Name: Stop Leaving Money on the Table: Pricing Strategies that Drive Revenue
Uploaded: 2025-04-15T18:01:10.192Z
Duration: 33 min 16 s
Description: Stop Leaving Money on the Table: Pricing Strategies that Drive Revenue

Transcript for "Stop Leaving Money on the Table: Pricing Strategies that Drive Revenue": Hello? Let's see. Hello. Hello. How are we doing? Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you all for joining us. We're gonna get started here in just a moment. We're gonna give, you know, two or three minutes just for people to join. I know sometimes when you're coaching classes, it's hard to, you know, leave the class and then hop on a webinar. So, if you are live in the audience, go ahead and drop in, where you're from, what your gym name is, how long you guys been in business, and what's, what type of fitness do you serve. So I'd like to get to know who who's on the call. And, like I mentioned before, we're gonna wait a minute or two just to let a few more people join, and then we'll get rocking and rolling. I do have Hillary in the backstage. She's gonna be helping me with the slides today. You see, you'll see her, drop some comments and polls in the the chat. So as those come out, feel free to interact. If you do have questions as we're going, please type those in the chat. Sometimes I'll cover those as we're going through, and other times, we'll well, we might save it till the end. So hi, Liza. Welcome from Boston. What, what gym are you with, and what type of fitness and how long have you guys been open? Study performance. Okay. Great. Personal training, small group personal training. Awesome. Oh, 2021. Wonderful. Great. Well, welcome. Welcome. Hope, you get a lot of value out of the content we're gonna share today. So we're gonna wait about, two more minutes just to let people get on. I know they're coming out from classes. So just give another minute or two. Hi, Morgan, from Krav Maga, Maryland, self defense and fitness classes. Been in business for twenty years. Oh my gosh. Wow. That's impressive. Congratulations. That's so great. I'm sure we have a lot to learn from you. So that's wonderful. Great. Okay. If you're just joining us, I see the a few more people jumping on. If you're just joining us, let us know where you're from, what, what the name of your gym or studio, and how long you guys have been in business, and what type of fitness, do you serve your community with. Alright. Let's, we're gonna go ahead and get started. Looks like we have a pretty good sized group here, so feel free to drop any questions in the chat as we go. My name is Mike Wiest. I am a ten year veteran. I owned a CrossFit facility for ten years. I just sold it about two years ago. I also work here at Zim Planner. I run our marketing team, and I get to do a lot of these great webinars. We get to interact with a lot of our our customers all over the world. So excited to be here, excited to serve, and hope to deliver a lot of value, today. So go ahead, Hillary. Let's go to the next one. Great. Alright. So what are we gonna talk about today? We're gonna talk about pricing strategies and some ways you guy you all can leverage, different types of pricing models in in terms of increasing revenue. So we're gonna talk about when should you do a price increase, and how do you communicate that to your members? What are some different pricing models and how maybe traditionally you do class based or, by month, but are there there's other options. And the goal here is just to open up your eyes to other options to see if that's the right fit for you and your community. A question I get asked really regularly is should I show my pricing on the website? And when you should do that and when you should let people opt in to get more pricing information. So I'll deep dive into that strategy. It's a great way to generate leads. And then I'll look at hybrid plans and ways you can add more value to your members and also increase revenue that's really has an impact in your community, in retention, and, obviously, in revenue. So next slide. So we're gonna, jump to our first poll question. So Heather's gonna drop this. You should should see this pop up on the screen. So where are you at in your pricing strategy journey? So are you, you know, a, are you optimized? Have you tested different models? You made some updates recently. It's kind of outdated. We really haven't touched it. We just kinda go with the flow. And or, hey. We've never really thought about pricing. Don't really have a strategy for it. I just wanna get some feedback from the audience, so feel free to fill out that poll. Cool. Looks like we got some votes coming in. Awesome. Yeah. Make sure you guys fill that out. And we have a number of people on the call. So I'd like to just see where you guys are at. So some updates recently. Couple of people said they're optimized. Wonderful. Wonderful. Yeah. So fill that out. List them on the chat. And great. So alright, Hillary. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide. Oh, one person says, I don't have a strategy yet. Awesome. Well, that's good. That's why we're here. Okay. So one of the things you know, I've been very fortunate. I've been able to talk to thousands of gym owners over the last ten years that I've been in the industry. I've been in software, and just my time here, last five years here at Zen Planner. You know, we obviously care a lot of deeply about our communities, deeply about the people we serve, and sometimes we make those decisions at the detriment to the health of the business. Right? So I know one mistake I made when I opened my gym in 2013 was I told all my members they're gonna be grandfathered in for the life of the gym. Well, what I didn't anticipate at that time being a young gym owner was, hey. My rent automatically increases 2% every year. Hey. I need to expand my, facility because we're