I recently had a lively discussion centered around an article on Breaking Muscle, by Patrick McCarty. The article was Failure to Innovate: Will Your CrossFit Gym Thrive or Survive?
Mr. McCarty, who is 3-time Games competitor, affiliate owner, and owner of his own web development business, wrote on a topic that is at the forefront of every affiliate owner’s minds. Box owners face the reality that new boxes are springing up every day, and many of them are right down the road. If you own a gym and haven’t read his article, I encourage you to click the link above and read it right now…
From my affiliate owner friends, I often hear that 1 or 2 news boxes have opened up in jogging distance from [insert box name here], the market is saturated, and it’s getting tougher and tougher to attract and retain members.
From a personal perspective, when I first started CrossFitting, there were exactly two affiliates in the greater Orlando area. That was 6 years ago. Now, there are over 40 at last count, and there are five closer to my house than the one I go to. There is a lot of choice out there.
Mr. McCarty does an excellent job of defining market saturation and posits that we are in fact nowhere near market saturation. I agree with him.
If you step back for a moment and survey the landscape of fitness, there has always been a lot of choice. In Orlando, there have always been tons of globo gyms (LA Fitness, Golds, Planet, Anywhere, etc), plenty of one-off personal training gyms, and even independently owned “neighborhood” gyms. I went to a great neighborhood gym before I started at CrossFit Firebase. In you live in a sizable city, you probably have always had a lot of fitness options, even if you didn’t know it.
What I would agree with is that it’s getting tougher and tougher to attract and retain members. I have direct experience with this. I work in online marketing and I do SEO for several CrossFit gyms. Four years ago you could launch an AdWords campaign with a modest budget and expect to get a healthy number of emails and phone calls each month. All you had to do was convert those prospects to customers and you were in business. The cost of a click back then? Less than a dollar. Sometimes as little as $.20 per click. It was peanuts.
When I look in the AdWords account of one of my clients these days, some of our bigger keywords cost up to $4 per click. Wow! Not only that, but our ad may only show in the 3rd or 4th position of a SERP. Our marketing dollars only go a fraction as far. The landscape is far more competitive.
The days where you could open a CrossFit gym and expect people to flock to it without smart marketing and innovation are over.
Innovation is Key
Mr. McCarty goes on to say that innovation is key for any affiliate looking to weather the marketplace. He offers some practical solutions and I’m paraphrasing his list here:
- Offer open gym hours all day
- Offer strength and conditioning services beyond normal CrossFit WODs
- Partner with personal trainers
- Get out of the strip mall
- Balance pretty and “shitty”
- Customize your programming for different groups in your gym
I’d like to add a few more ideas:
- Market yourself as offering other services from day 1
- Look at adjacent sport/fitness niches and offer a service for it. For example, GORUCK is a blossoming events company and many CrossFitters try the GORUCK Challenge. Consider offering a ruck training program.
- Form partnerships with other adjacent niche companies so they can market for you
- Co-Brand with other products and companies
- Offer open gym hours for cheap ($50 month) to encourage highly experienced athletes to come in during your off-hours and train on their own. We’re at a point where there are now a lot of CrossFit athletes who don’t need to take classes anymore…give them space to train.
- Offer advanced coaching and training programs for experienced CrossFit competitors, something beyond the regular WOD.
Planning for the Death of CrossFit
There is an seminal article published in the Harvard Business Review that every business owner should read, and it relates to Mr. McCarty’s article. It’s called Marketing Myopia, by Theodore Levitt, and was first published in 1960.
Cribbing from the HBR article, here are a handful of changes in mindset a successful gym owner (or any business owner) should have:
Market to your current membership: Don’t expect your current members to stick around forever. They won’t. There will always be cheaper, closer, and bigger gyms opening up. Create marketing programs for your current membership. Reward them for being excellent members. Incentivize them to become lifetime members.
Your business is fitness: Don’t think of yourself as being in the CrossFit business. Think of yourself as being in the fitness business. That change in mindset will allow affiliate owners to innovate and add to their services beyond CrossFit.
Don’t think of yourself as offering a fitness service: Think of yourself as buying customers, as doing the things that will make people want to do business with you.
Plan for the obsolescence of CrossFit: Everyone reading this loves CrossFit. I love CrossFit. But what happens when a CrossFit killer comes along and tops it? If it could happen to Blockbuster and Kodak, it can happen to CrossFit. Planning for the obsolescence of CrossFit gives you the flexibility to evolve your fitness business into whatever the next thing is. At the very least, it allows you to add to your service portfolio beyond just offering CrossFit classes.
Hire Good Business and Marketing People: The gym owner should set the path and the vision for the company, but he or she should hire business and marketing people. Those people should be big thinkers and have business experience outside of CrossFit. Yes, they can be trainers and athletes themselves, but it’s essential to have skillsets outside of coaching fitness. I’m also not keen on contracting out all of the marketing and business services to outside vendors…those companies can provide useful tools, but I believe there should be a point person within the organization who has experience and vision.
Lastly, on this point, new affiliates should have these people in place before they open their doors. Launching a new affiliate in the current market without a marketing strategy and skilled people in place is a mistake.
Interested in hiring me to work on your CrossFit business? See my contact page or message me at firstrunmedia at gmail dot com.
Other CrossFit websites I’ve implemented or worked on: