Getting Your First Clients

Here is a little insight from some well known folks in the community on how they started out and what they did to get their first clients in the door.

Brian MacKenzie: CrossFit Endurance

I poured my soul into what I was doing. I had nothing and my future ex-wife was supporting my ass. I gave myself away to anyone who would let me train them. I volunteered for 1 year in an adaptive P.E. Class, I basically volunteered as a Physical Therapy Assistant for 6 months before I knew enough about basic training to not fuck someone up, or enough to progress their training. I screwed myself up training for a sprint triathlon, and was introduced to mechanics, where I paid for training, an internship, and learned the difference between training someone the way the wanted vs. the way they needed. At that point my life changed forever. Bottom line!

David Osorio: CrossFit South Brooklyn

My first client was someone who I had been training at a commercial facility in Manhattan for a couple months. He believed in what I was doing and would travel about 45 minutes into Brooklyn for SBK’s original park workouts. At that time he was the only one who would show up and if it wasn’t for him I would have been a lot more reticent to continue on with this whole experiment. Slowly, and thanks primarily to the Affiliate Blog links we started getting 1-3 more people for the weekly workouts.

The very beginning is a special time where you really get to plant your roots and establish what kind of environment you’d like to cultivate. It’s also a wonderful opportunity to take your first members and give them an emotional stake in what you’re trying to build. Include them in the process, ask for their feedback and let them know what your plans for the program and for them are. People love being active members in a community and once you empower them in it, they’ll never leave. A year and half later, our first 5 members are still actively training with us.

Dutch Lowy: CrossFit ATM

After training in Austin for a year i moved back to College Station where i decided 1 thing. I never wanted to train anybody ever again. That lasted about 2 weeks during which i could not find a job. My first client came from a friend of my moms who had heard i was a trainer and just moved back to town. The ladies poor son was my first Crossfit client. On a side note her sister is doing crossfit on her own at school and has started a crossfit club.

The next couple clients came from word of mouth and were actually my friends parents. I guess they trusted me since they already knew me. It grew from there and i could probably track all my current clients back to those original 6 or 7.

Michael Rutherford: CrossFit Kansas City

1. Be Professional – Know your stuff. Never FAKE it. Be a model.
2. Offer complimentary sessions
3. Provide referral account credits
4. Develop a relationship. People will quit a program easier than a relationship
5. Price your services appropriately. Cheap is cheap.
6. Identify your niche then market using call to action techniques.
7. If you get a lead ACT on it immediately. You build the first 45 new client one at a time.
8. Make every session memorable. It might not be the amazing lift or time or rep count it may be your presentation of the materials.
9. Find the influencers in your group. Give them an incentive to help you build the base.
10.Nurture social opportunities outside of the gym. See #4.

Kelly Starrett: San Francisco CrossFit

My first athletes were our friends in the back yard. We started with one athlete and added people until we were about 7+ deep before we ever had a space. Our model was based on creating a working, affordable training space for our friends and family first. If other people wanted to come (and turns out they did) that was fine, but we were interested in creating the place WE wanted to train.

We only offered one class a day while I was in grad school. We added classes as the interest in what we were doing grew. More importantly, we didn’t leverage our lives into supporting some gym/model that would really only fly after some 2 years of effort. We kept overhead low, and let SFCF grow organically. We only ever add professional/badass coaches, and we try to keep our model as flexible as we can while still generating revenue.

We have a pretty good understanding of the Petranek/Lelanne model and while it certainly works for them, it absoluely doesn’t resonate with us or with the athletes that train with us. But, start in your garage with your friends and family. Too many people want to replicate the successes of great training centers that have been slugging it out to be great for years. You can’t short the process. You can only work on being excellent.