we're at capacity. Hey. I need to refresh my equipment every three to five years depending on the type of equipment. Hey. We need to invest in bathrooms, and we need to invest in, new flooring. I had a I remember doing a concrete project because our concrete was busted up. So how often do you increase prices, and do you increase on everybody? Is it only people who are net new? This is a big concern. A lot of gym owners that I talk with is saying, hey. What happens if I do a price increase? Are people going to leave? So there's number number of strategies you can do here. Right? So, obviously, I think one one of the really great programs that I had at my gym that I think is valuable is I had a cohort of members that represented from each of my classes, one to two people, that I whenever I needed to make a a change in the gym or do something like a price increase, I always pulled that group together and had a small focus group. Or I just asked some questions on on how's the gym performing? How is your class experience? Are you getting value? You know, get that really great feedback and then say, hey. I'm gonna be proposing these changes soon. What do you think about that? Now you don't have to do that. For me, it was the right decision in my community, and I leveraged that group, for a lot of decisions I made. But, ultimately, it's a business. It's a business feeds your family. It provides income for your coaches and trainers. And so you have to do what's always best for the business. And I know sometimes that's easy to blend between being, you know, you know, friends with your members, but also you are running a business. So, one of the questions I always get though is, how do I do a price increase? Well, in the last five years, you know, going through COVID, you know, the a lot of a lot of the changes that are happening, sometimes price increases are necessities. So I think first and foremost, what I would recommend is putting in your membership agreement that people sign that you will be looking at pricing on an annual basis. And some gyms I talked to have a default a. It's a 2% increase annually at your membership renewal, while others say we have reserved the right to increase prices at any time. You know, there's a lot there's been a lot of changes with, you know, inflation, other things being more expensive, you know, minimum wage laws, things like that. So you have to be sure you can cover your overhead, but also provide for for your family. So in terms of strategy of how to execute this, we have a template on the screen that that, you know, is a great thing to work off of in terms of sending that letter. But my recommendation is to give them a little bit of a heads up. I know at one point, I called every single member of my gym and told them, hey. I need to do a price increase. And every time I've done price increases in the past, I've never lost a member over it. Right? I think it's just because of the clear transparency, the reasons why, where we're gonna be reinvesting the money. I think that's really important. Hey. More training for my coaches. Hey. We're gonna refresh, our equipment annually. I've even seen some gyms that have a annual fee that they they attach to memberships, so they can do things like invest, in their equipment or their space. So and then, obviously, you wanna monitor and discuss those things with your members, especially when you make the change. But if you're doing a really good job and your pricing goes up 5 or $10 per month, most people aren't going to sweat it. And if they do sweat it, they're probably out the door anyway. So feel confident about this. You have to do what's right for your business, to support your family. Alright. By the way, if you guys have any questions as we go, feel free to drop those in the chat, and I'll keep an eye on that. So I wanted to share this. There's definitely a different types of pricing models, and I wanted to show you some math on how those impacts. So I know some gyms do monthly where they bill just, like, on the first or the fifteenth of the month, and they get 12 you know, those 12 payments throughout the year. So here's an example. Monthly pricing, hundred 50 a month, 12 payments a year. There's your monthly revenue. There's your yearly revenue. I've seen none of their gyms price on a twenty eight day model. So a hundred and $50 every twenty eight days, you actually get an extra payments, and so you can increase your monthly revenue by almost $2 and then annually about 20,000. So you have to determine what's right for you. And the reason I'm sharing this is there are a couple of times a year where you have five weeks in a month, so your overhead, your expenses in those month is is higher than maybe what you originally budgeted for. And so I think when you're a young business owner, you may not think about that. You might just say, hey. I'm gonna charge once a month. But people are actually getting more service and more access a couple of times a year be because of those extra weeks that are in a month. You can also do the same thing on biweekly prices, where you're charging a little bit less, you know or not sorry. Not a little bit less, but you're charging every two weeks. So it has the same effect as the twenty eight day pricing, but you can also do this where it ties in with typical paydays, like the first or fifteenth of the month. So these are just a couple of pricing models. I have a few more to share. But this is, you know, just a quick math to show the impact. And if that's something you're interested in, you can obviously set that up in in Zendaya. Alright. Hillary, next slide, please. Okay. So one of the biggest questions I get, you know, I'm very fortunate. I get to talk with Jim and studio owners every single week on, these weekly success sessions that we host. And one of the questions I get is when should I or should I list my pricing website? So I wanna talk about that just a little bit in detail. So if you have a really good engine for your marketing, you know, you're getting consistent leads every month, you're converting a number of those leads, all of that is good, put your pricing on your website. What the pricing on the website is going to do is filter out anybody that's price sensitive. So if you charge a hundred and $50 a month, anybody that sees that on your website and they're very price sensitive, they're not going to opt in typically. The other option is you put a your pricing page on the website. You know, you can do strategies like, hey. Our prices start at $6, 7 dollars per class. You can definitely do that. And then have an opt in form that says, hey. Opt in to get our full pricing information. And so what you'll see there is you'll have actually have an increase in leads because of that strategy. What's nice about that is it gives you an opportunity to showcase your value via a phone call, an in person meeting, over text messages, where people may be price anchoring your business, especially if you do a group a group class, to something like a general access facility. Like, you know, things think of, like, a Crunch Fitness or Planet Fitness. So the you know, a lot of times in certain markets, you'll see those businesses advertising. They'll say, hey. For $10 a month, you get this amazing 5,000, six thousand, 10 thousand square foot facility with all this equipment. Well, people will associate, hey, $10.20 bucks a month. But then when they go to your facility, you're offering coaching, you're offering, a small class experience. It's kind of a personal training, small group experience versus a general access gym. And so a lot of times, you know, the perception of market is, hey. I can go get a fit fitness for $10.20 bucks a month. Well, those gyms thrive on 90 plus percent of their members never showing up in any given day versus a lot of the gyms that we work with are class based or coach based. And you want your members to show up because you actually wanna deliver results to them. And for them to improve if they're a martial arts facility, you want them to rank up in their belts, in their knowledge. And so that's definitely something to really consider. And if you're unsure of how to do this, we have a really great platform called Engage that, you know, hosts your website, and we can make it really easy to set up a form to to do opt in. And I would also suggest testing this out. So at my gym, May was a really tough month. I'm in a college town, so in May, we would lose a lot of college students. And so, typically, in April, what I would do is I remove my pricing for my website, put the opt in form, and then I capture a little bit more leads. And what we're typically seeing is about 14% of people that opt in on the pricing page are converting to members. So that may be a little bit less than what you see from your advertising campaigns or people who organically hit your website. But your lead volume goes up, and now those people are in your your database, and you can market to them regularly. So just a couple strategies on pricing on the website. If you need more leads, pull your pricing out, do something like a price per class, and get people to opt in. If your lead part of your lead funnel is doing really well, put your pricing in because maybe you wanna filter people out. But if you need to grow, my recommendation is to, price per class and put an opt in form. So, alright, Hillary. Next slide, please. Cool. The last thing I wanna cover around, membership plans is hybrid memberships. So a lot of gyms that we work with offer basically class access, meaning you get three times a week, you get unlimited, and, you know, members are having a great experience. But if you really want to build income for your coaches plus build revenue for the gym, my recommendation is a hybrid plan. So hybrid plans look something like this. You can have your base plan that's your standard rate, a hundred and $50 a month, Or you can do things at scale, like nutrition coaching, where you can have your new your base plan, but then you add nutrition coaching. A nutrition coaching is an extra $50, but you blend it together in as one payment. You'll what you'll see is you'll see people buying that middle tier plan, because people don't wanna that you know, it's like going to the a restaurant. Right? You buy the combo meal. You typically buy that medium sized combo meal, not the large, not the small, because the middle feels safer. You can also do this with things like personal training. You can do this with, you know, digital training courses or resources where you're adding value. One thing I did in my gym was our base plan did not get access to our seminars. But if you're in our hybrid middle tier plan, our seminars that we did once or twice a month were free. But if you weren't on that plan, then they were, you know, 25 or $30 for those seminars. So really think about hybrid plans as a way to drive revenue, but also provide income for your coaches. And building these programs and offering that to new people coming through the door, you're gonna see a lot more people opt in to a middle tier plan where it has some additional value. The good thing is you're doing this and you're adding value to the member. They're gonna get more value out of the, you know, their experience with you. So they're gonna stay longer. Their revenue over time is gonna increase your lifetime value. And then over time, you're gonna have a, a lot of your people on base plans upgrading to a nutrition coaching personal training seminar, however you structure those hybrid plans because you have options for them. So, just wanted to share that because not a lot of people are running hybrid plans. But, man, hybrid plans are for me, was one of the great revenue drivers