Sales Process

Having a solid sales process allows you to understand what is working or not in converting
consults to customers. This section will layout considerations as you put together your sales
process. These considerations are relevant for both in-person and online sales consultations.

When you meet and greet a potential client be sure to look and act the part as first impressions
are made in the first 6 seconds.

● Be on time
● Always remember their name
● Be in a great state of mind
● Be aware of your tone of voice
● Consider the space/atmosphere (what does it look/smell like?)
● Connect to something bigger/credible whenever possible and then connect it locally
● Take control of the conversation with the confidence that the fitness plan will build trust
● If in-person, take the client on a gym tour, making sure to point out the whiteboards (key
to showing personalization).
● Check-in with yourself at the end of the meeting to ensure your client understood.

Determine what their wants and needs are by asking:

● Why did you come in today?

● What are your goals in fitness?
● Why are your goals important for you to achieve?
● How committed are you to achieving your goals (0-10)? Why is it that number?
● Tell me about your nutrition/lifestyle habits
● What are your energy levels like during the day? How many times were you sick last
year? Are you on any medication or supplements?
● How long did it take you to develop the problem?
● In the past, have you tried to solve the problem? How many times did you try? How/what
did you try?

Sales Consultation

When undertaking a sales consultation be sure to do so in a salesroom, or designated

consultation area. The script below should help when explaining a 4-week trial offer. This can be
manipulated for any service offering.

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“Our goal is for you to experience _______ and a Personalized style
of fitness. We want you to try the service in a no pressure, no
commitment environment. An OPEX program is designed
specifically for you by your coach. To start the process, we perform
a three-session assessment that is called OPEX BMW (Body, Move, and Work).

The first session, Body, is where we gain insights into your body
composition and discuss your goals, fitness history, current lifestyle, and nutritional habits. The
second session, Move, is where we
perform a comprehensive movement screen to gain insight into
your movement patterns and how we will shape your program
based on your strengths and to improve your weaknesses. The last
session, Work, is where we perform work capacity testing to determine where you are today.

Over the four weeks, we will perform your OPEX Assessment

and design your personalized training program. You’ll execute your
program on-site, within a great community, and great floor coaching.
At the end of the four weeks, we’ll have a monthly consultation, as
we do with all of our clients. Monthly consultations are a great
opportunity to review your training, talk nourishment, discuss goals, and any questions you may
have. This is also a useful opportunity
to learn and fully understand the reasoning behind your coaches’
tips and program design. Our goal is to fully enable you to take
control of your health and fitness.

Based on what we’ve discussed, does this seem like something

that would help you?

Address any objections they may have here, before presenting the
numbers).

We charge $199 for the three-part, one-on-one assessment then

the rest of your month is completely free and there is no
commitment attached to signing up.

If the Client Buys

Should the client buy a 12-month contract, refer to the Sales Process. If the client
takes the 4-week offer, refer to Sales Process

Check out the BMW sheet below intended to set a client up.

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If the Client Doesn’t Buy

If the client doesn’t buy, we suggest dropping them into the ongoing nurture process.

Second Sales Consultation

After the client’s 4 Week Experience has ended, a second sales consultation should
take place. The consultation should be run as a hybrid monthly consult and sales
consult and contain a review of the four weeks of training, including how it went, plus
how it relates to their assessment and goals moving forward. The script below should
help with how to manage this consultation.

“The goal of the last four weeks was to allow you to experience
OPEX and how our system works. Based on the assessment
process, I designed a six-week program with the priorities of
improving your core stability, left to right side squatting imbalance
and to create rhythm and consistency in the gym.

We are four weeks into your program, and you may have noticed
that we’ve been prioritizing single leg squatting on Mondays and
isometric core work on Tuesday and Friday. The great news is I
see that your compliance is at 92% over that time!

Let’s discuss how it went:

How have you felt over the past 4 weeks?

What do you enjoy about the OPEX system?
Do you feel like we are addressing your goals?

As we discussed a few weeks ago, here are our membership

options to continue with the program (show sales sheet), which
option do you think works best for you?

*If the close is not happening, offer to roll the $199 into their first
month’s membership with a 12- or 24-month commitment.

