The Business of Fitness Podcast

For today's episode, you'll actually hear an episode of the Fitness Education Online podcast where Dan was interviewed to talk about all things customer experience in the fitness industry. In this episode he introduces Gobsmack Consulting, a practical framework for turning ordinary client touchpoints into experiences people actually talk about. Most fitness professionals are delivering a good service, but good service is just the cost of entry. Dan walks through how to map every client touchpoint, identify the pits and the forgettable middle, and redesign them into moments that create a genuine emotional response. The big takeaway: in an AI-driven world where everything is being scaled and commodified, the most powerful thing you can do is the opposite. Do the unscalable. Download the free 75-page customer experience framework for FEO listeners: https://gobsmack.com.au/feo/ If the content strikes a chord with you and you see customer experience as the future of your fitness business, drop Dan an email at dan@gobsmack.com.au. He'll send you details on upcoming events he's running to help you move your business into the experience economy.

Subscribe to my new podcast, The Gobsmack Podcast here. Summary: In this episode I explore why customer experience, not AI, is the real competitive advantage of the future, and how service businesses can escape commoditisation by entering the experience economy. 4 things you'll learn in this episode Why 'predicting the future' is no longer a viable business strategy in the age of AI, and what to focus on instead. How AI is collapsing the margins of service industries, and why doing things that don't scale becomes your real edge. The four economic stages every business sits in (commodity, product, service, experience), and why climbing this ladder is the biggest unlock for premium pricing. The data that justifies investing in customer experience, including how it can grow revenue 25% faster and explain up to 60% of organic growth. Transcription: The world of business is changing in ways that are equal parts mind-bending and terrifying. Needless to say, it's Artificial Intelligence that is acting as the absolute driving force of this transformational shifts in human civilisation. It's not only the change, but the rate of change. We're in the middle of the singularity. In technical terms, this is '…the point where artificial intelligence becomes capable of improving itself so rapidly that technological progress accelerates beyond normal human ability to predict, control, or understand.' (OpenAI, 2026). Again, '…beyond normal human ability to predict, control, or understand.' It's our inability to 'predict' that really interests me. And the interesting part of that word is the idea that until now, the world of business has been built on the idea that by predicting human needs, desires and behaviours, we can build and position our businesses for success. This is often referred to as 'skating to where the puck is going'. The concept is pretty self explanatory. It's an ice hockey term. The puck in ice hockey moves so fast, that by the time you get to it, it's gone. Instead, the best players have learnt to skate not to where the puck is, but to where they predict it will be. They 'skate to where the puck is going'. There's that word again, 'predict'. They skate to where they predict the puck will be. But remember, the pending AI singularity is characterised by changes that are '…beyond normal human ability to predict…'. We no longer know where the puck is going. And so we don't know in which distance we should skate. Business owners and entrepreneurs who have always built their success off the back of prediction are now playing ice hockey with a blindfold on. This is something I've thought a lot about over the last few years. And it's made me wonder if we might be asking the wrong question. The question shouldn't be 'where is the puck going?', but 'is there a puck that's staying still?'. If the puck isn't moving, we avoid the need to make predications all together. There's another convenient ice hockey term that allows us to continue this analogy, 'freezing the puck'. It's when the goalie covers the puck to stop play. The question becomes, 'in a world of unprecedented change, what will stay the same?' What is the frozen puck? The answer, as best as I can see, comes down to a single word. Experience. The human desire to live an experience. Something that they can actively participate in. Something that makes people feel a certain way. Something that gives people stories to tell. These experiences will be the currency of the future. Singing Beatles songs while toasting marshmallows around a campfire with the people you love. Getting clay under your fingernails while crafting a bowl on a pottery wheel with your best friend. Watching the sun set with your feet in the Indian Ocean, then racing your kids up a sand dune in time to watch it set again. People are always searching for the meaning of life. These things are better and more important, because they allow you to find meaning IN life. And so, I'm going all in. I'm betting the farm. I'm betting my business and my career… on experience. On customer experience. I'm transforming how I do things, and I'm launching Gobsmacking Consulting, to help service based businesses design remarkable customer experience. More on Gobsmack Consulting later. For the last year, I've given every spare second I have to