Fitness Business University Podcast

Vince Gabriele
  • 4.9 (168)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Weekly

The Fitness Business University Podcast — The #1 Fitness Business Podcast — is the go-to educational show for gym owners, by gym owners. Hosted by Vince Gabriele, a seasoned pro with 18 years in the trenches of the fitness industry, this podcast pulls back the curtain on the real strategies, systems, and money-making wisdom that have helped gyms around the world grow and thrive. If you’re a Gym Owner or Fitness Entrepreneur ready to get more clients, make more money, and free up your time to do what you love, this is your playbook. Vince delivers a funny, straight-talking, no B.S. approach — no fluff, no theories, just the proven, real-world skills you need to win in business and in life.

  1. 1d ago

    I triple checked with my wife that I can share this story with you… she said yes (surprisingly)

    If you need help and you'd like to reach out to Vince personally, send an email to him directly at vince@gabrielefitness.com I'm four hours into a ruck in the Watchung Reservation training for the Grand Canyon, and I'm not talking about business today. I'm talking about your marriage. Or your significant other. Which I'd argue is the most important business relationship you have. I told the story I've never told publicly. Vanessa and I separated six months after we got married. She moved back to California. I mailed the divorce papers. They went to the wrong address and she never received them. We were apart for eight months and I was done. Both of us found God in our own way during that stretch, and that's what brought us back. We just celebrated 19 years and we're happier than we've ever been. I said a bunch of things in these woods I probably shouldn't have. I told you how I compared my wife to my mother for years and how awful that sounds out loud. I told you I'm a judgmental prick and that it took my mom passing for me to see that every quality I loved most in her lives in my wife. Recorded this fully expecting to delete it. 5 Key Takeaways: Everyone has two lists. There's a list of qualities about a person that aren't great, and a list of qualities that are incredible. Everyone has both, including you. One of the secrets to a good marriage is deciding which list you focus on. I spent years on the wrong one.Marriages cycle through harmony, disharmony, and repair. Justin Rabinowitz gave me that. We sat in disharmony for a long stretch early on. Knowing the cycle exists changes how you handle it, because you stop believing the bad season is the permanent state.Men need freedom. Women need safety. Tony Robbins made this point at Date With Destiny and it landed for both of us because we were in the room together. When Vanessa tells me to go, that gives me freedom, and it makes me want to do everything I can to make her feel safe. Learning it together is what made it stick. If I'd come home and told her about it, it would have meant nothing.Happy couples expect nothing but owe everything. That's Andy Stanley. It can't be tit for tat. It can't be "if you give me freedom, I'll give you safety." It has to be I give you safety, I give you safety, I give you safety.Your kids are watching what you do, not listening to what you say. The number one thing you can do as a father is show your kids how much you love your wife. I do sweaty kisses after every workout. They groan. But they've never once had to be told that exercise matters.The gym owners who come to me with problems at home almost always have problems in the business too. So investing in that relationship is investing in your company, though that's not the reason to do it. If you need help and you'd like to reach out to Vince personally, send an email to him directly at vince@gabrielefitness.com

    I triple checked with my wife that I can share this story with you… she said yes (surprisingly)

  2. Sep 7

    How To Make More Money at Your Gym (Vince's Perform Better Key Note)

    Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy This is my full talk from the Perform Better Summit. Six profit levers you can pull to make more money in your gym starting Monday. Here's the number that bothers me. The average gym does $300,000 in gross revenue at about a 20% margin. That's $60,000 to the owner. For what you people do, that's not good enough. My goal for everyone I work with is $200,000 a year in personal income, and I don't think that's unreasonable. I opened by telling the room how I got here. I was a 300 pound washed up offensive lineman who moved to San Diego, worked for Todd Durkin, and ground out 60 sessions a week making what an entry level teacher makes. Then I opened my own gym and went broke. I had to sit down with my dad and tell him I didn't think I could do this. He told me I'd proven I was a great trainer and hadn't proven anything about running a business. So I went and learned the business. 5 Key Takeaways: Price is the fastest lever and it's not close. Your value judgment does not matter. Only your customer's does. My wife bought a $474 birthday cake for our one year old and it made no sense to me, but she was the buyer. I raised prices $49 across the board on clients who have been with me for 19 years. A guy stuck at $13K was 12 months away from $20K based on his churn and acquisition. We raised prices $40 on every member and he got there in two months. One letter, one decision.Only 15% of your future buyers purchase in the first 100 days. The other 85% buy over the next 100 weeks. So the question isn't just what your 21 day follow up looks like. It's what you're doing for the next 100 weeks. Three emails a week, always with a call to action, always relevant, and no AI slop. Find your own voice and build a relationship.Referrals are free customers worth $7,234 each. That's my actual lifetime value: 19.5 months at $371 a month. So when someone sends me a client, what did that cost me? Nothing. The mindset shift changes how you treat the person who sent them. And make it easy to refer. HelloFresh sent my wife a text she could forward to a friend for a free box. Don't ask people to bring a friend. Hand them a free 30 day membership to give away so they show up as the hero.An ounce of personalization is worth a pound of automation. I wrote out the exact letter my jiu jitsu instructor would need to send to get me to come back after quitting twice. It takes responsibility for putting me in the wrong class, offers a new path, and connects it to my son training there. Compare that to "we miss you at the gym." Send 10 personal reach outs a month to past members. That's 120 attempts a year at almost zero cost.Fill the seats you already have. Four people per session at $50 is a $416,000 business. Add one more person per session and it's $520,000. That's $104,000 more with zero increase in cost. Pure profit. I took my kids to Medieval Times and Madison Square Garden and there wasn't an empty seat in either place. They're masters of capacity. Why aren't we? Also: an empty spot costs you more than someone using it for free, because free means opportunity.Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

    How To Make More Money at Your Gym (Vince's Perform Better Key Note)

  3. Sep 4

    Why You Need A Business Coach

    Last week to grab your seat. 85% of your future customers are already on your list, and I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy I fly to St. Louis to see my cardiologist. I live 20 miles from five of the best hospitals in the world and I get on a plane to Missouri. Tom asked me why, and the answer turned into this whole episode. Back in 2017 I got a CAC score that put me in the 95th percentile of calcified plaque for my age. A local cardiologist told me to go on a statin. I was a young fitness guy so I told him he was crazy. He threatened to put a stent in me right there. So I went and found a second doctor. Then I kept looking until somebody told me what I wanted to hear. I spent years uncertain. Working out and feeling something in my chest and wondering. Then I read a line in The Magic of Thinking Big that changed it: when you're struggling with a decision, go find the best expert you can find and make their opinion final. Stop searching. So I called Charlie Weingroff, asked who my guy was, and got on a plane. Nothing much changed in the treatment. What changed was my mind. The uncertainty went away. That's exactly what a business coach does. Tom and I break down the four reasons to have one, how to tell if the person selling you coaching is full of it, and the mistakes I've made hiring the wrong ones. 5 Key Takeaways: Certainty is what you're actually buying. The number one thing gym owners struggle with is feeling stressed and uncertain. Am I on the right track? Should I open another location? A coach doesn't have to know everything. Sometimes an outside voice is enough to stop you from stewing on a problem for six months. And when the owner is stressed, the whole team feels it.Speed is the second thing. There are guys I've coached who probably would have gotten there without me. G-Man says it all the time: he stood on the shoulders of giants. He's 30 with young kids living a life most 40 year olds are still trying to build. He might have figured it out on his own. It just would have taken another five or ten years.Blind spots are called blind spots for a reason. Keith Cunningham says the best question you can ask yourself is "what don't I see?" Most people won't open that can. When I do consulting days, the thing I spot is often so obvious it's laughable, and they look at me like a genius. It has nothing to do with me. It's that I'm not emotionally invested in the day to day of their business.Find the people who will give you a real reality check. I visited a gym owner recently who was struggling in stage one and overweight, and the reality check he needed had nothing to do with his business. Nobody on his staff will ever tell him that. I've got a coach right now who's been very complimentary and I don't like it. I need to know where I'm screwing up.Four ways to vet a coach. Get a referral from someone you trust who knows that world. Consume their free content until trust is built before you pay a dime. Make sure they've actually done what you want to do. And look for proof beyond themselves, specifically longevity in their clients, not "444 leads in 30 days." I look for people who've been in a group for a decade, because that means there's real depth of knowledge, not just one play.Last week to grab your seat. 85% of your future customers are already on your list, and I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

