The Business of Fitness Podcast

Dan Williams

Actionable ideas to build your fitness business. Presented by Fitness Business Mentor, Dan Williams.

  1. Jun 2

    98: I built a business from zero and documented every step

    For the last year, I've been building a new business. And every step of the way, I've been documenting the process. In this episode, I walk you step-by-step through this process. I explore how to build a new business from market problem to launch, using research, IP, branding, productisation and marketing strategy. Here are five things you'll learn from this episode of The Business of Fitness Podcast: Why the best fitness business ideas should start with a real market problem, not just a good-sounding idea. How deep research can help you create stronger intellectual property, better services and clearer business positioning. Why naming, branding and website copy are useful tools for clarifying your business strategy. How to turn one body of knowledge into digital products, workshops, consulting, courses and ongoing content marketing. Why awareness, customer experience and word of mouth should be part of your long-term fitness business growth strategy.

    33 min

  2. May 5

    97: Why I'm betting my business and my career on customer experience

    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

    26 min

  3. Apr 30

    Four simple steps to charging $10,000 for your service

    In this episode Dan uncovers the pricing mistake leaving fitness professionals underpaid, and shares the four-step approach he used to help one trainer charge $25,000 per client. Four things you'll learn in this episode: Why the traditional "build first, price later" approach keeps fitness professionals stuck in a scarcity mindset and earning less than they deserve The exact reverse-engineered pricing method Dan used to help one exercise professional collect $250,000 in pre-payments every January How to flip the pricing conversation so $25,000 a year feels like an obvious bargain to the right client Who you actually need to be selling to, and why trying to be for everyone is quietly costing you a fortune   Transcription: There's a really big mistake people are making with how much to charge for the service they're offering. And this big mistake means they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Whether you're selling personal training, semi-private training classes, gym memberships, or anything else fitness related, you're earning less than you should. Here's the problem. This is what people are currently doing: People have an idea for a service they want to offer. They build a business that will provide that service. They look at the business they've built and try to work out how much people will be willing to pay for the service. They release that business out into the world and hope that the right people will find them and pay them money. The big problem with this is it really comes from a scarcity mindset. And it often seriously limits how much people are able to charge. The issue is that they are starting with the service they're going to be offering and then they work out how much it's going to cost their customer. They decide they want to sell personal training. They look at what people charge for personal training and they match their pricing to what everyone else is doing. This is the same mentality as the people who spend their entire life to build their business and hope that at the end of the day there is some time and energy left to give to their life. The people who live to work instead of the people who work to live. So how do we switch this thinking? Let's talk about a more abundance-mindset approach to pricing your fitness service to ensure you're earning what you're worth. It comes down to four simple steps. Step 1. Find a problem that needs solving. Step 2. Look at how much money you want to earn, or how much you want to charge people for solving that problem. Step 3. Find a way to give more value than the cost, or how much you're charging people to solve that problem. Step 4. Find people who can afford that cost. Let's unpack this. Firstly step one: find a problem that needs solving. Too many people start their business with an idea. But an idea is not a good idea – unless it solves a real problem. You need to start by identifying a problem. A real one. Ultimately every single successful business solves a problem. If you can find a big enough problem that has a negative enough impact on people's lives, they will pay you handsomely to solve it. So once you've identified a problem that needs solving, we get to the most important part of pricing your service. Determining how much you want to earn. And this is the big shift from a traditional approach to pricing a service. Normally what people do is they work out what that service involves and then how much they can justify charging for it. But we're gonna flip that. First we're going to decide how much to charge for it and then we'll work out what that service needs to be to justify the price. This is the exact process I used with an exercise professional that I mentored a couple of years ago. He came to me because he had been running his business for many years and had reached a ceiling where he just couldn't work any harder to earn more money. He determined that he wanted to earn a quarter of a million dollars a year in revenue, that he wanted to be a sole trader, and he only wanted to work with 10 clients. So some simple maths showed us that he needed to charge each client $25,000 a year to hit this target. Now $25,000 seems like a lot of money for a fitness professional to charge for personal training. And it is but only if you start with personal training and work out how much to charge for that. Instead what we did was start with that dollar amount and worked out how good that personal training would need to be for $25,000 per year to be a good deal for the client. Fast forward to today and this exercise professional receives ten payments of $25,000 (quarter of a million dollars) in his bank account on the first of January every year for his clients to pre-pay their annual fee. Needless to say the service and experience that these clients are getting is pretty exemplary and it's so good that they all think 25,000 is a great deal. And that's step three: finding a way to give more value than the cost. Once you know what you want to charge (and that should be high), work out what the client needs to receive so that the price seems perfectly reasonable. And finally to step four, where we find people who can afford that price. It won't be everyone and that's fine. You shouldn't be for everyone. You need to find the people who have the problem that you have built your business to solve and who have the money to pay you to solve that problem. And that's how you price your service. Find a problem that needs solving. Work out how much you want to earn to solve that problem. Provide a service that makes that amount seem like a good deal. Then find the people who can afford to pay you. Your action steps: Identify a real problem you can solve Pinpoint a specific, painful problem in the market that your business is genuinely equipped to solve. Decide how much you want to earn Start with your target income and client load, then do the maths to work out what each client needs to pay. Design the service around the price Build out a premium offer so your target fee feels like a good deal for the person paying it. Define who can realistically pay you Get clear on the exact profile of person who has the problem and the budget, and stop trying to appeal to everyone. Put your offer in front of the right people Focus all your marketing time, energy, and messaging on reaching those specific buyers.   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: How to Raise Gym/PT Prices Without Losing Clients | Read | Listen 3 ways to make it easier to earn more in a fitness business | Read | Listen How to grow a fitness business WITHOUT more clients/members | Read | Listen