the deep exploration and understanding of customer experience. What I've pieced together has been nothing short of enlightening for me. I've found that in an increasingly transactional, impersonal and sterile business landscape, customers are aching for connection and individualisation. They're aching for a story to tell. They want to feel something. And that's the purpose of customer experience, creating remarkable experiences that make people feel a certain way. The essayist, Maya Angelou, famously said, 'People will forget what you do but will never forget how you made them feel.' In his 2022 book, 'Unreasonable Hospitality', author and restauranteur, Will Guidara told us 'Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away'. This is all well and good, but there needs to be a business case for customer experience. Unfortunately, it's not enough to elicit a feeling in someone, in business, we also need to make money. You must be able to justify the financial value of spending resources on increasing experience. And the data gives us strong evidence to make this justification, supporting the idea that businesses with better customer experience have better bottom lines. This evidence runs deep: Businesses in the top quartile for customer advocacy grow revenue up to 25% faster than bottom-quartile competitors (Marsden et al., 2005). A seven-point increase in Net Promoter Score (a measure of customer experience) correlates with roughly a 1% increase in revenue (Marsden et al., 2005). In many industries, the customer experience leader grows more than twice as fast as its competitors (Bain & Company). Customer experience differences can explain roughly 20% to 60% of the variation in organic growth between competing businesses (Bain & Company). Emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as merely satisfied customers (Heath & Heath, 2017). Better customer experience increases lifetime value because customers tend to pay more, buy more often, and stay longer (Gingiss, 2021). Acquiring a new customer can cost five to 25 times more than retaining an existing one (Gallo, 2014). Let's return to that elephant in the room, artificial intelligence. There's no denying or ignoring the role that artificial intelligence will play in the future of business. No matter your industry, the impact of AI on your business will be nothing short of extreme. It's a revolution, and no business is immune. Let's look at how AI will change your business, and where customer experience will fit into this rapidly changing future. Technology blogger, Carl Cortright, writes, 'The core concept is simple. AI agents are beginning to commoditise what used to be high-margin service industries. We are moving toward a world where services that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars will cost tens to hundreds. The end result is inevitable. Services will become ubiquitous and embedded in everything we do, but the margins for the businesses providing them will collapse… The (AI) agents are coming. The margins are compressing. And knowledge work is about to become as cheap and accessible as flipping a switch.' AI is basically a technology that allows for near infinite systemisation and near infinite scalability. Everything that was expensive, difficult or time consuming is becoming cheap, easy, and instantaneous. And if you're not embracing that, you just won't keep up, we can't see your business surviving. Implementation of AI is simply a cost of entry to running a service based business, it's something you need to be doing to just be in the same conversation as your competition. So, in my pursuit of the 'frozen puck', here's where I see an opportunity. With a mass global embrace of AI, the playing field will be instantly levelled. While the early days of the technology saw the use of AI as a competitive advantage, as the technology becomes mainstream, businesses will need to find something new to make them stand out. Given a long enough timeframe, no one can predict the impact of AI, but for at least the medium term, there's a huge opportunity. We can't compete with AI as the ultimate tool to make things that scale. So we need to ask ourselves 'What is unscalable?'. From his article of the same title, essayist Paul Graham would advise us to 'do things that don't scale'. I couldn't agree more. Everyone is focussing on how AI will change the future of customer businesses. But businesses need to focus on the things that won't change. We need to ask ourselves, 'what will stay the same?'. Branding expert, Marty Neumeier, encourages people to 'zig when everyone else is zagging'. Everyone is focussed on AI-enabled systemisation and automation. And sure, you should be too. Yes, smart business owners will focus on AI tools, but they'd that while also 'zagging' to build a customer-experience-driven competitive advantage. Everyone is looking for automation. This is what AI promises. People are going to crave things that do not scale. This is what we need to provide through customer experience. The modern history of business has followed three distinct stages. First, commodification, where businesses that try to compete on price, and end up losing what could make them special and unique. Think about bulk-billing medical centres, walk-in $15 hair cuts or $9 per week 24 hour gym memberships. By 'commodifying a service', the service becomes highly scalable and very cheap, but strips away all sense of brand or emotional attachment. Only