    Why You Need A Business Coach

  4. Aug 28

    The MOST IMPORTANT Things You Should Be Focusing On to Grow Your Gym

    85% of your future customers are already on your list. I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy I visited three gyms in one day and every single one was at a different stage of business. One was doing $10K a month. One was doing $25K. One was building an organization. And every one of them was asking me about the wrong thing. The guy at $10K wanted to talk about where to move his equipment. He has 20 members. He should be making phone calls, not rearranging dumbbells. I see this constantly right now with AI. Gyms with 20 members spending half their day building tools in Claude instead of going out and getting customers. It's the same thing I'm seeing coaching fifth grade football right now. We've got 25 plays installed and these kids can't get into a stance. We should have four plays and spend 95% of our time on the basics. Business is no different. Tom and I break down the four stages of a gym business and exactly what you should be focused on at each one. Nothing else. Just the fundamentals that actually move you to the next level. 5 Key Takeaways: Stage one has three jobs and that's it. Deliver an experience so good your churn rate is impeccable. Get to a critical mass of customers. And get yourself in shape, because your energy is what attracts people. Everything else is a distraction. If you can't afford to hire anyone, you're stuck doing every session yourself forever, and that's how gym owners burn out and quit.Stage two is a people business. Find good people, train them, and build a culture around defined core values. Every bad trainer we ever hired came from a rushed hire where we needed somebody so we just got somebody. And don't try to hire another you. Look for someone who shares your character qualities, not your personality.Get to 80% and make the call. Arthur Brooks took this from the Marines. The gap between 80% and 100% certainty won't change your decision, but the time you spend chasing it will cost you months. Same applies to training your staff. Shoot for them being 80% as good as you, not 100%.In stage three, you have to give up owning every seat. Mark O'Donnell put our org chart on the board and asked who owns each seat. The answer was Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince. That was the problem with the business. You can be responsible for results without doing the work, but you can't be the answer to every question and grow past $50K a month.Stage four is defined by your involvement, not your locations. Gabriele Fitness has one location and is a stage four business because I have almost zero involvement. Most clients don't even know I'm the owner. The requirement is one competent point person running the facility who owns the results and the PNL. No general manager, no stage four.85% of your future customers are already on your list. I'm teaching how I turn one hour of writing into $865. https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailbuy

    The MOST IMPORTANT Things You Should Be Focusing On to Grow Your Gym

  5. Aug 9

    Turn Dead Leads Into Buyers

    How to make $865.38 per hour writing emails. Full workshop September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026 Here's a study that will change how you think about your leads. When someone opts in with a company, roughly 50% of them will eventually buy. But only 15% of those buyers purchase in the first 100 days. The other 85% buy over the next 100 weeks. Read that again. Most gym owners have a system for the 15% and nothing for the 85%. They hammer a lead for 21 days, get no response, and write them off as dead. Those aren't dead leads. They just haven't bought yet. In this episode, Tom and I break down what to actually do with that 85%. The short version: get in their inbox consistently and build the relationship until they're ready. Three emails a week, 200 words each, call to action in the PS. Bobby and Maria from Big Day Fitness did exactly this after taking my email workshop and got 12 to 13 new customers last year from emails alone. At $5,000 lifetime value each, that's $60,000 for writing a few hundred words a week. I'm teaching the full system on September 11th. This is my fourth email workshop and I believe it's the most important one I've ever done. I'm bringing in Doberman Dan, a legend in direct response who actually lived with Gary Halbert in Costa Rica and now coaches me personally. Ben Stocks is teaching Facebook ad copy. And I'm covering print marketing, because one newspaper ad at my gym has produced over $60,000 in lifetime client value this year. I chose September 11th on purpose. My dad, sister, and brother in law all worked in the World Trade Center. That day hit close to home. Stephen Siller was a 34 year old FDNY firefighter who had just gotten off the late shift when he heard about the first plane. He turned around, grabbed his gear, found the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel closed, strapped his equipment to his back, and ran three miles through it on foot to the towers. He never came home. He left behind his wife Sally and five children. The Tunnel to Towers Foundation his family created provides mortgage free homes to families of fallen first responders, Gold Star families, and catastrophically injured veterans. 25% of the proceeds from this workshop go to them. 5 Key Takeaways: Your dead leads aren't dead. They're just early. 85% of the people who will eventually buy from you do it over the following 100 weeks, not the first 100 days. If your only system is a 21 day follow up sequence, you're throwing away the majority of your future customers.Three emails a week is the sweet spot for a gym. 200 words. Curiosity plus useful in the subject line. Call to action in the PS. That's the whole formula. Commit to it for 90 days before you decide whether it works.Nobody is thinking about you as much as you think they are. Gym owners don't email because they're afraid of being annoying. When someone unsubscribes, they're not at home plotting against your business. They just unsubscribed. And they probably weren't going to buy anyway.Stop swinging for grand slams. Derek Jeter never hit a grand slam in his entire career. Most of your emails will get crickets and that's fine. You're hitting singles. Bobby and Maria got 12 customers worth $60,000 from consistent emails, not from one home run.Know, like, trust is the sequence and email is how you move people through it. Vince has never met Arthur Brooks but trusts him enough to buy any book he releases, all from consuming his emails and content. You can build that same trust with someone who has never set foot in your gym.12 customers. $60,000 in lifetime value. From emails. I'm teaching the entire system on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026

