Culture & Retention

hello everyone and welcome to part four of the golden Playbook of retention and we're going to be discussing culture and retention the importance of building true relationships and building a true community and a true tribe and the amount of effect that will have on your retention and the length of retention that you have in your business um which will in turn turn into more revenue and more growth um that's what we're going to discuss today um this is basically I'm going to this is where I'm going to finalize this sort of small gold Playbook um

in this module we obviously add more retention uh retention training videos um but these four um four parts we really want you to start with first because it kind of gives you a true understanding of um what retention truly is the psychology behind it and also what to do right now that doesn't require any costs or massive investment or stuff like that so that's what we're going to going to discuss in this video so we're going to cover culture and retention your culture is the sum of your one-on-one relationships your gym culture is the sum

of your one-on-one relationships with your clients and your staff culture is the sum of your one-on-one relationships with your staff right there's a clear there's a clear there's a clear similar similar path between all these three things and that is the one-on-one relationship that you have with them right your culture is not how often your client visits a are together right it's not how long they stick around after a workout or even how engaged clients are with your workout session your culture is relationships and every relationship is oneon-one right you might disagree with that but

just think about all the relationship that you have with people right even friend groups your family your uh you know anyone right yes you can have um you know you can have it in a sort of a group setting but think about it for a second really everyone in that certain group you have a one-on-one relationship with them one is stronger one is a little weaker one you like more one you like less right it is still a one-on-one relationship with that person and that is the same when it comes to your uh to your

clients and the same when it comes to your staff right great culture keeps clients longer which basically means great 10one relationships keeps clients longer great 10one relationships with your clients will will keep them longer and that's what we're going to discuss in this video and exactly what that means and how to do that your culture is the sum of your personal relationships if you build trust and empathy with your clients you have a good culture a good relationship is a balance between friendship and objectivity your clients are not your friends and that's the first thing

that you have to keep in mind but your relationship with them must be friendly you must stay professional uh but you must stay professionally distant enough to charge money for your service but you must stay close CL enough to demonstrate that you care and that's not an easy balance to have you can do a little bit of you can do a little bit too much of one side and a little bit too much of the other you have to be professionally distant but you have to stay close enough to demonstrate that you care which in

which in turn will build the relationships that you have with clients and this is the same for your staff your culture is determined by your clients's relationships with your team and your team's relationship with you right there needs to be a clear hierarchy and there needs to be a clear step by step on how this is done you can't be the EV you know the the um the everything man your team is going to have to distribute what you want um when it comes to your client's culture and the relationship that building you're going to

have to delegate that to your team you must understand your vision and Mission your team must understand your vision and Mission it's very important you have a clear goal in sight a clear thing that you want with your business and a reason why you started and your team must stand behind that and understand it they must also know that you care about their careers and have a plan in place for them right they must know that they're not some that they're not tools that you simply use to make more money that you truly care about

them and that you care about where they end up in life they must see the Horizon and know they can achieve their career goals on your platform you have to think about it your coach has probably joined for the same thing yes of course to earn money and take care of the family and pay the bills but they also have a passion for what you do they also have a passion for your business and they love most of them at least I hope love teaching and they love helping people get to their goals and making

them more happy and them more healthy and they have to understand that that is your vision and Mission too your team must create one-on-one relationships with your clients the same way you would that's very important but that's tough to do and this is the most alling part of being an owner handing over responsibility for client relationships right 99% of you you know are very control freaky when it comes to your business and that's completely fine and that is you know it's understandable it's your baby right it's one of the most important things in your world

right but to truly build a business you're going to eventually have to delegate responsibility over to your teammates and act as a true CEO SL owner instead of someone instead of just another employee of your own business right it's hard but it's very possible and it's necessary if you truly want to build something that lasts staff people will all have different personalities right strengths and weaknesses for example one might be incredible at creating workouts for clients but might not have a strong sense of empathy or one might be creative but not really organized for this

reason which we discussed in the last video we always build a safety net we add a suc a client success manager for two to four hours per week so that person can manage your client's relationships with your brand when your coaches might be lacking your client's relationship should be with your brand it should not be tied to one single individual it should be with your brand and your company and this means that they have to align with your company's values and vision now you have six relationships to managing your business and these are the six

core ones right your client relationships with your staff arguably one of the most important ones your client's relationship with your brand and those two should be connected to each other your staff should be your brand and they should represent it accurately your staff's members relationship with their manager right and your staff's members relationship with your brand your relationships with your direct rapports and your Rel your relationship with your brand right there's a lot of things to manage here but a lot of these things if one or two are done right the others are done right

