3 Ways To Increase Your Monthly Revenue in 30 Days with Marcel Petitpas, Parakeeto

• Who is Marcel Petitpas and what is Parakeeto? [3:00]
• Optimize Your Profitability: The Agency Profit Podcast. [3:57]
• How to maximize your revenue potential when you’re constrained by time and space. [5:05]
• Unit Economics…Explained.[9:00]
• The million dollar logo and value-based pricing. [12:10]
• Zone in on your onboarding and follow-up process. [17:30]
• It’s about the process, man!  [22:35]
• Create a consistent experience. Be predictable. [24:00]
• Let’s get tactical. Next 30 days. [29:45]

Dan Uyemura [0:05]
Welcome to The gymOS Podcast. I’m your host Dan Uyemura, CEO of PushPress. Each episode I bring the best and the brightest in the business world straight to your gym and we tease out actionable steps and strategies that you can implement immediately become a better business owner. And on today’s episode, we got Marcel Petitpas Marcel is the CEO and co founder of a company called Parakeeto, which is a service business that helps digital agencies run more profitably. He’s also the head Strategic Coach for my business mentor Dan Martell. That’s how I met him. When you listen to episode, you’ll actually hear about the exact moment we met, which is pretty funny. And he’s here today to talk about pricing and how Jim should price and we actually dive into a few tactical things about how to set up your process in such a way that illustrates the kind of value you can bring to to these customers, which inevitably will do a few things like help you charge, charge them more money, or make more revenue over a longer period of time with them as well as probably dial in your process for getting referrals, which is kind of the lifeblood of most boutique fitness studios in terms of marketing. So why don’t you check out this episode and I’ll see you on the other side.

Welcome back, everybody, The gym OS Podcast, we are kicking off season two. This is me a special one. So I’m part of a mentoring group. And I encourage every one of you guys to find a mentor in your specific fitness niche. And because it’s just quicker and easier to learn from people who have been there and done that before. Anyways, I’m part of a mentoring group for for SaaS Software as a Service CEOs and one of the more recent meetups that we We went to we the my mentor Dan Martell actually is a crossfitter. And we went and did a CrossFit workout and I saw this this one guy in the corner, not doing the workout but doing some squats and I’m like, yo, bro, what are you doing? And he’s like, Oh, my small off cycle. And I’m like, you know what you’re talking about? And I got him here today. This is I’m gonna screw up his last name Marcel. Head up. Ah, Marcel Petitpas got it. Good. He’s the CEO of Parakeeto. Yes, he’s the CEO of Parakeeto, which is a SaaS company in the group. He’s actually also the head Strategic Coach for Dan Martell. So we we come to Marcel for advice and questions when we have them as well. So we got our highly qualified person here to talk about business and not only does he know about business, but he’s a longtime fitness or slash crossfitter. He’s a CrossFit coach himself and he does a small upcycle so brings all kinds of just dripping with credibility here. So Marcel, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick to the audience.

Marcel Petitpas [3:00]
Yeah, thanks, Dan. It’s a pleasure to be here. As you mentioned, I’m the CEO of a company called pear Kido. And we primarily focus on building products for digital creative agencies or professional services agencies. So the company that might have built your website or your lawyer or your accountant, helping them budget and measure their performance on projects even more easily. I’m also the head Strategic Coach at Dan Martell. So I help software companies grow and scale their business faster. I’m also the interim CEO at a digital agency in San Francisco called girlfriend, which has done work for some pretty cool brands like Nike, Adobe, Google, and so on Slack, Uber, you name it. So that’s really fun and exciting work. And finally, I’m the host of a podcast called the agency profit podcasts where I talk about how to make your professional services agency more profitable so yeah, pretty much if I’m not talking about business, I’m either eating sleeping doing squats or watching the office that’s pretty much my life office. Nice.

Dan Uyemura [3:53]
Yeah, so pretty much my life as well. The question you just mentioned your your podcast agency profit podcast is that anything you Have these any of these Fitness Studio owners listening to this right now might be able to get something out of it?

