Fitness Business University Podcast

Fitness Business University Podcast

By Vince Gabriele

The Fitness Business University Podcast — The #1 Fitness Business Podcast — is the go-to educational show for gym owners, by gym owners. Hosted by Vince Gabriele, a seasoned pro with 18

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  1. Number 1: I triple checked with my wife that I can share this story with you… she said yes (surprisingly)

    If you need help and you'd like to reach out to Vince personally, send an email to him directly at [email protected] I'm four hours into a ruck in the Watchung Reservation training for the Grand Canyon, and I'm not talking about business today. I'm talking about your marriage. Or your significant other. Which I'd argue is the most important business relationship you have. I told the story I've never told publicly. Vanessa and I separated six months after we got married. She moved back to California. I mailed the divorce papers. They went to the wrong address and she never received them. We were apart for eight months and I was done. Both of us found God in our own way during that stretch, and that's what brought us back. We just celebrated 19 years and we're happier than we've ever been. I said a bunch of things in these woods I probably shouldn't have. I told you how I compared my wife to my mother for years and how awful that sounds out loud. I told you I'm a judgmental prick and that it took my mom passing for me to see that every quality I loved most in her lives in my wife. Recorded this fully expecting to delete it. 5 Key Takeaways:Everyone has two lists. There's a list of qualities about a person that aren't great, and a list of qualities that are incredible. Everyone has both, including you. One of the secrets to a good marriage is deciding which list you focus on. I spent years on the wrong one.Marriages cycle through harmony, disharmony, and repair. Justin Rabinowitz gave me that. We sat in disharmony for a long stretch early on. Knowing the cycle exists changes how you handle it, because you stop believing the bad season is the permanent state.Men need freedom. Women need safety. Tony Robbins made this point at Date With Destiny and it landed for both of us because we were in the room together. When Vanessa tells me to go, that gives me freedom, and it makes me want to do everything I can to make her feel safe. Learning it together is what made it stick. If I'd come home and told her about it, it would have meant nothing.Happy couples expect nothing but owe everything. That's Andy Stanley. It can't be tit for tat. It can't be "if you give me freedom, I'll give you safety." It has to be I give you safety, I give you safety, I give you safety.Your kids are watching what you do, not listening to what you say. The number one thing you can do as a father is show your kids how much you love your wife. I do sweaty kisses after every workout. They groan. But they've never once had to be told that exercise matters. The gym owners who come to me with problems at home almost always have problems in the business too. So investing in that relationship is investing in your company, though that's not the reason to do it. If you need help and you'd like to reach out to Vince personally, send an email to him directly at [email protected]

    34min
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  2. Number 2: How To Make More Money at Your Gym (Vince's Perform Better Key Note)

    Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy This is my full talk from the Perform Better Summit. Six profit levers you can pull to make more money in your gym starting Monday. Here's the number that bothers me. The average gym does $300,000 in gross revenue at about a 20% margin. That's $60,000 to the owner. For what you people do, that's not good enough. My goal for everyone I work with is $200,000 a year in personal income, and I don't think that's unreasonable. I opened by telling the room how I got here. I was a 300 pound washed up offensive lineman who moved to San Diego, worked for Todd Durkin, and ground out 60 sessions a week making what an entry level teacher makes. Then I opened my own gym and went broke. I had to sit down with my dad and tell him I didn't think I could do this. He told me I'd proven I was a great trainer and hadn't proven anything about running a business. So I went and learned the business. 5 Key Takeaways:Price is the fastest lever and it's not close. Your value judgment does not matter. Only your customer's does. My wife bought a $474 birthday cake for our one year old and it made no sense to me, but she was the buyer. I raised prices $49 across the board on clients who have been with me for 19 years. A guy stuck at $13K was 12 months away from $20K based on his churn and acquisition. We raised prices $40 on every member and he got there in two months. One letter, one decision.Only 15% of your future buyers purchase in the first 100 days. The other 85% buy over the next 100 weeks. So the question isn't just what your 21 day follow up looks like. It's what you're doing for the next 100 weeks. Three emails a week, always with a call to action, always relevant, and no AI slop. Find your own voice and build a relationship.Referrals are free customers worth $7,234 each. That's my actual lifetime value: 19.5 months at $371 a month. So when someone sends me a client, what did that cost me? Nothing. The mindset shift changes how you treat the person who sent them. And make it easy to refer. HelloFresh sent my wife a text she could forward to a friend for a free box. Don't ask people to bring a friend. Hand them a free 30 day membership to give away so they show up as the hero.An ounce of personalization is worth a pound of automation. I wrote out the exact letter my jiu jitsu instructor would need to send to get me to come back after quitting twice. It takes responsibility for putting me in the wrong class, offers a new path, and connects it to my son training there. Compare that to "we miss you at the gym." Send 10 personal reach outs a month to past members. That's 120 attempts a year at almost zero cost.Fill the seats you already have. Four people per session at $50 is a $416,000 business. Add one more person per session and it's $520,000. That's $104,000 more with zero increase in cost. Pure profit. I took my kids to Medieval Times and Madison Square Garden and there wasn't an empty seat in either place. They're masters of capacity. Why aren't we? Also: an empty spot costs you more than someone using it for free, because free means opportunity. Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

