Xplor Xperience: Psych up & take your business to the next level

The Xplor Xperience took place on 16 May 2024 at the Park Royal Hotel & Spa in Cheshire. Here are the top lessons for gym owners and operators from our expert line up of speakers.

The most ambitious gym owners and operators, along with fitness industry experts and partners, gathered on 16 May 2024 for the third edition of the Xplor Xperience.

The Xplor Xperience is purposefully different to other events on offer.

It’s all about helping your business thrive. With the right mix of carefully selected speakers and exceptional networking opportunities. And a tangible energy throughout the day to leave guests ready and empowered to think bigger and go further, faster.

This time around, the day focused on psyching guests up to take their businesses to the next level. Leaning into the psychology of mind and behaviour with ideas to help owners and operators:

Thanks to everyone who joined us – we were psyched to have you with us! Couldn’t make it? No sweat! We’ve got you covered here with this quick recap of the day.

Let’s get stuck in!

Get them psyched up

First up to start the day off right was Adrian Marks. Adrian is the Founder & CEO of customer acquisition agency enjoy! and Managing Partner of coaching business Acceleratr Consulting. Adrian took an in-depth look at how you tap into the psychology of consumer buying behaviour to attract and sign up more new members.

Adrian shared how you can tap into ‘Buychology’ to win (and keep) members – using value and happiness to drive growth. By delivering better outcomes than expected you’ll create value. And that creates happy, satisfied members.

There are 3 steps to selling that’ll help you build, grow, and sustain a successful gym business:

The challenge is that most people don’t buy logically, instead they are driven by emotion.

Adrian explained how you can tap into the value flywheel framework to solve pains and deliver pleasure – creating value and making it easier to grow your business. There are 2 levels to this flywheel:

Use this framework to score your business. The higher the score, the more you can charge.

Once you understand what’s motivating your prospective members to buy, you need to know how people buy things. Adrian shared that people only see what they’re wanting to see – what resonates with their pleasure or pain.

As soon as they are aware of a pain/desire, they’re forever aware, journeying through to considering solutions, building a preference, establishing an intention and acting until it becomes a habit.

The key is to tap into each stage with the right approach to win and help buyers along to the next stage.

Convert more leads into sales

Tip

To end the session, Adrian shared 3 secrets that are guaranteed to grow and scale your business. This was one. To convert more leads into sales you need to sell the gap between where the lead is and where they want to be. That means using the value flywheel to create an irresistible offer that links the size and intensity of the pain that’ll be removed to the certainty and speed of success.

Keep them psyched up

Second up, we were lucky enough to welcome Rugby League legend, Shaun Wane to the stage. Shaun has coached the likes of Wigan and even a winning England team, so as you’d expect it was an outstanding session.

This session was all about helping you motivate your members to stick with you. And as a leader and coach, Shaun knows just how to drive people to achieve their goals.

Shaun had a tough start to life. And life could have turned out very differently for him if it wasn’t for a key decision he made. After having been arrested at 15, and with a difficult homelife, Shaun decided to rise above his upbringing and fight for a positive future.

Going onto professionally play Rugby League for 14 years, Shaun developed a love for learning that he’s carried on with him. A love that helps him achieve his goal of winning.

He brought this love of learning and winning into business too. Shaun explained how he achieve sales on his own terms, even in the tarmac industry where cheapest traditionally won out.

Shaun shared what it takes to succeed, even against the odds, and motivate people to win. Obsessed with winning and being different, Shaun prefers to start with the end. That means looking forward rather than backwards to pre-empt and prevent problems before they occur.

Using a care pyramid model, Shaun advised that to succeed in keeping and motivating members you need to care about every element of your business. Consistently setting the right standards and developing the right culture to match.

Everything needs to be consistently done well. Doing this will help you create great experiences for members.

This approach can also be taken to motivating members to achieve their goals. By breaking the action needed into smaller, achievable actions, the outcome becomes easier.

Shaun explained that by repeating and making improvements every day, change happens. However, he cautioned that results aren’t fast and take dedication.

So, to avoid members dropping out, find ways to create belonging. That way you’ll keep members feeling a part of something they can’t walk away from.

Psych up your team

Following Shaun, Lara Hall-Bryce from Resilient as Fudge took to the stage for an inspirational and interactive session. Lara shared ways to apply evidence-based models and theories to improve the resilience and wellbeing of your team.

Lara explained that a resilient team is a helping hand for businesses. And key to driving sustainable success – winning and keeping members.

You need to help your team build resilience. The fudge tree model can be used to think about resilience and all the ways you can help your team build it:

As a leader you can support and boost the wellbeing of your team in a number of ways including effectively managing workload, open communication, clear feedback, recognition and more.

Lara highlighted that having a resilient team starts with you. Your behaviour and the environment you create, breeds resilient behaviour in your team.

The 4-3-6 resilience model can be used to help build resilience in yourself and your team. Lara explained that the system features:

Psych yourself up

Finally, to wrap up the May 2024 Xplor Xperience, Jamie Cartwright took to the stage for an incredibly moving and inspiring session. One that was all about mastering your mind to overcome obstacles and challenges that stand in the way of your success as a leader.

An accomplished fitness industry entrepreneur, Jamie is Co-Founder of BOX12 and a participant in series 6 of Channel 4’s hit series SAS: Who Dares Wins.

SAS: Who Dares Wins sees an elite team of ex-special forces recreate the SAS’s secret selection process. The series puts recruits through the ultimate test of their physical and psychological resilience.

For Jamie, it was a turning point in his personal journey. Through participating in the series, Jamie was able to exorcise and release past trauma that had a profound impact on his life.

Jamie started his working life as a professional football player. Jamie explained that his performance on the pitch was hindered by the impact that abuse suffered as a teenage footballer had on his mental health. Ultimately this led to the end of his football career at the age of 21.

Picking himself up, Jamie joined forces with a friend to build his first business – Ladyzone – a ladies only gym. The business grew into a chain of franchise gyms. And this success saw Jamie awarded the Young Business Person of the Year Award in the Sheffield Business Awards 2008.

Despite this success, behind the scenes, Jamie was struggling with a panic disorder. After 10 years in business, Ladyzone went into liquidation in 2015. Jamie felt like he was letting people down. He made a choice to continue forwards and rise up against the odds.

Picking up the pieces, Jamie spoke about his decision to start the BOX12 workout concept – a franchise model business based on a 36-minute boxing and functional fitness workout. The business launched in November 2019 – just a few months before COVID hit.

Instead of giving up, Jamie tapped into psychology to pivot plans for BOX12 and lead the business to success.

Jamie explained that emotions often dictate actions, he knew he needed to choose to act in contradiction to emotions. There was no clear path, the way forward had to be learnt along the way.

By listening to your gut and understanding it, knowing when to listen but acting differently to do tough things, you can build the mindset that’ll help you lead a successful business.

The wrap up…

The Xplor Xperience left us feeling psyched up, with renewed energy and a load of learnings to put into action.

From tapping into psychology to attract more sales (and increase your revenue), to mastering your mind to overcome the challenges of leading a business, with the right knowledge and mindset you can take your business to the next level.

Watch this space for more details of the next Xplor Xperience…

The Xplor Gym team is here to help you apply these learnings and more to your gym business. And we’d love to have a chat and see how we can help. Get in touch now.