Fitness Business University Podcast

Vince Gabriele
  • 4.9 (168)
  • Marketing
  • Semiweekly

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. 18h ago

    Father Calls His Gym Owner Son a Female Dog & Tells Him to Get Back to Work

    2 years into owning my gym, I got a tax bill I couldn't pay. I was ready to quit. I went to my dad and told him I probably should have just gotten a job in finance like everyone else in my family. What he said to me that day changed the way I looked at business. This episode is a little different. It's been 5 years since my dad, Joe Gabriele, passed away. Big Tom and I sat down to talk about some of the things I learned from him. Some of them were lessons he taught me directly. Others were things I picked up just by watching him. My dad was a Wall Street guy. He started his own company, worked his ass off, and helped a lot of people become incredibly successful. I recently went to a reunion with people who worked for him 40 years ago. Think about that. 40 years later, these people are still getting together because of what that company meant to them. There's a lesson there for anybody trying to build a business. We also get into some pretty personal stuff. His stroke in 2017, the unexpected way it changed my career, and what I learned watching him go through some really difficult years. And because my dad was also one of the goofiest guys I ever knew, Big Tom shares a story about him having a conversation with a cardboard cutout. Guys, this one means a lot to me. There are some lessons in here about business, but there are also some things about being a parent, taking care of yourself, and figuring out what actually matters. 5 Key Takeaways The tax bill that almost made me quit. About 2 years into owning my gym, I was hiring people, spending money, and doing a terrible job managing payroll and taxes. I couldn't afford a tax bill that came due in October. My dad told me I had already proven I was a good trainer. What I hadn't proven was that I knew how to run a business. That conversation changed what I started studying and who I went to for help.The gamble my dad took on Wall Street. In the early 80s, my dad left a successful job and opened his own municipal bond business. He signed a massive lease at what I believe was 44 Wall Street. An electrician came in, looked at the space, and told him he was going to lose his shirt. My dad told him the place would be filled in a month. I didn't have that kind of confidence when I first started. It took me years to develop it.How his stroke helped start my consulting business. In 2017, my dad had a devastating stroke. I spent about 2 months away from my gym helping my family. The business kept running without me. That's when I realized we had built something that other gym owners wanted. That experience helped lead to the consulting business, the books, the mastermind, and this podcast.The thumbs up I'll never forget. After his stroke, my dad couldn't walk, couldn't talk, and needed 24 hour care. But whenever someone asked how he was doing, he'd give a thumbs up. Even near the end of his life. I was reading Viktor Frankl at the time, and it made me think differently about suffering, attitude, and finding meaning when things get really hard.Why a $100 sale isn't worth losing a customer. My brother in law told me about the early days of selling bonds and trying to make a $100 commission. My dad would listen to sales calls and remind him not to chase the single transaction. Build the relationship. Earn the trust. I've carried that into the gym business. You can pressure somebody into a sale today and lose years of potential business because of it.

    Father Calls His Gym Owner Son a Female Dog & Tells Him to Get Back to Work

  2. 6d ago

    How to Get Clarity

    Click Here to learn more about how I help gym owners:https://vincegabriele.com 20 years of owning a gym, and one thing I've learned is that being busy and knowing what you're doing are two very different things. It's easy to get caught up in the day to day. You have a million things demanding your attention. Your staff needs answers. There are decisions to make. And somehow, with all that going on, you can still feel like you're not getting anywhere. That's where clarity comes in. Not another complicated business strategy or another 50 things to add to your plate. I'm talking about getting a better understanding of where you are, where you're trying to go, and what actually deserves your attention. Because, guys, sometimes the hardest part of running a business isn't doing the work. It's figuring out which work matters in the first place. Click Here to learn more about how I help gym owners:https://vincegabriele.com

    How to Get Clarity

  3. Oct 29

    Weird Ways Gym Owners Are Getting New Customers in 2026

    Click Here to get free books and resources to grow your gym:https://www.vincegabriele.com/ 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/

