Last week Doug Spurling took us through part one of his onboarding process for building long-term client loyalty.
Missed part one? Check it out here!
With 10 years of experience, 350 + members, and revenue approaching a million dollars a year… Doug knows a thing or two about building world-class onboarding processes.
In part two Doug delivers several nuggets of wisdom that we can’t wait to share with you.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The secret to identifying “at-risk” clients and saving them before a cancellation request comes in.
- How to structure important onboarding milestones around critical dates to support long-term client loyalty and buy-in.
- The math behind your length of engagement and why it matters for optimal onboarding.
Plus so much more!
If you’re a gym owner that wants to strengthen your onboarding with a tried, tested, and proven process from someone who’s been there and done that… Then this episode is for you.
Now that you’re a total pro at onboarding clients for long-term loyalty, you need the tools to scale yourself to success. Don’t worry! We have your back and are ready to help. Instantly get started with your FREE Naamly trial to experience the features Doug and his team use to make their onboarding process simple and effective.
Watch The Full Episode
Sumit: Welcome back, Doug. So last time we left it at just talking about day one, day two, day three, you know, that was the most critical pieces. The person’s in. Uh, it got me thinking about one thing. And then I’ll talk about the rest of the stuff you also said. Consumption goes down. People are not reading those emails.
What do you do about those people who are not reading your onboarding? Because as far as they’re concerned, They might be still overwhelmed, right? They’re not, they don’t know about my zone. They don’t know about what am I supposed to be doing if I am feeling sore. So how are you trying to shepherd them in again and continue with the choreograph that you talked about in our last day?
Doug Spurling: Yeah, so, I mean, that’s a good, that’s a good, I’m glad you brought that up. The that’s why I don’t lean or rely heavily on the, any type of email onboarding auto responder or whatever term you want to use. Any, any automation behind onboarding? Um, again, it’s, it’s in place. I, I, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t remove it.
However, I’m not going to count on it. Um, so where were you kind of helped with that is, uh, generally speaking, you will find that there, uh, in at least in the beginning, and this is probably true for a client’s entire, uh, life cycle with you is their attendance will dictate if they’re overwhelmed or not.
Because if you are completely overwhelmed, you are going to not show up as much. Because you’re overwhelmed. It’s not as important. You’re going to start making excuses, et cetera. So, um, we rely very heavily, uh, to give a plug to, to nominally. We rely very heavily on the dashboard that tells us for those that are at risk.
We do a ton of attendance metrics. To, uh, pay attention to people’s attendance. We, uh, use different styles of reach out, you know, texting, reach outs, phone, call, reach outs. Uh, and I can talk more about the systems of those, but, uh, trying to connect with people outside of the gym to check in, because like, I know I’m a reader I would prefer to read, but I know there’s a lot of people that we send them a quick video and they’ll watch the video.
I know for me, if a video is over, you know, 20, 30 minutes of the hung, I’m not going to, I’m not going to watch it unless you ask me to. Right. So, um, people’s consumption is different. Some people like to talk on the phone, some people like to text, so, um, not being hung up on really it’s about when we think again, onboard.
It’s we’re, we’re trying to build this connection, right? We’re trying to build this connection. We’re trying to, uh, make this, you know, I think of it as like a blanket, we’re trying to tie those, you know, those knots tighter together. So the more you can connect with them, you just have to figure out how they connect.
Some people are going to read those emails. Some people are going to need the text of like, uh, you know, we have a process. If somebody doesn’t show a no-show text, you know, Hey, miss Ms. Jett, your session today. That that can help. So, uh, ultimately it would come back to how are you throughout really throughout their whole journey, but specifically in the beginning while the habits are being built, how are you connecting with these?
Sumit: That’s excellent. Since attendance is such a big pillar, as you will to drive and reduce over a month for you to gauge what’s happening. Are there other pillars like that, that you look at, uh, outside of attendance.
Doug Spurling: Um, attendance is probably number one, number two, and number three. Um, I mean, we, as far as what we can measure, you know, um, I haven’t found and, and be curious if there’s any other thoughts, we’re always open to it.
Um, on, in, in the beginning. Wow. Uh, what constitutes in our business because it’s customer service based as a client stays with you. There’s a lot you can’t measure. Right? Right. We were actually just having a team meeting before this, and we were talking about, you know, um, what makes the difference between a client that is you really feel as a part of the community they’re immersed in the community versus they’re just here to work out.
