Fitness Business University Podcast

Click Here to learn more about how I help gym owners:
https://vincegabriele.com

20 years of owning a gym, and one thing I've learned is that being busy and knowing what you're doing are two very different things.

It's easy to get caught up in the day to day. You have a million things demanding your attention. Your staff needs answers. There are decisions to make. And somehow, with all that going on, you can still feel like you're not getting anywhere.

That's where clarity comes in. Not another complicated business strategy or another 50 things to add to your plate. I'm talking about getting a better understanding of where you are, where you're trying to go, and what actually deserves your attention.

Because, guys, sometimes the hardest part of running a business isn't doing the work. It's figuring out which work matters in the first place.

Click Here to learn more about how I help gym owners:
https://vincegabriele.com

Click Here to get free books and resources to grow your gym:
https://www.vincegabriele.com/

15% of one gym owner's customers came from BNI. I went to one BNI meeting years ago and hated it. Thought it was boring, weird, and had no interest in ever going back. So naturally, I just had Mike join one. I'll explain why.

Facebook ads are getting more expensive, the quality of leads is getting worse, and a lot of gym owners are sitting around wondering what happened. The funny thing is, some of the most successful guys I work with are getting new customers from places most gym owners wouldn't even think to look. Radio stations. Local newspapers. Networking groups. Stuff that sounds like it belongs in 1995.

In this one I walk Tom through what I'm actually seeing work. Not ideas I came up with sitting at my desk. Actual gym owners doing these things right now. One guy put together a giveaway with local businesses that ended up generating well over six figures in new business over the lifetime of the leads. Another made a local online newspaper his number one source of new customers. And I've got a couple in Massachusetts who went from $8,000 a month to over $80,000 a month and are now doing something pretty interesting with radio.

I also get into how we built our entire sports performance program by changing the way we approached sponsorships. Why I think a lot of gym owners are making a mistake with their Facebook lead forms. And what finally got me excited about our own gym's social media, which, if I'm being fair, was pretty bad for a long time.

5 Key Takeaways

• 15% of Tony's customers came from BNI, and I still don't like BNI. Tony is one of those guys who can walk into a room and talk to anybody. I'm not that guy. I went to one of these meetings and wanted nothing to do with it. But Tony told me that 15% of his current customers came from that networking group. That's a pretty significant number. So we had Mike join a local chapter. He might be pissed at me for it, but if it works, I don't really care. The bigger point is that sometimes the thing you personally hate doing is exactly what somebody else in your business should be doing.
• Bobby and Maria went from $8,000 a month to over $80,000 a month, and now they're doing radio. They own Big Day Fitness in Massachusetts and have done a phenomenal job growing their business. They've got two locations now, and they're testing something most gym owners wouldn't even consider. Instead of just buying commercials, they're going on local radio stations and getting interviewed as fitness experts. They're filming the interviews, cutting them into videos, and putting them on YouTube. The interesting part is that they're seeing more customers come in across all their marketing, not necessarily directly from the radio. And that's something I've been trying to get gym owners to understand for years. People usually need to see you in a bunch of different places before they finally make a decision.
• Devin Gage generated well over six figures in new business from a giveaway that didn't cost anybody anything to enter. He went around to local businesses and bought gift cards, roughly $50 or $100 each, and put them together into a massive community giveaway. Then he got the participating businesses to promote it to their customers. So instead of just advertising to his own audience, he had all these other businesses helping him reach people. The money came from following up with the people who entered, measured over their lifetime as customers. Devin actually came on one of our mastermind calls and spent about two hours walking us through how he did it. What I like about this is that he didn't invent some revolutionary new marketing strategy. He took a few old ideas and combined them into something that worked.
• Dustin made a local online newspaper the number one source of customers for his gym. He's in Kansas, and he's been writing a weekly fitness column in the Johnson County Post for years. He educates people, gives them something interesting to read, and includes an offer to come try his gym. That's it. He's been incredibly successful with it. And here's the mistake I think a lot of gym owners make. They'll say nobody reads newspapers anymore because they don't read newspapers. Tom brought up the same thing about radio. But you're not trying to market to yourself. I'm 47 years old now, which puts me right in the middle of our target market. I actually read the local newspaper. When I asked our own members whether they read a publication called Renna Media, they told me they read it cover to cover. So we started advertising in it.
• We built our entire sports performance program by changing what we asked for in sponsorship deals. Little League teams and local organizations would come to us asking for $250 to put our logo on a banner or the back of a shirt. I never thought that was a particularly good way to get customers. So instead of giving them exactly what they asked for, I'd offer them more money in exchange for three emails sent to their list with an offer from our gym. I'd even write the emails for them. All they had to do was copy and paste. At one point we had around eight of these annual sponsorships going at the same time, with promotional emails going out every quarter. That was how we built our GRIT sports performance program. The organization got the money it needed, and we got something a lot more valuable than our logo on an outfield fence.

Click Here to get free books and resources to grow your gym:
https://www.vincegabriele.com/

Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/

First solo episode in a while. I recorded this one outside walking around a field, so if you hear birds and a train going by, that is why.

I want to talk about going from six to seven figures, and I want to start by taking the air out of it. Over a decade ago I was one of the only gyms I knew doing seven figures. A buddy was so stunned by it that he talked me into starting a podcast with him called Million Dollar Gym. It did not last long. These days plenty of gyms are doing seven figures, and a lot of them are guys in my own mastermind who started at low six.

Here is my problem with the number. Saying you hit seven figures is an ego move. I have done it myself. If you do a million in revenue with high six figures in expenses, your profit is the same as the guy doing low six figures. You just built a bigger, louder, more stressful version of the same paycheck.

So this one is really about leveling up, which is the whole topic of our mastermind in Denver on November 13th and 14th. I walk through who is speaking, including Jason Marr, who went from zero to seven figures in 18 months when it took me five years, and the panel of gym owners I hand picked because they crossed seven figures with us and their lives actually got better because of it.

I also give away the part of the event I could not wait to share, which is the order these things have to happen in if you want to move fast.

