Today we are going to dive deeper into fitness business automation and we’re going to go deep into one system that I created in particular that’s going to help you hold your clients more accountable to their weight and fat loss goals automatically. If you’re getting a lot of clients and you’re finding it difficult to keep track of their goals, keep track of their weight, body fat on a regular basis, then this training is for you. What I’m going to talk about is a piece of software that I created. It’s called FitClients. You can check it out at FitClients.com. I’m going to tell you a little bit about it and why I created it.
When I first started my fitness business, I just did the old paper method. People would come in, we’d have them measure their weight, body fat, and then we had a little portable file box. They’d go in and dig through, go to the first letter of their last name, pull out their paper, fill in their information, and then put it back in the box. That was fine when we had 30, 40, 50 members, but once we got up to 100, 150, 200 members, it was really hard to keep track of all their results. For my assistant at the time, she would have to go through every single member’s paperwork and that would take her at least a day or two, then she would have to follow up with the people that didn’t weigh in, or if they weighed in and didn’t have a good result. It was just taking up way too much time. What I did was I created a software, FitClients.com, to take care of that problem. I’m going to take you through FitClients, and how to get the most out of it.
1. How to Get Started
The number one question I get is how to get started using FitClients, how to introduce it to their members, how to learn the software. We just added 20 new training videos to the site, so it’ll help walk you through some of the different features and functions and stuff. When you first get FitClients, what you want to do is send out an email letting people know that you have a new system that you want to use to help hold them accountable to the weight and fat loss goals and you’re looking for 20 beta testers. Everybody’s going to want to hop on board because most people want to be the first ones to do something.
Send out an email to your email list and ask for 20 beta testers. You’re going to get those 20 and you’re going to use that to learn the software because if you mess up during the beta test and something doesn’t go right, it’s not going to be that big of a deal. Do that for two or three weeks and keep them weighing in every single week. What we do is we have everybody weigh in on Mondays. We call it Motivational Mondays. We encourage everybody to weigh in at home, that way it’s first thing in the morning and they’re on their same scale. We actually tell them to buy an Omron body fat tester because they’re only about 30 bucks. Do that at home first thing in the morning as well.
Our trainers are trained that anybody that walks in on Monday morning into boot camp to welcome them to Motivational Monday and ask them if they have weighed in and done their body fat yet today. If they say, “Yes,” then great, they can get warmed up. If they say, “No,” we have a little kiosk stand, we have a little iPad Mini with the terminal open right next to a scale and the Omron body fat analyzer, and we have them weigh in, do their body fat, and put the information into the software right then and there before they start warming up or working out.
Make sure that they’re weighing in on a weekly basis. Do that for two to three weeks and that will be enough to learn the software, see what kind of questions or problems people have registering, and how to register them, and all that.
2. 6 Week Contest
The second thing we do is we run a six week transformation contest. That’s going to get 70 to 80% of your members on board using the software and you run the contest using the software. You have everybody weigh in every single week for the contest. In order to be eligible to win, they have to have all six weight and measurements in. That’s going to jump start your clients using the software.
At the end of the six weeks, you’re going to want to send out an email to the rest of your members with a registration link. It’s actually going to be a link to your subdomain so they can sign up on their own and create an account and start using the software. At the end of the six weeks, you’re going to announce the winner of the transformation contest. What we normally do is, whatever month that is, we’ll make them the client of the month since they won the contest and that jump starts us doing a client of the month which is going to help keep your clients using the software. After that six-week transformation contest, we introduce a client of the month program.
3. Client of the Month
The way the client of the month program works is you have to weigh in and do your body fat every single week for four consecutive weeks in order to be eligible for client of the month. You’ll go through FitClients and you’ll look at all the clients that had weighed in on a consistent basis over the last four weeks and whoever had the best results, we make them put their pictures in every week, we make them put in their weight and their body fat in order for it to count.
After the four weeks or during that month, anybody that has done it for four weeks in a row is eligible to win. We’ll pick a winner and the winner gets a prize. We had prizes from different businesses that donated prizes to us. We had a 30 minute massage, a free cut and color, or a 25 dollar gift card to Smoothie King or a smoothie bar. We’ll send out some questions for them to fill out so we can send out an email highlighting them and people can get to know them better. We’ll ask them what their favorite sport is or what their favorite movie or music, or a bunch of different questions that get them to open up and tell a bit more about themselves and their story. We really give a lot of recognition and put it on Facebook.
Client of the month is going to really motivate people to keep using the software because everybody is going to want to aspire to be that client of the month and that’ll get them weighing in every single week because they know they won’t be eligible for a prize if they don’t. Keep reminding them about that, like, “Hey. If you weren’t picked this month for client of the month, it’s probably because you’re not weighing in consistently. That’s the only way that we can help hold you accountable to your goals is if you’re actually weighing in on a regular basis and we can see that you’re getting closer to your goal.”
4. Client of the Year
We have a client of the month every single month, then in December we do a holiday party. At the holiday party, all the 12 client of the months from that previous year are eligible to be the client of the year. We’ll pick one of those 12 people that were client of the month and we’ll pick a client of the year, crown them at our holiday party, and they actually get the whole next year for free. In exchange for doing some videos with us, a couple photo shoots, kind of being an ambassador to our program and telling their story and getting out there.
We’ll try to get them on the news, or we’ll write a press release, so we leverage that in our marketing as well, but that’s what everybody aspires to be is the ambassador to our gym for that next year. It really does motivate your clients to keep weighing in consistently, trying to reach their goals. It’s not necessarily the person who lost the most because not everybody needs to lose the most, but it’s whoever has the most compelling story or overcame the most obstacles and so on. If they’re client of the month then they aspire to be client of the year.
Once you’ve implemented the Motivational Mondays, having them weighing in on a weekly basis. At first it’s kind of tough because you’re adding something new, people don’t like change, so you have to have a way that motivates them to do it, but once you’ve done it for a few months, it really just becomes part of the way you do business so any new people coming in, it’s just the way that you do business. You’ll see that you’ll get more and more people on board using the software. After you get through that initial six week transformation contest and you had the first couple clients of the month, then I would open up your six week transformation contest. Run it again, but this time to your entire email list and also to your Facebook fan page, your fans, and also run ads to a six week transformation challenge and that’ll get even people that aren’t actual members in and using the software.
Coming Up
If you’ve been doing promotions for a while, I have a step-by-step system that you can track all the things you have to sell and you can put them in a product catalog and it’ll tell how much money you made the last time, how you got the word out there, whether it was just through email or through Facebook ads or through affiliates or other businesses promoting it or whatever you did and what the result was. That way the following year, you can see if you want to run that same promotion again and then how you can make it better or if you want to run something different. Stay tuned for more updates, and be sure to catch the next video on Facebook.
Talk soon,
Jeff Sherman