very slightly better than commodities, are products. With products, we start to see some branding creep in, but we're still lacking any human connection. For examples of service businesses that are productising their offering we can look to dieticians selling one-size-fits-all meal plans, psychologists selling self-help workbooks instead of therapy, and accountants selling 'tax pack lodgement kits'. Products are slightly less scalable and slightly more expensive, but they still don't make people feel anything, and they rarely give people stories to tell. More recently, we've been living in the service economy. This is where the vast majority of service-based businesses still operate. This era is defined by businesses doing work for customers instead of selling commodities or products. This work might be fixing your computer, painting your house or getting you the best mortgage. Usually, the service that people receive is perfectly adequate, it gets the job done. But it still doesn't make people feel, and it doesn't give them a story to tell. As Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin point out in 'Talk Triggers' (2018), 'people never say: 'let me tell you about a perfectly adequate experience I had recently'. The big problem with operating a business that sells a service is that the cost of services (and the services economy in general) is trending to zero. Competition among businesses now means every business in a certain industry provides pretty much the same service. Think about how you choose a service based business, you'll often choose the cheapest option. You choose the cheapest accountant to do your tax return because the outcome will be the same regardless of price. Need a tap replaced? You'll choose the cheapest plumber. Need a prescription from your doctor? You choose the cheapest. As long as you get your desired outcome (a completed tax return, a tap that doesn't drip and a script for antibiotics), cheaper is better. According to B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore in their book 'The Experience Economy' (1999), 'in a service economy, lack of differentiation in a customer's mind causes services to face the price pressure usually associated with commodities, meaning customers make buying decisions based purely on price.' One of the single greatest things a business can do is move out of this service category. So far we've moved from commodities to products to services. With each step, the thing being sold has become less scalable for the business and therefore more expensive for the customer. But there's one more step, the transition from services to experiences. Experiences are the least scalable and therefore you can charge more for experiences than services. Commodities are highly scalable and cheap. Experiences are unscalable and expensive. The service economy is dead. For a business to thrive, it must enter the experience economy. Don't get me wrong, services are still important. As are products and commodities. But on their own, they're not enough to give a business a strategic advantage. It's no coincidence that many of the global leaders of the experience economy have arrived at the same conclusion. In 'The Starbucks Experience' (2006), Joseph A. Michelli revealed that Starbucks considers that 'coffee is just a product that is our vehicle to start a conversation with the customer'. Former Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, was famous for saying 'Starbucks is not in the coffee business serving people, they are in the people business serving coffee'. The Disney Institute shares a similar sentiment. Their 2006 book co-written with Theodore Kinni, 'Be Our Guest', emphasises that 'goods and services are simply props to engage the customer'. The founder of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, was quoted in 'The Airbnb Way' (Joseph A. Michelli, 2019) as saying 'Airbnb is now offering experiences, not accomodation'. And 2015's 'Driven to Delight: Delivering World-Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way', documented Mercedes Benz's desire to shift from a '…product dominant model to a customer obsessed model'. Starbucks sees coffee simply as a 'vehicle' to deliver an experience. Disney says that services are simply 'props'. Airbnb sells experiences, not accomodation. Mercedes Benz prioritises the customer over the car. So yes, commodities and products and services have a place. And that place is to act as the foundation for what truly matters. Experience. As the price of commodities, products and services drops towards zero, you have an opportunity (and an obligation to your business) to escape the service economy. Engagement, feelings and the stories we tell will become what can't be 'cheapened'. As people ache for emotional connections, these things will attract a premium. While everyone else is automating and systemising, there's an opportunity for you to use 'experience' as a differentiator, as the asset you're selling. People will pay more for it, they'll keep coming back, and they'll share the stories with their friends. So that's my thesis. And that's why I'm launching Gobsmacking Consulting, an agency that does one thing and one thing only. We help service-based businesses design remarkable customer experience. Much of the last year of my life has been about building our proprietary framework for customer experience design. We will lead the businesses that work with us through this framework. Our