5 Key Takeaways

• The best line I have heard on this came from my friend Nick Peterson. The mistake is confusing more for closer to what you want. Read it twice. The last thing I want is for you to come to an event about getting to seven figures and walk out building a gym that pushes you farther away from the life you actually want.
• A really high margin is often a warning sign, not a trophy. I visited a gym owner doing $60,000 a month with margins that were through the roof. He also had zero employees and was coaching 60 sessions a week. I asked him if he had time to go to the bathroom. If that is what somebody wants, fine. It is not the kind of life I want to help people build, because it ends in burnout and resentment and you miss a huge piece of your own life.
• Clarity, then certainty, then speed. In that order. It is hard to move fast when you are not sure what you should be doing, and it is impossible to be sure what you should be doing if you have no clarity on where you are right now. Most people are further from reality than they think. I asked a gym owner what he weighed and the real number turned out to be 40 pounds higher than what he told me. That is a clarity problem, and it shows up in the business the exact same way.
• The marketing plan that gets you to six figures will not hold seven, and churn is why. A gym with 300 clients at a 2% attrition rate is still losing six people every single month, and 2% is excellent. The bigger you get, the more people you have to replace just to stand still, which means you have to get better at marketing, not just busier.
• Decide on the life first, then price it, then go build the business that pays for it. People ask why I never opened multiple locations. My litmus test has been simple for six years now. Can I be done at 4:00 and take my son to jujitsu? Ten gyms would have made that harder and taken up more of my head than I was willing to give. That is my answer, not yours. Do the work to figure out what yours is.

Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/

Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/

Weird title, I know. Here is where it came from.

Back in 2019 I was coaching a lot of gym owners and almost all of it was built on assumptions. I would ask somebody a specific question about their numbers and nobody had the answer. It is the same thing we all deal with on the training floor. The client who is 40 pounds overweight tells you he eats eggs for breakfast and salad for lunch. Business owners do the exact same thing. They give you the highlights and leave the rest out.

So I went looking for a small group of brave people willing to open the whole thing up once a quarter. Financials, KPIs, team, org chart, all of it. That became the CEO Mastermind, and this is the first time I have ever talked about it publicly.

In this one I walk Tom through how it actually works. The 16 page document they have to fill out before every meeting. Why they have to print a copy for every other person in the room. What happens in the hour they spend in the hot seat. And the one thing I was certain would kill the whole idea, which has still never happened once in seven years.

I also get into why I almost refused to let one guy join, what he is doing now, and why the majority of people who ignored my advice about opening a second location ended up in trouble.

5 Key Takeaways

• The hardest part of the document is the part nobody else asks for. Every member copies and pastes their real profit and loss statement from their accountant, prints it, and hands it to all nine other people in the room. The first time I asked for that I could not believe I had the guts to do it. What it did was move the whole group off the bench press number. Revenue is top line chest beating. Profit is what you take home to your family. Those guys have gotten more profitable every year since because they know which number they have to stand behind in 90 days.
• Nobody has ever forgotten the document. Not one time in seven years and over 100 meetings. I was sure guys would have a bad quarter and conveniently leave it at home. Zero. The only people who miss are the ones who had a baby or a wedding.
• A guy came to me doing 10K a month and the cost of this group was 80% of his monthly revenue. I tried to talk him out of it. He insisted. He just reported $85,000 a month at his last meeting. He is an anomaly and I will say that plainly, but it is the reason I do not gate the room on revenue alone.
• The reason the room sees your business better than you do has nothing to do with being smarter. It is that they are not emotionally attached to it. When they tell you to raise your prices, Mrs. Johnson who has trained with you for 12 years never enters their head. When they look at your org chart, they see a wrong person in a wrong seat where you see a good dude who has worked hard for you. That is a board of directors, and almost no gym owner has one.
• Your KPIs tell you where the leak is and most owners are working on the wrong one. Guys walk in blaming their agency and their Facebook ads, and then somebody in the room points at the sheet and reads out that they converted 3% of their leads to a consult. If you have a 10% attrition rate you are not going to outmarket that. The financials tell you what already happened. The scoreboard tells you why.

Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/

Click Here to get a custom local marketing plan for your gym, completely free: https://www.vincegabriele.com/helpmemarket

Big Tom and I did something different this week. Instead of picking a topic, we took the questions straight from my SPF group. Five of them. All the same problems I hear every week on deep dives and coaching calls.

We start with pricing, because Mike Williams from Florida asked how often you should actually raise your rates. That turned into the bigger conversation about why gym owners refuse to do it. I just spent an hour on this with a gym owner from New Hampshire who was dead set against raising prices on current members. His reason had nothing to do with his business. It was that he did not want people to be upset with him while he was standing on the floor with them.

Then we get into the question four or five guys asked in different words: I have 13 employees, 12 of them are great, and one is making my life hell. I walk through the four people issues, and the one that is most common in our industry is the high performer everybody loves who is quietly poisoning your team.

From there it goes into when to hire your next trainer, how to build a scoreboard with only four numbers on it, and how to tell the difference between being busy and actually moving your business forward.

I also tell the story about the email I got two weeks ago. My dad’s municipal bond firm folded in the late 1980s. Forty years later, 40 to 60 people are still getting together for a reunion. Both of my parents who owned that company are dead and they are still doing it. That email made me take a hard look at the culture I have built, and I did not love what I saw.

5 Key Takeaways

• Your value judgment on price is irrelevant. Vanessa drove 45 minutes and paid $444 for our daughter’s first birthday cake. To me that makes no sense. To her it made perfect sense, and hers was the only opinion that mattered. The gym owner who will not raise his rates is pricing his gym out of his own wallet instead of his customer’s. One caveat: if you are sitting at 12% attrition, fix your churn before you touch price. You will make a bad problem much worse.
• There is no single right frequency on price increases. Two schools of thought. Cut deep and cut rarely, which is what we just did at GFP with a $50 per month increase, roughly 12%, and we will not do that again next year. Or build a smaller automatic bump into the membership agreement so every October it climbs 3% to 5%. Pick one. Just stop doing nothing while your rent and your payroll go up around you.
• When you have one problem employee out of 13, all your mental energy goes to that one person and the other 12 get taken for granted. Run them through the four people issues first. Right person right seat means invest harder in them, not ignore them. Right person wrong seat means find them a different spot. Wrong person right seat is the one that eats gyms alive, the coach the clients love who is a cancer behind the scenes. Do not fire that person on a Tuesday and watch your business implode. Fire him in your head today and build a 30, 60, and 90 day plan to absorb the damage before he actually walks. And the number one leadership tool you can own is a mirror.
• Stop waiting until you have enough clients to justify a hire. Bring on a part time trainer at $25 an hour, hand over 10 sessions a week, and that costs you about $1,000 a month. What you just bought is 40 hours of your own time. For most of you, three new customers covers that entire investment, and you only have to get those three once. You have 11 more months after that. If you cannot find three customers with 40 hours, the hire was never the problem.
• Your scoreboard only needs four numbers. Leads, consults or trials, new members, and attrition. Every one of them needs a weekly goal, because without a goal you are just reporting what happened and you have no idea whether you won. When a number is off track, ask one question. Why did this happen? Block 30 minutes, write the answer down, and commit to one action step. Not a full rebuild. One step, then check next week whether you actually did it.