    11 min

  4. Apr 15

    How you can use agentic AI to earn more money and win back time

    Summary: In this episode Dan explores agentic AI, how it differs from chat-based AI, and why delegating to it rather than using it can help you earn more and reclaim time. 5 things you'll learn in this episode The key difference between chat-based and agentic AI. Most people are directing AI step by step. Agentic AI works differently: you give it an outcome and it figures out the process, much like delegating to a trusted person rather than micromanaging every move. A practical filter for deciding what to hand over. Any recurring task, anything involving multiple tabs or tools, and anything that doesn't require knowledge only you possess are now prime candidates to delegate. This alone could reshape how you spend your days. What to keep for yourself, and why it matters. Writing your own articles, generating ideas, doing creative work. The benefit comes from the doing, not just the output. Knowing where to draw that line is just as important as knowing what to delegate. 13+ real examples of tasks being delegated right now. From content suites and podcast show notes to Canva assets, email campaigns, and data organisation. These are live examples from the past few weeks. Where the real opportunity lies. It's not just about saving time. It's about what you do with the time you get back. When the tasks that don't require you are removed, what remains is the work that genuinely moves things forward. How most people are currently using AI At the moment, most people are using AI in what I'd call a chat-based way. You open up something like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you type in a prompt, and it gives you a response. Then you type another prompt, and it gives you another response. And so on. It's essentially a series of individual tasks. You are directing every step of the process. You are telling it what to do, one instruction at a time, and it is responding to each of those instructions. There's nothing wrong with this. It's incredibly useful, and for a lot of people it's already a big step forward from how they were working previously. But it does have a limitation. You are still doing the thinking around how to get to the outcome. You are still breaking the task down into steps. You are still effectively managing the process. The shift to agentic AI Agentic AI works differently. Instead of giving it a series of steps, you give it an outcome. You don't say, 'do this, then do this, then do this'. You say, 'this is what I want done', and it works out the steps required to get there. The way I've found it easiest to think about is to compare it to working with another person. If you were delegating a task to someone and you had to micromanage every step, telling them exactly what to do at each stage, that would feel very similar to using chat-based AI. But if you were working with someone you trusted, you would simply give them the job and the desired outcome, and allow them to figure out the process themselves. That's much closer to what agentic AI is doing. It's not just responding to prompts. It's completing tasks. What this actually means in practice Once you start thinking about it this way, the question becomes less about 'what can AI help me with?' and more about 'what should I no longer be doing myself?'. For me, a useful filter has been this: Any repetitive or recurring task, any task that involves moving between multiple tabs or pieces of software, any task that doesn't require knowledge that only exists in my brain, and generally anything that would take me somewhere between 30 minutes and a couple of hours, those are now candidates to be delegated. What remains is the work that actually requires me. Thinking, decision-making, coming up with ideas, and doing the parts of the job that are inherently human. A quick note on what I'm not outsourcing This is important, because I think there's a temptation to go too far with this. I still write my own articles. I still come up with my own ideas. I still do the creative work. Not because AI couldn't do some of it, but because there's value in the process itself. It's a bit like journaling. You wouldn't ask someone else to do your journaling for you, because the benefit comes from actually doing it. So I'm not trying to remove myself from the work entirely. I'm trying to remove myself from the parts of the work that don't require me. How I'm currently using it To make this a bit more concrete, here are a number of ways I've been using agentic AI over the last few weeks: Turning a single written article into a full content suite, including blog formatting, internal links, images, social media posts, email newsletters, and drafts across all platforms Preparing for mentoring calls by pulling previous Zoom