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Case Study - Doug Spurling
Spurling Fitness
Six years ago, Doug Spurling went all in on his dream - to open his own training facility.
Located just north of New Hampshire in Kennebunk, Maine, Spurling Fitness offers a combination of Team Training and Small Group Training.
“We started off kind of doing everything probably like everybody else. Now, we're pretty focused on really just those two services, we execute the heck out of them.”
Fast forward to 2017 and his dream is now flourishing. Spurling Fitness has grown rapidly to over 300 clients and a full staff of coaches.
But as that growth happened, Doug realized that he couldn’t keep doing what worked six years ago. He had a brand new set of challenges that came along with all the success.
New Challenges With Growth
“We didn't really do much for nutrition, or at least we didn't have anything organized formally for nutrition. We would kind of casually get people nutrition guidelines, and they'd get their welcome packet of some PDFs and stuff like that, but nothing was organized on the nutrition front.
“The frustration we were running into was, basically, it was chaos on the nutrition front. Nothing was systematized, nothing was organized.”
Now if you know Doug personally at all you know how much this drove him crazy. See, he is one of the best in the industry at creating simple, scalable systems within his business.
Figuring out a simple way to be better coaching nutrition was a huge challenge at Spurling Fitness.
Needed A Solution
Doug knew he needed a simple way to correct this “chaos” but didn’t know where to turn.
“We were basically promising nutrition coaching. Some clients, if they were on top of asking for it, they could take advantage of it. But there was really no structure programmed with it.”
Spurling Fitness was also growing. Fast!
As they were adding more and more members Doug knew they needed to figure out not only how to coach this many people, but also give them an incredible experience Spurling Fitness was known for.
“The question that clients are always asking is what have you done for me? In the first 90 days, they're kinda like, oh, this is new, this is exciting. The key is really six to twelve months. Once you've made it past twelve months, you've hopefully created this community, they're a lifer. Those six to twelve months is really the most sensitive time frame.”
Doug knew they needed to find a way to engage their clients and provide a consistent, exceptional service.
A question that kept coming up...
“It's very easy to wow ten clients, but how do you wow 300 clients?
It's going to take a system like Coach Catalyst where you can show them progress.”
How Spurling Fitness Uses Coach Catalyst
Over the past year, Spurling Fitness has created and implemented different uses for Coach Catalyst.
The first challenge they set out to solve was their nutrition coaching. Instead of having chaos and disorganization Doug wanted a simple, organized way to deliver coaching across all 300 clients.
Enter their Essentials Program. Boiled down, each client gets a 3-day food log review once per month and access to their private facebook group. Each client follows a habit based approach to work on for the month.
However, some clients want and need more.
That is where their Accountability Groups fit in.
“They're going on all year long, and we just kind of have a rolling start every six week. If you don't want to take advantage of this six week round, you got to wait until the next six weeks. Every six weeks, there's a new group starting.”
This group includes weekly in-person meetings where Trent, their nutrition coach, uses motivational interviewing to help get the most out of the participants.
“It’s simple in the sense that Coach Catalyst has done a great job making it super straightforward. Just tweak the daily lessons, enter the people you want to be in that program, and then every six weeks, we just update who's in that program. It's awesome stuff! The clients really like the daily accountability on the app!”
This setup has helped solve their initial nutrition coaching challenge. But Doug quickly found out Coach Catalyst could help out in other areas of their business as well.
“What we really, really like are the measurements and the progress pictures.”
You see, that was another frustration! Doug had not found a simple way to store all his clients photos and measurements.
“There's other stuff to host pictures, but it's way too complicated.”
“What we ended up doing was we put all of our clients into Coach Catalyst, and they have the ability through the app to take progress pictures now, which is super cool.”
Numbers Don't Lie!
The result of implementing Coach Catalyst into their business?
“Our retention rate, was floating around 92-93%, which is still pretty good. But now it's up to 95-96%. We're talking six, eight people a month retention!”
Now this might not sounds like a ton right away but really think about that. If your average client is spending $200-$300/month, keeping six clients around is worth up to $1800 per month!
In addition to upping their retention rate, Spurling Fitness was able to add an additional revenue stream with their nutrition groups. Doug couldn’t recall the actual numbers but knew it was a big boost to their revenue.
“I don't know the exact numbers, but tens of thousands of dollars just from nutrition alone. A couple thousand bucks a month easily right now, and we haven't even tapped into it fully.”
And Doug doesn’t see these numbers doing anything but growing in the future.
“Nutrition is going to be the next big thing. Your clients don't need more education, they don't need to know recipes. That's what they think they need to know, but that's what they don't need. They need accountability. Coach Catalyst makes it super easy to hold people accountable!”
We totally agree Doug!
A big thank you to Doug Spurling and everyone at Spurling Fitness who allowed us to highlight their gym!
If you want the same platform Doug has used to WOW 300 clients, hold them accountable, increase retention AND add thousands of dollars in revenue every single month, give Coach Catalyst a 30-day test drive for only $1.