Click Here to get a custom local marketing plan for your gym, completely free: https://www.vincegabriele.com/helpmemarket

Most gym owners are grinding on the wrong problem for the stage they are actually in. Take the 5 minute audit and find out what deserves your attention right now: https://fourstagesquiz.com/

Dustin Bogle is a former pro wrestler who trained in a backyard ring built by his buddy's dad. Those buddies turned out to be The Young Bucks. He wrestled for ten years, set himself a hard deadline of age 28, and when the big contract never came he walked away cold turkey and went all in on his gym.

What happened next is why I wanted him on. He opened six gyms in six years. He sold all six. Three of them are still running today and three are not, and he tells you exactly why. Then he moved into brokering and has now sold 30 gyms plus a handful of other businesses.

We get into the stuff nobody talks about on stage. The fight with his brother over a water jug delivery that ended their partnership. The cease and desist that forced him to rebrand a year in. The gym he opened in what the locals called leisure land, where every person walking past his window was 70 years old and headed to the deli next door. He had the money, he had the systems, and he still picked the wrong corner because he stopped knowing his market the way he knew his first one.

Then there is the part most of you need most. Dustin runs Gym Reinforcements, which does nothing but lead nurture, and they have collected $40 million for gym owners since 2020. He gives up his actual numbers and the exact mechanics behind them. If you are generating leads and nobody is showing up, this is the hour.

5 Key Takeaways

• Three of his six gyms survived and the difference came down to two words that both start with L: location and leadership. He had six gyms and hired maybe eight managers in that whole stretch, versus 50 trainers. He got world class at hiring coaches and never built the reps to hire leaders. One bad manager can kill a location on its own.
• His manager test is three questions. Do I trust this person with my keys, my cash, and my kids. Then: are they magnetic enough that my team and my clients crave being around them. Then: are they coachable, meaning do they actually act on what I tell them. He walked away from people who were great talkers but only closed the lay downs and refused to do follow up or ask for the sale.
• He moved six large group gyms to small group and raised the price from $49 a week unlimited to $89 a week for three sessions. He did not do it in one swoop. Year one was a hybrid where small group members got large group as a free add on while he quietly cut the boot camp schedule from six slots to three. Year two it was small group only. Yes he had churn. Revenue stayed flat or climbed and profit went up because every member was worth more.
• He built a free coaching pipeline out of two nearby colleges. Kinesiology students need 40 to 60 hours of field work to graduate, so he got on the department's approved vendor list and the head of kinesiology mass emailed every new student twice a year. Every fall and spring that handed him four to six intern coaches for six to eight weeks at no cost, and he hired a lot of them.
• A $10 charge to book the consult takes his show rate from 60% to 85%. He calls it a starting point session and it gets credited to the first month or refunded if it is not a fit. On top of that: at least eight appointment slots a day in 15 minute increments including weekends, a confirmation text that makes them reply with a Y instead of just reminding them, and a 30 to 60 second video sent after they confirm. He calls those trailers. The workout is the movie, and almost nobody sends the trailer.

Most gym owners are grinding on the wrong problem for the stage they are actually in. Take the 5 minute audit and find out what deserves your attention right now: https://fourstagesquiz.com/

Find out what stage your gym is in and exactly what to focus on right now. Takes 5 minutes: https://www.fourstagesquiz.com/

Some of the advice killing gym owners sounds perfectly reasonable. Never raise your members’ rates. Open another location. Copy the model that’s working for somebody else.

Tom and I break down the advice owners need to stop following, and why even good advice can be wrong for your business right now.

Tom starts with one that a lot of trainers hear: you’re great at this, you should open your own gym. But loving coaching doesn’t mean you’ll love managing staff, handling schedules, learning marketing, and running a business. He lived that himself.

Then we get into the promise I’ve spent years helping owners unwind: “I’ll never raise your rates.” Your costs keep going up, but you’ve decided your prices can’t. A financially healthy gym can hire better people, deliver a better service, and stay open. That helps your members too.

We also talk about copying somebody else’s model. Just because someone is crushing it with 30-minute sessions or a six-week challenge doesn’t mean switching your entire business over will produce the same result. You need to understand why it works and whether it fits your business.

The biggest conversation is about opening a second location. I’ll own this: earlier in my consulting career, I pushed growth harder than I focused on the life somebody actually wanted. I look at that differently now.

I share the advice Seth Godin gave me when I was considering a second gym, and why that conversation led me to build this coaching business instead. Being able to expand doesn’t automatically mean it’s the right move for you.

We finish with two more traps: using AI to replace the relationships that make your gym valuable, and expecting one online funnel to handle all your marketing. Use the tools. But keep showing up in your community and give yourself more than one way to get customers.

The 5 Biggest Takeaways

• Being a great trainer doesn’t mean you should own a gym. Coaching clients and running a business require different skills. Make sure you actually want the job you’re building for yourself.
• Promising never to raise rates puts your business at risk. Your costs won’t stay the same forever. Your pricing needs to support a healthy business that takes care of its members, staff, and owner.
• Someone else’s winning model might be wrong for your gym. Don’t overhaul your business because somebody is selling a new approach. The advice needs to fit your stage, your business, and the life you want.
• Get better before you get bigger. Before opening a second location, make sure the first has healthy profits, consistent growth, clear leadership, repeatable systems, and reliable lead generation and retention.
• Technology can’t replace relationships or a well-rounded marketing plan. Use AI as a tool, keep showing up in your community, and don’t depend on one funnel to bring in every customer.