model of experience design centres on 'experience mapping'. This process will define two distinct journeys that a customer will go through. First, the service experiences will be mapped. The service experience is every single touch point that a customer experiences during the course of a single service a business is providing. And then, we'll help businesses design and map the lifetime experience, every single touch point that a customer experiences across the life of the company. Across both journeys, we'll help identify pits and plateaus of experience and turn them into peaks; we'll build experience triggers to surprise and delight; and we'll create an environment for intentional magic that will leave people gobsmacked. We'll help create and implement unignorably remarkable experiences for a business's customers. Experiences that make them feel something and form emotional connections with a brand. Experiences that give them stories they won't shut up about. We'll be implementing the Gobsmack Design Framework through keynotes, workshops, consulting, and courses. I'm so excited for the future, and for the small part Gobsmacking Consulting can play in helping design it. Your action steps: Identify your frozen puck: Find the things in your industry that won't change, and build your differentiation around those constants rather than chasing predictions. Map every customer touchpoint: Document each moment a customer interacts with your business during a single service, then again across their entire lifetime with you. Turn pits and plateaus into peaks: Find the average and underwhelming moments in your customer journey, and intentionally redesign them to surprise and delight. Use AI to free up time for experience design: Adopt AI to systemise the scalable parts of your business, then redirect the time you save into the unscalable, human moments customers cannot get anywhere else. Create stories worth telling: Build at least one signature moment into your customer journey that customers will feel compelled to tell their friends about. If you enjoyed this, you'll also enjoy the following, they're some of my most popular articles and podcasts on topics similar to this one: Delivering an Experience: The Strategy of 'Being Different'. or listen to the podcast episode here. Your missing marketing strategy. The power of storytelling. or listen to the podcast episode here. 9 unique ways to make your business stand out (to get more clients) or listen to the podcast episode here.

Today we bring you an episode of the Kinetic Careers podcast with Jeremiah PEIFFER. Dan Williams was lucky enough to be invited by Jeremiah for the very first episode of his podcast, which helps sport and exercise science students and graduates to develop their career. Jeremiah and Dan had a wide ranging conversation where they covered: Dan's pathway through exercise and sports science How the EP profession and ESSA have evolved The way Dan has designed his businesses around being a present dad and building a lifestyle not just an income The role of failure, networking and lifelong learning in career growth Practical advice for students and new grads on positioning themselves, building business acumen and creating remarkable client experiences in an AI-shaped future.

Summary: In this episode Dan explores why business owners should stop measuring success only by money and start valuing time as their true currency, helping you design a more profitable and balanced business life. 4 things you'll learn in this episode: Why revenue and profit can be misleading measures of business success How tracking hours worked reveals your true hourly rate and workload What it means to switch from 'dollars as currency' to 'minutes as currency' Practical ways to redesign your business to earn time, not just money Need a website? I can help. Transcription: I think just about every single one of us is measuring the wrong thing in business. I'd like to share something I'm struggling with a bit at the moment. My very first business was selling shells I'd picked up off the beach. My business premises was the top bunk of my bed. My customers were Mum and Dad. I was six. From this moment, the measure of success of my little business was how much money it earned. And from that moment forward, every business I had was measured by the same metric. Money. And it makes sense. We live in a capitalist world. And I'm fine with that. I believe that people should get paid for solving other people's problems. But living in that world makes it really hard to gauge the success of your business by anything other than the size of your bank account. That mindset has been drilled into us since before we could walk. Money is our measure of business success, and for some of us, it's also a measure of life success. Society tells us that dollars are the currency that matter – they're the scoreboard that tells us if we're winning the game. And we know it shouldn't be like this, but it is. So back to the thing I'm struggling with. I'm struggling to break way from a lifetime of 'money as the measure of success'. Within the last couple of years, I've made some major structural changes to the businesses I run. Let me take you back to what business looked like before these changes. I was working around 45 hours a week on multiple businesses, I had a team of 12 staff, brick and mortar premises, and my wife and I owned a home and three investment properties. Revenue was high – I was earning more