Fitness Business School – Business of the Month

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in this episode I wanna talk with you about our Business of the Month program. Let’s get started.

Welcome to the Fitness Business School podcast, the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen to the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

One of the first marketing strategies that, that I put into place years and years ago with, with our second local business was a business of the month program. Now, I learned this from my good friend Curtis Mock. This is, this was a program that he had some success with when he went around and consulted with gyms.
And so we took it and ran with it and kind of created a handful of iterations of business of the month that I think it became almost like this utility tool, like a Swiss Army knife, because we could do it in different ways and it became really effective.

Now, business of the month is the way that we’ve always described it, but in truth, it is more of an organization, like a featured organization program where you are going to an organization, anything from a business to a PTA group, to a club, sports team, to an HOA, and you are saying, Hey, you know what?
We want to do this special thing for you and the members of this organization. So that’s the general framework of it, right? You pick a specific organization and you create an offer for the people in that organization that gives them an incentive, makes them feel special, makes them feel appreciated, and
they’re getting something that is probably not the off the shelf, what they would find on the website offer from your business. So again, it’s a little bit of a special opportunity for those people.

So our original business of the month program, we would just go around to local businesses that were in our kind of geographic footprint for our health club and would say, Hey the employees of this business each get a 30 employees and their significant other each get a 30 day membership to our health club. And
we started this long enough ago that things like landing pages and whatever else weren’t as common. QR codes weren’t as common, so we didn’t do it digitally as much. What we we did was we would take an inexpensive basket, would go buy it somewhere like a craft store, Michael’s or something, right? We’d
throw a bunch of apples or make it a fruit basket. We would have a short form that was kinda like a waiver that somebody would complete as a member of the, as a member of this program or as a participant.

They would fill it out and we would pick them up and that would activate their 30 day membership. Now, for us, the obvious benefit was now we could go directly through, directly to the potential members instead of having to go through HR instead of, it was a smaller business that didn’t have hr. Instead of
having to go through the owner, the manager, we had direct access to the people in the business. Because while corporate programs I think are wonderful, and we’ve had some success with them throughout the years, they have a much slower sales cycle. They’re not easy to navigate, and the bigger the corporate
target you go after, the more bureaucratic it is and all that stuff. So this gave us an opportunity to go to groups, whether it be a business or a PTA or people who all were in a specific apartment complex or something like that.

And it was basically just saying, Hey, this is a gift for being a member, being an employee here. And it reflects well on the business or the organization because it, it feels like they’re doing a favor for their employees, their tenants, for their members. And so that was always an easy, consistent way that we could go out there and build relationships in the community, create an outbound campaign. Well, the easiest starting point for us now, the health club that I owned was about two
hours from where I lived. So I didn’t have a bunch of pre-existing relationships. So the easy way for us to build relationships with businesses, so it wasn’t entirely cold calling, was the Chamber of Commerce. Now, I will tell you, in the beginning, we just cold called we, we went through the Yellow Pages and cold
called.

But I think that we recognized very soon that it was easier for us to say, okay, let’s go join the Chamber of Commerce and then say, Hey, we want to extend this featured business option to fellow chamber members, and we’ll just go down the list and do this with fellow chamber members. And we’d go, you
know, we’d drop off the basket, we’d say, Hey, we will be back a week from today and pick this up. Try to find a point person in the business to make sure that people didn’t just lose track of it and leave it in a break room. But people are actually facilitating getting the these filled out. And sometimes that would
mean, Hey, I’m gonna give the office manager a two month or a three month membership. And, and it worked like crazy. It worked absolutely wonderfully. Every month we would get between 10 and 20 members to actively become paying clients.

They would come in and during their trial, we would make them that kind of irresistible offer to become an ongoing client or an ongoing member in that setting. And so we would go and make announcements periodically through our email newsletter or with in club signage and ask our members, Hey, are you a,
would you like your business? Would you like your employer? Would you like your organization to be our featured organization at this, at our facility? And so every week we’d get a couple inquiries and we’d follow up and we would incentivize that member with some sort of, Hey, we’ll give you, I’ll take a
free month on your membership. We’ll give you a free month of group training or something like that and incentivize them that way. Well, so we rolled this out in our training business, then we started to deliver it in our old Bootcamp Blueprint program.

And some people used it for literally a decade, and it just was this like clockwork system to bring in a handful of new trials every month. And it just worked like crazy. Well, there, there have been some, you know, some sorts of evolution in ways that we can do this over time that, that I think have made it even
easier if you wanted to run a business or organization of the month type of program, a featured organization. Because when we say of the month, we, we don’t necessarily only have one featured organization each month. If you are aggressive about this, the way that I would probably do if I were
gonna go open up a business locally tomorrow, I would just pick a bunch of featured businesses, maybe one business in each respective category every month, right? So the first thing that it that I would do, knowing kind of what we know now and how this has evolved is I would go to my network and my
internal client base and see if they had an organization they wanted to do this, I’d say, Hey, we’re gonna be introducing this new program, eh, but you know, before we just kind of roll it out in general in the community, we wanted to prioritize you guys first.

Do you have a business or an organization you would like to do this, this with? Because now we know that we’ve got somebody who can be that kind of champion for this program in this organization and start that way. And frankly, from my perspective, I would just create a simple landing page. And we’ve even
created templates for this in our automatic member software. I’d create a simple landing page where somebody could opt in and they would get a golden ticket or gift card for, for one month that they could use that they discretion, not necessarily feeling like it had to be right now, right? So that, that’s one of the
things that, that I think could be a stumbling block. Like if you were to do this during the summer and somebody’s gone on vacation, they may not do it because they feel like there’s this urgency.

Now, from my perspective, I’d rather just say, Hey, download this golden ticket, this gift card, this one month VIP pass that you can use, that doesn’t expire. But when they download it, now we have them in a funnel, right? Like we have them set up for a follow-up campaign where we have direct access to them.
We don’t have to go through the organization or the business anymore, and we can follow up with them and move them in the door. So we’ve got somebody who’s relatively qualified because they’re interested in this service. It’s not, Hey, this is a recipe guide, or something else where maybe they’re not interested in
actually training. They downloaded this because they do have an interest in the service. Now I’m going to follow up with them. I would definitely find an incentive for whoever the champion was gonna be and say, Hey, if you can get X number of people, we will give you blank, a gift card towards this much of our
services, or this many months instead of one month, we’ll give you two months or three months, we’ll give you two months.

If we get at least five people, we’ll give you three months. If we get 10 or more. And I would go out and run this internally with my network, I would then, if I’m a member of an affinity group, a chamber of commerce, whatever, I would just kind of go down the list and do it that way. And this sort of program is
a wonderful outbound program that it’s just not gonna dry up. You’re never going to run out of groups, organizations, teams, businesses, neighborhoods that you can run this type of thing with. And it’s just this wonderful kind of pipeline filler that keeps giving that anybody on your team could go and execute. You
can certainly do, but it’s something that it’s script focused, it’s systematic. So it’d be easy to delegate this and build this. And you’re not dependent on the this idea that, oh, I’ve gotta spend a ton of money up front.

I’ve got this really expensive kind of long sales cycle because I’m running ads and I’m paying a lot now, but the sales cycle for these leads is 90 days, and so I’m going negative for 90 days. So they’re just different ways to approach this. So if it were my business, I would introduce this kind of feature business
featured organization into what I’m doing, and it is just like clockwork. It’s this wonderful gift that’s gonna keep on giving, keep your pipeline full, and really help to grow your business.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School.

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

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