The point is to build a business that gives you the life you want. Get clear on what that looks like, understand the stage you’re in, and focus on what actually moves you forward.

Find out what stage your gym is in and exactly what to focus on right now. Takes 5 minutes: https://www.fourstagesquiz.com/

Find out what stage your gym is in and exactly what to focus on right now. Takes 5 minutes: https://www.fourstagesquiz.com/

Quick one today. The new book is close to done and it has a new title.

It was originally The Four Stages of Fitness Business Success, which sounds terrible once you say it out loud. Then I sat down at a seminar next to the book editor for all of Tim Ferriss' books and he spent an hour with me on titles.

New title: The Four Stages of Gym Business Mastery.

Tagline: escape the training floor, join the seven figure club, and build a gym that runs without you.

Here's why the book exists. I spent most of my life as a business owner not knowing what I should be doing, and that not knowing created enormous stress. What I secretly wanted was for somebody to just tell me what to do today.

The worst stretch was stage two. I finally had a few trainers, I wasn't running every session, and I had some freedom. And the freedom was more painful than the grind because I felt useless. I sat at my desk with my head in my hands wondering what I was supposed to do next. That's the book I wish somebody had handed me.

Each stage has three things to focus on. Not to be a better trainer. To win at that stage in both money and time, and to move toward the next one if you want it.

I also built a quiz that tells you which stage you're in right now based on my criteria, and then sends you a series of emails on what to focus on for that stage. These aren't marketing emails. They're long and they each include a case study from someone I coached who got through that exact stage.

I'm also picking five people at random from everyone who takes the quiz and shipping them an advance hardcover of the book before it's released.

One more thing. Gym owners get on calls with me and talk about the wrong things constantly. I had a stage one owner doing $15K a month who only wanted to talk about the app he was building. He has 20 clients. He needs customers, not a custom app. That's the whole point of this book. It grabs you by the cheeks and says no, not that, do this instead.

Find out what stage your gym is in and exactly what to focus on right now. Takes 5 minutes: https://www.fourstagesquiz.com/

If you need help and you'd like to reach out to Vince personally, send an email to him directly at vince@gabrielefitness.com

Last year I hired Dax Moy. I'd just sold a company, my mom was in the thick of being very ill, and I wanted to take my consulting business to the next level. I'd had business coaches for two decades at that point. What I realized was that the thing standing between me and the next level wasn't more knowledge. It was my development as a leader and as a man.

Dax is a former British soldier who joined the army at 16, went airborne, then commando, then Special Operations as a reservist. He became the highest paid personal trainer in the UK within 18 months and stayed there for about 20 years. Then he got caught in the 2004 tsunami in Thailand with his family, spent hours in the water doing CPR and carrying bodies, and developed PTSD years later. Sleeping an hour and a half per week. None of the positive thinking material he'd built a career on helped him. So he went into neuroscience looking for an operating manual for the brain.

He calls himself a guru. Not the way people use it as an insult, but the actual Sanskrit meaning: someone who moves you from darkness toward light.

This is a conversation about identity, and it's the reason my faith went from something I'd been half in and half out of my whole life to something that's now part of who I am.

5 Key Takeaways:

• Your brain is a pattern recognition machine. It uses patterns to create predictions, predictions to create responses, and responses to shape outcomes. Anxiety from a neuroscience standpoint is just threat, and threat is a lack of prediction or a bad prediction. Stop making things up, improve the quality of your prediction, and your anxiety comes down. You don't need affirmations. You need to give your brain what it actually wants.
• Certainty does not come from out there. Most people try to get it from the economy, the president, the market, their lead flow. That's the least predictable place to look. Real certainty comes from identity. The question isn't what's going to happen. It's who am I going to be while it happens.
• Define, refine, align. Most people chase success without ever defining what the word means to them. Dax spent over two months with me on beliefs alone. Define what the thing is. Refine what it is not. Align on what it looks like when you're living it out loud. And Dax has a clearer picture of what success will never look like for him than what it will.
• Write your success definition so it's fully under your control. Mine used to be "I have a really good marriage." I can't control that. Two people are involved. Now it reads "I'm prioritizing my marriage with Vanessa and giving her love, safety, and attention without being critical and having unfair expectations." Every piece of that is mine to control.
• When you're lost, stand still, then go back to your last known location. That's military navigation and it applies to everything. Most people resist it because it feels like going backwards. Dax distinguishes ego from vanity here: ego says we shouldn't be here, let's turn around. Vanity says we've come this far, what would everyone think if we went back. A lot of gym owners stopped doing the thing that was working and never went back to find out why.

If you need help and you'd like to reach out to Vince personally, send an email to him directly at vince@gabrielefitness.com

If you need help and you'd like to reach out to Vince personally, send an email to him directly at vince@gabrielefitness.com

I'm four hours into a ruck in the Watchung Reservation training for the Grand Canyon, and I'm not talking about business today. I'm talking about your marriage. Or your significant other. Which I'd argue is the most important business relationship you have.

I told the story I've never told publicly. Vanessa and I separated six months after we got married. She moved back to California. I mailed the divorce papers. They went to the wrong address and she never received them. We were apart for eight months and I was done. Both of us found God in our own way during that stretch, and that's what brought us back. We just celebrated 19 years and we're happier than we've ever been.

I said a bunch of things in these woods I probably shouldn't have. I told you how I compared my wife to my mother for years and how awful that sounds out loud. I told you I'm a judgmental prick and that it took my mom passing for me to see that every quality I loved most in her lives in my wife. Recorded this fully expecting to delete it.