than I ever thought I would. But the nature of running businesses in that way meant expenditure was high too – but not so high that there wasn't a very tidy profit margin. And it's that profit that was my scoreboard. If I profited more in February than I did in January, I was becoming more successful. Sure, it was pretty stressful, and I was always worrying about something, but that's just a cost of doing business right? But then, I made some very deliberate and intentional changes to how I worked. Fast forward to today. Zero staff, no premises, no investment properties, lower revenue. By most traditional measures, you'd say I'm now less successful than I was. However, expenditures dropped by about 75% and profit (which is the only financial metric that only really matters to me) dropped by only about 10%. And importantly, most importantly by far is something the accountant can't see. I'm achieving this off the back of an average of 22 hours per week of work – that's all types of work – billable work, admin, business development… everything. You'll remember I was working 45 hours a week. And it's now about 22. That means I'm doing HALF the amount of work I was. 50% of the work for 90% of the profit. That's a massive increase in profit per hours worked, and probably a 90% drop in stress too. But you know what, there's a tiny little niggling part of my brain that's still telling me I'm less successful than I used to be. Because of that small drop in profit. Part of me is still a slave to the notion that dollars are the true and only measure of success. I'm working really hard on this, and I think I'm slowly winning. I'm slowly honestly believing that the currency that measures the success of my business is not money, but time. Time is the currency. Time is the resource I'm earning. I'm flipping my thinking. I no longer engineer my work to optimise for financial earnings, but to optimise for temporal earnings – earnings of time. I base business decisions on the time they'll earn me, not the money. The changes I've made are paying me 23 hours a week. That is the value of the business I've built. That's the salary my business pays me. Not money, but time. A traditional approach would see people put that 23 hours back into their business. For my highest financial value tasks, I charge my consulting out at a rate of $300 an hour. That's just under an extra $7000 a week if I was to trade my free time in for money. But you know what, I'd rather have the extra 1,380 minutes per week than the extra $6,900. Bear in mind that I started my business 19 years ago – and I'm not denying the need for hard work and long hours. But I am denying that that mindset needs to continue just out of habit. Just look at the number of depressed, divorced billionaires. I believe there is a better way. How could your life be changed by switching from 'dollars-as-currency' and adopting more of a 'minutes-as-currency' mindset? It's a change that's worked for me, and something I explore in great depth with the business owners I mentor. If you want to start making this change, I recommend you start by introducing some new KPIs to the metrics you track. Start tracking your hours of work across all work types, and then calculating your TRUE hourly rate. How about also implementing a self-administered 'quality of life' scale each month – just as a regular reminder of what's most important. What get's measured get managed, and you can't manage your time without first measuring it. Episode 61 of the podcast is called 'I tracked every minute of work time for a year. Here's what I learned.'. Listen here, or read the article here. I'd recommend you check that one out if you're interested in how I track my time. And all the way back in episode three, I spoke about 'Your REAL Hourly Rate: The True Cost of Running a Fitness Business' (podcast | article) Those two episodes are a great place to start if you want to switch to a minutes-as-currency mindset. If you're interested in the philosophy of money, time, work, and life in general, I've got one more resource for you. This is an article I wrote and released as a podcast, where I break down my general philosophy of how to live a full and good life. In it I attempt to answer questions around: The role of pain and suffering in life. How do I remove them? Should I remove them? How can I balance ambition with contentment? Striving with settling? Journey and destination? How can I balance work, productivity, time and money, to give me a 'good life'. When I strip back the work I do, who am I? Do I use busyness and work as a distraction from the question of what I actually want to do with my life? What are the elements of a 'good life', and how do I get more of them? That episode was published in May of 2025, I hope you check it out (article | podcast). And I hope you can consider a switch to a 'minutes-as-currency' mindset. My life has never been better than since I made that change. Your action steps: Start recording every hour you spend on all business tasks to calculate your true hourly rate. Add new KPIs that track time, such as weekly hours worked and a monthly quality-of-life score. Analyse which tasks or structures reduce your hours without harming profit and adjust your business model accordingly. Resist reinvesting every freed hour into more work; protect and use reclaimed time for life and health. Revisit your definition of success regularly to ensure it aligns with both profit and lifestyle goals.