Dave Werner and Nancy Meenen: CrossFit Seattle

Our very first client was a friend of Robb Wolfs She later brought in her boyfriend and a co-worker. The 2nd client we got was from the CrossFit website. Greg came up for his first affiliate “talk” and we put up an invitation on the main site and our website. In walked Carrie Klumpar who had been following the main website for a while. She decided to stick around and pay Dave and Nick to train her. Our 3rd client came from Brian Mulvaney. She was a friend of his in the paddling community who also came to Greg’s talk. Our 4th client came from the website as well. We taught a kettlebell class at our box that was advertised though the “experimental college” (which is similar to the fun kind of continuing education classes that many community colleges offer) at the University of Washington. We got a few clients from these classes. Dave and Nick also agreed to coach the Hockey team at the UW (for free) from which they got one client. We started in the fall of 2002 and by the end of 2003 we had 21 clients. It was slow growing for us.

Greg Everett and Aimee Anaya: Catalyst Athletics

From Aimee:
I think one of the most important things we did was to start posting that we would be opening a gym in the next couple of months. We let people know on the message boards and via our own site that we were coming to town! In doing this, we started to receive lots of emails inquiring about rates and schedules. It got people talking a month before we were even open and they told all of their friends, resulting in an increase of excitement, anticipation, and questions. I saved all of those emails in a “potential client” folder, and once we were preparing to start our first classes, and open our schedules to private training, I sent all those people an email simply stating “it’s almost time”.

Once we developed our pricing structure, availability, and class times, I sent another email to the folder of peeps giving them a link. When we finally opened we had people waiting for us! Now, we really emphasize our sense of family, commitment, and teamwork (working together in a group and supporting each other), making it clear our intentions and goals as a team (trainer-client) and for them as an athlete.

This sense of atmosphere, plan, structure, and goals we have developed for our clients does all the advertising for us. Word of mouth travels very quickly when you are providing these folks with a solid, legit foundation that is irreplaceable and cannot be found elsewhere.

From Greg:
It’s important to add, though, that we’re a special case. My name is associated with CF NorCal, the company has been around for a couple years, and the Performance Menu for even longer. So opening a gym for us was much different than for others. We could bank on an existing reputation and a large volume of daily exposure online. While we do have some clients who’ve come to us by chance or due to simple geographic proximity, the majority have come to us because of our reputation for both O-lifting and CF.

Robb Wolf: CrossFit NorCal

I honestly think I started an affiliate from the LEAST advantageous a position one can imagine. I did my undergraduate degree in the little college town of Chico, CA. I moved away for over 6 years (Seattle, east coast, Colorado) and then moved back to Chico to start CrossFit NorCal. I had little money, and absolutely NO connections. I started CFNC in the back of a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu studio and my first…perhaps 5 clients came from the folks in the BJJ/kickboxing program.

I also worked at a physical therapy clinic and the owners of that clinic convinced a few of their patients who were athletes to come and train with us. This put CFNC up to about 10 clients. I carpet-bombed the town of Chico with fliers in every cafe, bike shop, and athletic supply store I could think of. The fliers were horrible…we saved them and will perhaps post some of our old collateral that just makes me shudder now…but it actually brought in a few people. We put fliers up at the university, and in the school mail boxes of all the elementary, middle and high school teachers in town. This effort scored us a few more folks including our Director of Training, Natalie Taylor.

We had a booth at the Thursday Night Farmers Market where the Chico-Hippy-burnouts would listen to our descriptions of functional fitness, watch our promotional video…then ask if we had any weed for sale! We did however hand out a flier to a girl who was the secretary of a local real estate big-wig. The secretary never came down to train, the big wig did and brought about 25 people with her.

I have no idea how many hours we worked to get those first 50 clients but it was NOT a linear dose-response curve. Things we did three months in the past often bore fruit in strange and difficult to track ways. Something that is VERY important to keep in mind for folks new to the business ownership scene is that unlike school and other work environments, self employment is not a linear effort/rewards system. This can be a serious mind-fuck for many people who need instant results…you need to take a bit of a Zen approach to the whole thing. You focus on the task at hand, do the most exceptional work you can…then simply observe the results, remain a bit disconnected from the whole process, then re-evaluate and make your next move to grow the business. It is interesting to note: The first 50 are the tough ones! Once you get those the next 50 are far easier, the next even
easier etc. If you care about your clients, structure their programming with some thought, they will make great progress and this will greatly accelerate your progress.

How about the rest of you? Post to comments anything you did to attract your first clients: who were they and how did you get them?