5 Key Takeaways:

• Everyone has two lists. There's a list of qualities about a person that aren't great, and a list of qualities that are incredible. Everyone has both, including you. One of the secrets to a good marriage is deciding which list you focus on. I spent years on the wrong one.
• Marriages cycle through harmony, disharmony, and repair. Justin Rabinowitz gave me that. We sat in disharmony for a long stretch early on. Knowing the cycle exists changes how you handle it, because you stop believing the bad season is the permanent state.
• Men need freedom. Women need safety. Tony Robbins made this point at Date With Destiny and it landed for both of us because we were in the room together. When Vanessa tells me to go, that gives me freedom, and it makes me want to do everything I can to make her feel safe. Learning it together is what made it stick. If I'd come home and told her about it, it would have meant nothing.
• Happy couples expect nothing but owe everything. That's Andy Stanley. It can't be tit for tat. It can't be "if you give me freedom, I'll give you safety." It has to be I give you safety, I give you safety, I give you safety.
• Your kids are watching what you do, not listening to what you say. The number one thing you can do as a father is show your kids how much you love your wife. I do sweaty kisses after every workout. They groan. But they've never once had to be told that exercise matters.

The gym owners who come to me with problems at home almost always have problems in the business too. So investing in that relationship is investing in your company, though that's not the reason to do it.

If you need help and you'd like to reach out to Vince personally, send an email to him directly at vince@gabrielefitness.com

Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th:
https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

This is my full talk from the Perform Better Summit. Six profit levers you can pull to make more money in your gym starting Monday.

Here's the number that bothers me. The average gym does $300,000 in gross revenue at about a 20% margin. That's $60,000 to the owner. For what you people do, that's not good enough. My goal for everyone I work with is $200,000 a year in personal income, and I don't think that's unreasonable.

I opened by telling the room how I got here. I was a 300 pound washed up offensive lineman who moved to San Diego, worked for Todd Durkin, and ground out 60 sessions a week making what an entry level teacher makes. Then I opened my own gym and went broke. I had to sit down with my dad and tell him I didn't think I could do this. He told me I'd proven I was a great trainer and hadn't proven anything about running a business. So I went and learned the business.

5 Key Takeaways:

• Price is the fastest lever and it's not close. Your value judgment does not matter. Only your customer's does. My wife bought a $474 birthday cake for our one year old and it made no sense to me, but she was the buyer. I raised prices $49 across the board on clients who have been with me for 19 years. A guy stuck at $13K was 12 months away from $20K based on his churn and acquisition. We raised prices $40 on every member and he got there in two months. One letter, one decision.
• Only 15% of your future buyers purchase in the first 100 days. The other 85% buy over the next 100 weeks. So the question isn't just what your 21 day follow up looks like. It's what you're doing for the next 100 weeks. Three emails a week, always with a call to action, always relevant, and no AI slop. Find your own voice and build a relationship.
• Referrals are free customers worth $7,234 each. That's my actual lifetime value: 19.5 months at $371 a month. So when someone sends me a client, what did that cost me? Nothing. The mindset shift changes how you treat the person who sent them. And make it easy to refer. HelloFresh sent my wife a text she could forward to a friend for a free box. Don't ask people to bring a friend. Hand them a free 30 day membership to give away so they show up as the hero.
• An ounce of personalization is worth a pound of automation. I wrote out the exact letter my jiu jitsu instructor would need to send to get me to come back after quitting twice. It takes responsibility for putting me in the wrong class, offers a new path, and connects it to my son training there. Compare that to "we miss you at the gym." Send 10 personal reach outs a month to past members. That's 120 attempts a year at almost zero cost.
• Fill the seats you already have. Four people per session at $50 is a $416,000 business. Add one more person per session and it's $520,000. That's $104,000 more with zero increase in cost. Pure profit. I took my kids to Medieval Times and Madison Square Garden and there wasn't an empty seat in either place. They're masters of capacity. Why aren't we? Also: an empty spot costs you more than someone using it for free, because free means opportunity.

Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th:
https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

Last week to grab your seat. 85% of your future customers are already on your list, and I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

I fly to St. Louis to see my cardiologist. I live 20 miles from five of the best hospitals in the world and I get on a plane to Missouri. Tom asked me why, and the answer turned into this whole episode.

Back in 2017 I got a CAC score that put me in the 95th percentile of calcified plaque for my age. A local cardiologist told me to go on a statin. I was a young fitness guy so I told him he was crazy. He threatened to put a stent in me right there. So I went and found a second doctor. Then I kept looking until somebody told me what I wanted to hear.

I spent years uncertain. Working out and feeling something in my chest and wondering. Then I read a line in The Magic of Thinking Big that changed it: when you're struggling with a decision, go find the best expert you can find and make their opinion final. Stop searching. So I called Charlie Weingroff, asked who my guy was, and got on a plane.

Nothing much changed in the treatment. What changed was my mind. The uncertainty went away.

That's exactly what a business coach does. Tom and I break down the four reasons to have one, how to tell if the person selling you coaching is full of it, and the mistakes I've made hiring the wrong ones.

5 Key Takeaways:

• Certainty is what you're actually buying. The number one thing gym owners struggle with is feeling stressed and uncertain. Am I on the right track? Should I open another location? A coach doesn't have to know everything. Sometimes an outside voice is enough to stop you from stewing on a problem for six months. And when the owner is stressed, the whole team feels it.
• Speed is the second thing. There are guys I've coached who probably would have gotten there without me. G-Man says it all the time: he stood on the shoulders of giants. He's 30 with young kids living a life most 40 year olds are still trying to build. He might have figured it out on his own. It just would have taken another five or ten years.
• Blind spots are called blind spots for a reason. Keith Cunningham says the best question you can ask yourself is "what don't I see?" Most people won't open that can. When I do consulting days, the thing I spot is often so obvious it's laughable, and they look at me like a genius. It has nothing to do with me. It's that I'm not emotionally invested in the day to day of their business.
• Find the people who will give you a real reality check. I visited a gym owner recently who was struggling in stage one and overweight, and the reality check he needed had nothing to do with his business. Nobody on his staff will ever tell him that. I've got a coach right now who's been very complimentary and I don't like it. I need to know where I'm screwing up.
• Four ways to vet a coach. Get a referral from someone you trust who knows that world. Consume their free content until trust is built before you pay a dime. Make sure they've actually done what you want to do. And look for proof beyond themselves, specifically longevity in their clients, not "444 leads in 30 days." I look for people who've been in a group for a decade, because that means there's real depth of knowledge, not just one play.