transcripts and summarising key points before each session Drafting personalised outreach emails in bulk, each tailored slightly to the recipient but based on the same core message Running monthly checks across all websites by submitting test enquiries through every contact form and verifying they are received Researching and shortlisting options, such as reviewing hundreds of website templates and presenting a refined list based on a brief Renaming and reorganising large batches of files in Google Drive to follow consistent naming conventions Extracting key ideas or quotes from long documents and turning them into usable content Creating Canva assets, including carousels and visual posts, using pre-built templates Writing podcast titles, descriptions, and show notes based on existing content Drafting email campaigns in Campaign Monitor, including summaries and links to relevant content Scheduling and queuing content across platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Google Business, ready for approval Analysing and organising data into spreadsheets, pulling from multiple sources and structuring it for reporting Logging into different tools and platforms to complete multi-step tasks that would normally require switching between tabs manually The real opportunity I don't think the opportunity here is just about saving time. It's about changing how you allocate your time. If you remove the tasks that don't require you, you are left with the tasks that do. And those tend to be the ones that actually move things forward. Thinking more clearly. Making better decisions. Spending more time on the parts of the business that create value. That's where this becomes interesting. A final thought Most people are still using AI in a very step-by-step, prompt-and-response way. And again, that's fine. It's useful. It's a good place to start. But the big change happens when you stop thinking of AI as something you use, and start thinking of it as something you delegate to. Once you make that shift, it opens up a very different way of working, it certainly has for me. Your action steps: Write a 'stop doing' list. Identify the tasks you do regularly that are repetitive, multi-step, or don't require knowledge that only you have. These are your best candidates to hand over. Start with one task. Pick the most time-consuming item from your list and experiment with delegating it to an agentic AI tool. You don't need to overhaul everything at once. Protect the work that requires you. Be deliberate about what you continue doing yourself, particularly the creative, strategic, and relationship-based work that has real value precisely because it comes from you. Track what you get back. As you delegate more, note where the recovered time goes. If it flows into higher-value work, you're using this well. If it disappears, you have a different problem to solve. 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: I tracked every minute of work time for a year. Here's what I learned. | Read | Listen How my business earns me 23 hours a week | Read | Listen We Asked 8 Experts: Is ChatGPT now better at programming than you are? | Read | Listen

    33 min

  5. Mar 24

    The Ultimate Guide to Business KPIs

    Summary: Dan explains why most business owners glance at numbers without using them well, and shares a complete KPI system to track what matters, focus your effort, and build a better life. This one works really well as a video, as Dan does a walk through of a KPI spreadsheet. You can watch that here, or read the article (including visuals) here. 5 things you'll learn in this episode Why glancing at revenue or checking the bank balance is not the same as having a proper KPI process, and what changes when you build one. How to design the life you want before you set a single target, because your numbers should serve your life, not just your business. The exact spreadsheet structure I use, including how to set medium and long-term targets and keep things clean across months and years. A complete list of KPIs across marketing, sales, customers, revenue, finance, time, and even life quality, with equations for every single one. How to use the traffic light system so your priorities are immediately obvious every time you open the sheet. Your action steps: Write down what you want your life to look like before you build or update any KPI spreadsheet. Set up a simple spreadsheet with a column for KPIs, a medium-term target, and a long-term target. Manually pull your numbers from Xero, your CRM, and other sources at the end of each month. Review your KPI sheet every week and identify the one or two numbers that most need your attention. Apply the traffic light system so your biggest constraint is always easy to spot.

    27 min

  6. Mar 10

    How would Mr. Beast Market a Fitness Business?

