Fitness Business School – Forever Clients

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about what I call forever client. Let’s get to it.

Welcome to the fitness business school podcast. The show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their end 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.

The fitness industry has been an interesting place for me to kind of grow up as a business owner in, because when I first got into the industry, initially I was an employee. I had been a college baseball coach, a college strength coach. I had taught at a university, did any number of side things, running my own camps, working at other people’s camps, doing a little bit of private instruction and that sort of stuff on the side just to, to kind of make ends meet.
But then, I took a job and then a second job I knew I wanted to own a business, but I felt like I was ill-equipped to become a business owner and learned a little bit and finally opened my own business in mid 2004. And at that point, most personal training that I saw, I mean, almost exclusively personal training was delivered in one-on-one sessions, 60 minute sessions. Some people were innovative in doing 45 minute sessions or whatever else. Everything was sold in packages.

A lot of health clubs would sell like three packs of sessions as a, as kind of a front end offer, and then move people into longer programs. But most things were sold in these big blocks of sessions that people would buy. And in most cases, the more you buy, the cheaper it is. Now, the challenge with that obviously is you had to resell somebody every time that they wanted to or that their package ran out. You were really only dealing with people who could afford these big block purchases. And it just, it, it felt kind of odd to me because I, coming from the baseball background that I had, I thought about just the retention of people, and that was a big deal for me. But when I got into the fitness industry, I thought, well, okay, the people making all the money, here are the health clubs, and they’re selling everything on a subscription. They’re selling everything where people join and the short commitments are 12 months, but a lot of them are 24 or 36 months. Heck, I even remember being in a Bally’s and they were selling lifetime memberships, and they’re definitely some ethical questions with a lot of what was being sold.

But it just never made any sense to me that if my mortgages billed monthly and my car payments monthly, and the way that I’m compensated in, in most jobs is all of it’s kind of done where the budget functions monthly. Why wouldn’t we craft our payment structure to do the same? So when I opened my first training business, that’s what we did. We did 12 month subscriptions, and we had a three and a six month option, and maybe five to 8% of people ever took the six month. Nobody took the three month because the price procession was pretty steep by comparison, and it just served as kind of a price anchor. Now, I went to seminars and was in mastermind groups and that sort of stuff to try to cut my teeth in the industry, so to speak.

And really interacted with the two people who were the most prominent consultants, coaches, whatever you’d like to call them at the time. I think they would’ve called themselves consultants. And both of them told me that I was crazy that you couldn’t sell training on a subscription, let alone a 12 month subscription. I mean, told me I was crazy. One of them told me I was crazy with some profanity laced in between to try to to, to humble me a little bit, I guess. And I’m like, wow, wait a minute. I mean, I already at the time had about 300 clients in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky on, on a subscription, paying me almost all of them on 12 month commitments. So I’m like, ah, maybe you’re wrong. And you know, clearly they, they had kind of misread the market. And within a handful of years, most of the industry had shifted that way. I will take some credit, certainly not all the credit for popularizing that. I know we talked about it a bunch with all of our coaching programs and all of our clients, and I wrote about it when I would write for trade publications and on websites. And I think some other smart folks like Alwyn Cosgrove were out there kind of talking about that too. And the industry shifted to the point that I later heard both of those people talking about that in presentations they were making about how the subscription billing became such a big deal. So fast forwards to today, and all of the businesses that I encounter with almost no exception, there are, I mean, I’m talking three to 5% of the people might not bill on some sort of subscription at this point that I run into.

And all of the franchises that have kind of come onto the scene are very much subscription models. But the interesting part of that is now we’ve let the pendulum swing this other direction where everybody is so subscription heavy that it is like they expect clients to have what I would call unbroken memberships, where they just stay and pay in perpetuity without any sort of interruption. Now, some people offer the opportunity to pause a membership for a matter of weeks or even a couple months depending on circumstances. But by and large people you know, they, they’ve kind of taken that approach where, okay, the, the lifetime relationship value of somebody is simply what their unbroken subscription is. Now, admittedly, some of the other benefit that I had from not really starting in the fitness industry and having an athletic background, both coaching and then founding a sports performance franchise and doing a lot of stuff in that field is unbroken wasn’t always available because if kids were coming in to train for three months at a time, then they wouldn’t be training during their season in, in many cases, as much as you’d like to have an in-season program these kids with full plates or these college kids that were away at school, they just their schedule didn’t really accommodate it.

And I think that we’ve tried to, to fit everything into this, this box of unbroken memberships instead of thinking, how do I maximize the value of the relationship forever? And there are a couple things that I hear periodically or I see in my own business that, that lead me to believe that there’s a lot
of untapped opportunity here. The first is there has probably not been, and I’ve certainly not tracked this, but I am almost certain there has not been a single week since I stopped coaching college baseball now 20 years ago that I haven’t had a conversation or a text back and forth or some sort of interaction via messenger or actually seeing somebody in person that didn’t play for me or coach for me during the time I was a college coach. And that holds true.