of the business, but also added a ton of value to our members. Next slide, please. Cool. So we're gonna talk a little bit about payments in this, next part of the presentation. So I got a little poll here. Are transaction fees cutting into your revenue? So, you know, yes. They are. Credit card fees are paying. Somewhat, we're managing. C, no. We've already offset them. And d, we're not sure. So, obviously, we know a lot of people are, use their credit cards to pay. Some gyms are set up with ACH, which is great, but most people feel very comfortable leveraging their credit card to pay for memberships. So how are you guys managing that? Are you just eating the fees? Is it something that you're managing? Maybe the increased prices that cover some of that fee. Do you add a fee on top of it? I wanna get a, I wanna get a understanding of the people watching this webinar, what they're doing. So cool. So I'm seeing majority of the votes are somewhat, but we're managing. So and then another one that says I'm not sure. Okay. That's great. So let's go ahead and go to the next slide. We're gonna talk about some opportunities here. So last year, we released a program called flex fees, and it's a way to supplement your transaction fees when somebody purchases from you. So go ahead and hit the next slide. So let's talk a little bit about what flex fees are. So if you've ever been to a big city, or maybe even where you live and you go to a restaurant or you go to a, you know, coffee shop, you may see when you're checking out that they have their prices for their items. And then as you, you know, you're signing the receipt, you'll pay your taxes, and then you'll pay a a, a flex fee or a transaction fee. So we've been able to bring this to, the Zen planner community, and now you're able to add a transaction fee on top of that that membership. Right? So let's look at what this looks like from a math perspective. So if your membership price is a hundred and 50, you have that 30% flex fee that covers all of your payment processing. The member's gonna pay $1.54. You're gonna earn $1.54. And the 3% flex fee actually covers the transaction fee. So your effective rate on your, you know, maybe a 3.89% processing for credit card fees drops to a point eight nine. So we're seeing a lot of adoption, across our customers all over, The US. And this is a really great way for you to put that in front or on top of your membership to cover those transaction fees. So, we have a lot of really good examples. I'm gonna share with you here a, a video from one of our customers who, was a little bit nervous about introducing us to his facility. But once he did, he's gonna share his results from that. So, basically, FlexFuse is out of small charge to the credit card, or ACH payment, helps your gym cover the transaction cost and boost your revenue. So, Hillary, let's go to the next one, please. So I wanted to kind of build this out for a year. And so what does this looks like look like? Right? So with flex fees, your revenue before I showed you was 22,000, I think, $7.50. With flex fees, you're gonna add an extra almost $700 a month in revenue. And in a year's time, that's $8,100. So with an additional $8,100, let me know in the chat, what would you buy for your gym? Right? Or what would you do for yourself? Would you take yourself on a nice vacation? Maybe you're gonna upgrade some equipment in the gym. Same thing on a the ACH side, you know, cover the ACH transaction, extra hundred and $50 a month. That's like adding a brand new membership every single month, you know, and then an extra $2 a year. So once again, more money in your pocket to do what you want, invest back into your facility, invest in coach or trainer development, or treat yourself and go on a nice vacation, with your family. Alright. Next slide, Hillary. Cool. So we're gonna share a video from CrossFit nineteen twenty six, and they're gonna tell us a little bit about why they implemented flex fees, what was the transition process, and then what were the results. So, Hillary, will you queue up the video? I hate raising rates. Right now. Every time I talk with seminar staff or I'm at a new training and they hear what our rates are, they're like, oh, you've gotta raise those rates. Can I ask you what your rates are? Three times a week, single athlete, eighty five dollars a month. I know. You have to know our area. We gotta get them in the door first. And so we've kept fees low and we wanna keep them fairly low, having the ability to use these flex fees in particular to be able to pass on processing fees to our members. They get it. It's really allowed for us to keep member costs down and to give them the flexibility on what kind of fees they're gonna wanna see too. The key things about flex fees is really just being completely transparent. And I know when flex fees came out, a lot of feedback we were getting is, how are my members going to react to this? How is my community going to react to this? Well, the data tells us everything we need to know. As gyms and studios are implementing flex fees into their business, they're not getting pushback from their members. Their members are understanding as long as they're transparent about it upfront. So don't just surprise them and turn this on and surprise them. Let let them know. Just say, hey. The cost of, you know, doing business is going up. I know your insurance goes up every year. Your rent typically goes up every year. What you pay your staff goes up every year. And this is a great opportunity for you to collect more revenue, and your members are going to be okay with it. So don't have any fear when it comes to flex fees. It's definitely a a great way to drive some additional revenue in your business. And and CrossFit nineteen twenty six example, every time I've seen that video, I I just I'm astonished that he was only charging $85 a