    Weird Ways Gym Owners Are Getting New Customers in 2026

  4. Oct 24

    How to Go from 6 to 7 Figures

    Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/ First solo episode in a while. I recorded this one outside walking around a field, so if you hear birds and a train going by, that is why. I want to talk about going from six to seven figures, and I want to start by taking the air out of it. Over a decade ago I was one of the only gyms I knew doing seven figures. A buddy was so stunned by it that he talked me into starting a podcast with him called Million Dollar Gym. It did not last long. These days plenty of gyms are doing seven figures, and a lot of them are guys in my own mastermind who started at low six. Here is my problem with the number. Saying you hit seven figures is an ego move. I have done it myself. If you do a million in revenue with high six figures in expenses, your profit is the same as the guy doing low six figures. You just built a bigger, louder, more stressful version of the same paycheck. So this one is really about leveling up, which is the whole topic of our mastermind in Denver on November 13th and 14th. I walk through who is speaking, including Jason Marr, who went from zero to seven figures in 18 months when it took me five years, and the panel of gym owners I hand picked because they crossed seven figures with us and their lives actually got better because of it. I also give away the part of the event I could not wait to share, which is the order these things have to happen in if you want to move fast. 5 Key Takeaways The best line I have heard on this came from my friend Nick Peterson. The mistake is confusing more for closer to what you want. Read it twice. The last thing I want is for you to come to an event about getting to seven figures and walk out building a gym that pushes you farther away from the life you actually want.A really high margin is often a warning sign, not a trophy. I visited a gym owner doing $60,000 a month with margins that were through the roof. He also had zero employees and was coaching 60 sessions a week. I asked him if he had time to go to the bathroom. If that is what somebody wants, fine. It is not the kind of life I want to help people build, because it ends in burnout and resentment and you miss a huge piece of your own life.Clarity, then certainty, then speed. In that order. It is hard to move fast when you are not sure what you should be doing, and it is impossible to be sure what you should be doing if you have no clarity on where you are right now. Most people are further from reality than they think. I asked a gym owner what he weighed and the real number turned out to be 40 pounds higher than what he told me. That is a clarity problem, and it shows up in the business the exact same way.The marketing plan that gets you to six figures will not hold seven, and churn is why. A gym with 300 clients at a 2% attrition rate is still losing six people every single month, and 2% is excellent. The bigger you get, the more people you have to replace just to stand still, which means you have to get better at marketing, not just busier.Decide on the life first, then price it, then go build the business that pays for it. People ask why I never opened multiple locations. My litmus test has been simple for six years now. Can I be done at 4:00 and take my son to jujitsu? Ten gyms would have made that harder and taken up more of my head than I was willing to give. That is my answer, not yours. Do the work to figure out what yours is.Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/

    How to Go from 6 to 7 Figures

  5. Oct 15

    Getting Naked in Front of 12 Other Gym Owners

    Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/ Weird title, I know. Here is where it came from. Back in 2019 I was coaching a lot of gym owners and almost all of it was built on assumptions. I would ask somebody a specific question about their numbers and nobody had the answer. It is the same thing we all deal with on the training floor. The client who is 40 pounds overweight tells you he eats eggs for breakfast and salad for lunch. Business owners do the exact same thing. They give you the highlights and leave the rest out. So I went looking for a small group of brave people willing to open the whole thing up once a quarter. Financials, KPIs, team, org chart, all of it. That became the CEO Mastermind, and this is the first time I have ever talked about it publicly. In this one I walk Tom through how it actually works. The 16 page document they have to fill out before every meeting. Why they have to print a copy for every other person in the room. What happens in the hour they spend in the hot seat. And the one thing I was certain would kill the whole idea, which has still never happened once in seven years. I also get into why I almost refused to let one guy join, what he is doing now, and why the majority of people who ignored my advice about opening a second location ended up in trouble. 5 Key Takeaways The hardest part of the document is the part nobody else asks for. Every member copies and pastes their real profit and loss statement from their accountant, prints it, and hands it to all nine other people in the room. The first time I asked for that I could not believe I had the guts to do it. What it did was move the whole group off the bench press number. Revenue is top line chest beating. Profit is what you take home to your family. Those guys have gotten more profitable every year since because they know which number they have to stand behind in 90 days.Nobody has ever forgotten the document. Not one time in seven years and over 100 meetings. I was sure guys would have a bad quarter and conveniently leave it at home. Zero. The only people who miss are the ones who had a baby or a wedding.A guy came to me doing 10K a month and the cost of this group was 80% of his monthly revenue. I tried to talk him out of it. He insisted. He just reported $85,000 a month at his last meeting. He is an anomaly and I will say that plainly, but it is the reason I do not gate the room on revenue alone.The reason the room sees your business better than you do has nothing to do with being smarter. It is that they are not emotionally attached to it. When they tell you to raise your prices, Mrs. Johnson who has trained with you for 12 years never enters their head. When they look at your org chart, they see a wrong person in a wrong seat where you see a good dude who has worked hard for you. That is a board of directors, and almost no gym owner has one.Your KPIs tell you where the leak is and most owners are working on the wrong one. Guys walk in blaming their agency and their Facebook ads, and then somebody in the room points at the sheet and reads out that they converted 3% of their leads to a consult. If you have a 10% attrition rate you are not going to outmarket that. The financials tell you what already happened. The scoreboard tells you why.Click Here to join us in Denver on November 13th and 14th: https://www.vincegabriele.com/events/7-figure-breakthrough/