I mean, I was texting yesterday with two different people that fell into that category and talked to one on the phone this morning before we even got started recording. So these are relationships that have lasted for 20 plus years. And my, my great hope is they will be relationships that last for as long as I last. And the, the idea that somebody is only a client or in that case only, an athlete on their coach only during the time that they were most active in that case, it was
a long, long time ago. I think that’s the wrong way to approach it. I think that in my world, if somebody played for me, then we’re always on the same team. And sure, there are people that may view that differently, and some players may say, well, look, I don’t wanna be on his team anymore because maybe I didn’t play the role I wanted.

Maybe I didn’t get the opportunity that I wanted to, and that’s fine but ideally I want to help those folks as long as I can possibly help them. And, and you never know, right? Like, you never know what kind of impact you’re gonna make on somebody. I’ve gotten random messages from people that I coached long ago who might’ve only been on the team for a year or two that kind of talk explicitly about how I impacted their life in ways that I would’ve never imagined. And it just
reminds me of the, the, the power, the influence, the impact that we can have in the role that we’re playing as a coach. And so I’ve tried to maintain a lot of that same mentality once I got into business, pretty much the same mentality has kind of permeated most everything that I’ve done. I’ve got people that I hired in 2004 that have stopped working for me long ago, that still come to me for business advice or in some cases life advice. Holly has women that were clients of hers in person in 2005 or six that still join her online challenges today. And in the business coaching world, I think of, of it as, hey, anybody that’s been my client, I continue to think of as a client, maybe not an active client, but I still care about their success. I still periodically try to check in and obviously that list of people has grown over the years, but I don’t think it’s an accident that we have any number of people in any quarter of the year, there will be 2, 3, 4, 5 people who
were actively involved and have come back.

And I think that’s the coolest thing ever that, that that happens, right? Because that means that they saw value in the relationship and they felt that, that I helped them then enough, and that can potentially help them now. And for whatever reason, maybe it didn’t make sense to continue at the time, maybe it didn’t make a lot of sense for them to keep going. They found they, they needed help in another area that maybe they didn’t feel like I was the best solution, maybe just life changed and they weren’t able to engage in the way they had previously. But I would think that financially at least 25% of my business comes from people who have previously done business with me and have stopped at one point or another. Now it may have been, hey, they did, uh, producer challenge with us
back in 2015 and then they came back, or something like that. So it may not be some longstanding mastermind or private client type relationship. But, you know, I think we miss the boat on this.

We think in terms of just, Hey, a relationship has to look this one way and, and we drive the bus. We’re the ones making the decision. But, I know over the
past few years we’ve had plenty of kind of topsy-turvy things happen in our lives from, from me selling off some business interests to moving houses and kids going off to college and Alex, getting sick and family losing family members and, and then all the stuff that everybody dealt with during the pandemic. And to think that everything should just stay status quo and just go uninterrupted is probably being oblivious to how human beings lives actually function. So my
recommendation to you, and, and it’s funny because I used to tell Holly this way. I mean, I’m talking 12, 13 years ago, I would tell her, Hey, when somebody cancels, give them a parting gift. Give them a body weight workout they can do on their own and say, Hey, I just wanna make sure you’re taken care of.

And first it will come across as a complete kind of pattern interrupt to what they’re expecting and what they’re used to, and it will leave that kind of positive, uh, feeling on that relationship as much as you can. Obviously some people leave for whatever reasons that are beyond our control, and maybe there isn’t a positive relationship to be had, but that’s you doing that because ultimately I mean, I think that it is, it’s the decision between, Hey, this person’s never gonna train with us, or This person’s just not gonna train with us right now. And if we have the op opportunity and we want to continue relationship with those people, then we
probably need to view it through that, not right now lens and treat people in a way that, hey, if timing is right later on, and if circumstances change that we’re the first people they think of, and we can continue to extend invitations, we can continue to check in and see how they’re doing with no business kind of
motive in play. And you’d be amazed at how much good that does for your business. And frankly, I mean, it may sound a little bit corny, but how much good it does for your soul to know that somebody may have depended on you to really make a change in their life during an important time and forever forward. You get to be viewed in a positive light and they’re gonna speak well of you and you’re gonna know you made a difference.

And frankly, for a lot of us, I think that’s a big driver in why we do what we do and how we operate. So don’t let you know the, the kind of status quo that a lot of people have fallen into thinking that unbroken memberships are the only measure of a relationship and that people should stay forever, or
you just write them off. Don’t let that stuff cloud why you’re actually doing this and the impact that you can have, and frankly, the positive that it can have on your business.

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