Small enough to get wrong

An owner on my Tuesday call wanted to add a cheaper option underneath her semi-private.

Her reasons were all good ones. There's a real price ceiling in her town. She's got new coaches who need reps but aren't ready for her premium service. And she has people quitting right now, this month, purely over money.

Two things came out of it and they're both worth having.

The first is the trap sitting underneath any second offer.

Most of us already run classes that are sometimes two or three people, at a hundred eighty a month. And we run semi-private at six hundred. To us those are obviously, wildly different products. To a normal human standing in the room looking at both, there is no visible difference whatsoever.

So when you bolt a cheaper thing onto an existing thing, whether new people buy it is the easy half of the question. What your CURRENT members do when they notice it is the half that costs you money.

I put it to her as one of her own clients: I'm one of your higher-paying people. There's ten of us in here every time I come. You've just announced something at half the price that looks the same to me. Whether it actually is the same doesn't matter much, does it?

She'd already been worried about it. Most people have.

The fix isn't a better explanation. Nobody reads your explanation. It's making the thing structurally different enough that confusing them is impossible. Different length, different days, different equipment, different name. Tuesday and Thursday at 6pm, kettlebells only, that's the whole program. Nobody looks at that and thinks it's your semi-private with a discount.

The second thing is where I pushed back hardest, and it's the more useful one.

Her instinct was to launch big. Thirty-five minute slots, three times a day, five days a week, so everybody coming off F45 could see there was a better way.

A new offer, at a new price, for a new kind of person, is a NEW BUSINESS. You don't know yet whether thirty-five minutes is too long or too short. You don't know what those people want or what they'll pay. And she'd told me herself the coaches she wants running it aren't ready.

You need learning reps. You need to learn to back squat again, not walk up and load four hundred.

Don't give your team the chance to mess it up twenty times a week. Give them the chance to mess it up twice a week.

Somebody else in the room had already run exactly this play and had receipts. Two classes a week, sold as program spots. Filled. Stayed full for six months. Only then did he add a second section, and the two groups never mixed.

He also caught something I'd have missed: his two-day-a-week people get bitten by the bug around month three and start asking for more. A small cheap offer works beautifully as a front door, as long as it stays small enough that upgrading is the obvious next move.

And his line is the one I keep repeating: you're not trying to get people to leave the F45. You're trying to get people who don't work out at all to come work out with you.

Start at two slots. One time, one format. Expand when that's something resembling full, and not one week before.

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.