Marcel Petitpas [4:06]
I think so because a lot of what we talk about it and this is one of the I think one of the things that’s interesting to talk about in the fitness industry, because there’s so many different ways to structure your fitness business, depending on if you’re a gym owner, if you run boot camps if you do things online, but for a lot of you, there’s going to be constraints around either time, you’re either selling your time for money if you’re a trainer, or around floor space in your facility. And those constraints are if you’re selling time, that’s super relevant to what I talked about on the podcast, it’s all about how to optimize your profitability if you’re in a situation where you’re essentially constrained by time. And if you’re constrained by floor space and or time, there’s still a lot of transfer of knowledge there that a lot of concepts that will make sense. So yeah, if you’re like really focused on trying to like figure out the model, where you’re going to be the most profitable and how to think about those things and what the basic economics of that are, then you definitely could get some value out of some of the content. We create a pair keto.

Dan Uyemura [5:01]
So that that’s actually a perfect segue because that’s what I want to talk to you about today. And that’s specifically how to maximize your revenue potential when you’re constrained by time and or floor space or your, your building that you’re in. Now you’re in, you’re in the fitness space, what do you see from that from the gym owners you’re connected to and the community that you’re around as the primary problem in terms of like maximizing revenue in the gym?

Marcel Petitpas [5:26]
Yeah, so, you know, I’m a longtime crossfitter. And there’s actually a stage in my life where I thought about opening a CrossFit gym in my early 20s. Back when there was like one CrossFit gym in a city that had 3 million people in it. In France, for example, I was like, Man, that’s the opportunity. And then I started running the numbers on it and figured out that like, you can run across the gym and do reasonably well and work your ass off and end up with very little profit at the end of the year to show for it. It’s not a hyper profitable business model for most people. And it’s generally because you’re highly constrained by your square footage. In whatever building that you’re renting, and unlike most of the other gyms that you’re competing with, like a crunch fitness or or, you know, these kinds of gyms, they make money by selling 10,000 memberships and having a couple hundred people actually show up to the gym every month, whereas you as across the gym often can’t get away with that. So, you know, that’s one of the things that I see a lot is CrossFit gyms or you know, gyms that are focusing on high utilization as one of the core ways that they retain their members being constrained by the amount of floor space that they have. And then I see a lot of other folks who are essentially selling themselves into golden handcuffs by trading their time for money. And this is a lot of the personal training or, you know, one to one or even one to many coaching, you know, instruction boot camp style things and I actually used to do this back in the day I used to teach boot camps and like tibo classes, I was like a white Billy blanks and university. That’s actually how I met my fiance. So yeah, like full thing like the headset, the punches. Let’s go Nancy get deeper in that squat like all that. And so I got a really good look at that business model as well. And that was a situation, you know, of the owner that I worked with there where it was very much this golden handcuffs thing where he had trouble scaling that model, even though it was one too many, because there was such a constraint around time, right? And often, you know, it was him or the trainer’s that had to be there. Every time they closed the deal they were selling themselves into into some pain, there wasn’t much leverage or much scale to what they were doing.

Dan Uyemura [7:26]
Yeah. Now, I will. I will mention in our world in this in the software world, we’re always really worried about scale, because we need to be able to scale a business into millions of millions of dollars of revenue. For the average gym owner, it’s okay to be a lifestyle business and it’s okay to make enough money so that you’re comfortable financially and you’re able to pay the people working for you. So so there is there is not an infinite scalability problem. Yeah, but but I do think a lot of gyms don’t pay attention to their revenue models and their pricing strategies enough to the point where they can get comfortable They’re always hungry for that next client or that next personal training client, because they’re never at a point where they’re comfortable, right? Would you agree with that?

Marcel Petitpas [8:09]
Yeah. And I think one of the challenges with that is that at some point, you have to retire, right? Like, you’re not going to run this gym until you’re 90 years old, at some point, you need to sell it, or you need to have enough savings to be able to retire. And, you know, I see a lot of gym owners that are in a position where they’re just making enough money to fund their lifestyle and they don’t have enough to put aside for retirement. And they’re not building the unit economics into their business. So that that thing is more than just the cost of the assets that you’ve acquired over that time. Like the the barbells and the plates and the the concept probably all the concept to rowers and assault bikes is probably the majority of the value in your gym. If you don’t have great united comics, like is that going to be enough to retire on it? I think that’s an important consideration that you might not be really thinking about. If you’re, you know, younger, you’ve been doing this for just a couple of years and you’re still caught up in the excitement of owning your own gym, but it’s it’s an important consideration nonetheless.