as well right but this is an organism your business is an organism and things need to be connected and things are connected right and what you need to do is you need to build a managerial layer usually a COO or a general manager or a Chief Financial Officer or chief sales officer or sales lead there should be the you know these things the general manager the the CFO and the COO these should be the owner's three Direct rapports in turn they translate the owner's intent vision and Mission to staff now you're probably thinking a COO

and a CFO and a sales lead like my God that's a lot of hiring to do um and that's yeah you know I can understand um so this might not be something that you can do immediately but this is definitely something that whenever you have the option this is definitely something you want to be working towards you're going to want to be working towards hiring a general manager if you don't have one already you're going to want working towards hiring a Chief Financial Officer and a chief sales officer and these people will be your three

three um really your three sort of people that will in turn transition your vision and Mission to your staff and your staff will in turn transition that over to your clients you should be at the top you should not be doing all this stuff yourself it's just not possible and well it is possible what you'll be working 13 hour days which you don't want to do and you'll never be able to really grow good gym owners should be removed from daily operations but still available to staff members who have unique situations right for example the

CEO which is you shouldn't be the one with the key to the supplies cabinet but should still be available to listen to a staff member with concerns about his or her career right you can kind of tell the difference right you shouldn't be you shouldn't yes you should be there for your team members they should be able to talk to you they should be able to ask questions and voice concerns but you shouldn't be there for the dayto day that's not your job your job is to build and grow the business make it more efficient

more productive and more profitable that's your only job as a CEO to make the decisions right and you'll have people working for you who will do the day-to-day stuff the owner must clearly Define the Brand's values it's your brand it's your company you must clearly you find them Yushi must answer questions like how does our service fulfill our goal what is our goal think about it really a lot of people you know they kind of just do stuff but think about what is really your goal in life what is your goal with this business that

you have what will you not do what is an absolute no no when it comes to your brand vision and Company who's our perfect client think about it maybe you already have a perfect client build an avatar based on that person if you don't build an avatar on a sheet of paper what is really the perfect client and make your staff understand what the perfect client is what is the perfect service Del perfect delivery of our service right what is the perfect way you should be doing things how far will we go to solve a

customer complaint these are all questions that you need to ask yourself that you need to write down and that these answers need to be known by your team Yi must also Define the language and behavior used by the brand for example the CEO must have staff playbooks a quality control or evaluation process and a style guide for brand media right these things would all be set in place so once they are set in place your staff understands them your staff know knows what to do and you won't have to deal with this on a day-to-day

basis it's going to cut your workload in half right which is in turn is going to give you more time to work on building the business growing the business investing all that stuff right so these things need to be written down they need to be clearly understood by your team by your managers and your manager should be able to help your team as well as you would be able to when it comes to these subjects right and it may seem like the owner is too far removed from client interactions to influence company culture but that's

not true the owner's role Your Role is to Define and teach the company culture to key staff right like the general manager like the CFO like the sales manager who then in reinforce the culture by tracking client and staff relationships right you should be able to delegate these important things in your business you should not be a you should not be doing these things yourself all right at this level companies must track average stick rate SL retention as a measure of their client facing culture and they must TR track length of employment as a measure

of corporate culture many businesses make wild guesses about about employee culture adding pinball machines and free breakfast cereal right but they fail to measure the effect of their action on employee retention employee retention is something so often overlooked but it's key and essential to building an amazing team that builds that grows your business right that means they're not taking their culture seriously they just not they're just trying to be as cool as Google right don't try to be fancy don't try to be hip right you need to take your company's culture extremely serious as it's

you know a little boring and it might be very straightforward for you and maybe like yeah you know I already have a culture right but this truly is so much more important and so much more effective on your business in the long term than any Facebook ad or any sales script like everything else in your business culture is measurable that means no matter how poor your current culture you can improve it right so don't be afraid if you think oh I don't really have these things you know sucks to suck right no you can improve

this the key is to focus on one relationship at a time and measure your progress right you need to actually be working on relationships and you need to be tracking this stuff like we covered in the first video data is key so how do you create a culture that binds people together you do that by reinforcing the story people tell themselves about your gym family and by leveraging the internal phase People Like Us do stuff like this right when people in your gym culture talk like that you know that you've got them in the right

spot right when you have a true Community a true tribe a true Unwritten unspoken set of rules that people follow right and people belong to your gym because the base of their self identity is in your tribe they're more closely aligned with your group than when any one thing your group does and it's kind of a sort of something you kind of have to think about deeply right your culture should be and your client should self-identify with everything about your business with your tribe with the community with the group not simply about one thing you

do not simply about one special thing or unique thing you do but about everything aligned with your business right it should be self identity to them and you need to ask yourself the question which is which is kind of a way to spot if your clients are in that self identity phase is you need to ask yourself the question if your gym stop doing CrossFit style workouts I'm just going to use a CrossFit for example but this is with any Fitness needs right and start of doing something entirely different for three months ask yourself how

