Weird Ways Gym Owners Are Getting New Customers in 2026
15% of one gym owner's customers came from BNI. I went to one BNI meeting years ago and hated it. Thought it was boring, weird, and had no interest in ever going back. So naturally, I just had Mike join one. I'll explain why.
Facebook ads are getting more expensive, the quality of leads is getting worse, and a lot of gym owners are sitting around wondering what happened. The funny thing is, some of the most successful guys I work with are getting new customers from places most gym owners wouldn't even think to look. Radio stations. Local newspapers. Networking groups. Stuff that sounds like it belongs in 1995.
In this one I walk Tom through what I'm actually seeing work. Not ideas I came up with sitting at my desk. Actual gym owners doing these things right now. One guy put together a giveaway with local businesses that ended up generating well over six figures in new business over the lifetime of the leads. Another made a local online newspaper his number one source of new customers. And I've got a couple in Massachusetts who went from $8,000 a month to over $80,000 a month and are now doing something pretty interesting with radio.
I also get into how we built our entire sports performance program by changing the way we approached sponsorships. Why I think a lot of gym owners are making a mistake with their Facebook lead forms. And what finally got me excited about our own gym's social media, which, if I'm being fair, was pretty bad for a long time.
5 Key Takeaways
- 15% of Tony's customers came from BNI, and I still don't like BNI. Tony is one of those guys who can walk into a room and talk to anybody. I'm not that guy. I went to one of these meetings and wanted nothing to do with it. But Tony told me that 15% of his current customers came from that networking group. That's a pretty significant number. So we had Mike join a local chapter. He might be pissed at me for it, but if it works, I don't really care. The bigger point is that sometimes the thing you personally hate doing is exactly what somebody else in your business should be doing.
- Bobby and Maria went from $8,000 a month to over $80,000 a month, and now they're doing radio. They own Big Day Fitness in Massachusetts and have done a phenomenal job growing their business. They've got two locations now, and they're testing something most gym owners wouldn't even consider. Instead of just buying commercials, they're going on local radio stations and getting interviewed as fitness experts. They're filming the interviews, cutting them into videos, and putting them on YouTube. The interesting part is that they're seeing more customers come in across all their marketing, not necessarily directly from the radio. And that's something I've been trying to get gym owners to understand for years. People usually need to see you in a bunch of different places before they finally make a decision.
- Devin Gage generated well over six figures in new business from a giveaway that didn't cost anybody anything to enter. He went around to local businesses and bought gift cards, roughly $50 or $100 each, and put them together into a massive community giveaway. Then he got the participating businesses to promote it to their customers. So instead of just advertising to his own audience, he had all these other businesses helping him reach people. The money came from following up with the people who entered, measured over their lifetime as customers. Devin actually came on one of our mastermind calls and spent about two hours walking us through how he did it. What I like about this is that he didn't invent some revolutionary new marketing strategy. He took a few old ideas and combined them into something that worked.
- Dustin made a local online newspaper the number one source of customers for his gym. He's in Kansas, and he's been writing a weekly fitness column in the Johnson County Post for years. He educates people, gives them something interesting to read, and includes an offer to come try his gym. That's it. He's been incredibly successful with it. And here's the mistake I think a lot of gym owners make. They'll say nobody reads newspapers anymore because they don't read newspapers. Tom brought up the same thing about radio. But you're not trying to market to yourself. I'm 47 years old now, which puts me right in the middle of our target market. I actually read the local newspaper. When I asked our own members whether they read a publication called Renna Media, they told me they read it cover to cover. So we started advertising in it.
- We built our entire sports performance program by changing what we asked for in sponsorship deals. Little League teams and local organizations would come to us asking for $250 to put our logo on a banner or the back of a shirt. I never thought that was a particularly good way to get customers. So instead of giving them exactly what they asked for, I'd offer them more money in exchange for three emails sent to their list with an offer from our gym. I'd even write the emails for them. All they had to do was copy and paste. At one point we had around eight of these annual sponsorships going at the same time, with promotional emails going out every quarter. That was how we built our GRIT sports performance program. The organization got the money it needed, and we got something a lot more valuable than our logo on an outfield fence.
Click Here to get free books and resources to grow your gym:
https://www.vincegabriele.com/
https://www.vincegabriele.com/
Creators and Guests