    Getting Naked in Front of 12 Other Gym Owners

  6. Oct 9

    The Coach You Can’t Fire (And 4 More Gym Problems, Solved)

    Click Here to get a custom local marketing plan for your gym, completely free: https://www.vincegabriele.com/helpmemarket Big Tom and I did something different this week. Instead of picking a topic, we took the questions straight from my SPF group. Five of them. All the same problems I hear every week on deep dives and coaching calls. We start with pricing, because Mike Williams from Florida asked how often you should actually raise your rates. That turned into the bigger conversation about why gym owners refuse to do it. I just spent an hour on this with a gym owner from New Hampshire who was dead set against raising prices on current members. His reason had nothing to do with his business. It was that he did not want people to be upset with him while he was standing on the floor with them. Then we get into the question four or five guys asked in different words: I have 13 employees, 12 of them are great, and one is making my life hell. I walk through the four people issues, and the one that is most common in our industry is the high performer everybody loves who is quietly poisoning your team. From there it goes into when to hire your next trainer, how to build a scoreboard with only four numbers on it, and how to tell the difference between being busy and actually moving your business forward. I also tell the story about the email I got two weeks ago. My dad’s municipal bond firm folded in the late 1980s. Forty years later, 40 to 60 people are still getting together for a reunion. Both of my parents who owned that company are dead and they are still doing it. That email made me take a hard look at the culture I have built, and I did not love what I saw. 5 Key Takeaways Your value judgment on price is irrelevant. Vanessa drove 45 minutes and paid $444 for our daughter’s first birthday cake. To me that makes no sense. To her it made perfect sense, and hers was the only opinion that mattered. The gym owner who will not raise his rates is pricing his gym out of his own wallet instead of his customer’s. One caveat: if you are sitting at 12% attrition, fix your churn before you touch price. You will make a bad problem much worse.There is no single right frequency on price increases. Two schools of thought. Cut deep and cut rarely, which is what we just did at GFP with a $50 per month increase, roughly 12%, and we will not do that again next year. Or build a smaller automatic bump into the membership agreement so every October it climbs 3% to 5%. Pick one. Just stop doing nothing while your rent and your payroll go up around you.When you have one problem employee out of 13, all your mental energy goes to that one person and the other 12 get taken for granted. Run them through the four people issues first. Right person right seat means invest harder in them, not ignore them. Right person wrong seat means find them a different spot. Wrong person right seat is the one that eats gyms alive, the coach the clients love who is a cancer behind the scenes. Do not fire that person on a Tuesday and watch your business implode. Fire him in your head today and build a 30, 60, and 90 day plan to absorb the damage before he actually walks. And the number one leadership tool you can own is a mirror.Stop waiting until you have enough clients to justify a hire. Bring on a part time trainer at $25 an hour, hand over 10 sessions a week, and that costs you about $1,000 a month. What you just bought is 40 hours of your own time. For most of you, three new customers covers that entire investment, and you only have to get those three once. You have 11 more months after that. If you cannot find three customers with 40 hours, the hire was never the problem.Your scoreboard only needs four numbers. Leads, consults or trials, new members, and attrition. Every one of them needs a weekly goal, because without a goal you are just reporting what happened and you have no idea whether you won. When a number is off track, ask one question. Why did this happen? Block 30 minutes, write the answer down, and commit to one action step. Not a full rebuild. One step, then check next week whether you actually did it.Click Here to get a custom local marketing plan for your gym, completely free: https://www.vincegabriele.com/helpmemarket

    The Coach You Can’t Fire (And 4 More Gym Problems, Solved)