    Summary: In this episode Dan explores how MrBeast would market a fitness business, and what fitness professionals can learn from his approach to attention, storytelling, referrals, content, and growth. 5 things you'll learn in this episode How to make your fitness business website more clickable, clearer, and easier to act on Why storytelling and client journeys are powerful fitness marketing tools How MrBeast's approach to content marketing can improve your reach and engagement What fitness businesses can learn from Feastables and MrBeast Burger about referrals and shareability How to build a stronger fitness marketing system across email, paid ads, offline marketing, and promotions How would the most viral content creator of our generation market a fitness business? Success leaves clues, and I was interested in the clues that MrBeast's digital empire would leave for health and fitness business owners. I wanted to unpack his approach to business and see what we can borrow for our industry. I did a similar deep dive to how Elon Musk would disrupt the gym industry, which you can read here or listen to here. If you've ever turned on the internet, you know MrBeast, or Jimmy Donaldson. He's one of the most successful creators on YouTube, building an audience of more than 100 million subscribers by creating videos that are impossible to ignore. His content usually involves huge challenges, massive giveaways, and large-scale acts of generosity. But MrBeast is not just a YouTuber. He is also a very switched-on entrepreneur. He has built several businesses off the back of his audience, including MrBeast Burger, Feastables chocolate, and the viral mobile game 'Finger on the App'. He has also donated millions of dollars to causes such as food banks, environmental projects, and people in need. What makes MrBeast interesting is not just the scale of what he does. It is the way he thinks about his businesses. Everything he does is designed to capture attention, hold attention, and be shared. He constantly experiments, studies what works, and reinvests almost everything he earns back into making even better content. So what can he teach us? I've studied his approach and broken it down into what I see as the eleven most important marketing strategies. I covered each of these in more detail in my article and podcast 'The One Page Fitness Marketing Checklist', which you can check out on episode 79 of the podcast. You can also download the one page marketing checklist here. The eleven areas we'll be examining through the lens of MrBeast are: Website Documentation and Storytelling Content Marketing Micro-Influencer Marketing Referral Process Email Marketing Customer/Member Reactivation Paid Social Media Advertising Paid Search Engine Advertising Offline Marketing Promotions and Tactics Website Your business needs a simple, professional website that clearly explains who you help and how you help them, builds trust with social proof, and makes it extremely easy for the right people to take the next step. So how would MrBeast create a website for a fitness business? One of his biggest obsessions is making people feel like they have to click. He spends an enormous amount of time on the thumbnails for his YouTube videos because he knows that in an impatient, short-attention-span economy, first impressions really matter. MrBeast talks a lot about the idea of a 'purple cow', which is borrowed from Seth Godin's book of the same name. The idea is that if you're driving past a field full of cows, the only one you'll notice is the purple cow. In the Diary of a CEO podcast MrBeast said the best ideas should make people say, 'What the f**k, I've never seen that'. If he were building a website, he would be looking for a clear and unusual homepage that looks different from everyone else. If we look at the Feastables website, we can see that it's built around really low-friction next steps. It's very easy for people to purchase the product, find stores where they can buy it, or get support. He would build a website for a fitness business that acts as a central hub with clear calls to action and very obvious next steps. Ultimately, the business needs a website that not only looks good, but actually converts, captures leads, retargets visitors, and feeds the rest of the marketing machine we're building. Documentation and Storytelling You need to consistently document the life of your business and share client journeys so potential clients can see people like them overcoming problems with your help. Storytelling is at the heart of MrBeast's digital empire. It's worth looking at Beast Philanthropy to see how he uses real-world documentation to shape behaviour and tell powerful stories. The official positioning of Beast Philanthropy is to use social media to 'educate and inspire' an entire generation. Jimmy Donaldson has often talked about his desire to inspire a movement. This is exactly the way he would approach documenting the inner workings of a fitness business. It's about showing the life of the business in a way that builds emotion, gives people a story to tell, and creates belief in the outcomes you promise. One thing MrBeast does exceptionally well is show the before-and-after narrative. This is not just a visual transformation like weight loss. It's a deeper emotional storytelling arc. MrBeast isn't using storytelling just for entertainment. He's using it to create behavioural change. That's exactly what a fitness business should do. The purpose of storytelling is to influence behaviour, encouraging people to start with your business and commit to long-term change. Ultimately, people watch MrBeast's content because of the storytelling. It just