    Turn Dead Leads Into Buyers

  6. Aug 2

    Steel Cage Client Retention Secrets (Part 1)

    Losing clients faster than you can replace them? Book a free Gym Clarity Call and we'll help you stop the bleeding: https://gymclaritycall.com/ Your best marketing asset isn't marketing. It's your retention rate. Here's the math that should change how you think about this. A gym with 100 clients at a 3% attrition rate needs six new clients a month to add 36 members this year. That same gym at 6% attrition needs twelve. Same growth, double the work. Most gyms can get six clients in their sleep.  Twelve means spending money, spending time, and praying you don't have an off month. And a 1% drop in attrition on a 100 member gym at $500 a month is an extra $23,000 a year. That's one less person leaving per month. Little hinges swing big doors. In this episode, Tom and I break down the critical event in your business and the two biggest levers that protect it: your staff and your training system. This is part one of two. Part two covers client relationships, which might be the biggest piece of the whole thing. 5 Key Takeaways: The critical event in your business is the exchange between your coach and your client. The CEO of Home Depot flies around the country to watch the interaction between the guy in the orange apron and the customer because he calls that the critical event. Ours is the hour a client spends with a trainer. Screw that up and nothing else matters. Not your marketing, not your Instagram, not your funnel.Hire people your clients actually want to spend an hour with. That's the simplest culture fit test there is. If a client is calling to find out when a certain trainer is working so they can avoid that shift, that trainer isn't going to make it and neither is your retention rate. Hire for character. You can teach someone to coach a squat.Burnout is the silent killer of good coaches. Split days six days a week, an hour long commute, and pay that doesn't match the market will destroy a great trainer's energy within a year. Manage their schedule like a pitching rotation. Pay them fairly and beat them to the punch on raises. The people who ask for raises are usually the ones doing a bad job.Your program has to do no harm first and match your market second. If you're training 50 year olds and your system is built like a college football program, people are going to get hurt and hurt people cancel memberships. Run every exercise through the filter: what is this actually going to do to this person? Are you really such a bad coach that you can't get someone strong without a straight bar deadlift?Measure the energy on your floor. We created something called the PEL score (Positive Energy Level) where we'd rate coaches on a scale of one to ten based on the vibe they created. This isn't about being a cheerleader or breaking it down at the end of a session. It's body language, tone of voice, and whether they're engaged or leaning on the equipment with hands in their pockets. Clients feel that the second they walk in.Losing clients faster than you can replace them? Book a free Gym Clarity Call and we'll help you stop the bleeding: https://gymclaritycall.com/

    Steel Cage Client Retention Secrets (Part 1)