Pricing
Now it’s time to go into more detail about pricing on top of what’s already in the
products/services section of the business plan. A few important things to consider include:

● Cost structure

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 ● Willingness to pay
● Your service offering(s)
● Grandfathering

When you think about pricing, you must keep a few points in mind:

Cost structure

Each gym is going to have a bit of a different SG&A expense structure, but we anticipate your
monthly expenses to be between 3-8k (not including COGS) with the largest expenses being
rent and floor hours. This means you’re going to need to make what’s called a contribution
margin (gross margin) on each client that allows you to earn enough money to not only cover
your expenses but to build some scale.

For example, if you pay your coaches (after employee expenses) 50% of each client’s revenue,
do no Personal Training or sell supplements or merchandise and you charge $200, you will
make $100 in contribution margin per client. If your cost structure is $6k, you need to have 60
clients to break even (assuming you are paying yourself as a coach).

We want you to be able to break even around the 30-40 client mark when possible. There will
be examples where it may take more. If you put some Personal Training sessions into the mix,
you can get that client number down.

We want you to be able to break even earlier because you work hard, and your service is
valuable. A valuable service, coupled with a smart cost structure, should ensure your business
is secure sooner, making it possible to scale faster.

Remember that the lower your cost structure, while remaining premium, the faster you’ll break
even, and the more profit you’ll make.

Willingness to pay

You must know how important your service is for your clients. Personalized fitness is not group
training anchored at $150/month. We are not Planet Fitness at $10/month. We are
Revolutionized Personal training. Our product is better because:

● Personal Training often costs clients $600+ (many times $1000+ for 3 sessions/week)
● We offer more features/benefits than Personal Training
● While expensive is relative, we believe our service is worth over $500/month per client

Your market has preconceived notions of what fitness should cost. Everything that you say,
market, or do with your clients either bolsters your price point or hurts it. If you don’t present
pricing to prospective clients in a confident way, they won’t pay up. If you don’t deliver

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consistent and outstanding service, they won’t pay up. If you don’t market well, they won’t pay
up.

Your price point should continue to move north with stronger client results, but you will want to
price effectively (i.e. not too low) when starting.

If you connect more closely to Personal Training and its market your audience will be much
more likely to pay more because they already expect it to be much higher than group training.

If you connect more to the group, there’s a possibility these clients will try to push your value
down. Because you have costs and it takes approximately two hours to serve a client in a month
(not including floor hours), you need to make enough money to build a strong and professional
business.

Service Offering(s)

Individual Design

While every market is different, you must price above $200/month per client for Individual
Design. We recommend $275 for locations outside of city centers, with that number moving to
$300, within a year. We recommend $350 for most locations in city centers due to your cost
structure and the fact your audience’s WTP is higher.

To feel confident in your pricing, be sure to research other businesses you compete with, as
well as businesses that your target market patronize. Consider the following:

● What is your competition’s monthly cost versus what they offer to their clients?
● What do their facilities and amenities look like?
● Do they fully personalize workouts?
● Do they write all workouts for their clients or just when they come into the gym - i.e. PT?
● Do they work nourishment and lifestyle?
● Do they do assessments?
● Do they do monthly consultations?
● Are their coaches on the floor?

4-Week Trial
We don’t advise pricing the trial under $180 as it’s important to recognize the amount of
time in total the trial requires from the coach, namely:

● Three+ hours of 1:1 time

● Two hours of assessment
● Two+ hours of programming
● An unspecified amount of time on the floor

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The total amount of time spent on the client is not commensurate with anything less
than $180. We recommend starting the trial at a $199 price point and raising it over
time.

Personal Training

Personal Training should be charged in addition to a client’s monthly membership and should
only be offered to people because they need it. To price personal training, we recommend doing
the same research as above and then pricing a bit higher than you think. The reasons to do so
include the fact this isn’t your main service; only clients who need it are being sold it, so they
tend to be stickier and have a higher willingness to pay; plus, they are already bought into you
because they are your clients. As a guideline:

● Don’t price under $75/hour

● Work hard to get to $100+ which will happen as you gain clients, limit the number of
sessions you do, and do a good job within these sessions
● Sell individual sessions or blocks of 12
● If they buy 10, make the price the anchor price you want to charge
● If they buy one, add approximately 15-20% to the price of the block of 10
● With the 4 Week Trial, there is a good amount of work so you can’t give it away. We
generally recommend approximately $199 or more.