Right? Like, and as a gym owner, you know, you have clients that they’re just a part of that community, but how do you measure it? Right. And our only tried and true way is different metrics around attendance. Uh, we look at, you know, a number of visits a week. We have a weekly target for total visits a week.
We want to make sure that’s on track. Uh, we have a metric for at risk, what we call at risk, which is people who, uh, we pull it every Monday. And that is people who did not come in the previous week. Those people are at risk because they didn’t show up last week. And so we give them targeted, reach out. So really paying attention to that.
And then, you know, kind of behavior change behavior, psych 1 0 1 rewarding what you want repeated. So we reward when somebody hits 10 visits, we reward when somebody hits a hundred visits, 250 visits. Um, so I do think. Um, you know, ultimately this, this, this business that we’re in, comes down to usage, you might run a different model than me.
You might have different staff structures. Um, you might be online, offline hybrid. I don’t know, but either way, especially if you’re a training gym price point where you’re 2, 3, 400 bucks a month for a member. Yeah. You’re you’re you’re you can’t run it like a health club then be based on not you, you know, they, those, those people want it not to be used.
Right. Um, for us usage is number one. So through all through onboarding and then, you know, carry that through their whole life cycle, paying attention to usage and attend, which is attendance in our case will dictate if they’re going to stay. And if they’re enjoying it and loving it. Second to that would be things like results, you know, uh, we’re always trying to find ways other than usage and hitting the milestones, hitting the attendance milestones, recognizing for hitting those milestones, uh, looking at other performance metrics.
Like we use the InBody to show the people they’re paying to get, uh, most likely physical results. So at some point, yes, they’ll stick through for awhile, but at some point. They do want to see the 20 pound goal weight loss that they had. So using something like the InBody, we structure that, uh, on a regular basis to be done, uh, whether you, you know, whatever software you might use or, or, or way to track workouts to show, you know, uh, Susie improved, you know, 10% in her, in her bench press or whatever it may be.
Uh, those I would say are also important, but, uh, certainly not, uh, as important as attendance.
Sumit: Perfect. So, so now three days have gone. You’re looking at tenants. What next what’s the next stage of onboarding? Is it seven day check-in is a 15 day check-in what’s happened. Tell us,
Doug Spurling: so, uh, we do an, every other, uh, assuming that they are, which I know most training gyms offer some type of trial in the beginning.
Um, and even if they’re not a trial, we keep the same. Uh, a weekly check-in and this is not, we, we, at this point, don’t, uh, do all of them in the in appointment format. Um, not all of these are scheduled appointments, but we have trackers and reminders built in within our staff, within our systems to check in with people on a weekly basis.
Uh, and that’s both, of course, continuing to check in on how they’re liking it and if they’re feeling overwhelmed and stuff, but also if they’re on a trial, We got to get them converted onto a membership, right? So there’s the sales piece of it as well. Um, there’s also, we were just meeting about this the other day.
There’s also the referral piece. Um, going back to that welcome bag, something else that we put in that welcome bag as part of our onboarding is a gift card, but they can give to somebody. And, uh, we, we want to build into our onboarding a followup to say, Hey, who’d you give the gift card? Because we noticed that we weren’t getting as many gift cards back as we thought, so check-ins like that on a weekly basis.
Um, and then that goes for the first, first month. Um, and then broader than that to kind of, to kind of wrap up the whole onboarding. Um, and I can speak a little bit to recognition too, cause I do think recognition as part of onboarding, but a slightly separate from a pure logistics of onboarding. Um, we do an inbox.
Every 30 days. So they’ll have their InBody on their first day. We schedule one out. So that would be like, if you go back day one appointment, date to appointment those weekly check-ins are literally, you know, email, text, phone, call how’s things go and not, not a formal kind of appointment, but on day 30 they have another embody.
Cause they’re now 30 days in and that’s our opportunity to say, okay, you’ve been here 30 days. Let’s do another InBody. How our results go in. That’s a sit down. Um, and at that point it’s okay. Let’s do another one in 30 days or, Nope. Uh you’re you are good with doing one every 90 days. Uh, you’re frustrated with results.
So let’s set you up with a, uh, a meeting with a coach, whatever it may be. Um, but, but that really from a logistical standpoint should take care of, uh, the.
Sumit: Okay, perfect. Got it. Um, one of the things that I hear a lot. People talk about is all our clients are different. Well, so right. Like someone’s coming with something, even though we’re providing individualized training.
