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The Business of Fitness Podcast

The Business of Fitness Podcast

By: Dan Williams
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 Actionable ideas to build your fitness business. Presented by Fitness Business Mentor, Dan Williams.2023 Economics Hygiene & Healthy Living
Episodes
  • 80: How to bring back ex-members to increase revenue

    80: How to bring back ex-members to increase revenue
    Aug 19 2025
    Dan explains a simple client reactivation system for fitness businesses, show how to track resurrection rate, and share easy steps to win back ex-members. 5 things you’ll learn: How to build a list of ex-clients and calculate a monthly resurrection rate for your fitness business.How to improve offboarding with quick exit interviews that record clear reasons for leaving.How to trigger win-back messages the moment a client’s original blocker is removed.How to use Fresh Start timing and milestone contacts to lift replies and bookings.How to reach past clients with Meta Custom Audience ads and a direct booking link. Transcription: If you’re looking for a new way to grow your business, generate a list of all your previous clients and members. I’ve never seen anyone do this and not be shocked by how long that list is. There’s a huge number of people who, at some point, used your service, but are no longer paying customers. People who once needed you, but who, for some reason, got to the point where they didn’t need you any more. And this list provides an opportunity for reactivation – converting ex-clients back into current clients. And that’s what I want to discuss, a strategy guide to client reactivation. Generally, we spend most of our time on two things, client retention, and lead generation. We build systems and pipelines for lead generation, and we design client journeys to provide valuable experiences to keep people around. But once they leave our business, too many businesses cut them lose, going back to focus on retention and new leads. And sure, these things are important (particularly retention), but reactivation often seems to be forgotten. I want to fix that. But first, there are five things you need to do before even beginning to think about client reactivation. I’ve spoken a lot about these before (and I’ll give you some recommended content if you want to dig deeper), but I’m not going to go into detail, but let me summarise what you need to do BEFORE you start the process of reactivating past clients. 1: Provide a remarkable experience so people don’t leave in the first place. Check out my article ‘Delivering an Experience: The Strategy of ‘Being Different’ or listen to episode 69 of the podcast. 2: Build a system to alert you of your three clients who are at highest risk of departure each week and add value to them that week. Read my article ‘Increase retention to 98% using this 10 minute strategy’ or listen to episode 26 of the podcast. 3: Conduct an exit interview with all departing clients, and identify the reason they’re leaving. Keep a table of all the reasons for departure in seperate columns, with the list of all the people who left for that reason under the heading. 4: Identify how long into their client journey each customer is when they leave. Identify the most common time to leave (for example, it might be between four and 6 months, and increase the experience people are receiving for the eight weeks leading up to that point. This will plug your biggest leak. Read: ‘The Only Thing Fitness Business Owners Need to Do For Retention’. 5: Make sure memberships on hold (dormant customers) receive weekly contacts of some kind. Ok, so assuming you’re doing those five things, we can move onto some ideas to help you reactivate your past clients. If you’re not doing those five things, the strategies we’re about to discuss won’t work as well. It’s really common for business owners to bump into ex customers who say to them ‘oh, I’ve been meaning to get back in touch with you guys’. It’s definitely something I’ve experienced. This tells me people are open to working with you again, they just need a bit of a nudge to take that first step. Firstly, what gets measured gets managed. So start measuring what’s called your ‘resurrection rate’. This is the percentage of past clients who you come back to you each month. We calculate this by dividing the number of returning clients in a month by the number of past clients at the start of the month. For example, if you start March with a list of 200 ex members, and during the month of March three of them restart, that’s 3 / 200, or 1.5%. So your resurrection rate is 1.5%. This number will allow you to gauge the success of the reactivation strategies. Ok, so once you’ve started measuring your resurrection rate, we can start the process of increasing it. Client departure: And we begin with the client departure. How can you make this a great experience? People expect a great experience to START their journey with you, but it’ll really blow their mind if the END of their journey is equally remarkable. How you do this is up to you, but the litmus test is whether your departing client tells a friend about how good the departure experience was. That’s the definition of ‘remarkable’ – able to be remarked about. As part of this departure, you need to have some ...
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    20 mins
  • 79: The one page fitness marketing checklist. Just do these things.