many members would stay right and that's a true thing you should think about if we just Chang everything around right now how many of our members would stay and the people who would stick around are more closely aligned with your culture than with any one activity and that's the type of client you want that's what I talked about a little earlier right and I'm just going to use CrossFit as an example but this is the case for any Fitness n obviously every client you have does CrossFit or some other form of high-intensity training they have

that in common and the pursuit of CrossFit reinforces their places in your culture but you have to ask yourself what else do they have in common because it can't just be CrossFit that's what you should pursue next to build your culture right what else do these people all have in common perhaps almost all your members enjoy watching the local college team play if so that represents an obvious way to strengthen the bonds of the tribe right and that's the sort of type of stuff that you want to be looking at you know we see some

gyms where the whole membership goes out on drinks uh goes out for drinks on Friday except maybe the 10% who don't what do you do for those people ask yourself that some of you might have you know community activities and things like that but I can you know almost 100% say with certainty not everyone's joining in so what are you doing for the people that aren't and maybe you're happy to leave them and if that's so then carry on but it say and 90% is a great number but it say only 10% of your gym

goes out on drinks Friday what are you doing for the 90% who don't right like I I see a lot of gmers we have 100 members and they are very close with 15 people but what are you doing for those 85 that kind of being left left behind that will leave any M any minute right they they have to be focused on as well and what I'm not recommending is that you have 10 special events every month I'm saying that if you want to strengthen your culture choose the extracurriculars that attract the most people don't

focus on the 10% focus on the 90 and you have to understand we're not a longtail business you don't make a living of 10,000 people who visit the gym one time we're an extremely short sale business and it's important that people in your gym say people like me do something like this right and you want every person in your gym to say that start a day marketing is sexy but acquiring clients is more expensive than retaining them right put retention first then bolster your business with great marketing a lot of people put marketing client acquisition

and sales first and they're very important but they leave retention kind of on the back burner and kind of just leave that you know oh yeah you know that's figured out that's done while retention and customer relationships should be the number one priority and then you can focus on the other important stuff the best gyms we work with can tell you the length of retention and lifetime value of a client they can also tell you what it costs to require a client the that data underpins all their efforts right they know that a small increase

in wages paid to a CSM can result in thousands of dollars when length of retention goes up they know $50 in birthday CS for a client is a great investment and it's not just a stupid expense they also know exactly what they can spend on marketing when they have they know exactly what they can spend on marketing when they have amazing retention systems in place businesses can invest wisely in client acquisition because they know they'll more than recruit their initial cost through the length of retention right when you know and when you increase your length

of retention by an extra 6 to 12 months you'll be able to spend more on client acquisition you'll be able to spend more marketing more on sales more on you know programs like these and stuff like that because you'll know that you'll be able to earn more per client it's such an important thing but a lot of people forget that and you got to ask yourself how much confidence would you have in marketing spend if you knew each client would stay for 3 years on average say your average client worth you know say you're earning

1,200 bucks a year per client right and that's your average potential right now and say you can push that up to 3 years you would in turn make $3,600 per client so you would be feel a lot more comfortable I'm guessing spending a little bit more money on ads and client acquisition when you know that that your um lifetime value of a client is so much higher higher and it's going to give you so much more freedom to build your business so you want to ensure you're doing everything you can to increase retention then focus

on adding more of high value clients don't reverse the order with which I see 90% of gy owners doing retention first then acquiring new clients that's second retention is crtical critical because it ensures stability and sustainable growth for the business right and it allows key staff people to focus on coaching and not scrambling for clients right because that is what a lot of gym owners are doing right now it's just scrambling for more clients more clients oh business is going bad more clients more clients but they're not focusing on retention and clients benefit from retention

too you have to understand this is not just a money grab trying to squeeze more money out of your clients they came to your gym to solve a problem they won't solve on the couch if you can keep them coming to the gym they'll accomplish their goals and it's your duty to do everything you can to help them cross goals of their list and make plans to accomplish new ones right if they keep coming to your gym they'll also be healthier and that's a primary goal for some but a great thing for all right we're

helping people here we're really saving lives here everyone benefits with increased retention truly everyone there's no one that hurts so this always should be your number one so take take action to improve your length of retention today and start tracking your metrics and if you need help with this Join one of the group calls or schedule oneon-one session and we'll jump further in detail we'll be uploading more videos to this module as well with tips and tricks and new strategies and you know some more um some more sort of copy and paste trainings that you

can really just kind of implement into your business today with strategies and everything but this is very important and we've already given you a ton of stuff that you can add to your business which I'm very confident a lot of you will be lacking in so start working on that let's get to work people I'll see you guys in the next video goodbye