Any business around for Covid understands the importance of trying to see what’s coming around the corner.
So when we sat down with Thomas Plummer for this episode, we had one question.
“What’s next”?
The answer might surprise you…
In this episode, we unpack:
- Why having great coaches isn’t enough (and what you should be focusing on instead).
- How the industry is changing and the steps you can take to be ahead of the game.
- The market segment no one is serving and how you can take advantage of that opportunity.
Plus much more!
Looking to build a future-proof business model? Look no further, this episode has you covered.
Want help simplifying and systemizing your fit biz? That’s exactly what we help you do throughout the entirety of the client journey. Schedule your FREE Naamly trial today so you can start experiencing the benefits!
Watch The Full Episode
Sumit Seth: Welcome back, Tom,
Thomas Plummer: all the time. No. See man, I’m liking these, we doing like these once a week. Now I have to leave for all week to think about what are we going to talking about next? And I want to get this out or this sound, so, yeah, it’s good to see you, man. Let’s go. Let’s let’s let’s have some fun
today.
Sumit Seth: Let’s have some fun. So welcome to another. Just one thing episode. And this time around Tom, I just came back from back-to-back masterminds. And the question that I was hearing a lot of people that when we break out and I was talking to folks was what’s, what’s going to happen next. What’s around the corner now.
So you’re
The expert you tell us. What’s what, what do you see? This is kind of like in a weird way, a bizarre question, because there’s, I just wrote an article, uh, for one of the old school magazines about. What what’s the industry like today, what happened? And you know, you, and I’ve talked before about the split and there’s the mainstream industry, the chains.
I think a lot of that stumbling investor groups are buying enough and kind of that independent gym. That’s a whole new world that we don’t play. Eh, price wars. It’s, it’s almost a toxic world over there. And on this side we have the training gems, and then you, even within the training jams, you have the, the guys that do, you know, the team training or the circuit training, and then you have the smaller training jams, and then you have the guys trying to push the bigger one.
So I’m looking all this stuff or Caden and, and, you know, it’s just, if you look back through the entire history, and there’s always precursor. That kind of, if you’re a writer they’re called foretelling, which is always set you up because you say like, you know, somebody opened that door five years ago and they, we never saw them again.
And then, you know, sooner or later something’s going to open that door. Well, the, the, the precursors in this stuff, there’s all kinds of things indicating that we’re ready in the gym business to, to bust through to another level again. Um, I was, I was working on a presentation for Chris foyer performed better, and it was.
Um, I’m looking at, you know, the, the, I was in the mainstream fitness world for a generation. I worked with world jams, gold gems, all these guys back to there. And then I met Parisi in the mid nineties. I met cost groves at the late nineties, 2000. I started seeing these trader gyms coming through and I’m like, Wow there.
This is a whole new world on this side, but there’s no business education nobody’s talking business, and this is guys are getting results or getting a higher return per client. They’re working with the clients. I’m looking at the mainstream where we’re going. This is not going to go anywhere. This is there’s no where to go.
So. The word, you know, I hate to use the older word now, the pivot, it was time for me to, to change. You know, I started with perform better with their summit and I think 2006 or seven, and it just put me on a new path. Well, were there again that the, that the gym’s really. At that point, you were going to just bust through again, what are we going to see?
It’s it’s there. Everybody’s a good trainer. Everybody there. Good trainers are coming out of everywhere. You know, you go to perform better. There’s 5,000 good trainers a year attending those summits. There’s but there’s a generation now of, if I’m not selling training, I have to sell the experience of training.
I have to sell all the trainings delivered and there’s guys now starting to build. That you will see them coming out this year, late this year, next year, they’re starting to build gems based on the experience of training, not just tricking lights or something like that, but everything from the colors, the design.
