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The Business of Fitness Podcast

The Business of Fitness Podcast

By: Dan Williams
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About this listen

 Actionable ideas to build your fitness business. Presented by Fitness Business Mentor, Dan Williams.2023 Economics Hygiene & Healthy Living
Episodes
  • 76: How to boost retention by helping your clients build habits that stick

    76: How to boost retention by helping your clients build habits that stick
    Jul 8 2025

    This is part two of a conversation between Tim Karajas and Dan on the Extension Fitness podcast.

    Tim and Dan we explore how to improve retention by helping our clients and members build long-term exercise habits within your business. They talk about practical strategies and mindset shifts you can use to turn your customers into life-time exercisers.

    We work so hard to increase retention rates in our business, but if you’re not building habits in your clients, you’re fighting a losing battle against human psychology. Today, Dan explores how to win that fight.

    5 things you’ll learn in this episode

    • Why making exercise laughably easy at the start is essential for building lasting habits.

    • How identity-based motivation increases adherence to exercise and turns actions into lifelong behaviours.

    • Why loss aversion is a powerful psychological driver—and how to use it to help clients stay consistent.

    • How to apply the minimum effective dose to avoid burnout and ensure sustainability over decades.

    • What mindset traits, like growth mindset and life-structure alignment, are common in people who succeed with long-term exercise.

    Your action steps:

    1. Help clients design a starting exercise habit that feels so easy it's impossible to fail.

    2. Ask clients to picture their worst possible week and build habits they can still stick to even then.

    3. Reinforce identity-based language by helping clients move from “I exercise” to “I am an exerciser.”

    4. Use loss aversion by tracking progress and helping clients see what they risk losing by stopping.

    5. Check for alignment between a client’s stated values and their calendar—then help them close the gap.
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    25 mins
  • 75: How I predict if a fitness business will succeed (do these things!)

    75: How I predict if a fitness business will succeed (do these things!)
    Jul 1 2025

    Dan was recently interviewed by Tim Karajas on the Extension Fitness podcast. This is part one of a two part conversation between Tim and Dan.

    Today, you’ll hear Tim ask Dan about whether there are clues he can pick up on when first speaking with a business owner that let him predict whether a fitness business will be successful.

    Dan talks about the importance of being unique, how to test new ideas quickly, and the importance of designing your business around the life you want to have.

    Tim finishes by asking Dan to distil what it takes to be successful in business down to three points.

    6 things you’ll learn in this episode

    • Why being different is more achievable (and more effective) than being better than your competition.

    • How niching down—sometimes to an extreme—can unlock loyal client bases and long-term business success.

    • What a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is and how to use it to test ideas with minimal risk and effort.

    • Why quitting fast can sometimes be smarter than persisting with the wrong business idea.

    • How Dan reverse-engineered his business to support the lifestyle he wanted as a dad.

    • A simple 3-step framework for building a successful business through value creation, marketing, and value delivery.

    Your action steps:

    1. Define a unique problem your fitness business solves and make that the centre of your offering.

    2. Build a minimum viable product that looks complete from the outside but takes minimal time and cost to test.

    3. Use feedback and traction (or lack of it) to decide quickly whether to evolve or abandon your business idea.

    4. Focus your marketing on making your uniqueness obvious, not just your qualifications or features.

    5. Deliver an experience so good that clients can't help but talk about it—make referrals effortless.
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    18 mins
  • 74: 9 unique ways to make your business stand out (to get more clients)

    74: 9 unique ways to make your business stand out (to get more clients)
    Jun 24 2025
    Dan Williams explores nine powerful ways fitness business owners can stand out by being truly different, because in today’s crowded market, being better isn’t enough. For each area of differentiation we’ll look at a well known business case study, and Dan will brainstorm some unique fitness business ideas. 5 things you’ll learn in this episode: Why competing by being ‘better’ traps you in a red ocean, and how to escape it.How to define your unique selling proposition (USP) with one sentence.The nine key areas where your fitness business can stand out from the crowd.Creative, real-world examples of differentiation across gyms, PTs, EPs, yoga and martial arts studios.Why living your USP through repeatable actions is more effective than generic claims. Episode Transcription: The single most important thing that people need to get right when they’re in the early stages of building a successful fitness business is also the most difficult thing. It’s one of the very first things I work on with the business owners I mentor, and is without a doubt, the thing they struggle with most. This incredibly important, yet incredibly difficult task, is how to make your business different. So today, I want to make it easier for you, by giving you the nine ways you can be unique. I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of businesses either fail, or just as bad, slowly fade away into obscurity while paying their owners a fraction of what they deserve based on the work they put in. It’s hard to be different. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and if everyone was doing it, you wouldn’t be different any more. And yet, if you’re not different, you have no advantage over your competition. Why would people choose your 24 hour gym over the one on another street corner? Why would they choose you as a PT over the ten other options they’ve got in the same gym? Why would they come to your semi private classes, when there are five other businesses offering the same service within 2km of your door? You might have heard me talk about this before. It’s a topic I often explore when I’m giving live, in person talks and keynotes to business owners, and I recently covered the need to be unignorably different in episode 69 of The Business of Fitness Podcast, “Delivering an Experience: The Strategy of ‘Being Different’”. If you haven’t listened to that one, I recommend you check it out, because it’s a great accompaniment to this episode. But basically, I spoke about a blue ocean strategy. Most business owners are in a red ocean, where they’re fighting with their competitors to try and be the best. There’s blood in the water – hence the ‘red’ ocean. Everyone looks the same, competes on the same points, and fights to be slightly better. But being ‘good’ isn’t good enough. The goal isn’t to be ten times better than your competitors, it’s to step out of the fight completely. The goal is to be different. To build something so unique, and so remarkable, that you create your own blue ocean, a space with no competition. In that episode, I gave two action steps. The first is to define your USP – your unique selling proposition, and the second was to make of list of the actions you take in your business to make that USP true. To define your USP, the exercise is simple. Complete this sentence. ‘The thing that we do that is different from everyone else is…’. But as I’ve said, finding the thing that makes you different is really hard. When I ask people what makes them different, I’m met with boringly predictable answers. Boutique gyms tell me they have the best community. Personal Trainers tell me they’re empathetic, offer an individualised approach and meet people where they are. Again and again, I hear words and phrases like ‘individualised care’, ‘going the extra mile’, ‘building relationships’, ‘a science-based approach’, ‘world class programming’, ‘professional coaches’, ‘a non intimidating environment’, ‘amazing communication’, and the list goes on and on. But this is what everyone is saying, so it’s not different. It’s brainstorming your unique selling proposition that is the challenging part. Working out what it is that makes you stand alone. And in that previous episode about being unignorably different I teased at nine different areas you could be different in. They were: Your target market, price point or revenue model. The problem you solve, the tools you use to solve that problem. Your location, the experience you provide, your area of specialisation, your use of technology, or your support of a cause. People told me these were a great starting point, but that they were still struggling. So I thought now we could go a bit deeper, and have a look at some case studies of these nine areas. I wanted to get your creative juices flowing by looking at some very well known global brands that are a great example of each of the nine ...
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    25 mins

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