In this 'quick thought' Dan asks us to rethink identity, not as what we do for money, but as how we actually live and spend our time.

Dan explains a simple client reactivation system for fitness businesses, show how to track resurrection rate, and share easy steps to win back ex-members. 5 things you'll learn: How to build a list of ex-clients and calculate a monthly resurrection rate for your fitness business. How to improve offboarding with quick exit interviews that record clear reasons for leaving. How to trigger win-back messages the moment a client's original blocker is removed. How to use Fresh Start timing and milestone contacts to lift replies and bookings. How to reach past clients with Meta Custom Audience ads and a direct booking link. Transcription: If you're looking for a new way to grow your business, generate a list of all your previous clients and members. I've never seen anyone do this and not be shocked by how long that list is. There's a huge number of people who, at some point, used your service, but are no longer paying customers. People who once needed you, but who, for some reason, got to the point where they didn't need you any more. And this list provides an opportunity for reactivation – converting ex-clients back into current clients. And that's what I want to discuss, a strategy guide to client reactivation. Generally, we spend most of our time on two things, client retention, and lead generation. We build systems and pipelines for lead generation, and we design client journeys to provide valuable experiences to keep people around. But once they leave our business, too many businesses cut them lose, going back to focus on retention and new leads. And sure, these things are important (particularly retention), but reactivation often seems to be forgotten. I want to fix that. But first, there are five things you need to do before even beginning to think about client reactivation. I've spoken a lot about these before (and I'll give you some recommended content if you want to dig deeper), but I'm not going to go into detail, but let me summarise what you need to do BEFORE you start the process of reactivating past clients. 1: Provide a remarkable experience so people don't leave in the first place. Check out my article 'Delivering an Experience: The Strategy of 'Being Different' or listen to episode 69 of the podcast. 2: Build a system to alert you of your three clients who are at highest risk of departure each week and add value to them that week. Read my article 'Increase retention to 98% using this 10 minute strategy' or listen to episode 26 of the podcast. 3: Conduct an exit interview with all departing clients, and identify the reason they're leaving. Keep a table of all the reasons for departure in seperate columns, with the list of all the people who left for that reason under the heading. 4: Identify how long into their client journey each customer is when they leave. Identify the most common time to leave (for example, it might be between four and 6 months, and increase the experience people are receiving for the eight weeks leading up to that point. This will plug your biggest leak. Read: 'The Only Thing Fitness Business Owners Need to Do For Retention'. 5: Make sure memberships on hold (dormant customers) receive weekly contacts of some kind. Ok, so assuming you're doing those five things, we can move onto some ideas to help you reactivate your past clients. If you're not doing those five things, the strategies we're about to discuss won't work as well. It's really common for business owners to bump into ex customers who say to them 'oh, I've been meaning to get back in touch with you guys'. It's definitely something I've experienced. This tells me people are open to working with you again, they just need a bit of a nudge to take that first step. Firstly, what gets measured gets managed. So start measuring what's called your 'resurrection rate'. This is the percentage of past clients who you come back to you each month. We calculate this by dividing the number of returning clients in a month by the number of past clients at the start of the month. For example, if you start March with a list of 200 ex members, and during the month of March three of them restart, that's 3 / 200, or 1.5%. So your resurrection rate is 1.5%. This number will allow you to gauge the success of the reactivation strategies. Ok, so once you've started measuring your resurrection rate, we can start the process of increasing it. Client departure: And we begin with the client departure. How can you make this a great experience? People expect a great experience to START their journey with you, but it'll really blow their mind if the END of their journey is equally remarkable. How you do this is up to you, but the litmus test is whether your departing client tells a friend about how good the departure experience was. That's the definition of 'remarkable' – able to be remarked about. As part of this departure, you need to have some sort of exit interview