    1h 26min
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  3. Number 3: Why You Need A Business Coach

    Last week to grab your seat. 85% of your future customers are already on your list, and I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy I fly to St. Louis to see my cardiologist. I live 20 miles from five of the best hospitals in the world and I get on a plane to Missouri. Tom asked me why, and the answer turned into this whole episode. Back in 2017 I got a CAC score that put me in the 95th percentile of calcified plaque for my age. A local cardiologist told me to go on a statin. I was a young fitness guy so I told him he was crazy. He threatened to put a stent in me right there. So I went and found a second doctor. Then I kept looking until somebody told me what I wanted to hear. I spent years uncertain. Working out and feeling something in my chest and wondering. Then I read a line in The Magic of Thinking Big that changed it: when you're struggling with a decision, go find the best expert you can find and make their opinion final. Stop searching. So I called Charlie Weingroff, asked who my guy was, and got on a plane. Nothing much changed in the treatment. What changed was my mind. The uncertainty went away. That's exactly what a business coach does. Tom and I break down the four reasons to have one, how to tell if the person selling you coaching is full of it, and the mistakes I've made hiring the wrong ones. 5 Key Takeaways:Certainty is what you're actually buying. The number one thing gym owners struggle with is feeling stressed and uncertain. Am I on the right track? Should I open another location? A coach doesn't have to know everything. Sometimes an outside voice is enough to stop you from stewing on a problem for six months. And when the owner is stressed, the whole team feels it.Speed is the second thing. There are guys I've coached who probably would have gotten there without me. G-Man says it all the time: he stood on the shoulders of giants. He's 30 with young kids living a life most 40 year olds are still trying to build. He might have figured it out on his own. It just would have taken another five or ten years.Blind spots are called blind spots for a reason. Keith Cunningham says the best question you can ask yourself is "what don't I see?" Most people won't open that can. When I do consulting days, the thing I spot is often so obvious it's laughable, and they look at me like a genius. It has nothing to do with me. It's that I'm not emotionally invested in the day to day of their business.Find the people who will give you a real reality check. I visited a gym owner recently who was struggling in stage one and overweight, and the reality check he needed had nothing to do with his business. Nobody on his staff will ever tell him that. I've got a coach right now who's been very complimentary and I don't like it. I need to know where I'm screwing up.Four ways to vet a coach. Get a referral from someone you trust who knows that world. Consume their free content until trust is built before you pay a dime. Make sure they've actually done what you want to do. And look for proof beyond themselves, specifically longevity in their clients, not "444 leads in 30 days." I look for people who've been in a group for a decade, because that means there's real depth of knowledge, not just one play. Last week to grab your seat. 85% of your future customers are already on your list, and I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

    47min
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  4. Number 4: The MOST IMPORTANT Things You Should Be Focusing On to Grow Your Gym

