If they're not already in your gym, that's the problem
Nick Habich · Tuesday, October 13, 2026 · from the Tuesday Roundtable
I said something on my Tuesday call that went by in about four seconds and nobody reacted to it. I've been chewing on it since, because I think it's the most useful thing I said all hour and I threw it away.
We were doing an exercise about the person you're marketing to. And I told them it should be somebody who's already in your gym.
Because if it isn't, you have a problem in your gym. You're serving the wrong people.
Sit with that one.
If the person you most want walking through your door does not currently exist inside your building, then the business you're marketing and the business you're operating are two different businesses. You're running ads for a gym you don't have.
That happens more than anybody admits. You get an idea of who you want, usually a version of yourself, or the client you had four years ago who made the job feel great. Then you build content for that person while your actual room fills with somebody else entirely. And you never look up and check whether the two match.
I've done a softer version of this. Not chasing a fantasy exactly, but building marketing around the members who are easiest to be proud of instead of the ones who most represent who we actually serve well.
The fix isn't complicated and it isn't fun. Go stand in your own gym at your busiest hour and look at who's there. Not who you wish was there. Who IS there, paying you, on a Tuesday.
If that's the person you'd want more of, congratulations, your marketing job just got dramatically easier. You have a hundred of them to study, they're right there, and you can ask them anything.
If it isn't, you've got a much more interesting problem than a content problem, and no hook is going to touch it.
That's the thing about the specific-person exercise. Everybody thinks it's a marketing drill. It's mostly a mirror. It tells you whether the gym you're describing to strangers is the same one your members walk into, and those two things drift apart quietly over years.
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.