. Alright, what's wrap it up there? I think this is a great little succinct piece about this is our, these are our playbooks for doing referrals. I think it's super actionable. So go do it, my friends. Thanks Fisher. Thanks for coming. Even though you're not feeling 100% today, it was good to hear your wisdom on this topic. And listeners, if you found this podcast valuable, please leave us a five star review everywhere that you listen. Email us,
[email protected], myclobusinessfeetacorns.com. Listen to what he wants to talk about next, which guests you want to have on the podcast. And don't forget to go subscribe to our email list. We're putting out some epic shit. I'll see you on the next one, Fisher. Have a good guest day, y'all. Bye. (upbeat music)
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