Last week to grab your seat. 85% of your future customers are already on your list, and I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

85% of your future customers are already on your list. I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865.
https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

I visited three gyms in one day and every single one was at a different stage of business. One was doing $10K a month. One was doing $25K. One was building an organization. And every one of them was asking me about the wrong thing.

The guy at $10K wanted to talk about where to move his equipment. He has 20 members. He should be making phone calls, not rearranging dumbbells. I see this constantly right now with AI. Gyms with 20 members spending half their day building tools in Claude instead of going out and getting customers.

It's the same thing I'm seeing coaching fifth grade football right now. We've got 25 plays installed and these kids can't get into a stance. We should have four plays and spend 95% of our time on the basics. Business is no different.

Tom and I break down the four stages of a gym business and exactly what you should be focused on at each one. Nothing else. Just the fundamentals that actually move you to the next level.

5 Key Takeaways:

• Stage one has three jobs and that's it. Deliver an experience so good your churn rate is impeccable. Get to a critical mass of customers. And get yourself in shape, because your energy is what attracts people. Everything else is a distraction. If you can't afford to hire anyone, you're stuck doing every session yourself forever, and that's how gym owners burn out and quit.
• Stage two is a people business. Find good people, train them, and build a culture around defined core values. Every bad trainer we ever hired came from a rushed hire where we needed somebody so we just got somebody. And don't try to hire another you. Look for someone who shares your character qualities, not your personality.
• Get to 80% and make the call. Arthur Brooks took this from the Marines. The gap between 80% and 100% certainty won't change your decision, but the time you spend chasing it will cost you months. Same applies to training your staff. Shoot for them being 80% as good as you, not 100%.
• In stage three, you have to give up owning every seat. Mark O'Donnell put our org chart on the board and asked who owns each seat. The answer was Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince. That was the problem with the business. You can be responsible for results without doing the work, but you can't be the answer to every question and grow past $50K a month.
• Stage four is defined by your involvement, not your locations. Gabriele Fitness has one location and is a stage four business because I have almost zero involvement. Most clients don't even know I'm the owner. The requirement is one competent point person running the facility who owns the results and the PNL. No general manager, no stage four.

85% of your future customers are already on your list. I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865.
https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

How to make $865.38 per hour writing emails. Full workshop September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026

Here's a study that will change how you think about your leads. When someone opts in with a company, roughly 50% of them will eventually buy. But only 15% of those buyers purchase in the first 100 days. The other 85% buy over the next 100 weeks.

Read that again. Most gym owners have a system for the 15% and nothing for the 85%. They hammer a lead for 21 days, get no response, and write them off as dead. Those aren't dead leads. They just haven't bought yet.

In this episode, Tom and I break down what to actually do with that 85%. The short version: get in their inbox consistently and build the relationship until they're ready. Three emails a week, 200 words each, call to action in the PS. Bobby and Maria from Big Day Fitness did exactly this after taking my email workshop and got 12 to 13 new customers last year from emails alone. At $5,000 lifetime value each, that's $60,000 for writing a few hundred words a week.

I'm teaching the full system on September 11th. This is my fourth email workshop and I believe it's the most important one I've ever done. I'm bringing in Doberman Dan, a legend in direct response who actually lived with Gary Halbert in Costa Rica and now coaches me personally. Ben Stocks is teaching Facebook ad copy. And I'm covering print marketing, because one newspaper ad at my gym has produced over $60,000 in lifetime client value this year.

I chose September 11th on purpose. My dad, sister, and brother in law all worked in the World Trade Center. That day hit close to home. Stephen Siller was a 34 year old FDNY firefighter who had just gotten off the late shift when he heard about the first plane. He turned around, grabbed his gear, found the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel closed, strapped his equipment to his back, and ran three miles through it on foot to the towers. He never came home. He left behind his wife Sally and five children. The Tunnel to Towers Foundation his family created provides mortgage free homes to families of fallen first responders, Gold Star families, and catastrophically injured veterans. 25% of the proceeds from this workshop go to them.

5 Key Takeaways:

• Your dead leads aren't dead. They're just early. 85% of the people who will eventually buy from you do it over the following 100 weeks, not the first 100 days. If your only system is a 21 day follow up sequence, you're throwing away the majority of your future customers.
• Three emails a week is the sweet spot for a gym. 200 words. Curiosity plus useful in the subject line. Call to action in the PS. That's the whole formula. Commit to it for 90 days before you decide whether it works.
• Nobody is thinking about you as much as you think they are. Gym owners don't email because they're afraid of being annoying. When someone unsubscribes, they're not at home plotting against your business. They just unsubscribed. And they probably weren't going to buy anyway.
• Stop swinging for grand slams. Derek Jeter never hit a grand slam in his entire career. Most of your emails will get crickets and that's fine. You're hitting singles. Bobby and Maria got 12 customers worth $60,000 from consistent emails, not from one home run.
• Know, like, trust is the sequence and email is how you move people through it. Vince has never met Arthur Brooks but trusts him enough to buy any book he releases, all from consuming his emails and content. You can build that same trust with someone who has never set foot in your gym.

12 customers. $60,000 in lifetime value. From emails.

I'm teaching the entire system on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026

Losing clients faster than you can replace them? Book a free Gym Clarity Call and we'll help you stop the bleeding:
https://gymclaritycall.com/

Your best marketing asset isn't marketing. It's your retention rate.

Here's the math that should change how you think about this. A gym with 100 clients at a 3% attrition rate needs six new clients a month to add 36 members this year. That same gym at 6% attrition needs twelve. Same growth, double the work. Most gyms can get six clients in their sleep.

Twelve means spending money, spending time, and praying you don't have an off month.

And a 1% drop in attrition on a 100 member gym at $500 a month is an extra $23,000 a year. That's one less person leaving per month. Little hinges swing big doors.

In this episode, Tom and I break down the critical event in your business and the two biggest levers that protect it: your staff and your training system. This is part one of two. Part two covers client relationships, which might be the biggest piece of the whole thing.