So does your onboarding and you spoke about in, I think earlier this episode or the one before about hitting 10 milestones, right? Is it’s are you checking off those 10 milestones? Well, I have two questions, I guess one is, is the 10 milestones. The consistent experience, irrespective of who you are and, or is it further segregated because this person is in for weight loss as a goal, and this person is in for pain being pain-free and therefore the onboarding would be different.
I think that’s a two-part question then pick it out
Doug Spurling: where you want to. Sure. So, I mean, uh, from a client experience standpoint, in my eyes, uh, clients. Right. Assuming, assuming that you are fairly. Uh, defined in your target market. I would say from a client experience standpoint, Your goal, like, I want to know your goal, but your goal, whether it’s to lose 20 pounds or to rehab an ACL, your onboarding is not going to change.
What of course will change is in the model that you run. Uh, is the client doing a, you know, walking lunch, or are they doing a line glute bridge? Because they can’t do lunges because of their knees. That’s, that’s the training piece of it. And that’s where, you know, your coach development and your programming systems and your training systems come into play.
But as far as choreographing, the, the client experience, um, assuming that your target market is fairly niche down. They all basically want the same client experience. I’m not saying they want the same result. I’m not saying they want the same program, the same exercises. Um, but the overarching experience needs to be the same, then what you learn over time.
Sumit: Got it. Okay. Um, the milestones let’s what are those 10 milestones, if you had to rattle them off and the more importantly, which one are the most important ones that you would say, if I’m a training gym, who’s just getting into this.
Uh, I should have at least these three or four or five piece, or if I can’t have all that.
Doug Spurling: Sure. Yeah. So we hit on it. We did on a lot of them already in these first couple episodes, uh, milestone one being, you know, your first success session, your, your day one, your sales consult a milestone to milestone three being the first two days.
I think they are, uh, drastically those, those two days, in my opinion. You cannot redo a Thursday, 2:00 PM session on, you know, August 25th and can’t like, the time has passed.
So the nailing, the first couple as a client builds trust with you as they build a relationship with you, just like people in your life, they’re going to be, they still want to be consistent, but they’re going to be a little bit more forgiving. Not saying you should be showing up late or being all kinds of consistent, but they’re gonna be a little bit forgiving, but the judge.
The judgment of, is this the place for me? I feel happens within the first two or three sessions. Is this the place for me? Right. So day one, day two. Uh, then we go to that day 30, right? That day 30 is our, is our four, technically our fourth milestone. Um, that is where they, uh, have been here a month. They have, if you recall their second InBody, which is the tool we use to measure the physical results.
Um, that for me is a good milestone. One you’ve most likely, um, made it past a second buying decision. You’ve either converted from a trial. You, um, you know, you, you, you you’re, if you’re on a 21 day trial, a 14 day trial, you’ve converted past that. And hopefully if my team is good at what they do, which I know they are, you will see a results on that embody 30 days in, right.
So that would be another milestone. Uh, the falling milestones actually shortly after that, which has been a long milestone of ours for a long time, which is the six week miles. 42 days in a and 42 day in milestone, uh, depending upon what kind of model you run is very, very cool because, uh, there’s a lot of play there at 42 days.
A one, if you do monthly, which a side note I always recommend, uh, gym owners do. If you do monthly billing, they have now been built twice. Right, because they’re now in their second built, which means they’re making a, another buying decision. Do I want to keep paying for this? Uh, also, if you do, which I know a lot of training gyms do monthly programming, where the clients receive a new program every month from a training perspective, uh, they’re now in their second program.
So they can, uh, they, they, they’re just deeper into the experience. Uh, what we like to do at six weeks. Is, we will give them a personalized letter, a handwritten letter mailed to them, uh, focused on a shout outs of their first six weeks. So it could be, uh, you know, Hey, Austin job hitting 15 workouts in your first six weeks.
Love working with you, uh, looking forward to the next, you know, six years together or whatever, just super personalized mailed out. We have a tracker in place with our team where, uh, Brian on our team, every Monday poles who has letters do for six weeks that week and boom, boom, boom coaches. Write it. They go out in the mail.
So six weeks is a big milestone. The next milestone after that is day 90. So day 90 would be milestone six, uh, day 90 is an interesting one because you are now three months in. And what we’ve found at this point, uh, for context, we’ve been, I’ve been running this gym for I’ve owned it now come up on 10 years.