Dan Uyemura [9:01]
Now you throw around that term unit economics again, in our world that is a key driver in a lot of the decisions we make. But for if there’s a listener right now listening who just did not that one right over their head? Can you explain that as

Marcel Petitpas [9:13]
as quickly as you can? Yeah, I mean, the unique dynamics of a business are essentially the math behind how much it costs you to acquire a customer, how quickly you make that money back, and how much that client is worth to you over time. And those are kind of really important things to measure because it allows you to measure the impact of the different things that you’re you’re going to try and experiment with your business to try and get someone to pay you more money every month, trying to acquire new customers faster or cheaper, or trying to extend the amount of time or the lifetime value as we like to call it that you get out of each member that you bring into the gym and the there’s a laws of averages that apply to all of these things. So you know if you know for example, that right now, the average A member that signs up for your gym sticks around for two years, well, you probably want to measure that closely so that you can try different things to get them to stick around for three, or four or five. So that if you have to go and spend a few hundred dollars on, you know, sponsoring you local sports teams and throwing local events and running Facebook ads or things like that, to get those customers that you can start to essentially recoup that money faster and recoup more of it over the long term and get to a place where, especially in the in the case of a sale, but also for yourself where you have you have a sense of control over how to actually keep your business where it needs to be from a revenue and profit perspective to be viable.

Dan Uyemura [10:40]
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting working with so many of our clients and being in this gym space for a while. It’s like, if our gym owners took the level of fanaticism that they had, that they apply towards their fitness endeavors into their business, they will be unstoppable. Like if you asked any one of these listeners right now like what their 85% Have a back squat is or, you know if it’s a different you know, whatever it is like whatever it is they’re dialed into, they know it because they’re dialed into it. And if we can figure out a way to turn these these gym owners to become that fanatical about their business and be the same. So these unit economics are no different than whatever training methodology you’re doing, like the stair steps, you need to get to get to there, right, like you need to know, like, like Marcel said, what your average costs, what your average lead cost is, or how long someone’s a member or what their lifetime value is, because you can’t make decisions without knowing. And probably in your gut, you have ideas and you kind of have ballpark ideas, but when you actually dial it in and pay attention, these numbers, you can improve them. Right or, or understand if things are going backwards, because you’ve made batch you’ve made you’ve done an experiment or you made a choice that took things backwards, you can change them. But you can’t fix we can’t measure right and we know that in fitness, we know that nutrition and it’s our job on this podcast to get gym owners to do that in business as well. So you’ve, you mentioned in this that if you’re constrained by time and you’re constrained by floor space, the scalability of this business goes down, where can a gym owner look to increase their revenue if they need to?

Marcel Petitpas [12:12]
Yeah, so I mean, this is gonna vary depending on what your gym looks like. And you probably already seen lots of examples of this. But like the the concept that we see a lot in, in software, and also in Creative Services, it’s this thing that, especially recently has really been blowing up as a concept is this idea of value based pricing. And it’s the idea that you’re decoupling the units of something that people would typically quantify the value of something with, from the pricing and your anchoring instead to value. And the interesting thing when you start to look at your pricing this way is, you realize how relative value is so for a perfect example, this is a million dollar logo. I’m gonna ask you all you gym owners are listening to this. Would you ever pay a million dollars for a logo? Oh, of course not. That seems like a ridiculous amount of money to pay for logo, especially when you know, you can go on Fiverr or on Upwork and get one for a couple hundred bucks. But there’s a reason that businesses every single year spend millions of dollars on logos. And this is a perfect example is if the print budget for that logo is $16 million, like if you got to go put it on 100 airplanes and 1000 brochures and in a bunch of airport kiosks, like if you’re an airline, for example, then it makes perfect sense to spend a million dollars on a logo because the relative value of de risking it is high. So then you start to actually think about, well, who is my core customer? What is the demographic of the kind of people that are coming to my gym? And what is the value of being fit and healthy to them? And when we can start to ask those questions and get those answers and it will start to unlock this whole new way of looking at the way that we price and we can start detaching it from how many classes they get access to or how much of our time they get access to and we can start to look for alternative ways to help them reach their goals. help them achieve the things that are important to them and help them achieve their goals. value that they’re seeking in the exercise of being more healthy. And we can find ways to do that, that have more leverage and more scale. And sometimes that even means partnering with other businesses, whether it be like in the nutrition space, whether it be in the mindset, space, supplements, you know, physio therapy, massage therapy, like any kind of PT mobility, like there’s all kinds of opportunities to help deliver more value and deliver a more complete solution to your customer, to help them achieve their goals that will allow you to increase the average revenue per month, increase the level of value that they’re getting, without necessarily requiring more time, more floor space, more equipment, more class load, any of that stuff, you know, and if you think about it, like I don’t know, if you’re, if you’re a normal gym, you know, maybe you’ve got 200 250 members in your gym. Maybe they’re paying you 150 bucks a month, if you can increase that by 10 or 20%. That is a very meaningful lift to your bottom line. At the end of the year, if it’s not adding overhead, and this is really all we talk about when I go into professional services businesses is how do we increase the efficiency of how you deliver value to your clients so that we can bring in more revenue without requiring more people more overhead, or more time. And so that same opportunity exists for you as a gym, and it lies in discovering what’s valuable to your clients, and then using that as the basis for finding ways to deliver more value to them. Yep.