5 Key Takeaways:

• The critical event in your business is the exchange between your coach and your client. The CEO of Home Depot flies around the country to watch the interaction between the guy in the orange apron and the customer because he calls that the critical event. Ours is the hour a client spends with a trainer. Screw that up and nothing else matters. Not your marketing, not your Instagram, not your funnel.
• Hire people your clients actually want to spend an hour with. That's the simplest culture fit test there is. If a client is calling to find out when a certain trainer is working so they can avoid that shift, that trainer isn't going to make it and neither is your retention rate. Hire for character. You can teach someone to coach a squat.
• Burnout is the silent killer of good coaches. Split days six days a week, an hour long commute, and pay that doesn't match the market will destroy a great trainer's energy within a year. Manage their schedule like a pitching rotation. Pay them fairly and beat them to the punch on raises. The people who ask for raises are usually the ones doing a bad job.
• Your program has to do no harm first and match your market second. If you're training 50 year olds and your system is built like a college football program, people are going to get hurt and hurt people cancel memberships. Run every exercise through the filter: what is this actually going to do to this person? Are you really such a bad coach that you can't get someone strong without a straight bar deadlift?
• Measure the energy on your floor. We created something called the PEL score (Positive Energy Level) where we'd rate coaches on a scale of one to ten based on the vibe they created. This isn't about being a cheerleader or breaking it down at the end of a session. It's body language, tone of voice, and whether they're engaged or leaning on the equipment with hands in their pockets. Clients feel that the second they walk in.

Losing clients faster than you can replace them? Book a free Gym Clarity Call and we'll help you stop the bleeding:
https://gymclaritycall.com/

Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026

This is the full recap of the SPF Mastermind weekend. Over 100 gym owners in the room, another 50 on Zoom, two full days of talks, and a barbecue at my house. Tom and I break down every major theme so you get the highlights whether you were there or not.

The overarching concept was the Anti-Fragile Gym. Not just surviving uncertainty but getting stronger from it. I walked through the Kintsugi model, which is Japanese pottery where the cracks are filled with gold because the value is in where you were broken. Then we got into the business side: eliminating single points of failure, financial fragility, differentiation in the AI economy, and why the gym of the future is actually a retention focused company, not an AI company.

Devin Gage delivered a keynote on leadership that I called one of the best leadership talks happening anywhere in the world that day. Leo dropped a full AI toolkit workshop. Dustin Yancey taught his online newspaper column strategy that generates 50+ clients a year. And Charlie Weingroff closed the weekend reminding everyone in the room why the product is the thing that matters most.

5 Key Takeaways:

• The number one chokehold on your business is still the psychology of the owner. Thoughts create emotions. Emotions create actions. That's your life. There are two voices in your head: the boss voice and the bitch voice. The game changer is learning to hear the bitch voice and not believe it, not react to it. Like the final scene in Beautiful Mind where he sees the hallucinations walking next to him and doesn't flinch.
• The four quarter day will change how you handle bad days. Break your day into four quarters. If something terrible happens at 7am, you've got three more quarters to win. Win three out of four and you had a winning day. It's the same concept as "just make it to the next meal" that gets guys through Navy SEAL training. Stop writing off entire days because of one bad hour.
• The gym of the future is a retention focused company, not an AI company. AI is a tool for the back end of your business. It does not replace the critical event, which is the exchange between your coach and your client. The gyms that win in the next three to five years will be the ones that do real life community, real relationships, and real coaching better than everyone else. Be the company that doesn't automate the human part.
• If you can't explain what makes your gym different in 30 seconds, you have a problem. I asked 100 gym owners to raise their hand if they could. Seven hands went up and none of them wanted to get called on. AI is going to level the playing field on content, ads, and marketing. If you can't differentiate, you're just another gym. Pick one: a unique selling proposition, your three uniques, or a unique mechanism. Just pick one and own it.
• Email is the most underutilized asset in your business. You've already paid for the leads. They're sitting on a list. All you have to do is write 300 to 500 words, put a call to action at the end, and cast the pole in the water. You're not swinging for grand slams. You're hitting singles. Tom had a member sign up after reading his emails for three years. That only happened because the pole was in the water every single week.

Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026

Join us at the Gym of the Future Live Event on July 17th and 18th in Berkeley Heights, NJ. In person and virtual tickets available:
https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/gym-of-the-future/

Quick episode while I'm waiting outside jiu jitsu. The SPF Mastermind meeting is a week away and I wanted to break down exactly what we're covering and why this one matters.

The theme is the Gym of the Future. And before you think this is all AI and robots, it's not. My opening talk is about the things you need to stop ignoring and start doing better. Not what to add. What to improve. And the number one thing I'm going to prove with a full slide deck is that your retention rate is the single most important thing in your business for the next three to five years. A gym with 6% attrition loses 72 people a year.

A gym with 3% loses 36. That's half the marketing budget, half the stress, and twice the growth with the same number of new members coming in.

AI can't replace the critical event in our business: the exchange between your coach and your client. That's the thing. That's the whole thing. Everything else supports it. So we're going to talk about what needs to get better around that core.

Here's the full lineup.

Day one starts with me on stage all morning covering what gym owners need to focus on in the next three to five years to actually thrive. Then Devin Gage takes the keynote slot talking about leadership at every stage of business, from $20K a month to $100K plus, because the leadership your gym needs changes as you grow. He's opened nine gyms in three years and is on his way to 100. Then we do the What's Working Now group exercise where 100+ gym owners in the room share the best strategies producing results right now.

Day two opens with Tom Leonardis going boots on the ground with a full AI toolkit workshop showing you the specific tools you can use in your business today. Then Dustin Yancey takes the stage to break down how he's gotten 50 to 60 new clients from writing a column in his local online newspaper. We close with a 90 day planning session and the day two keynote: Charlie Weingroff. If you're bringing staff, his two hours alone will make them exponentially better coaches. That's not an exaggeration.

Friday night we do a barbecue at my house. Virtual attendees get the recordings. In person attendees get to meet Big Tom.

Join us at the Gym of the Future Live Event. In person and virtual tickets available:
https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/gym-of-the-future/

Join us at the Gym of the Future Live Event on July 17th and 18th in Berkeley Heights, NJ. Charlie Weingroff, Devin Gage, Joe Hashey, and Vince on stage. https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/gym-of-the-future/

Your most valuable list isn't on Facebook. It's every person who ever paid you and left. And if you've been in business for more than a few years, that list is in the thousands.