So I would like to think I have 10 years of mistakes and data. So, uh, at day 90, you, I feel like people start to question like the grace period. I’ll stick with it is E it’s past, right? Like I’ll give this three months. Right. And that’s anecdotal there’s no, I don’t have any hard data for that, but that’s like, I’ll give this a, the whole saying, like, I’ll give it a couple of months.
Right. And they really want to see, do I jive with the community? Do I have relationships with the coaches? Is this going to be my home? Is this going to be my third place? Um, and then also we have a 90 day results guarantee. So we built into our sales process, not only a 30 day kind of broad satisfaction guarantee, but a 90 day results guarantee.
We guarantee that you will see results within 90 days. Um, so we have a sit down at the 90 day, mark, make sure you got results. We use the InBody for that. Um, so that’s, that’s another big milestone. The next milestone would be day 180, which is six months. Six months in, uh, is basically a duplicate a duplicate of the six week.
So they’ve been here six months. We don’t want them. I’ve found that this milestone was big because if we don’t personally recognize them at this milestone, they might feel forgotten. Because they’re not quite a veteran. Who’s like been here for years. Um, but they are past like the newbie stage where they need all kinds of attention.
Right? So six months in, we have a tracker built out just like the six weeks. They get a handwritten letter from a coach. Awesome job being here, six months, proud of you, et cetera, et cetera, just recognition personal shout out six times. So that would be the next milestone, uh, the next two milestones. So if you’re following me, I know I’m going fast, but that’s milestone seven, uh, milestones eight and nine are years, one and two.
So hitting the one-year anniversary and the two year anniversary, and that’s really just, you know, ultimately deciding why or why are people not making it past the first year, which if you do 12 month memberships is a renewal period. Uh, and then the second year. We have, you know, visits clubs, like 250 visits, 500 visits.
We’re trying to get their name on there, but really just trying to, I think what’s helpful for the milestones is you can, every client is at one of these milestones and at every, at every milestone, there’s a, drop-off like, there are people that make it to day 90 milestone, but don’t make it to day 180 milestone, or they make it to 180, but they don’t make it to one.
And if you can categorize everybody in there and study, why did that client not get that milestone? Was it a process? Do we need to update our programming? I mean, there’s something going back to, there has to be a better way. There’s something. Um, but here is I’ll end. I’ll end this milestone thing with milestone 10.
I actually think it’s the coolest milestone. Uh, so milestone. Is, and this is not, not unique for every business, uh, not specific for every fitness business, but specific to ours, uh, which is approximately 34 months, 34 months, uh, 34 months is that you can round that up to three years. So there’s a lot at play in the fitness industry at three-year mark.
And if you think about. Uh, one, if you average 3% churn every month, times, 12 months, that’s 36% of your clients every year will churn. We’ll leave. That means times three. Every three years, 100% of your clients are turning. Now. I’m not saying you don’t have people that have been with you long in three years, but your churn rate is going to increase.
And that’s at 97%, which is really strong retention. Right. Um, so you have a churn rate. You have, uh, basically every three years in my Miami. The culture and community of your gym is just different.
Sumit: No, this is perfect. What I loved about this, Doug is like, you know, these milestones like that.
And I was just in my mind just thinking, okay, he said 10, maybe he’s going to look somewhere, but no, you just rattled them off. You knew exactly. And I love the point about 34 months. Yeah. There’s a method behind the madness. It’s just not ear three. It is very particularly 34 months. So thanks for sharing that.
Like I think that,
Doug Spurling: and for context, Sumit, sorry to cut you off, but for context, uh, that number is, is, uh, referred to leg length of engagement. We got, we got that from, uh, from Chris Cooper, length of engagement. Uh, every gym can track that it’s taken all of your clients. How long have they been with you divided by that?
That tells you your average client. So our average client stays with us 34 months. So I’m constantly looking at how can I make that 35 months, 36 months? Because every time somebody stays past 34, it’s going to bring it up. But if somebody leaves before 34 months, it’s going to bring it down. So, you know, you know, if your leg is increasing, if your length of engagement is increasing, then your operations are getting better and your experience is getting better.
Sumit: Yeah, 100%. Now I have to ask you because you’re, since you’ve talked about leg, I’m a big follower about legs and arms and all that good stuff. How do you handle suspensions in the leg calculation or people who were buying packages?