Dan Uyemura [15:28]
So right there, that sentence is going to be the key to this whole episode, right? I believe, from my experience in dealing with many, many thousands of gym owners, most gym owners have opened their business, they’ve kind of come from another gym, they’ve replicated the model that they’ve seen, and they love whatever fitness or training system they’re in. And that’s the value they’re offering. It’s just I love it, and you’re gonna love it too. So here it is. We’re doing martial arts and it’s 125 bucks a month, whatever. What Marcel is saying here and if we really want to impact This is a take a step back from that. And look at your ideal client look at the person who will spend a lot of money with you, who gets a lot of value from you and what do they need? Right? Let’s say in the martial arts space, you could be packaging bullying classes with you know, some type of self esteem psychology stuff, like there’s a lot of things you can do and actually the martial arts to do I send my son to kind of does this but they don’t market it heavy enough. We just stumbled upon it, right? Create your create your package your product around what the customer needs, not necessarily what they want. Right? Because all you have to realize those are two different things. What I need and what I want are two different things. And the irony is, at least in the CrossFit space, I feel like I feel like a lot of gyms did this because they charge a lot of money and then they they backed it up by by talking about value, not price, right. That was a discussion that we had for a long time. But then they started they stopped right like There’s so much more like nutrition is such a big, low hanging fruit because that’s the basis for everyone’s needs, right? And package everything around that need. So what Marcel is basically saying is when you when you when I come into your gym, and instead of saying like, hey, you’re gonna get sweaty, you’re gonna feel good, and we’re gonna make you live longer and look look better naked. And you start talking about how I’m going to get, you know, like these real needs that I might have, the value goes way up for me, right? Which means you can sell for more correct

Marcel Petitpas [17:29]
100%. And I want to get tactical here, because I think like there’s so much value in getting tactical, so much of the opportunity, and starting to develop this kind of this kind of bench of products and services that you can start to like customize for your individual clients so that you can get more revenue out of them every month has to do with your process for how you onboard and then how you manage and follow up with those clients going forward. So like tactically, this should be a conversation that you have every time that a new client comes in for their you know, free trial, their discovery or whatever that first experiences is like, and if you go by the way, if you go to any of the gyms that are sales orgs first we’re talking the crunch fitness is the equinox, like, basically every other gym that’s on a CrossFit gym, watch what they do every single sales playbook because I’ve been to those places I’ve gone for the tour when I was like traveling, and I was trying to pretend that I was just moved there. So I get a free week membership. So I could go and stick to my squats because the hotel gym doesn’t has a Smith machine, which is an embarrassment to squat racks and they should be illegal. Anyway, that’s a whole other rants Don’t get me started on Smith machines. But like we’ve all been in those environments. What does that sales conversation look like? It always starts with Why are you here? Why is this important to you? What are your goals, right? That is the same conversation you should be having with your clients that are coming in really coming from a place of like, I want to make sure we can deliver the best possible solution to you. And then I love the idea of qbr or quarterly reviews with those clients. So like get a 15 minute call in the calendar with you know Your clients every quarter or twice a year where you can check in with them on how are you doing with these goals because their needs will change. Right? They might come in just being like, I just want to be consistent at Fitness. And six months from now, they might have achieved that goal. And now they’re like, Okay, well, what do we need to do to get you to your next level, what’s your new set of goals, and you can kind of be there every step of the way. And that gives you the opportunity to like constantly be developing a better relationship with them and giving them more value and supporting them along their journey. So like simple processes, you can install on your business of having conversations that are rooted in value and needs and priorities are what’s going to give you the insight that will make all this that kind of might seem overwhelming right now become a lot more obvious because people will just tell you what they need and what their goals are. It will become so much more obvious what you need to go in and bring into your gym as available services to help meet those needs.

