Fitness Business School – Unbundling Your Programs

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about how you can make more money by unbundling your 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.

The trend in the fitness industry has been to do more for less. And if you look back to when I first came into the fitness industry, the mainstream, kind of commercial side, big box health clubs were providing a ton of amenities and they were the linchpin of the business.

Fitness industry at the time, most trainers were centered there and training studios where these high end places that one on one stuff happen not too far into that camp start to started to happen. And that was a little bit of unbundling, right? Because most bootcamps in the beginning looked a lot like the group X classes that had been included in your membership when you were the big box health club.

Over time. The places like planet fitness came around and they drove prices down and made the health club market a little bit more of a commodity. And in the training world, the way that we’ve done some of what we do is we’ll say, okay, these franchises, they. We’re not going to compete with their fancy locations or the, the traffic counts that they’re getting for having class a real estate or the ad budget they have.

So we’ll just throw in more. And sometimes the benefit here is, you can get somebody into a program and then Incrementally sell them more of what they want or even what they need over time. But if you include it all in the beginning, there are a couple of obstacles, right? Like people don’t see it as having a specific value.

If they feel like it’s free, it’s included. A great example of this would be like nutrition coaching. And We don’t do a good job making it feel like this high value thing. So a lot of people will say, okay, come join my small group training program and we’ll include this and this. When, if we unbundle things both from A kind of, Hey, we’re including these other bonuses to sell this main thing.

We’re saying, Hey, you getting the nutrition coaching, it’s a bonus. We’re almost implying, Hey, this is less important. This is less valuable when the argument could easily be made. The nutrition coaching is going to have a bonus. Better or a more profound impact on body composition improvement than the actual training, unbundling that and selling that as a separate thing, I think is a big opportunity to make more money.

It’s a big opportunity to get more buy in. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t sell it at a discount to the people under your roof. I, for years I have sold, things like private coaching days or private coaching hours for a discount to existing clients over what they are sold to for the general public.

And I think that is the appropriate way to do that because if it’s included, it’s not valued as much. But because they’re a client, they get a preferred rate. It’s a little bit like for lack of a better way of putting it, like having a Costco membership or something, right? Like you, you have a membership, so you have access to these things.

So nutrition coaching is one way to do this, but other things that I think that we include a lot of the time, a transformation challenge. I, again, I think that we don’t need to include challenges because sometimes there’s a They need to have a little bit of skin in the game. They need to make a commitment to doing something over and above doing something different, doing something beyond what they’re normally doing.

And so we can unbundle this, we can sell this thing separately, but then we can sell it to a limited number of people outside the facility. We can certainly unbundle things. By month or by a week and sell people shorter experiences and not really think of them as a trial, right? Like it’s just, Hey, you’re going to go buy this thing.

And if you like it, then hopefully we’ll get you to do more of this thing. I think a lot of times we sell things with the entire focal point being set, being us wanting people to purchase. On our terms and in some ways. It makes sense, right? Because obviously we want to have everybody on a subscription if we can.

And understand this is somebody who like saying this, that I was arguably the biggest proponent of subscription memberships in the fitness, like in the personal training world that there was, I had people early on Thomas Plummer and Phil Kaplan telling me that wouldn’t work, that I was crazy. And. It made all the sense in the world that it would work.

But sometimes you go so far and you let the pendulum swing one way that you almost feel like, Hey, the only way that this works is if you approach it this way. And I don’t know that’s the case. I think that maybe we can sell people one time purchases or punch cards. If we’re hosting things, if we are running sessions and we can derive more value Money per hour more money per square foot for those sessions Then we should probably do that.

And if that allows somebody to experience what we offer in a simple way that makes it easier for people to get an experience and build a relationship and hopefully get a result, then. They’re more likely to stay, but even if they don’t stay, let’s say that somebody comes into your facility for six weeks, twice a year, and they pay you 199 for the six weeks.