month, but I get it. You know, certain communities, certain areas of the country, you know, may not be big enough to support a higher membership rate. I totally understand that. So, Heather, let's go ahead and go to the next slide. So how to implement flex fees? You know, like I mentioned before, being transparent is super, super key, key. And then how are you gonna leverage those fees? I think that's really, important. Definitely communicate that this is coming. You know? That's maybe in your Facebook community. Obviously, you need to send an email. Maybe you'll post something at the front desk. And then position really is a benefit. So, you know, instead of increasing prices every year, maybe you can just add the flex fees, and that would cover what you would normally charge in a price increase. How are you gonna improve services? How are you gonna reinvest in your staff, your equipment, and your programs? So, you know, people were really pretty apprehensive when we first announced this, but as more and more gyms have adopted flex fees in their in their operation, we've actually seen a lot of really positive feedback. And, you know, now gym owners are going on more vacations and supporting their family and their communities better. Next slide, please. So let me just run you through some quick math. I think that's all it's always important to show the work. Right? So we've been discussing, like, the base plan and what that looks like in terms of your revenue. You know, if you were to move to something like a twenty eight day pricing, you know, that's where you get that extra payment. So there's that increase. If you start adding those hybrid plans and you see the blend of, you know, 50 member community, how many people are gonna be on the one fifty plan, how many are on the 200 plan, the two fifty, You can see how your revenue is starting to jump pretty significantly just with a couple of tweaks to your offering. And then you plug in flex fees on top of that, and we have a nice mix of ACH users versus credit card users. You can notice how we've increased revenue by a hundred grand without changing or adding one single additional member. So adding more value to your members over time and leveraging the right programs and pricing models, hybrid plans, and flex fees can literally add a hundred thousand dollars. And if your operations are really dialed in, that's a ton of profit going right to the bottom line. Right? So you can pay yourself invest in your facility. So tons of opportunities with this whole you know, learn a little bit about what opportunities are out there. Maybe not every part of this model makes sense, but in my opinion, the feedback we've gotten on flex fees is very, very positive, and members are incredibly receptive to that. K. Next slide, Hillary. Cool. So just a quick poll. You know, I talked a lot about flex fees last five, ten minutes. How likely are you to test flex fees that you're doing? Is is this something you're interested in? Let us know in the poll. Alright. Seeing some votes starting to come in. Cool. Wanna people wanna learn more. Somebody says, hey. I'm ready. Let's jump in. Alright. Great. Well, we're I'm gonna show you here in just a moment on how to get started with flex fees and give you Scott you all some additional resources. So, yep, people wanna learn more, a couple more people say I'm ready. Awesome. Awesome. Well, before I show you how to how to get more, I wanna I do wanna open up for questions. So if you have questions, please drop that in the chat. I'm happy to have some more conversation. By the way, if you are watching this live, you will get a, an email with the recording in it, so that won't be coming. And feel free to share that with, you know, if you have another owner, a head coach, a general manager, etcetera. So okay. I'm just checking the chat. I don't see any any questions coming through. So if you have any questions, we have another fourteen minutes available for this, webinar today. But, Hillary, go ahead and go into the next slide. I wanna, share how people can learn more. So, you see a couple QR codes in here. The one on the left is our guide. So we have a guide to flex fees. And so this really just takes what I shared today, but goes a little bit deeper in terms of how things work. So you can scan that QR code, go to the website. It'll get you a download for to learn more about flex fees. But if you're ready to take the next step and talk to our team, flex fees cost nothing out of pocket, by the way. So it's just yeah. We have to get you signed up. You can hit that second QR code, and then it'll get you linked up with one of our members of our account management team, to get flex fees activated in your community. One quick caveat. Flex fees is not available in every single state. This is a state by state, thing. So, just keep that in mind. But when you talk to our account management team, Tom, Kira, JT, etcetera, they'll let you know, you know, if your if your facility is eligible and then walk you through any additional details you, you know, you may have questions about. So check out those QR codes. Once again, my name is Mike, here at Zim Planner. Excited to, hopefully, you guys get a lot of value out of today, and, I hope that, we can continue to help you grow your gyms. You all are doing amazing work. And gym owner to gym owner, I'm I'm just so appreciative. I know what it's like day in and day out running a gym. It's tough. It's one of the toughest industries, I think, in the in the world. So really happy you guys are here. If you have any questions, I'd love to reach out to me. It's just [email protected]. I'll type that in the chat. Feel free to shoot me an email. And, for those of you that come to my success calls that host Tuesdays and Thursdays, looking forward to seeing you soon. Alright. Thanks so much, y'all. Have a great rest of your week.