or survey which will tell you why they left. Removing reasons for departure: And this brings us to the next strategy. Contact your ex clients when their reason for departure has been removed. Remember I spoke about keeping a table of all client departures, with each client listed under their reason for departure? This where you can use that. For example, if you launch online programming, contact all ex clients who left because they were moving away from your gym. If you're introducing a new, cheaper option, contact all clients who left for financial reasons. If you've built a new system to help clients exercise around an injury, let all your clients know who left due to injury. Service updates: Similar to this, you can contact past clients with any announcements about new products or services you're offering, introducing new staff, announcing changes to the facility, or anything else that indicates a change in how you're doing business or the experience people can expect from you. If you're about to launch a service that is limited to a certain number of people, use this scarcity as a tactic to encourage re engagement – maybe you can offer this limited service to ex clients first, giving them 24 hours to register their interest before you open up the opportunity to everyone else. The fresh start theory: With a bit of knowledge of marketing psychology, we can take advantage of what's called the 'fresh start theory'. This well research phenomenon tells us that people like to start something new or undergo a big behaviour change on a Monday, the first day of the month or the first day of the year etc. So, make sure you're timing your communications with them to be just prior to a new week, month or year. For example, you might contact your database of ex clients at the start of the new year saying something like, 'We know a lot of people are wanted to take back control of their health this year – just wanted to let you know we're here to help and ready when you are.' Milestone contacts: You should also be contacting people during milestone moments in their life. Again, we're not trying to make a hard sell here – or even a soft sell for that matter. You'll remember I was talking about the number of people who express interest in returning to your business after bumping into you in person. Contacting people during milestone moments in their life just provides a 'virtual bump'. They should receive a handwritten birthday card in the mail for every birthday. You should make a particular effort when people are approaching a major milestone birthday. People who've just turned 29, 39, 49, 59, 69 etc. are more likely to be wanting to get back into exercise. The most common age for people to run their first marathon is 40, with peaks of participation at the start of every new decade of life. Take advantage of this to help them along their milestone journey. You can also contact them on their anniversary of starting with you. Maybe they initially started in the lead up to summer, or when the weather meant they couldn't get outside to run. Whatever their reason for contacting you at a certain time of year – that reason may reemerge on their anniversary of starting every year. Content Marketing: Staying front of mind is key, and this is where content marketing becomes important. The purpose of content marketing as a general marketing strategy is to position you as an expert to your target client. This becomes doubly important as a reactivation strategy, as a way to remind your previous clients that you're still there, and available to help solve their problems. As part of your regular content marketing, you should be email everyone in your email network fortnightly with your latest articles, videos, podcast episodes, carousels, infographics, or whatever other medium you choose to use. Past clients should definitely remain a part of this email network. Make sure that a percentage of your content is about topics that are specifically relevant to people who you're hoping to attract back to your business. Maybe tips about how to restart exercise after a break, how to rebuild a broken exercise habit, or the psychology of loss aversion and the ease with which a person can maintain a baseline level of strength and fitness. Paid Advertising: While paid advertising is commonly used for new cold-lead generation, it's not often used for internal marketing (for example upselling your current clients), or to attract old clients back in. For example, within Meta, you can create a 'Custom Audience from a Customer List'. This is where you can have an advert running that is visible only to past clients. You don't need to re-sell them on your service, or educate them about what you do, because they already know that. Instead, you should have a very strong call to action to make it as clear and simple as possible for them to restart. Because this custom audience list size will be very small, you can achieve a lot of success here from a tiny budget (the minimum Meta will allow). General