She didn't know she was allowed to offer him classes

A personal training client at my gym cancelled a couple of weeks ago.

He texted his coach. She wrote back, oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. He said okay, cool. And that was the end of a paying member.

Then my GM asked her whether she'd offered him group classes instead.

She hadn't. Not because she forgot, and not because she was having a bad day. She didn't know she was allowed to.

That's on me, not on her. Nobody had ever told her that "I can't afford this anymore" is a different sentence from "I want to leave."

His concern was cost. Only cost. He could have dropped his price and stayed with us, and instead we processed a cancellation and said sorry.

Somebody on my Tuesday call has already systemized the fix and hers is better than mine, so I'm stealing it and you should too.

She runs what she calls a member success session. Free, bookable any time, by anybody, included in every service she sells. And in those conversations she goes both directions depending on what she hears.

Not getting results in classes? You should probably be in semi-private, let's talk about that.

Can't afford semi-private anymore? Try the classes before you quit on this entirely.

Up and down, same conversation, same session. It can go both ways with clients. Internal upsell and internal downgrade, and neither one is a special event that requires her permission.

The rule I'd put on it: keep somebody in your ecosystem as long as you can realistically serve them. If a member decides what they really need is ballet, let them go with your blessing and do NOT build a ballet program. But if somebody can't spend a thousand a month anymore and would happily spend three hundred, and you let them walk, you just filed a pricing conversation as a cancellation.

Here's the part I didn't see coming, and it's why this is worth more than the saved membership.

When you downgrade somebody honestly, when you tell a person to pay you less because it's the right call for them, you have just proven that your advice isn't self-serving. You gave up money in front of them.

The next time you tell that person they should upgrade, they believe you. You cannot buy that.

Go ask your coaches what they say when a member cancels over money. Ask them today, casually, not as a test. If the answer isn't some version of "here's the cheaper option," that's not a coaching problem, it's that nobody ever told them.

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.