Assessments

Because you are either working free trials or full memberships, you mostly want to use the
assessment price as a sales tool that can be rolled into a membership to close the deal. We
generally recommend $199 as the value. If you’re rolling it into the membership, use the real
value (i.e. two full sessions) at the full PT price for those sessions.

Grandfathering

If you’ve ever owned a gym or coached people for a long time, you’ve probably struggled with
some or many of your client’s price points. If you start and don’t have the expectation that prices
may go up over time, it will be very challenging to increase prices, if indeed you’ve earned the
right to do so.

That said, when you do deliver outstanding service consistently to your clients, you will earn
more client willingness to pay. When it comes time to remove grandfathering your client’s
pricing, we recommend offering them the following choices:

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 ● To go month to month at their coach’s current price point - not their coach’s previous
price point
● Buy a 12-month contract at a 5% discount from their coach’s current price point
● Buy a 24-month contract at a 10% discount from their coach’s current price point

You’ll likely face this situation after one or two years when you’ve built credibility and brand
power. To avoid a similar situation going forward we suggest:

● Ensuring you position future price changes to your new clients when you sell them their
first contract
● Ensure your contract clearly states this and what happens after their contract period is
up
● Earning their ongoing trust by overdelivering.
● Two to three months out from a client’s contract is up, you’ll want to notify their coach so
that they can ease them into a price conversation by positioning their long-term results
and relationship. When it comes time for their first contract to end, if you have set the
expectation up front of price changes, transitioning them to a second contract will
generally go smoothly.
○ If the coach’s price has not changed, you’ll want to discuss the longest-term
contract on offer as the client can receive a discount if they sign up for 12/24
months.
○ If the coach’s price point has changed, you’ll still want to position the longer-term
contracts because your clients will likely be able to stay pretty close to their
current rate if they lock back in.
● You will need to renew the contract monthly as opposed to just letting people go - that
will take a bit of work each month, but you’ll lock in a longer-term contract, increase
client retention and LTV, and increase revenue/profit.

Most people don’t take pricing seriously enough. You need to do your research, test your
market (i.e. set your pricing and do test runs with friends, family, and others who you’ve not met
before), be confident, and successfully close clients at your price. If you’re priced too low, you
should be closing a bunch of deals. Be aware you may regret this later. If you’re too high, have
no success stories to back you up, and are not confident you won’t be able to attract and close
enough clients to grow fast enough.

Owner/Coach Pay
Owner Pay

As you would have seen in the Pro-forma, we want you to work hard to get your gym up and
running with a low-cost structure. We don’t want you to skimp on paint, cleaning supplies, the
equipment required, the right assets/signage, and amazing coaching.

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From there it’s all about hard work, the right, and consistent message, and talking to your target
market every chance you can get so you break even and can scale up with additional coaches.

Should you decide to bring in coaches before you have broken even, you must understand the
tradeoff. The upside of hiring coaches earlier means you should grow faster because both you
and the coach can spend more time bringing in more clients and you should have more time to
work on the business because you’ll get the coach to help with floor coaching and sales
consults.

The downside of hiring another coach earlier, meanwhile is that it costs more money as you’ll
want to pay your coaches sufficiently well and an additional coach requires more of your
attention. Given we recommend delaying hiring another coach, we suggest paying yourself first
and doing so paying attention to this structure:

● Set your financial books up smartly

● Know how much cash you have
● Know how much your costs will be each month so that you can project your cash
runway, i.e. how many months/years you could survive without bringing any clients in.
● Know the number of clients you need your first coach hired by
○ We find this number to be 25-35 clients
● Know the number of clients when you’ll begin to hire your first coach. This is different
than the above number and allows you to know when you must have your job
descriptions out and interviewing.
● Pay yourself $0 except if you make a profit
○ While you get up and running, your cash flow in the business is critical
● If you decide to take out coaching commission or salary, make sure you factor this into
your cash position
● In your financial metrics, show the numbers as if your coaching commissions were
tracking at 40% (this assumes you’re not paying yourself). This is for you to see what
your business looks like when all clients have approximately 40-50% of COGS attached
to them.
● When you bring coaches on, begin to physically pay yourself via commissions or a
salary based on the clients you’re working with. This can and should grow over time as
your business grows in profit.
● Always consult with your accountant because you should take the bulk share of your
monthly take from profit as it’s taxed at lower rates (currently).