    79: The one page fitness marketing checklist. Just do these things.
    Aug 6 2025
    In this episode Dan shares the one-page marketing plan he recommends to every fitness business he mentors, focusing on 11 proven marketing areas that consistently drive long-term growth without chasing fads. Download a PDF version of the one page marketing checklist here. Four things you’ll learn in this episode: How to simplify your marketing by focusing on 11 essential categories that actually work.How to build systems for storytelling, referrals, and reactivating past members to drive growth.The most effective way to run paid social media ads without wasting money.Why consistent, low-glamour marketing actions outperform chasing trends and short-term tactics. Transcription: I’ve spent 19 years in business searching for the magic bullet of marketing – first for my own businesses, and then for the hundreds of business owners I’ve mentored. And believe me when I tell you I’ve tried everything. Spoiler alert, there is no magic bullet. And the more people search for it, the more they’re distracted from the tried and tested basics of marketing… the things that actually work. There’s an exercise I’ve found myself setting for a lot of the business owners I mentor. I tell them to create a list of non negotiable marketing tasks. A one page marketing manifesto. A list of actions they need to regularly take to ensure they’re covering all bases of marketing. Then, as long as they’re ticking these boxes, I don’t have a problem with them running off chasing the shiny objects and short term trends that they hope will be the next big thing that promises to bring them 30 clients in 30 days. Almost always, this thing will be a waste of time and money, but if they’re incessantly doing the basics, at least they’ll experience the consistent, persistent, regular, steady growth that comes from doing the basics well. So I thought I’d formalise this one page marketing plan, and share it with you guys so that in a world of distractions and broken promises, you’ve got something simple, tried and tested to come back to. Here’s how I’m going to structure this. First, I’ll give you a list of the 11 areas of marketing you need to focus on. Second, I’ll give you a broad description of each, so you know how and why that marketing strategy works, along with a rough overview of what you need to be doing. Third, for each of the 11 areas I’ll give you a very short and succinct, and HIGHLY actionable task list for that area of marketing. I’ll tell you what to do, and how often to do it, with no bullshit. And finally, I’ll summarise each of the 11 areas into a weekly task lists to give you your one page marketing plan. Two big caveats before we kick this off though. Caveat number one: The single best marketing strategy is to be so good they can’t ignore you. Without this, your churn rate will be high, and retention will be low. You can build a solid business with no marketing strategy other than providing a remarkable experience to your clients. By the same token, even if your marketing plan is absolutely world class, you simply won’t be successful if the product and experience you provide isn’t up to scratch. You should combine this with a system to identify clients who are at high risk of departure, and a system to minimise the risk of this departure. Caveat number two: If you don’t know who you’re for, don’t waste your time starting the process of marketing. A marketing strategy needs to begin with an intimate awareness of your avatar – your target customer. You need to create highly detailed documentation of the avatars your business serves. This should include demographics, relationships, dwelling, occupation, education, values, personality, spending habits, content consumption, future goals, and roles in purchasing decisions. For each avatar, you should understand their level of awareness and summarise their pain points clearly. These avatars should guide your decisions about your products, services, and customer experience. Your marketing needs to be purposefully designed to speak directly to them. Ok, with those two disclaimers out of the way, and remembering that a red hot customer experience and an understanding of your avatar need to come first, let’s jump in, we’re going to cover the following categories: WebsiteDocumentation and StorytellingContent MarketingMicro-Influencer MarketingReferral ProcessEmail MarketingCustomer/Member ReactivationPaid Social Media AdvertisingPaid Search Engine AdvertisingOffline MarketingPromotions and Tactics WEBSITE: Your business needs to have a professional, functional website with a strong user experience. It should act as the central hub for both current and potential clients, serving as both a marketing destination and an educational resource. The site needs to be optimised for organic search traffic and include dedicated landing pages with clear, low-friction calls to action for each service. The messaging should focus on...
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    27 mins
  • 78: 3 gym owners share 20 must-read books behind their success

    78: 3 gym owners share 20 must-read books behind their success
    Jul 30 2025

    Dan spoke with three leading fitness business owners to discuss their top five books for fitness business owners.

    Jake Morgan, Ben Major and Scott Hook give us their most impactful and business-changing book recommendations.

    The boys also discuss their reading habits, and why reading (or listening) to books has been instrumental in every level of their success.

    Add these to your wishlist!

    Jake Morgan, Habitual Strength and Conditioning.
    1. Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
    2. The Power of Moments by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
    3. 10x is Easier than 2x by Dan Sullivan & Dr. Benjamin Hardy
    4. Atomic Habits by James Clear
    5. Happier by Tal Ben Shahar

    Ben Major, PrimeFit:
    1. Man Up by Bedros Keuilian
    2. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
    3. Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne
    4. The Power of Moments by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
    5. Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan

    Scott Hook: VSC
    1. Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape
    2. Get Different by Mike Michalowicz
    3. Cult Status by Tim Duggan
    4. Built to Serve by Evan Carmichael
    5. Beyond Entreneurship by Jim Collins

    Dan Williams
    1. 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
    2. Company of One by Paul Jarvis
    3. Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
    4. Deep Work by Cal Newport
    5. Influence by Robert Cialdini
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    40 mins
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