The why-the-hell-would-I-give-you-money zone

There's a gym about a minute down the road from mine that charges twenty bucks a month. To make that work they need something like ten thousand members. Shark Bite is expensive and we run about 115.

Both of those are real businesses. Neither one of us is confused about what we are.

The place you don't want to be is in between, and a guy on my Tuesday call walked right into it in front of everybody, which took guts.

He put his actual numbers up. Eighty dollars every two weeks for four classes a week, ninety-five for unlimited. Most people take the eighty, so he lands around a hundred and seventy-six a month. Then he said the thing I've heard from a hundred owners and have thought myself:

I don't feel like I should raise my prices, because I'm not even full.

I get why that feels like the responsible position. It sounds humble. It sounds like you're being fair to people.

It's also backwards, and it took me way too long to see why.

There's high and there's low, and then there's death in between. Low works because you're the no-risk option. Nobody agonizes over twenty dollars. High works because people believe they're buying something worth the money. In the middle you're not worth a premium and you're not cheap enough to be a shrug. You're just sitting in the why-the-hell-would-I-give-you-money zone.

Another owner in the room had already gotten out of it and said it cleaner than I did. There's a perceived value ladder you climb. The gyms getting top pricing aren't getting it because they picked a bigger number. He charges two hundred for unlimited, and the only other option at his place is twenty-five to drop in. That gap IS the story. It also gets people in the door more often, because unlimited only pays off if you use it.

So the sentence the whole thing rests on:

If you don't make the value be perceived correctly, then no price is right.

Not too high. Not too low. None of them.

And nobody enjoys the next part. Every CrossFitter on earth thinks their coach is a great coach, including the ones whose coach checks his phone the second the clock starts. Meanwhile there's a 23-year-old on Instagram selling supplements who has people convinced she knows exactly what she's talking about. She's not better than you. She's just better at making people believe.

That's the actual gap. Not the number on your website.

Nick

Nick Habich owns Shark Bite Fitness in Cape Coral, Florida, and coaches gym owners in Pathfinder Collective. These notes go out to his email list on Tuesdays and Thursdays.