We did the math on Gabriele Fitness. 19 years, an average of 175 members, roughly 4% monthly churn. That's thousands of people who have walked through our doors, paid us, liked what we did, and left for reasons that had nothing to do with us. If we can get half a percent of them back in a year, that's a new customer every single month at zero acquisition cost.

Tom and I break down how to build a reactivation system that runs consistently, the psychology behind why past members are embarrassed to come back, and the specific strategies that are working right now. I also share the exact letter my jiu jitsu instructor would need to write to get me to come back after quitting three times.

5 Key Takeaways:

• People don't leave because they hate your gym. They leave because life gets in the way, they got hurt, or things got stale. None of those reasons are permanent and none of them mean they wouldn't come back if you asked. The problem is you're not asking. Build a monthly process of reaching out to 10 to 15 past members with personal texts, not template blasts.
• Your past members are embarrassed, not angry. I've quit jiu jitsu three times. I desperately want to go back but I'm embarrassed to walk in the door. Your past members feel the exact same way about your gym. They gained back the weight, they fell off the routine, and they don't want to face the people they quit on. Your job is to take away that embarrassment and give them a reason to come home.
• Take some responsibility in the reactivation message. The most powerful thing my sensei could say to me is "When you came in last time, I put you in the wrong class. That was on me. Here's what I'd do differently this time." That acknowledgment changes everything. It takes the blame off them and gives them a new path forward.
• Don't let people go easily. Before someone cancels, have a real conversation. We created the Wall Street Program because guys were saying they didn't have time. So we built an 8:30pm session and a Saturday morning session specifically for them. Sometimes the solution is simpler than you think. And sometimes you just need to tell someone "If you leave, you're never coming back. I'm just being honest with you."
• This should be a built in system, not a panic move. Reactivation is not something you do when leads are down. It's something you do every single month regardless of how many new leads are coming in. Your defense should score points. These are the most qualified leads on the planet because they've already paid you, they already know your coaches, and they already trust your product.

Join us at the Gym of the Future Live Event on July 17th and 18th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/gym-of-the-future/

Register for the 3 Hour Marketing Masterclass on June 30th at 12pm Eastern ($1 to reserve, only 50 spots):
https://www.vincegabriele.com/june2026masterclass/

Most gym owners get referrals by accident. A client mentions your gym to a friend, the stars align, and someone signs up. That's great. But you can't run a business on things that happen by accident.

Tom and I break down the difference between accidental and orchestrated referrals and give you every strategy that's actually producing referrals right now at Gabriele Fitness and across the SPF Mastermind. This isn't theory. One gym owner got 24 new clients last year just from doing Bring a Friend Week every month at zero cost. Our March Madness internal challenge generated 15 referrals in a single month. And none of it requires you to beg anyone for anything.

5 Key Takeaways:

• Referrals are the thumb of the marketing glove. You need multiple ways to get new clients (Facebook ads, email, social media, website) but referrals are the strongest because they convert at the highest rate, cost nothing to acquire, and those clients tend to refer others. If you have 100 members, you should be getting at least 20 referrals per year. If you're not, something is off with your product or your process.
• People refer to elevate their own status, not to do you a favor. When your client sends a friend to your gym and that friend has a great experience, your client's status goes up in that relationship. They look like the person who knows the best spots. Stop thinking of referrals as asking for a favor and start understanding the psychology behind why people actually do it.
• Bring a Friend Week is the simplest orchestrated referral strategy you can run. Send three emails, put up some flyers, tell your members at class. Even if you get one new member from it, you spent nothing and gained a client worth $5,000 to $6,000 in lifetime value. Do it quarterly at minimum. The gym owner doing it monthly got 24 clients a year from this one strategy alone.
• Build referral generation into your internal challenges and events. March Madness at Gabriele Fitness is a point system where members earn points for bringing referrals. 40 to 50% of members participate. We got 15 referrals the first year and 11 the second. Themed bring a friend classes (nurses, firefighters, spouses on Valentine's Day) reduce intimidation and make it easier for members to invite specific people.
• The point of sale referral is your biggest window. When someone signs up, your business is on the top of their mind more than at any other time. Give them a physical card (we use a black metal card) with a free 30 day membership they can gift to a friend. They become the hero, not the beggar. The second window is the first sign of success: when they lose their first 10 pounds or hit a PR, that's when you ask.

Register for the 3 Hour Marketing Masterclass ($1 to reserve, 50 spots):
https://www.vincegabriele.com/june2026masterclass/

Register for the 3 Hour Marketing Masterclass on June 30th at 12pm Eastern ($1 to reserve your seat, only 50 spots): https://www.vincegabriele.com/june2026masterclass/

I just got back from hiking the highest mountain in Colorado at 14,440 feet. We summited, ran low on water, lost the trail, and spent three hours walking across the top of a mountain range with no path. And I didn't panic. That's not because I'm some tough guy. It's because I've spent years training my mind for uncertainty through meditation and experience.

That's what being a business owner is. It's signing up for a long run of uncertainty. And the better you can handle it, the more successful you're going to be.

After 19 years as a gym owner and a decade coaching gym owners, I know the number one thing that creates that uncertainty: marketing. Most gym owners started as trainers. They know their stuff on the floor. They can even sell from personality alone. But when it comes to lead generation, getting new customers in the door, and knowing where your next 10 members are coming from, that's where the anxiety lives.

The fix is developing marketing as a skill set. Not leaning on AI to create slop. Not hoping referrals will carry you forever. Actually learning the principles.

That's why I'm doing a 3 hour marketing masterclass on June 30th at noon Eastern. This is not a quick fix webinar. This is an immersion. Lead generation, conversion, and pricing. Plus two bonus sessions with playbooks: Carly Fernald is breaking down the Summer Slim Down campaign that just signed up 141 customers across three New York gyms, and Tom Leonardis is teaching his AI follow up system that reduces no shows and increases your close rate.

50 spots. $1 to reserve your seat. $49 billed 24 hours after the event. Show up, and if you think it wasn't worth it, email me and I won't charge you.

Register for the 3 Hour Marketing Masterclass ($1 to reserve, 50 spots):
https://www.vincegabriele.com/june2026masterclass/