Dan Uyemura [19:52]
It’s a such an interest, like there’s so many tenants to business that are so obvious and easy that they get overthought or overlooked. Looked. One thing I noticed Dan Martell does is he asks us all the time, what problems are you having with your business like that easy, right? And whatever we tell him, he starts solving for us. So imagine if you had a gym culture and this was part of your DNA where it’s like, we are a results based, and a customer base gym. All we care about are your results. When when I onboard you into this system, I’m going to ask you to have a worksheet that I’ve pre made. And I’m going to ask you what your needs are in the next three months. And every three months, you’re going to get 15 minutes face time with me and we’re going to go over this worksheet. That’s not that hard. And they’ll literally tell you like, I’ve got a wedding coming up for the summer. So I just need to drop some weight. I don’t care about strength. Oh, you know, like, whatever their needs are for that timeframe. They’re going to tell you and then you just dial it in, keep that worksheet around and dialed in for that person. Let them know you care. And you’re trying not only will you increase the value for them, they’re probably going to send people your way. Because what other gym in your area cares about them that much?

Marcel Petitpas [20:55]
Right? Totally. And then you’re gonna have the people that are going to come in and they’re gonna be like, Okay, well equal. is the same price and they’ve got a sauna and you’ll be like, cool. Why do you want to go to the gym in the first place? Do you want it? Do you want a sauna? What do you want to get results? And if somebody is like I care more about the sauna, then he’s like, you know what I cannot or not a good fit for you. Anyway, go have fun at Equinox Exactly. Yeah, go hold the phone for the Instagram influencer, that’s doing squats wrong in the corner. But have fun with that.

Dan Uyemura [21:21]
Yeah, so so that’s, that’s a really, really big key takeaway, like I want you like so we Marcel just went through a tactical example of how to do this. Now we’re going to walk back to strategic right. And the idea here is you need a process. You need to a you need to, you need to decide if you care about your clients results or not. And then you need to build a process around it. And it can be just that simple. Make a worksheet. It can be a Google Doc, or a Google Form even or something. And it’s the same questions every time. And it gives you a jumping off point to start a discussion and figure out how you’re gonna help things help your client. And one thing you’re going to notice is probably there’s going to be five answers that get through all your clients. You’re going to get five answers 90% of the time. So you can start building your product around that that’s the value that you need to drive, right? If you get the same five answers, you start building your product around those same five things, right? That’s exactly how you find the value for your perfect customer. And then you can start to identify like, color code, your, your, your worksheet, you know, if it’s a green that your highest paying best client, who always refers people, and if there are red, they’re a person who’s kind of one foot out the door. Don’t pay as much attention to the red ones pay a lot of attention to the green ones, right? You’re gonna find correlations between all these things, which will make your product way better. Yeah.

Marcel Petitpas [22:33]
Yeah, 100%..

Dan Uyemura [22:35]
Well, that was easy.

Marcel Petitpas [22:36]
100%. It’s about the process, man. And this is I think one of the things that I see all the time is you know, maybe you’ve got a couple of founders in the gym or you’ve got you know, a couple of coaches that are you know, like they do a lot of hours and the experience that somebody gets when they drop into the gym or they come in for their you know, free session is wildly different from one coach to the next. That is a problem. This all of this should be engineer to support the unit economics of your business. And you should be experimenting with how to tweak and optimize that onboarding process to increase the number of people that convert the number of people that get successfully activated. Right, you should know what your x successful activation looks like is it that they complete their on ramp and then they come to at least two classes a week for the first month, right? And then all that like you should know what the ideal path to success for your client looks like. And then start to optimize and iterate that process to support that and make sure that the people who are actually facilitating that experience are all creating a consistent experience right? That is so so key that gets missed all the time.

