54 leads, 3 members

That was my last month. Fifty-four leads into Shark Bite, three new members out the other end.

I put that number up on my Tuesday call on purpose, because it's easy to teach this stuff from a good month and pretend the bad ones don't happen. It's 110 degrees in Cape Coral in June. Nobody here is thinking about a gym. That's the honest reason, and it's also the kind of reason that sounds like an excuse, so I'll let you decide.

Here's the math I wish somebody had put in front of me years earlier.

Outside a big metro, figure about ten percent of your leads become members. Ten percent, IF YOU'RE GOOD at sales. If you're not good at it yet, you're closer to four hundred leads for ten members, and I know that's an ugly sentence to read.

So if you want ten new members, you need a hundred leads to get there.

A hundred. That's hard. I understand exactly how hard it is and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But if you sit on your butt, you don't get there, and no amount of reworking your pricing page changes the arithmetic.

Now, the reason that number matters more than any other number in your business.

A guy on the call brought a real decision to the room. Farmer's market booth, that Saturday, twelve minutes from his gym, three hundred and fifty dollars. His read was that the crowd is nothing like his people and he'd walk away with nobody.

He was arguing about whether he LIKED the booth. That's not the question.

I pulled up my ad account live on the call. Shark Bite is paying about twenty-two dollars a lead right now. So thirty leads costs me six hundred and sixty dollars through Facebook. That same thirty leads at a booth costs three fifty.

Thirty leads for three fifty is a good buy. Five leads for three fifty is a bad one. That's the entire decision and it has nothing to do with farmer's markets.

Three other owners in the room had done booths. One's run city hall events and art festivals for sixteen years and has never traced a single membership to one of them. Not one. Another got exactly one signup from a wellness expo and said he'd do it again anyway. The third does a street shutdown every year and walks out with thirty to sixty names.

All three landed in the same place without being asked. You don't buy members at a booth. You buy leads.

So the question isn't whether the event is your avatar. It's whether you're on pace for a hundred leads this month. If you're not, take the booth. Take almost anything. Once you're actually on pace, you've earned the right to turn it down and hand Facebook the money instead.

I spent my last two years in the Army as a recruiter and they put me on booth duty constantly, so I'll save you the tuition: if you go, you have to be the loudest thing at that event. High energy the whole time, calling people out of the crowd, the entire three hours. Nobody there came to see you. A cheaper booth does not fix a bad booth. Two hundred dollars is still wasted if you're going to sit behind the table on your phone.

Go count last month's leads and multiply by ten percent. That's your honest forecast for next month, and if you don't like it, you already know which end of this the problem is on.

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.