happens that the moral of the story often has a philanthropic or legacy-building impact. Content Marketing You should regularly create useful educational content that solves the problems of your target avatar and positions you as the obvious expert in your niche. One of the big lessons from MrBeast regarding content marketing is the importance of making something people actually want to watch. Too many fitness business owners focus on the process of creating content or the systems they use to produce it. Instead, MrBeast judges content on three simple criteria: do people click it, do they keep watching it, and do they feel good about it afterwards? I often reference the Steve Martin quote about being 'so good they can't ignore you'. I think MrBeast would strongly agree with this idea. He aims to create content that people simply cannot ignore. He also talks a lot about the purple cow effect. If he were running your content marketing system, he would strongly discourage boring, interchangeable content that everyone else is posting. Instead, he would push you to create content with a stronger premise, clearer packaging, and higher curiosity. Ultimately, something different. Micro-Influencer Marketing Your business needs systems that encourage clients to share their experiences publicly so their stories create authentic social proof for people just like them. MrBeast leveraged his viral presence to launch MrBeast Burger. Originally it was a pop-up burger joint that has since evolved into a delivery-based burger brand. The initial MrBeast Burger launch was essentially a marketing stunt designed to be shared. This wasn't Kardashian-level influencer marketing. It was much smaller, but far more widespread micro-influencer marketing. On the MrBeast Burger website it describes the launch as a 'one-of-a-kind experience', featuring branded packaging, uniforms, signage, and a free meal. They even described it as the world's first free restaurant. This was perfect fuel for micro-influencer marketing. The whole point wasn't simply to get people trying the burgers. It was to get people posting about them. A fitness business should think the same way about member experiences. If we look at the Beast Philanthropy YouTube channel, we see the same strategy. Supporters are constantly encouraged to watch, like, and share the videos, with 100% of the revenue going to charity. In the fitness industry, the equivalent is creating shareable moments so your audience becomes the distributor of your message. I talk a lot about the importance of remarkable experiences. If your business gives people ordinary moments, they won't post them. If you give them extraordinary experiences, they will share them for you. Referral Process You need a clear and consistent referral system that makes it easy and rewarding for clients to introduce their friends to your business. Ultimately, the whole point of a referral process is bringing someone you care about to experience a business. One of the cleverest examples I've seen comes from MrBeast's Feastables products. Out of curiosity when they first launched, I bought a Feastables chocolate bar. As soon as I opened the wrapper, I saw the marketing genius behind the product. The first square of chocolate had the word 'share' embossed into it. MrBeast had literally built the referral process into the product. The idea is that the first square is designed to be shared with someone else. The best way to test a product, whether it's a chocolate bar or a personal training session, is to experience it. By making every chocolate bar shareable, every purchase becomes a potential referral. If MrBeast were applying this logic to a fitness business, he would look for ways to make the experience itself shareable. Email Marketing Your business should regularly email your network with helpful, problem-solving content that builds trust and keeps you top of mind. One of the big challenges MrBeast faces is that much of his empire is built on rented attention. YouTube owns his subscribers. Social media platforms own his followers. If we look at Feastables, we can see how he pushes visitors towards channels he controls. As an ecommerce brand, it moves people

    26 min

  7. Mar 2

    14 Psychological Triggers to Get More Website Leads

    These are the 14 things I include on every website I build to turn the site into a lead generating machine. Here are five things you'll learn from this episode of The Business of Fitness Podcast: Why a good-looking website is not enough to get more gym leads How simple psychology can help turn website visitors into enquiries Why speaking to one clear type of client improves conversions How small wording changes can increase trust and action How to structure your fitness website so people feel understood and ready to join Need a website? I can do that for you.

    11 min

  8. Feb 16

    91: How Jade bought and saved a struggling gym

    Dan chats with Jade Webb. Jade was already a successful business owner prior to purchasing a gym. She shares the process of buying a business, from initial negotiations, through to a complete business overhaul. 5 things you'll learn: How Jade went from mechanical business owner to gym owner. Why she bought a gym, not built one from scratch. What due diligence she did and what she missed. How she completely rebuilt culture and customer experience after a chaotic first 30 days. The KPI changes and why experience has driven her growth and retention.

    34 min
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Actionable ideas to build your fitness business. Presented by Fitness Business Mentor, Dan Williams.

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