  7. Oct 2

    20 Years of Gym Owner Gold in 1-Hour

    Most gym owners are grinding on the wrong problem for the stage they are actually in. Take the 5 minute audit and find out what deserves your attention right now: https://fourstagesquiz.com/ Dustin Bogle is a former pro wrestler who trained in a backyard ring built by his buddy's dad. Those buddies turned out to be The Young Bucks. He wrestled for ten years, set himself a hard deadline of age 28, and when the big contract never came he walked away cold turkey and went all in on his gym. What happened next is why I wanted him on. He opened six gyms in six years. He sold all six. Three of them are still running today and three are not, and he tells you exactly why. Then he moved into brokering and has now sold 30 gyms plus a handful of other businesses. We get into the stuff nobody talks about on stage. The fight with his brother over a water jug delivery that ended their partnership. The cease and desist that forced him to rebrand a year in. The gym he opened in what the locals called leisure land, where every person walking past his window was 70 years old and headed to the deli next door. He had the money, he had the systems, and he still picked the wrong corner because he stopped knowing his market the way he knew his first one. Then there is the part most of you need most. Dustin runs Gym Reinforcements, which does nothing but lead nurture, and they have collected $40 million for gym owners since 2020. He gives up his actual numbers and the exact mechanics behind them. If you are generating leads and nobody is showing up, this is the hour. 5 Key Takeaways Three of his six gyms survived and the difference came down to two words that both start with L: location and leadership. He had six gyms and hired maybe eight managers in that whole stretch, versus 50 trainers. He got world class at hiring coaches and never built the reps to hire leaders. One bad manager can kill a location on its own.His manager test is three questions. Do I trust this person with my keys, my cash, and my kids. Then: are they magnetic enough that my team and my clients crave being around them. Then: are they coachable, meaning do they actually act on what I tell them. He walked away from people who were great talkers but only closed the lay downs and refused to do follow up or ask for the sale.He moved six large group gyms to small group and raised the price from $49 a week unlimited to $89 a week for three sessions. He did not do it in one swoop. Year one was a hybrid where small group members got large group as a free add on while he quietly cut the boot camp schedule from six slots to three. Year two it was small group only. Yes he had churn. Revenue stayed flat or climbed and profit went up because every member was worth more.He built a free coaching pipeline out of two nearby colleges. Kinesiology students need 40 to 60 hours of field work to graduate, so he got on the department's approved vendor list and the head of kinesiology mass emailed every new student twice a year. Every fall and spring that handed him four to six intern coaches for six to eight weeks at no cost, and he hired a lot of them.A $10 charge to book the consult takes his show rate from 60% to 85%. He calls it a starting point session and it gets credited to the first month or refunded if it is not a fit. On top of that: at least eight appointment slots a day in 15 minute increments including weekends, a confirmation text that makes them reply with a Y instead of just reminding them, and a 30 to 60 second video sent after they confirm. He calls those trailers. The workout is the movie, and almost nobody sends the trailer. Most gym owners are grinding on the wrong problem for the stage they are actually in. Take the 5 minute audit and find out what deserves your attention right now: https://fourstagesquiz.com/

    20 Years of Gym Owner Gold in 1-Hour

  8. Sep 25

    Fitness Business Advice that is Killing Owners

    Find out what stage your gym is in and exactly what to focus on right now. Takes 5 minutes: https://www.fourstagesquiz.com/ Some of the advice killing gym owners sounds perfectly reasonable. Never raise your members’ rates. Open another location. Copy the model that’s working for somebody else. Tom and I break down the advice owners need to stop following, and why even good advice can be wrong for your business right now. Tom starts with one that a lot of trainers hear: you’re great at this, you should open your own gym. But loving coaching doesn’t mean you’ll love managing staff, handling schedules, learning marketing, and running a business. He lived that himself. Then we get into the promise I’ve spent years helping owners unwind: “I’ll never raise your rates.” Your costs keep going up, but you’ve decided your prices can’t. A financially healthy gym can hire better people, deliver a better service, and stay open. That helps your members too. We also talk about copying somebody else’s model. Just because someone is crushing it with 30-minute sessions or a six-week challenge doesn’t mean switching your entire business over will produce the same result. You need to understand why it works and whether it fits your business. The biggest conversation is about opening a second location. I’ll own this: earlier in my consulting career, I pushed growth harder than I focused on the life somebody actually wanted. I look at that differently now. I share the advice Seth Godin gave me when I was considering a second gym, and why that conversation led me to build this coaching business instead. Being able to expand doesn’t automatically mean it’s the right move for you. We finish with two more traps: using AI to replace the relationships that make your gym valuable, and expecting one online funnel to handle all your marketing. Use the tools. But keep showing up in your community and give yourself more than one way to get customers. The 5 Biggest Takeaways Being a great trainer doesn’t mean you should own a gym. Coaching clients and running a business require different skills. Make sure you actually want the job you’re building for yourself.Promising never to raise rates puts your business at risk. Your costs won’t stay the same forever. Your pricing needs to support a healthy business that takes care of its members, staff, and owner.Someone else’s winning model might be wrong for your gym. Don’t overhaul your business because somebody is selling a new approach. The advice needs to fit your stage, your business, and the life you want.Get better before you get bigger. Before opening a second location, make sure the first has healthy profits, consistent growth, clear leadership, repeatable systems, and reliable lead generation and retention.Technology can’t replace relationships or a well-rounded marketing plan. Use AI as a tool, keep showing up in your community, and don’t depend on one funnel to bring in every customer.The point is to build a business that gives you the life you want. Get clear on what that looks like, understand the stage you’re in, and focus on what actually moves you forward. Find out what stage your gym is in and exactly what to focus on right now. Takes 5 minutes: https://www.fourstagesquiz.com/

    Fitness Business Advice that is Killing Owners
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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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