The little baby, 80 foot, many lock rooms where I almost, I had my own high end, like a hotel bathroom. Everything is toward the experience. It’s not just what happened to the trainer is what did the trainer experienced surrounding that training from how we stay in touch with them using like your, you know, brilliant software to how we, um, Manage them online to how we gift them, reward them for being our clients, to how we entertain them with parties and beer taps of wine coolers and wine bars in the gym to how we maintain all these things there that Jim, the next generation gym is going to be a little bit.
I mean, he is going to have to be 4,000 to 6,000 feet. Uh, it’s going to be more elite. That client is that small group. One-on-one client. You don’t have to have all this team nonsense, or if you do, you put it in at a high enough level. There’s several gyms now. Uh, Pittsburgh, north fitness, uh, quench training on Cape Cod.
Their lowest entry into the gym. They offer team is still $229 because it pre-qualifies the clients and they get four or five personal training or small group sessions a month. So that upscale elite gym, we talk about that. We throw the words around, but we haven’t built that.
We’ve got the training right. 10 years ago. But with this guy never created the delivery. For that. And that’s the, so the next big thing, the next brilliant thing I think is going to be is that next generation of gym that’s truly built for the elite upscale clients. It again, it’s it’s how do we deliver it?
What is the experience of your day?
There’s such a better level that the play that Jim is going to be built, that will be the gym of the future, because it will own that top 60 or 40% by a fluids that will own that market.
That don’t want to be in the big gyms. They don’t want to be in the change yet, and they don’t want to be in these little 1500 foot dump training gems. And these are the type of gyms that have the capacity to do. Uh, a hundred thousand 1.2 a month, 1.5 a month. Lisa, that summarize all this. I know we’ve got a limited time on this one.
If I put all that together, the big thing is going to be that that’s, that’s going to be your first mainstream commercial training gym that can generate $2 million in. And I think that Joel will be going to see those coming out. They’re going to come in big numbers. There’s already guys touching those 1 6 1 8 1 2 million bouncing off the numbers, but building a delivery system that will get us to $2 million is what I’m really saying.
But the delivery system to get us to that number doesn’t exist. The client is. The client wants to come to that gym. We haven’t built the gym yet. They can bring enough of those clients in to get us 2 million years. That’s coming. That’s what’s next is that type of training jail.
I think that resonates really, really well because just not in addition to the sessions I had last week, there are other people that have been talking about how we went from that model, where you’re looking for 300 members each paying on average.
About $300, which give our tape works. That’d be that $90,000 a month, which translates into that million dollar thing. It’s now going to go back to about a hundred to one 50 members each paying the magic number seems to be a thousand dollars. And now you can own that person and then provide that total care, total support total system solution, if you will, to that elite client and that.
Right there. You’re providing a higher level of service and it’s $150,000 a month to the gym, or you’re providing a lot more care to that individual if you will. So that that’s, it’s, it’s spot on. That’s exactly what I’ve been. It’s
Thomas Plummer: it’s there. It’s going to be there, but everybody talks about it. Nobody, the word elite, the word upscale, wherever we’re real.
We’re trying to build a jam that really reaches out and owns that client that. I mean, there’s touches of that, uh, advantage personal trainer, Greg drab, and mystic does a great job with that. Uh, I think he’s pulled that Pittsburgh north does a great job of touching that client quince I’ve mentioned does a great job of that female only.
But that upscale client and the word thing is their home. They’re looking for that place, but they don’t want to go to the other gyms. They’ll never set foot in these big box gyms, nor do they want to set foot in a Southern little small gym where I walk in, I stand on the side of the workout area. The other guy finishes and that client walks off and I walk out and again, it’s a crap bathroom.
I can’t linger. I can’t, there’s no space where I can come and just, I want to be part of your family. It’s just now suddenly a guy the other day, when he’s rebuilding front, Jim, I said, put a beer cooler in there and get a place where you can put a small pony keg of beer and put in a wine cabinet. That locks of course, but you don’t get 30, 40 bottles of wine on Friday afternoon.