Engagement: Regularly engaging with your ex clients on social media by commenting on their posts is another great way to stay front-of-mind. Again, this should be 0% sales, and 100% general interest and encouragement. Final thoughts: Ok, some final thoughts that run through all these ideas. Make as many of your communications as possible, as one-on-one and individualised as possible. A personal email is much more likely to be read than an email to a mailing list. And finally, the general feeling of all communications is 'we're ready when you are'. You just want to make sure you're remaining front of mind, so when they're ready to restart, you're the first business they think of. A strong reactivation strategy deserves a place right next to retention and lead generation on the podium of business growth strategies. If you're not prioritising reactivation, it's time to start. Your action steps: Export every past client into one spreadsheet, add a 'reason for leaving' tag, and start tracking your monthly resurrection rate. Set calendar reminders to contact people when their blocker is solved, for example new pricing, online options, or injury support. Schedule Fresh Start messages before Mondays, new months, and the new year, and send birthday and join-anniversary notes. Keep ex-clients on your fortnightly email with 'restart' tips, simple plans, and a one-click booking link. Upload the past-client email list to Meta Custom Audiences and run a small-budget ad that sends straight to booking. If you enjoyed this, you'll also enjoy the following, they're some of my most popular articles and podcasts on topics similar to this one: 'The one page fitness marketing checklist. Just do these things' or listen to episode 79 of the podcast. 'Delivering an Experience: The Strategy of 'Being Different' or listen to episode 69 of the podcast. 'Increase retention to 98% using this 10 minute strategy' or listen to episode 26 of the podcast. 'The Only Thing Fitness Business Owners Need to Do For Retention'.

Dan spoke with three leading fitness business owners to discuss their top five books for fitness business owners. Jake Morgan, Ben Major and Scott Hook give us their most impactful and business-changing book recommendations. The boys also discuss their reading habits, and why reading (or listening) to books has been instrumental in every level of their success. Add these to your wishlist! Jake Morgan, Habitual Strength and Conditioning. 1. Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara 2. The Power of Moments by Chip Heath & Dan Heath 3. 10x is Easier than 2x by Dan Sullivan & Dr. Benjamin Hardy 4. Atomic Habits by James Clear 5. Happier by Tal Ben Shahar Ben Major, PrimeFit: 1. Man Up by Bedros Keuilian 2. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle 3. Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne 4. The Power of Moments by Chip Heath & Dan Heath 5. Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan Scott Hook: VSC 1. Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape 2. Get Different by Mike Michalowicz 3. Cult Status by Tim Duggan 4. Built to Serve by Evan Carmichael 5. Beyond Entreneurship by Jim Collins Dan Williams 1. 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman 2. Company of One by Paul Jarvis 3. Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara 4. Deep Work by Cal Newport 5. Influence by Robert Cialdini

This is part two of a conversation between Tim Karajas and Dan on the Extension Fitness podcast. Tim and Dan we explore how to improve retention by helping our clients and members build long-term exercise habits within your business. They talk about practical strategies and mindset shifts you can use to turn your customers into life-time exercisers. We work so hard to increase retention rates in our business, but if you're not building habits in your clients, you're fighting a losing battle against human psychology. Today, Dan explores how to win that fight. 5 things you'll learn in this episode Why making exercise laughably easy at the start is essential for building lasting habits. How identity-based motivation increases adherence to exercise and turns actions into lifelong behaviours. Why loss aversion is a powerful psychological driver—and how to use it to help clients stay consistent. How to apply the minimum effective dose to avoid burnout and ensure sustainability over decades. What mindset traits, like growth mindset and life-structure alignment, are common in people who succeed with long-term exercise. Your action steps: Help clients design a starting exercise habit that feels so easy it's impossible to fail. Ask clients to picture their worst possible week and build habits they can still stick to even then. Reinforce identity-based language by helping clients move from "I exercise" to "I am an exerciser." Use loss aversion by tracking progress and helping clients see what they risk losing by stopping. Check for alignment between a client's stated values and their calendar—then help them close the gap.