Big Question:
How do we organize and grow as a team of geographically dispersed personal trainers, meeting a clear market need but with no existing model to replicate?
In Summary:
Person-to-person connection and building goodwill by giving more than we ask for to partners, hosts, trainers, and clients, empowering each by centering their needs while incorporating them into the system as a whole.
Background:
At-home fitness has always been important to me, since I started exercising in my back yard and living room as a child. In December 2016, the opportunity arose to join startup Golden Home Fitness as the first Area Leader and as a Personal Trainer, both of which I started in March of 2017. At the turn of the next year into 2018, I started my role as Director of Operations, which I remained in until leaving the company in late 2019.
Golden Home Fitness was started out of the need to help people improve their health and wellness, especially people without the time to get to and from a gym, or with the preference for a more private environment. Building a team of trainers ready to go to each client's home was an efficient solution. With the rapid growth in luxury apartment development, particularly buildings with fitness facilities included, the Greater Boston market was primed for this solution.
Even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, at-home and on-site fitness services were meeting a need and growing. According to IBIS World Reports pulled in 2019, the industry then was growing at a stable pace nationally at an annualized rate of 2.6%.
Industry incumbents had tried several routes, others pursuing a franchise model, or more of a trainer brokerage model, while at Golden Home Fitness, we chose to build an in-house brand to leverage the technology the company founder created, as he connected our databases for payments and for training session reporting into one mobile interface.
Problem:
Most trainers build their careers in a physical gym, relying on foot traffic and consultations with prospective clients to build up a stable client base. Increasingly, even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, many trainers instead choose to build up a personal brand online and sell various versions of online coaching to prospective clients whose trust they have earned as a person-to-person relationship. With no foot traffic, and seeking to build a team brand instead of many individual personal brands, this meant there was no well-trodden path and that we needed to innovate or fail.
Ultimately, we faced the problem nearly all organizations face: how do we optimize resources and create an impact greater than the sum of our parts?
The answer was, as it always is, collaboration.That became my chief role, building partnerships for events, supporting referral networks, convening our team, running social media, and producing a podcast to interview our trainers and guests.
Alternative Solutions:
Focus more on online coaching.
Focus more on private residences rather than managed apartment communities.
Become a broker for independent trainers.
Open a physical studio and centralize operations.
Focus more on corporate wellness instead of luxury residential communities.
Implementation:
This collaboration was a golden (pun intended) example of systems thinking:
Paying attention to area trends and looking at our own data, we learned that our best opportunity for growth was by focusing on luxury apartment communities.
Integrating human-centered design as well, we spoke with and listened to community managers at the luxury housing complexes where we already had individual clients to empathize with their need to fill a resident events calendar with engaging, fun, and free events. They did not want to be approached by people looking to use their residents in a funnel for easy marketing.
Our sales team identified all of the luxury apartment communities with fitness facilities within a reasonable radius of our trainers and began to make contact.
By focusing on building partnerships that add more value to the person responsible than we ask for in return, my marketing team of three including me was able to follow up and schedule events, managing all partner relationships in our CRM system (customer relationship management).
As a decentralized company, gathering as a team was a major priority. Events with residential complexes became a primary way to gather. This became a prime time to not only develop video content specific to each residential apartment complex, but also to share that educational content on social media.
Built and trained a marketing team of two to for events and social media marketing. From late 2018 through 2019, we maintained 2x per day social posts M-F (one short video and one feed post), 1-2x/week blog posts. Plus, 3/week events with our 40+ luxury residential partners.
To meet this demand, I trained my team while creating training manuals on using Later, Adobe Illustrator, Kapwing, Canva, and our CRM. I then mentored my team to lead their own marketing workshops for others.
Prioritizing teaming and opportunities for growth, we created a weekly paid meeting for a new trainer to present a topic for continuing education every week. This not only led to knowledge sharing and improved our client experience, but also created opportunities for leadership development, public speaking, and self-efficacy, transferrable skills that we could help develop more complete people as a part of our team.
Improved event sales by increasing meaningful contacts with a 360-degree approach to marketing. Custom-built graphics matching the luxury residence brand identity increased conversions. With cross-promoting on social, email, and print materials directing to our landing page, syncing into our CRM pipeline.
Built partnerships with snack and beverage companies for free promotions to give away and draw attention at events. With attention, we could offer a free raffle offering a month of coaching. While filling out the form, we could schedule a free 30 min session with the sales team. These changes grew per-event revenue several times over. We trained the entire staff to use events to also make videos for social: helping customers, educational clips, and fun b-roll content.
Created a system to add value for our apartment complex partners by developing a custom fitness support system for each residential community, complete with branding native to each one's brand color and logo on flyers, website, along with QR codes linked to videos recorded on their equipment.
Results:
In late 2019, I completed a full Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Analysis along with an @Risk Monte Carlo Simulation to assess the current and future value of the company as well as to assess potential strategic opportunities and threats. While maintaining confidentiality, I am able to disclose that our company revenues grew significantly, several times over between when I joined in 2017 and when I left in Q4 of 2019. More importantly, we were able to serve many more clients every month than we could when I arrived (such as those from the testimonials below). This growth is attributed to the efforts of all our team members during that time, and in particular to the effectiveness of the team when we were best able to collaborate on running events to support luxury housing community residents.
More than anything, this experience reinforced the fact that when we give more than we ask for in relationships with all of our stakeholders (our partners, our clients, our trainers, and our administrative team), and when we trust others to join in our shared mission, we can scale our impact and help so many more people than we could without this constellation of collaboration.
Client Testimonials:
Johanna Gorton (Massage Therapist and Business Owner-Operator)
"When I first started working with Will, I was coming out of a major surgery, a few months prior and I was really worried that I wasn't going to be able to either get back to the ability that I had before or even be able to do a lot of the exercises and Will give me the confidence to be able to run a Spartan Race the month after we started working together. And a year later, I cut my ranking in half & finished in the top 80 people in my bracket. One of the things I really appreciate is, as a seasoned massage and bodywork professional, I really love Will's very thorough understanding of body mechanics as well as that custom programming that utilizes all of his skill sets."
Linda Bunce (Mortgage Broker)
"We focus on core, stability and exercises to build more strength and less pain in my knees and back. He always mixes up the workouts and he knows how to motivate me to maximize my workout experience. Thank you Will!”
"We focus on core, stability and exercises to build more strength and less pain in my knees and back. He always mixes up the workouts and he knows how to motivate me to maximize my workout experience. Thank you Will!”
Donna Johns (Insurance Broker)
“My exercise program was tailored to meet my needs and to accommodate my difficult schedule. I did not expect to see and feel the positive results of my workout as soon as I did. My trainer, Will Hansen is an excellent coach. He knows how to encourage you, when you feel like giving up, to get the most out of your workout.”