Just set up a little bar and just like clients stopped by from one to four, but we’re just gonna have. You know, and they come in and have a couple beers. They sit and talk to the other members. Maybe they work out first. Then they stop and have a beer on the way out. Like, why not? I want to be part of your community.
So that, that, that community, they used to be the country club people. Now they’re the social where they go out to eat together. As groups, there are people that go to the high-end restaurants. The whole backspace that client is in the training gyms. We don’t have enough ways to value their money. And that’s what’s next is to build a delivery system.
It’s not just the training. Every young trainer goes, same thing. Oh, I’m such a great trainer. You know, when I start training people, people are just my workouts. Dude, they’re not there. Everybody’s a good trainer. That’s the entry level. How do you deliver it? What’s the experience of your training? What’s wrapped around it from my contact points to my lingering ability in the gym, to the little amenities that quality of soaps in the bathroom, you know, the great of toilet paper, you know, it just all comes down to every single detail counts and we forget.
And so we build a gym based on training. We got crap against the walls and stuff shoved in the corners and no private spaces, no place to sit. And because we’re selling workouts, instead of selling the experience, that’s going to be a breakthrough. That $2 million gym is going to be a real part of our lives.
Um, and that’s going to be a big part of it. The guys are going to get left behind if they don’t start understanding delivery system, don’t start thinking about the experience of this because our clients have money. We’ve got to wrap the training around that money. We have to create an experience when they go.
Yes. Every dime I spend in here and more is worth it because this gym just gets me. We’re not there yet.
Sumit Seth: Can we agree? Well, thank you once again for your time. It’s so funny that you talked about that time. Like our very first positioning when we started anomaly. Where’d the client experience platform, because it’s like once the more, you know, your client there.
The way they think that the emotional things that drive them, the, you know, whether they’re vegetarian or non, you know, you just get to that level of detail about them because they’re sharing the life with them. The more you can get that information into a notepad who cares or in our case, in our system, so that when you, when other trainers come in or the GM comes into the owner, looks at it, they can use that to personalize individually.
And connect at a deeper level that that’s how you build those long-term relationships and kind of throw one more thing on that
Thomas Plummer: dude. One more thing, one more thing. It’s it’s the disconnect a trainer makes, let’s say he’s a good trainer green. He makes a hundred thousand a year. So a hundred thousand, 200 by three by 12,800 $8,300 a month after taxes.
He’s got six. So that’s, if you think about that, How does he connect to a guy that makes that an hour?
so what’s, what’s the sky that makes, you know, a billion dollars a year with that. But even the guy that. $2 million a year. How does he connect to that trainer? Well, the trainer thinks he knows that client, you know, cause if I get a car, like that plan would be like that client, you know, that type of thing, then, you know, they, so it’s really hard for our trainers to get inside the head of a guy with money.
And they almost always, because they have so little yet that they don’t connect with the guy that does, you know, you make six, seven, $800,000 a year. That keeps you into a different class of living style. And there’s a huge difference between a hundred and $700,000. There’s such an enormous living style difference for that.
But we, we don’t think about this guy in terms of his expectations of quality. He he’ll drop a hundred dollars for a bottle of wine. Like it’s just, cause it doesn’t matter. I want it. I get it.
They want privacy. Exclusivity. They want eliteness. The guy wants to come in early since cruel drink some really nice high-end cappuccino. Got a cute young person behind there.
They’re so nice and gracious working behind the counter. You know, just the guy goes, sir, can I get you another one of those before your workout? Or what do you need? And, you know, it’s just. It’s all that stuff for the money guy, as an expectation for the gym owner. That’s like what he pays for one day a year for a vacation somewhere, you know, and this is how this guy lives.
Well. He expects you the gym to be part of that. Lifestyle. And when we don’t get there, we, that’s why there’s a disconnect.
Sumit Seth: On that note, we will call it a day.
It’s about experience. It’s about connection and it’s about charging and knowing, knowing, getting into the head of the claim. So
if you do that, you can charge more for sure. All right. Thanks.