Dan Uyemura [23:42]
right all the time. So let’s actually dive into that there’s in my mind raft about there’s two main reasons why that’s super important. The obvious one is you don’t want one gym member getting a great experience another gym member getting a crappy experience and having them compare notes and not understanding where the disconnect is just makes you look bad. And it’s obviously not good for the for the bad experience members. But the bigger reason if we want to step even further back to what Marcel talked about earlier in this episode in the fact that like, as you’re building your business, you shouldn’t only be looking at your current revenue, you should be looking at a retirement, you should be looking at a sale, you should be looking at something bigger than just your current paycheck. And whether it’s a retirement, whether it’s you being able to step away from the business and let everyone else run it and you get to make $10,000 a month of doing nothing, or it’s it’s selling. All of those are dependent on a process happening, that’s you that is the same every time without you having to micromanage it, or manage it at all right. So you need to create that process in that experience that you can walk away from and it’s it’s replicable still happens.

Marcel Petitpas [24:46]
Totally predictability adds significant value to your business. And it’s also key because like if you don’t, if you don’t have a process, then how are you ever going to know what works and what doesn’t work? there’s going to be no reliability to any kind of data that you have. About how long people stick around unless somehow you’re tracking like all these disparate and different experiences that people are having. And then it’s really hard for you to figure out how much can I spend to get a customer? And how fast can I get the payback? And how many new clients does it take for me to get this many recurring clients that stick around for this amount of time, like, it’s really hard to get any insight into any of that. And then if you can’t have that conversation with a potential acquirer or a partner that wants to come in and run the business, it’s going to be significantly more challenging to close that deal or to get that kind of partnership done, right.

Dan Uyemura [25:20]
Yep. And even on the shorter term you want speak to predictability like the the fastest way to kill referrals in your gym is to have someone refer their friend to your gym and have a bad experience. They will never refer anyone again and they’ll probably tell other people not to refer you know, to you. So if you have that process in place where everyone gets the same great experience, and that experience is like super high on the on the totem pole in terms of what’s important. Your referrals will go up right.

Marcel Petitpas [25:59]
100%. Referrals like that’s probably a big channel for most of you that are listening like this is community is, is like a huge, huge selling point to most like really good fitness experiences and fitness facilities or you know, gyms, like community is such a huge aspect to it. So you want to make sure that there’s consistency there for sure. Because if that channel gets killed, that’s usually, you know, like it or not, that’s gonna be where a lot of your new clients come from.

Dan Uyemura [26:27]
Yeah, and what’s what, to me what’s insane is referrals for sure are probably one of the number one reasons new members come into these boutique type gyms, but I feel like they’re underperforming by like 50 to 80%. Like, if you actually dialed in your processes and your product and your vision on things you could be getting, you know, four, four referrals for everyone you’re getting right now. easily. So,

Marcel Petitpas [26:49]
yeah, and there’s so much like, you know, again, it’s all about engineering process, like you might, if you really think about if you just had some lightweight process in place, so everyone gets the same onboarding experience. And then you’re tracking how many classes they’re coming to every week for the first little while, and then the people that are coming to class a lot, and then you maybe do a check in 30 days in and you ask them to rate their experience from one to 10. And they say 10 it’s like, Okay, if they say eight or above now we go like cool. Is there anybody else in your life that you think would benefit from this kind of an experience from from this kind of fitness coaching? Boom, you engineer to drive referrals from the people that you know, are likely to do it. There’s all these different ways that you can actually start to build this flywheel into your process, and it doesn’t have to be super cumbersome. It can be fairly simple. But if it’s consistent, there’s so much power in that.