So over the course of the year, that person adds 400 to your business. It’s not an insignificant amount of money. Sure. It’s not as much money as you’d like to have gotten. If that person would have been there Every week of the year, but that person, if they come see you for three years and just come to those two challenges, one in the kickoff of the year and one, maybe after kids go back to school, that’s 1, 200.

1, 200 is a pretty meaningful amount of money. And there are plenty of businesses. That’s. The annual value of a client. So just, I think it’s a different way to look at it. So how can you unbundle or maybe what can you unbundle? Let me give you some really practical examples. Like the first thing that you can do is unbundle the commitment, the term of commitment.

So you can say, Yes, you can come for the month and this is what we’re going to do for this month. You’re going to come for this many sessions or you’re going to have access for this many sessions. And if you want to tie it to a specific result, you could say, Hey, lose 10 pounds in 30 days, come in and feel 10 years younger in 30 days.

And you’re selling a program knowing that this is. a tryout for both parties. And if it’s a good fit, then hopefully that person stays. So we can sell it that way. You can unbundle the format of the commitment and say, you know what, here is a, an all access pass for 10 sessions. You can come 10 sessions at your discretion and maybe your average Client pays 15 a session.

So now you’re going to charge 20 or 25 for these sessions. So maybe it’s 200 or 250 for this, but somebody can use it at their discretion. It feels a little bit like the way that people for years sold training sessions, right? They sold a 12 pack, a 24 pack, something like that. So we can unbundle in those couple of ways.

We can unbundle the add ons or the bonuses, right? So the nutrition coaching, we can sell that as a separate offering. We can unbundle transformation challenges as a separate offering. And then the last one that I’ll throw out at you, and it’s probably one that most people don’t think about is we can just unbundle coaching hours because how often do you have clients that just want to Say, Hey, I’ve got a few questions or this or that.

And you can sell a package of, Hey, would you like four coaching hours? We can use it to teach new exercises. We can use it to problem solve. We can use it to map out a lifestyle plan at home, but you can just unbundle those hours that people get. Almost the assumption that, Hey, I’m just going to pay this one subscription and this person’s on call for me and they do whatever.

And. The reality is we teach people how to treat us. If we let people do that, if we create an environment where, yeah, we’ll reply to any text at any day, at any time, and we’ll. So be available for all these hours. If you look up, somebody didn’t pay 200, 200, 250, 300 for the month for access to a dozen training sessions.

They paid for the dozen training sessions and 90 minutes of private coaching and a nutrition for nutrition coaching sessions that were layered in or something like that. So if you want to generate more revenue from your business, if you want to do more, have more impact, which almost sounds counterintuitive, Hey, I’m going to make people pay for these other things.

I commit to a nutrition coaching program, I’m more likely to be compliant. I’m more likely to be successful. I’m more likely to actually finish the program. Same thing with the transformation challenge that if you just say it’s included and we’ve all experienced that. We’ve all had people get access to all sorts of things that they don’t use because it’s just not that important to them under those circumstances.

So if you want to make more money and have more impact, unbundling is a good idea. A really simple but underappreciated way to do that and grow your business.

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

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

One of of the things that we’ve been doing with our current clients is taking them through this Ideal Business diagnostic and really what it is, this checklist that allows you to pinpoint exactly what your business needs next so you can keep improving, keep growing, and build a business that you love to own, one that pays you well, one that allows you to have the impact you wanna have and one that allows you to have a lifestyle that you truly enjoy.

In this diagnostic, we walk through everything and we do an evaluation and can instantly pinpoint what you need to do next to build that business that you want. I’m going to extend this opportunity to get on with either me or my team and take you through this evaluation and fix your business’s most vital needs fast.

So if we take you through this, you’re gonna be able to make those vital changes that you need to finally have what I call your Ideal Business. If you’d be interested in going through this entirely free, risk-free diagnostic with us and learn what you already have in place, what you’re doing well and where are your greatest opportunities for rapid improvement are just shoot me an email with diagnostic in the subject line to [email protected].

Again, an email to [email protected] with diagnostic in the subject line will get
you scheduled and take you through this evaluation to help you build the business you want.