Coach Pay

Professionalism is a huge part of our OPEX brand. Part of being a professional is that
professionals make money. Professionals make enough money that they can
not only live but have a family and enjoy some security.

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We believe coaches need to earn the professional badge, but that gym owners must
Allow them to do so. Too many fitness systems rely on paying their
coaches by the hour but don’t give them enough hours to earn a legitimate wage. Three
classes a day, four days per week @ $20/class = $1000/month is simply not enough to
live on.

To allow your coaches to be professionals, we believe you must do a few

things well:

● Onboard them where they feel safe financially

○ Not only do we believe they should make an hourly wage for floor hours
(approximately minimum wage is fine because this isn’t going to be the main
source of income) but that they should earn a draw commensurate with their
experience as well as their needs.
■ Often this is approximately $1-$2k/month. We realize that this payment
isn’t safe for the long run, but it is fair for the limited hours they will work
until they build a client base
■ Once they coach enough floor hours and people to earn more than the
draw amount, the draw goes away
● At this point, you’ll want to pay them based on client revenue
○ Base this on a 40% scale that can increase 0.5% per year with quality execution
● That means that if a client is paying $300/month, the coach will make $120 from that
client if they are in year one
● If you find that a coach is an outstanding performer and you want to incentivize them
further, move their percentage up a small amount as long as their price point is higher
than your base price point. Ensure the gym is still making net more money after paying
the coach
○ If your lowest price point is $300, for example, and a coach is outstanding and
worth 41%, their price point could be $325, for example, because $300*(1-40%)
= $180 and $325*(1-41%) = $191.75 to the gym
● Pay them the same percentage for Personal Training as you do for OPEX ID
○ Do this because they are already earning their % from that client’s monthly
program, plus the program is already written and you shouldn’t be overly
incentivizing personal training.

We often get asked the question “why not pay a higher percentage?” You are going to have to
pay coaches as employees which means you’ll have payroll expenses that will be approximately
7% more than if you didn’t pay them as employees. This being so, you’ll be paying out
approximately 50% when you factor in tenured coaches earning more than 40%. Your business
needs to earn a high enough gross margin to grow. On top of this, you’re also paying them for
floor hours.

We recommend paying coaches every two weeks; the 15th and 30th of each month

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(earlier if it’s a weekend or holiday). Over time, we’d love to see more and more coaches have
health care and 401k (a retirement package), but you need to ensure your business is solid first.

Systems
Systems are an integral part of the model, no matter if you are online or in-person, your systems
have to be tight. In this section, we will layout systems that you will need to run a personalized
fitness business. Keep in mind that the following are recommendations based on our
experience-there may be other companies that you prefer, but the following are our
recommendations.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A customer relationship management (CRM) is one of many different approaches that allow a
company to manage and analyze its interactions with its past, current, and potential customers.

We highly recommend that fitness businesses have a CRM. This is important for all parts of
your funnel, from prospects to customers. A solid CRM will allow you to personalize your
communication based on the contacts that you are speaking to.

Recommended CRMs:
1. Active Campaign
2. Flexx
3. Keap

Coaching Software

Having coaching software is vital for the personalized fitness model. Not only do we need a
platform to deliver daily training programs, but we need a platform where we can house metrics,
communicate with our clients, appropriately intake and assess, house consultation data,
prescribe nutrition and behavior protocols, etc.

Recommended Coaching Platform:

1. CoachRx
*until CoachRx Pro is developed (Jan 2021), we recommend the use of TrueCoach to
deliver day-to-day training programs

Payment Processor

A payment processor manages the credit card transaction process by acting as the mediator
between the merchant and the financial institutions involved.

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Having a well-developed, user-friendly payment processor is important to ensure receiving
payments from your clients are seamless and financial metrics are easy to acquire.

Recommended Payment Processors

● Pike 13
● Stripe

Social Media Manager

In today’s world, it is important to organize and plan social media content that you put out on
your channels. Unless you have a full-time marketer, it is important to make this process
low-drag and seamless on a weekly/monthly basis.
A social media manager allows you to plan your content and schedule that content with copy to
go out automatically instead of attacking social media reactively.

Recommended Social Media Manager

1. Later
2. Hootsuite

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