Understanding home gym culture isn’t as simple as it may seem on the surface. Even someone who’s experienced in other aspects of business might struggle to identify just what makes us tick. For example, I just found the old .pdf of a presentation I made to potential investors in 2017. The presentation was my “final exam” for a course called Plan for Profit and it was part of an opportunity called Boots to Business run by a local non profit called the Edge Connection. I think the course is a fantastic resource for prospective entrepreneurs because it gives you a crash course in everything you need to begin your life as a business owner.
In any case, at the time of the presentation, we were selling T-shirts through a print on demand platform called Spreadshirt and doing reasonably well. We’d decided to begin selling apparel to help raise brand awareness on Instagram which, along with our blog was where we introduced ourselves to the world. We grossed $200 in the first month and we were getting repeat business. Granted, because it was print on demand, we didn’t get a ton of revenue from sales, but it was still a sign that somebody wanted our stuff and they were excited enough to post images of themselves wearing the gear which was much needed free advertising.
We asked for $10,000 from the potential investors to simply upgrade our tech and allow us to begin ramping up what we were doing as far as content production. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any takers.
Not only did we not get the money, but one of the investors told us although we weren’t ready to receive loan money, he was willing to offer his services as a “business coach” at a discounted rate and that we’d soon be in a place where we were bringing in so much revenue that we wouldn’t need outside investors.
That appealed to the debt averse nature of my soul so we took him up on his offer.
That’s where the trouble started.
The first thing our “coach” did was tell us that we needed to set up a store front on our website instead of sending customers to Spreadshirt. That way, we could capture customer emails and begin selling directly to them. Plus, eventually we wouldn’t need to use Spreadshirt, instead we could use a fulfilment service and keep 100% of our profits rather. Hmm. That should have been a red flag. But it wasn’t. We paid extra money to redesign our website which took it from $99 a year to $500 in one month as we paid for plug ins and web design services. Coach then suggested that we hire one of his other clients to manage our newsletter (which we would have to come up with content for, she would just set up the automation so it went out every week). We passed on that but still paid for another plug in to integrate that plug in with what we had.
Unfortunately, while Coach had the idea to set up the website, he didn’t know how to help us work out the bugs so when one of our return customers wanted a shirt, he noticed that because of a bug in yet another plug in we had to pay for, the shipping would cost $30 which was $25 more than the shirt itself. It took all night to fix that. Coach then suggested that we hire another of his clients, who was good with websites and who promised to get us to the number 2 search ranking on Google right away and who could give us a discounted rate on wrapping our vehicles so our two SUVs would advertise Garage Gym Life for free every time we drove any where.
At the start of the second month, Coach’s first payment was due and at $500 with no increase in sales, I thought that this might be a bad idea. But I’m not a quitter, so I worked some overtime at my regular job and came up with the funds to pay him.
Month Two The saga continues
I noticed that Coach never actually answered any of my questions. Our weekly meetings frequently included conversations like this:
Coach “You’ve got to get more sales”
Me:”How do you suggest we do that?”
Coach: What is your unique value proposition?
Me: People like us and we’re building a community of home gym owners in a way that nobody else is (note:this was before Dave and Chari began building Garage Gym Powerlifting and in the early months of Street Parking so literally we were the only community on Instagram that was devoted to home gym culture.)
Coach: That’s great but it’s not going to pay any bills. You’ve just got to get more sales!
Me: Do you have any suggestions for how I do that?
Coach: What makes people want to come to you?
Me: We’ve built a community of people on social media from around the world that’s united by being home gym owners and following us. They come to us for inspiration and to be a part of that community.
Coach: That’s great but it’s not going to pay any bills. You’ve got to get more sales!
Me: Okay, but how do I do that? I’m not a sales person or marketer. What do you suggest I do?
Coach: You’ve got to figure out what makes you different from everybody else that does what you do.
Me: There ISN’T anyone who does what we do
Coach: Okay, then what makes people come to you
You get the idea. This would go on for the entire meeting and I kept getting more and more frustrated. My wife told me to be patient and trust the process but by month three we were faced with declining sales and a lot of our followers were leaving us. I’m not sure but I suspect that was because on the advice of Coach, we’d stopped reposting people’s workouts (something we’d pioneered doing and which caused our following to grow rapidly to 3,000 in about three months). Coach said that filling up our social media with all of that made it impossible to figure out what our product was.
The morning after another month of zero sales Coach called to remind me that it was time to pay his fee and that now that the introductory period was over, we were going to be paying him his normal rate of $1,000 per month.
I fired Coach on the spot.
We’ve never hired another business coach (we may in the future but my criteria will be a lot stricter) and now I mandate that any of the permanent team members who work with us in any capacity have to be a part of home gym culture as insiders. They have to be home gym owners or at least exercise at home in some capacity. So far it’s working. Everyone, from our social media manager, Bailey, to our magazine contributors, to our YouTube live stream engineer, Casey, has a home gym. Our magazine layout editor, Kellie, doesn’t have a home gym per se, but she does yoga in her living room, which works for me. The only people who don’t train at home who do projects for us are the contractors who create our thumbnails and edit our videos and we’re actively looking for home gym owners to fill those spots.
Why Does Understanding Home Gym Culture matter?
The problem with Coach isn’t that he wasn’t productive or even that he seemed to make his clients successful by getting his other clients to patronize them and recommend them to other people. No it was because he didn’t understand home gym culture. That lack of understanding is why he kept asking me to make changes to our brand that alienated our target audience while we were trying to build a foundation.
Michael Stelzner of the Social Media Marketing podcast teaches “a concept called the elevation principle. It’s a simple formula: great content plus other people minus marketing messages equal growth”. Stelzner says, as you’re trying to establish yourself as an authority, you need to avoid marketing because marketing messages in the beginning of your brand lifecycle “. . . is like flaps on an airplane. When you’re coming in for a landing, those flaps come up, and it slows the airplane. If you want to be more well-known, you need to try to strike out those marketing messages because your goal is to just get out there and be more well-known”.
We were in a phase of our brand where we were just trying to let people know that we were out there by building a community of people who would trust us enough to pay attention to the people we recommended that they listen to and pay attention to the messages we were trying to convey. At the end of the day, our product is information and Coach couldn’t or wouldn’t see that because he’s never been in a situation where he trained alone without encouragement or tried to bust a plateau without any feedback.
People who have been there just get it and when we put together a lot of people who’ve experienced similar challenges, from different training perspectives, we can offer a better product to our community.