Dan Uyemura [27:36]
Yep. Yep. One of the big concepts I have on this podcast is manufacturing experience or manufacturing success. Same thing engineering your process. It’s the same thing. And Eric LeClaire on our team, he actually has this year long calendar where things are planned out and I think taking a step back and looking at it from that lens like so for let’s say, Marcel joins my gym. He gets the one on one introduction, we go over his goal setting worksheet. I actually tell all my coaches to make sure they greet him when they see him. I tell some of my leader members to like, you know, take them under his wing, and get him acclimated, get make a friend around the gym. once every three months, we have a community event that that all the new people get a free ticket to, like, there’s a way you can manufacture this where people understand the value and the stickiness and start wanting to bring their friends into it, just by thinking about it a little bit. Right. And I think most gym owners like they do kind of things here and there ad hoc, willy nilly, they haven’t really put together the entire process. And that’s why I’m super bullish on this whole industry. Because once we get our gym owners to understand this, like the the upside is so huge, because they’re just there’s so much left on the table right now. And that’s what we’re working on here.

Marcel Petitpas [28:48]
Totally. Yeah. I mean, it’s the difference between doing the odd set of squats at some random weight, some random set of reps versus doing small off.

Dan Uyemura [28:56]
Yeah. It’s, I think it’s really good to put that Put it in those kind of terms. Because Yeah, you would never whatever training system you’re into whether it’s martial arts or strength, weightlifting, whatever, you would never just randomly do stuff, right. And you also wouldn’t just go in the gym and do the same exact thing every day. Like there is a process and, and a pattern you have to follow to get higher levels of success in whatever you do. And your business is no different. Well, that was 100. That was a pretty good topic. Hopefully, like I like it because we touched on strategic and tactical. And I think that’s pretty key. A lot of times it’s just strategic, and there’s not anything for people to take away from. So let’s actually give them something to unpack here. 30 days, like I’ve listened to this, and I want to work on this. What give me laid out for me, we’ve already kind of done it, but let’s just lay it out in black and white. What Can somebody do?

Marcel Petitpas [29:49]
Yeah, so I think the first thing that you want to do is start with trying to get a baseline of your metrics, right? Get it a simple way in place that you can start to track these things. So maybe it’s the software that your gym runs on, it provides these kinds of things for you or makes it easier, maybe you’ve just got a spreadsheet that you start tracking this kind of information in. But what you essentially want to do is have some kind of feedback loop so that you can understand any of the things that you’re about to try. Are they working or not? So get a baseline of your metrics…

Dan Uyemura [30:19]
Give me your, the three, the three, let’s keep it simple, the three metrics that you should look at.

Marcel Petitpas [30:24]
Yeah, so I would probably look at three important things. The first is, you know, how many new customers or trials how many trials are you getting in a given period of time, how many of those trials close and turn into customers, so ended up paying you money and doing whatever that first, you know, experience with your gym might be if it’s an onboarding, if it’s a, you know, 30 days for a discounted rate, whatever, and then how many of them become activated, so that would mean they they hit a certain milestone of like they came to this many classes or they did this many workouts or they, you know, stuck around and paid for their second month. So I would just kind of track your success metrics on the front end, that’s probably the first place. And I’ll throw in a fourth one, which is retention, right? How many months on average, do clients stick around with you? Those four metrics, you can do a lot with those four metrics. Cool, that’s a good place to start. So map that out. That’s the first thing now you’ve got a baseline, you’ve got a feedback loop, you’ve got a wall to bounce your ideas off of so to speak. Then the second thing I would do is start at the front of the funnel, and then work your way back. So I would start with let’s get a sales process in place. Let’s get some kind of a questionnaire or like a top three, four questions that you need to ask every new client that comes into the building. So you can set the foundation for the rest of the conversation. And those questions are probably going to be something like, why are you here? Right? Why is getting more fit important to you? And you want to dig into that you want to get to like the emotional thing. Like for me, it’s like I want to chase my grandkids around. I want to be the oldest guy in the old folks home that can get off the toilet by himself. Like those are my motivations for staying fit. I want Want to be a parent that can, you know, keep a parent and a grandparent, they can keep up with his kids, which is the reason I don’t compete in CrossFit anymore. Because that was actually pushing me in the opposite direction, I was going to be crippled by the time I was 90 if I kept doing that. So, like, get into like the emotional, visceral, like, why is this important to you? You know, make sure you get clear on their goals. What are your goals? You know, what’s the timeline when you need to achieve them? What do you think you need in order to achieve those goals? What are the things that are blocking you? What’s kind of getting in your way? And then finally, what would need to be true for you to sign up? I love that. What would what would need to be true question it’s one that Dan asked all the time. That’s like the ultimate sales question. Somebody who’s hesitating, somebody’s not sure what would need to be true. Such a good question, basically just asked him, What do we need to do to get your business? So those those would be like examples of a couple of good questions you want to ask, but you just want to get the anchor set for the value, the value of you know what’s important, and then why is it valuable to them? Get that ironed out. Let them I would map out what does that kind of first 30 days need to look like in terms of like the workouts that they have to do the conversations that they should have the people that they should meet the experiences that they might need to have the communication that you might have with them, whether it’s emails, phone calls, personal videos that you shoot to send them to me like, Man, I’m so proud of you for finishing your first workout you did so good today, I just want to let you know, little things like that, that you can architect and say, okay, on on day, 14, they get this personal video from me. And on day 27 they get you know, a follow up email about this. And then on day 30 we have another conversation and just like just draw it out like a timeline and just do the first version of it, keep it lightweight, and then implement it and then it’s just measure, try stuff measure and try stuff. And that’s that’s what you do forever.