  7. Jul 25

    Fragile Gym: How NOT to Be One

    Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026 This is the full recap of the SPF Mastermind weekend. Over 100 gym owners in the room, another 50 on Zoom, two full days of talks, and a barbecue at my house. Tom and I break down every major theme so you get the highlights whether you were there or not. The overarching concept was the Anti-Fragile Gym. Not just surviving uncertainty but getting stronger from it. I walked through the Kintsugi model, which is Japanese pottery where the cracks are filled with gold because the value is in where you were broken. Then we got into the business side: eliminating single points of failure, financial fragility, differentiation in the AI economy, and why the gym of the future is actually a retention focused company, not an AI company. Devin Gage delivered a keynote on leadership that I called one of the best leadership talks happening anywhere in the world that day. Leo dropped a full AI toolkit workshop. Dustin Yancey taught his online newspaper column strategy that generates 50+ clients a year. And Charlie Weingroff closed the weekend reminding everyone in the room why the product is the thing that matters most. 5 Key Takeaways: The number one chokehold on your business is still the psychology of the owner. Thoughts create emotions. Emotions create actions. That's your life. There are two voices in your head: the boss voice and the bitch voice. The game changer is learning to hear the bitch voice and not believe it, not react to it. Like the final scene in Beautiful Mind where he sees the hallucinations walking next to him and doesn't flinch.The four quarter day will change how you handle bad days. Break your day into four quarters. If something terrible happens at 7am, you've got three more quarters to win. Win three out of four and you had a winning day. It's the same concept as "just make it to the next meal" that gets guys through Navy SEAL training. Stop writing off entire days because of one bad hour.The gym of the future is a retention focused company, not an AI company. AI is a tool for the back end of your business. It does not replace the critical event, which is the exchange between your coach and your client. The gyms that win in the next three to five years will be the ones that do real life community, real relationships, and real coaching better than everyone else. Be the company that doesn't automate the human part.If you can't explain what makes your gym different in 30 seconds, you have a problem. I asked 100 gym owners to raise their hand if they could. Seven hands went up and none of them wanted to get called on. AI is going to level the playing field on content, ads, and marketing. If you can't differentiate, you're just another gym. Pick one: a unique selling proposition, your three uniques, or a unique mechanism. Just pick one and own it.Email is the most underutilized asset in your business. You've already paid for the leads. They're sitting on a list. All you have to do is write 300 to 500 words, put a call to action at the end, and cast the pole in the water. You're not swinging for grand slams. You're hitting singles. Tom had a member sign up after reading his emails for three years. That only happened because the pole was in the water every single week.Register for the Email Marketing Workshop on September 11th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/emailworkshop2026

    Fragile Gym: How NOT to Be One

  8. Jul 14

    The Gym of the Future Explained

    Join us at the Gym of the Future Live Event on July 17th and 18th in Berkeley Heights, NJ. In person and virtual tickets available: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/gym-of-the-future/ Quick episode while I'm waiting outside jiu jitsu. The SPF Mastermind meeting is a week away and I wanted to break down exactly what we're covering and why this one matters. The theme is the Gym of the Future. And before you think this is all AI and robots, it's not. My opening talk is about the things you need to stop ignoring and start doing better. Not what to add. What to improve. And the number one thing I'm going to prove with a full slide deck is that your retention rate is the single most important thing in your business for the next three to five years. A gym with 6% attrition loses 72 people a year.  A gym with 3% loses 36. That's half the marketing budget, half the stress, and twice the growth with the same number of new members coming in. AI can't replace the critical event in our business: the exchange between your coach and your client. That's the thing. That's the whole thing. Everything else supports it. So we're going to talk about what needs to get better around that core. Here's the full lineup.  Day one starts with me on stage all morning covering what gym owners need to focus on in the next three to five years to actually thrive. Then Devin Gage takes the keynote slot talking about leadership at every stage of business, from $20K a month to $100K plus, because the leadership your gym needs changes as you grow. He's opened nine gyms in three years and is on his way to 100. Then we do the What's Working Now group exercise where 100+ gym owners in the room share the best strategies producing results right now. Day two opens with Tom Leonardis going boots on the ground with a full AI toolkit workshop showing you the specific tools you can use in your business today. Then Dustin Yancey takes the stage to break down how he's gotten 50 to 60 new clients from writing a column in his local online newspaper. We close with a 90 day planning session and the day two keynote: Charlie Weingroff. If you're bringing staff, his two hours alone will make them exponentially better coaches. That's not an exaggeration. Friday night we do a barbecue at my house. Virtual attendees get the recordings. In person attendees get to meet Big Tom. Join us at the Gym of the Future Live Event. In person and virtual tickets available: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/gym-of-the-future/

    The Gym of the Future Explained
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About

The Fitness Business University Podcast — The #1 Fitness Business Podcast — is the go-to educational show for gym owners, by gym owners. Hosted by Vince Gabriele, a seasoned pro with 18 years in the trenches of the fitness industry, this podcast pulls back the curtain on the real strategies, systems, and money-making wisdom that have helped gyms around the world grow and thrive. If you’re a Gym Owner or Fitness Entrepreneur ready to get more clients, make more money, and free up your time to do what you love, this is your playbook. Vince delivers a funny, straight-talking, no B.S. approach — no fluff, no theories, just the proven, real-world skills you need to win in business and in life.

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