My clients aren't on social media

A guy on my Tuesday call said that to me last week. He wasn't being lazy about it, he actually believes it, and honestly he's got a decent case.

His clients are 50 and up. Semi-retired, live within a mile of his place, and they pay him around $500 a month. He's been stubborn about posting for years because in his head, those people are not sitting on Instagram looking for a gym.

I didn't have to argue with him. Four other owners on the call did it for me, and not one of them told him to post more.

One of them had just bought a watch off some stranger on the internet. Before he sent the money he asked ChatGPT to go find every review, every photo, everything, and tell him whether the guy was real. Which is what people are now doing to us. Your gym says it does these things, cool, where's the proof? No footprint, and the answer that comes back is "I'm not sure about this place."

Another guy runs a gym where the average member is 43 and he's got more people over 60 than under 30. His point stopped me. It's not your client doing the research. It's their kid. I live 500 miles from my dad, he just retired, he needs something to do, so I'm googling gyms near him. Maybe yours is the one I find.

Then somebody mentioned that every single coach she's ever hired found her through what she posted. Every one of them.

I want to be honest about something, because I was wrong about this in my own gym for years. I thought social media was where you sold memberships. It is not. Almost nobody is going to buy from you off a post, and if that's the number you're watching, you'll quit in about six weeks. What it actually does is tell people you're an authority worth handing money to. That's the whole job.

And that job gets bigger the more you charge.

At $50 a month nobody researches you. Somebody hands you fifty bucks and figures if it stinks, oh well, it was fifty bucks. At $100 they think about it a little. At $150 they want to know your whole life story, how you're going to take care of them, all of it. And we're still talking about small money here. This guy charges FIVE HUNDRED. Every ounce of trust he builds before anybody ever speaks to him is worth about four times what it's worth to me.

His homework wasn't to go post more. It was to text his clients, one at a time, and ask them: hey, I'm doing some research, I want to find more people like you, what social media are you on?

He posted too. Same day we hung up, one of his own clients put up something about training there. The client's dad saw it. Dad messaged him directly: hey, this is so-and-so's dad, I need to come in and start training with you. New client that afternoon.

The room had told him it'd be somebody's kid doing the looking. Close enough. It was somebody's dad.

And this is a guy who had just spent 25 minutes explaining to me that his people aren't on social media. What he said afterward was something like, I'm not one for alignment and all that stuff, but yeah, that happened.

Ask them. Don't sit there and guess the way I did for a couple of years.

Doctors have Instagram, man.

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.