Dan Uyemura [33:49]
Yep. All right, Marcel. Well, thank you for your time. A lot of great insight. Um, I think there’s there’s been two or three things a gym owner right now can unpack and take away. I really love the idea of You know, if you listen this podcast, you know, I’m a huge fan of manufacturing experience. And I think a lot of what we talked about was that taking a step back, looking at things from the lens of your customer and really tailoring high value, and really showing them you care. I think I think in business, it’s just as simple as that like providing a service or a product that solve someone’s problem and caring about the result that the customer is getting. It’s just it kind of is simple. Thank you so much for your time, Marcel, you are playing a role in helping all of these small boutique fitness studios become better business owners and we appreciate it tremendously. Thank you. All right. There you had it. Ladies and gentlemen, Marcel Petitpas of Parakeeto. Let me know what you guys thought. I love having CEOs and other business leaders from outside of the gym space come in and talk about how they run their businesses in a way that actually applies to you guys and Marcel is super Cool because he actually is a CrossFit coach and he understands what strength conditioning training is like. And he understands the gym business. probably pretty well, most entrepreneurs, they can like look at any business they go to, whether it’s a gym, a pizzeria, or what a coffee shop, and they can kind of dissect what’s happening there. In the lens of business, if that’s something you don’t do, you should probably practice that, like, start checking out businesses, when you when you visit them, and start to analyze what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It’ll actually help you in your gym. So let me know if you guys appreciated what Marcel had to say. We talked about a lot of things. In this episode, we talked about optimizing your profitability, how to maintain revenue potential when you’re constrained by time and or floor space. We talked about the primary problems gym owners have for maximizing revenue. And usually you just it boils down to the fact that you can’t trade time for money. And that’s one of the biggest mistakes a lot of people do. And probably, if you’re doing it, it’s okay, you got to start there, but you have to start ratcheting your yourself away from that. So trading time for money is not a good way to expand what you’re doing, it’s basically buying yourself a job. And what we’re trying to do here at PushPress is expand you away from that, right? We talked about this weird concept called unit economics. And if you aren’t, if you don’t really understand what that means, still, that’s okay. We’ll dig deeper into that. That’s basically saying like on a per customer basis, like how much money do they make? How much money does it cost to get them like on a per unit basis? What is the economics of your business? That’s not a way a lot of gym owners think. And we’re working on getting you thinking that way. Cool. Another huge topic, we talked about value based pricing, right? So that’s you can’t just instead of just throwing a number out there and just saying like, this is what our system costs, or our training methodology costs, you’re actually starting to drive into the value of it. So you could be charging per pounds lost for belts attain, you know, different types of things, so that the more value that client gets, the more revenue you’re able to generate from them. That’s a pretty key concept at least in the software world value based pricing. because it forces you to keep on delivering better value to your customers, which will in turn keep them customers longer. Anyway, I hope you guys really enjoyed that. If you did, make sure you give it a like share it with a friend and other gym owner who you think might benefit from this Marcel is a really cool guy if you want me to have him back on Send me a note let me know as well. He He told me he has a ton more that he can share with our audience and continue your education and becoming a better fitness CEO and becoming a better business owner. cool guys. That’s it for today. I’m glad you join me on The gymOS Podcast and until next week, and until next episode, keep on grinding.

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