How the hell do you do that?
Doug Spurling: Uh, if I have that answer, I would probably. I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t know. But he has that answer. That is suspensions is the, uh, is the, well, first of all, let me talk about sessions and packages. Um, I know some people still do it. We don’t do any of that. So we don’t have to, uh, I’m, I’m kind of anti session and dye package.
I’m not saying they’re bad for everybody, but for our business, with our team sties, with our overhead, with our. It’s not worth somebody to go buy a five pack of sessions for us. It’s just not, it’s not going to move the needle that much. So we, everything is monthly reoccurring memberships, um, the simplest way, and we don’t even have a software.
As you know, that contract leg, it is manual. It is manual. And all we knew is we have a list of every client. We have a list, a column, one client name. Column two is what month they’re on for their membership. On the first of every month, I have a staff member go through it’s part of his job every month. It goes through and adds a month to it.
If they’re still active. If they get, if they’re suspended or canceled, they get off for sake of simplicity. And, you know, cause you’ve been in some of my coaching calls, uh, we treat suspensions like cancellation and ultimately when we think KPI tracking it’s we always want to make sure we’re just comparing apples to apples and not apples to oranges.
So personally, I think, you know, talking out loud here, it’s, it’s less important. How you track it and more important that you track it consistently? Since, since I count suspensions as a cancellation and I count it as gravy as bonus, if they do come back. I now have data of that of 10 years. So really that’s why we have KPIs is to look at it and say like, oh, we’re filming this in August right now.
August is a terrible month in the fitness industry, So I can look at my KPIs from 10 off the last 10 August and say, where are we at? August, August. Cause comparing August to September in any KPI, whether we’re looking at suspensions leg Leeds.
It it’s, it’s not comparable, but as long as we’re tracking at the same, that’s the important of KPI tracking is I can say, okay, last month we lost 12. Last August, we lost 12 people. This August we’ve lost 15 people. What’s going on. That’s a little bit higher than last August and we can troubleshoot it or the suspensions are higher or whatever.
It may be so less important about, um, how you track it and more than it’s just track the same way so that you can use the KPIs. To cause that why do we track KPIs? That’s the question I always ask because I’m a numbers guy, as you know, like I have spreadsheets galore. And one thing I always try to be self-aware of is those numbers are telling a story.
So I need to make sure that yeah, we input the numbers into the scoreboard and we track our suspensions and we track our leg. But how are we changing our strategy because of what a number says. Right. And, and, and that’s, that’s really, what we have to do with KPIs is make sure that we take action, whether that be in rewarding the team, because you had a great month because the KPI got crushed or like right now, a specific example for us at risk, which is the number for us.
It’s a KPI. We pay attention to a lot. I spoke about it earlier. It’s the number of people who did not show in the previous week. Right. And that number for us is typically around 40 or 50 people. Uh, and right now that’s kind of normal 40 to 50 people. And that sounds like a lot, but when you have almost 400 people you’re managing in a week in August, it’s not terrible.
Well, the last couple weeks it’s been in the seventies. And so we can just keep inputting that number and we’re focused on, you know, connecting with people on, NAMMily trying to text them, trying to connect with them, pay attention to their trends, but I was kind of beaten. You know, beating my head against a wall saying, what else can we do?
Why are 70 people at risk right now? Is it our program? Are people not excited to be here? Like what? I mean, obviously there’s, you know, we’re filming this in stone, in the middle of a COVID pandemic and the Delta variants going up a little bit and there’s, there’s, you know, whey there’s hundreds of variables at play.
But ultimately what my point is is that I’m looking at that number. I’m recognizing that it’s higher. Then what it historically is. And as a team, we are creating strategies or actions to attach the, to that number and then watch it over time. No,
Sumit: this is brilliant. You know what, uh, you just gave me a great idea about bringing in that number as on top, because I know the number, right?
Like right now I’m telling you how many people not showed up. But I’m not counting, counting it up. I can definitely do that. And I’ll think about that more, but just sidetrack and I can, we can do 10 more episodes. One episode on KPI’s one episode, just this milestone. I would love to just talk more about this milestone.
Just, uh, you know, just there’s so many things. Just tell me your calendar. Maybe we can just put it out for the next five episodes and just keep going there because that’s a lot of the wealth of information here. So thank you again. I appreciate you taking the time. I really do.
Doug Spurling: Yeah, no problem, man. I love it.
Love doing it.