    85% of your future customers are already on your list. I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy I visited three gyms in one day and every single one was at a different stage of business. One was doing $10K a month. One was doing $25K. One was building an organization. And every one of them was asking me about the wrong thing. The guy at $10K wanted to talk about where to move his equipment. He has 20 members. He should be making phone calls, not rearranging dumbbells. I see this constantly right now with AI. Gyms with 20 members spending half their day building tools in Claude instead of going out and getting customers. It's the same thing I'm seeing coaching fifth grade football right now. We've got 25 plays installed and these kids can't get into a stance. We should have four plays and spend 95% of our time on the basics. Business is no different. Tom and I break down the four stages of a gym business and exactly what you should be focused on at each one. Nothing else. Just the fundamentals that actually move you to the next level. 5 Key Takeaways:Stage one has three jobs and that's it. Deliver an experience so good your churn rate is impeccable. Get to a critical mass of customers. And get yourself in shape, because your energy is what attracts people. Everything else is a distraction. If you can't afford to hire anyone, you're stuck doing every session yourself forever, and that's how gym owners burn out and quit.Stage two is a people business. Find good people, train them, and build a culture around defined core values. Every bad trainer we ever hired came from a rushed hire where we needed somebody so we just got somebody. And don't try to hire another you. Look for someone who shares your character qualities, not your personality.Get to 80% and make the call. Arthur Brooks took this from the Marines. The gap between 80% and 100% certainty won't change your decision, but the time you spend chasing it will cost you months. Same applies to training your staff. Shoot for them being 80% as good as you, not 100%.In stage three, you have to give up owning every seat. Mark O'Donnell put our org chart on the board and asked who owns each seat. The answer was Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince. That was the problem with the business. You can be responsible for results without doing the work, but you can't be the answer to every question and grow past $50K a month.Stage four is defined by your involvement, not your locations. Gabriele Fitness has one location and is a stage four business because I have almost zero involvement. Most clients don't even know I'm the owner. The requirement is one competent point person running the facility who owns the results and the PNL. No general manager, no stage four. 85% of your future customers are already on your list. I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

    1h 5min
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  5. Number 5: Turn Dead Leads Into Buyers

    How to make $865.38 per hour writing emails. Full workshop September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026 Here's a study that will change how you think about your leads. When someone opts in with a company, roughly 50% of them will eventually buy. But only 15% of those buyers purchase in the first 100 days. The other 85% buy over the next 100 weeks. Read that again. Most gym owners have a system for the 15% and nothing for the 85%. They hammer a lead for 21 days, get no response, and write them off as dead. Those aren't dead leads. They just haven't bought yet. In this episode, Tom and I break down what to actually do with that 85%. The short version: get in their inbox consistently and build the relationship until they're ready. Three emails a week, 200 words each, call to action in the PS. Bobby and Maria from Big Day Fitness did exactly this after taking my email workshop and got 12 to 13 new customers last year from emails alone. At $5,000 lifetime value each, that's $60,000 for writing a few hundred words a week. I'm teaching the full system on September 11th. This is my fourth email workshop and I believe it's the most important one I've ever done. I'm bringing in Doberman Dan, a legend in direct response who actually lived with Gary Halbert in Costa Rica and now coaches me personally. Ben Stocks is teaching Facebook ad copy. And I'm covering print marketing, because one newspaper ad at my gym has produced over $60,000 in lifetime client value this year. I chose September 11th on purpose. My dad, sister, and brother in law all worked in the World Trade Center. That day hit close to home. Stephen Siller was a 34 year old FDNY firefighter who had just gotten off the late shift when he heard about the first plane. He turned around, grabbed his gear, found the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel closed, strapped his equipment to his back, and ran three miles through it on foot to the towers. He never came home. He left behind his wife Sally and five children. The Tunnel to Towers Foundation his family created provides mortgage free homes to families of fallen first responders, Gold Star families, and catastrophically injured veterans. 25% of the proceeds from this workshop go to them. 5 Key Takeaways:Your dead leads aren't dead. They're just early. 85% of the people who will eventually buy from you do it over the following 100 weeks, not the first 100 days. If your only system is a 21 day follow up sequence, you're throwing away the majority of your future customers.Three emails a week is the sweet spot for a gym. 200 words. Curiosity plus useful in the subject line. Call to action in the PS. That's the whole formula. Commit to it for 90 days before you decide whether it works.Nobody is thinking about you as much as you think they are. Gym owners don't email because they're afraid of being annoying. When someone unsubscribes, they're not at home plotting against your business. They just unsubscribed. And they probably weren't going to buy anyway.Stop swinging for grand slams. Derek Jeter never hit a grand slam in his entire career. Most of your emails will get crickets and that's fine. You're hitting singles. Bobby and Maria got 12 customers worth $60,000 from consistent emails, not from one home run.Know, like, trust is the sequence and email is how you move people through it. Vince has never met Arthur Brooks but trusts him enough to buy any book he releases, all from consuming his emails and content. You can build that same trust with someone who has never set foot in your gym. 12 customers. $60,000 in lifetime value. From emails. I'm teaching the entire system on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026

    50min
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