For many gym owners in the CrossFit and functional fitness space, success still looks like survival: keep members happy, pay the bills, and maybe take a weekend off once in a while if you’re lucky.
It’s not what most gym owners had in mind when they opened their businesses, but it’s the reality many face.
For Tim Lyons, the founder of Gym Business Coach, the biggest thing they’re missing is the right mindset.
- “Most gym owners don’t believe they can do bigger numbers,” Lyons told The Morning Chalk Up. “A lot of gym owners get really comfortable just kind of making a little bit of money. And I think that’s a big mistake.”
The belief that gyms can become scalable businesses rather than owner-dependent jobs has become the driving force behind Lyons’ gym business coaching company, and it will be one of the main topics they tackle at their upcoming Growth Summit on June 25-27 in Scottsdale, AZ. (For $100 off a VIP ticket, use the discount code “MCU”).
Worth noting: Gym Business Coach offers a mentorship course called Springboard, designed to help gym owners step back from day-to-day operations and start earning more than $30,000 in revenue per month. And once they get to $30,000 a month, they become eligible to join a mastermind group called the Iron Circle, made up of some of the highest-grossing gyms in the country.
- There are currently 47 gyms in the Iron Circle, and Lyons said 30 percent of them gross more than $1 million a year.
Although most of the Iron Circle gyms operate on a semi-private training model, Lyons has also worked with numerous CrossFit gym owners over the years. Even if a CrossFit gym owner doesn’t want to switch to a purely semi-private training model, Lyons is adamant that they will get something out of both Springboard and the upcoming Growth Summit.
Lyons’ Journey in Fitness
Lyons opened his first gym, Pulse Fitness, in Scottsdale in 2009, after being laid off from a construction management job during the financial crisis. At the time, he had no formal coaching background and admits he had “no clue” how to run a successful gym.
His original business model was essentially a rental hub for independent trainers. The gym was busy, but it was failing financially.
- “There was no culture, no rhyme or reason to what we believed in. There was no methodology; we had conflicting methodologies in the same room,” Lyons said.
He continued: “Over in one corner I had a CrossFit coach, another corner I had a bodybuilding coach, and then over here I got this lady working with 80-year-olds with bands and doing little step-up drills, and some girl is over there posing, and I’m like, ‘What is happening?’”
Needless to say, it was clear that he was “in the wrong model.”
A trip to see longtime mentor Thomas Plummer and gym owner Rick Mayo in Atlanta changed everything.
- “I saw behind the curtains of a gym that was pretty successful,” he said.
And so Lyons got home from his trip, scrapped everything, fired his trainers, put most of his equipment in storage, and rebuilt the gym around semi-private training.
It nearly tanked the business in the short term. But over time, Lyons refined his systems, pricing structure, marketing funnels, and client experience, which would eventually become the blueprint for his coaching business.
By 2015, his gym was generating more than $500,000 annually, charging roughly $350 per month per client.
Then came another lesson.
His gym had extra space, so after surveying his members, he added yoga and spin classes, which he didn’t charge extra for.
- “We came out like gangbusters. The spin was packed. The yoga was packed,” he said.
But a few months later, Lyons walked into the room one day, the only person in the room was the spin class instructor.
He canceled both his yoga and spin classes, “and it was an uprising,” Lyons said. “There was a mass cancellation.”
- “That was the stupidest thing, to listen to what the clients said they wanted and I believed them,” he added, laughing.
But that same year, 2015, Lyons joined a mastermind group run by Mayo in Atlanta, The Secret Trainer Society.
Many of the group’s gym owners became interested in Lyons’ marketing practices. Lyons then began helping gym owners with their marketing, including running ads, capturing lead information, and driving traffic into funnels to nurture leads.
This was the start of his marketing and mentorship company, ProFit, which has since become Gym Business Coach and has worked with nearly 3,000 gyms since its inception.
Today, in addition to running Gym Business Coach, Lyons still owns a gym, Legacy Personal Training in Scottsdale, which generates between $80,000 and $100,000 per month and largely operates without Lyons’s involvement.
- After 17 years of owning a gym, Lyons’ message to gym owners is simple: It’s possible to live big, even in the fitness industry.
This is the message he’s planning to bring to the upcoming Growth Summit, where the “big promise” is that, if you attend the Summit and implement what you learn, “you’ll go back and have the best year in the next 12 months your gym has ever had,” he said.
