How Coaches Can Monitor Client Progress Remotely Using Coach Catalyst

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Last week, Kane shared with you how he was running his latest challenge at Core Health and Fitness.

Even though we may spend as much time talking to each other as we do our own families, we don’t run our gyms like mirror images of each other.

We have worked with our clientele long enough that we know what resonates with them.  I think that is the beauty of Coach Catalyst, you can build what you want.  We might run different challenges but we can use the same platform to deliver it.   

Today, I want to share with you the most recent challenge I am running at my gym Functional Fitness and also give you some insight into how I run challenges at FF.  

Our newest challenge is called Resolution Revolution and is different than any other challenge we have run. We have evolved our last couple challenges to get away from just awarding a few winners and finding ways to award as many people as possible.

We do this through what I call benchmarking.  

We set a benchmark for the challenge, an attainable goal. The last challenge we benchmarked fat loss. I believe it was 10 pounds in 6 weeks and we had a ton of success with it.

This go around, we wanted to do something different, and reward the actions that ultimately lead to results.  

Instead of setting the benchmark with an outcome based number we decided to build the benchmark on action based numbers.

Here is how we decide if someone is a winner.

They need to be 80% compliant with real food eating, assessed by Coach Catalyst.

They need to attend 18 workouts in the 6 week time frame.

Finally, they need to do 5 out of 6 weekly check-in reviews we deliver each Friday within Coach Catalyst.

If they accomplish all three actions, they win.

Win what?

A t-shirt of course, everyone loves t-shirts.  

I wanted to provide a lower priced challenge so no trip giveaways this time.  But, if you do want to give away trips, just reach out to me I can hook you up with my trip guy, Jerry, so you can get a 2 for 1 deal.  

My thinking behind this is we want to reward behaviors instead of outcomes. If I have a client who does all the right things but for some reasons doesn’t lose the weight like they should, I can’t not reward that.  

In previous challenges, I have seen too many people get discouraged or give up because there was no way he or she was going to win.  

Challenges and competitions make people crazy and this whole concept of thinking can take a back seat at times.  

If you have been in the general pop fat loss game for any length of time you would probably throw away every client’s scale if you had the chance.

Clients get sooooo focused on the numbers that it makes them neurotic.  

So, we threw away the scale this time and put all the focus on the actions.

Do the actions, you win!

We are still going to do measurements and track progress but that is more for me than them. I need to see if this technique is effective or not. 

Everything for our challenge is housed in Coach Catalyst.  We put all downloadable documents in the first lesson so a client can refer back at any time as needed.  

We have daily content that goes out in the form of lessons.  We use the Clean and Lean Challenge structure but swap out some new pictures and swap out some lessons so the content feels fresh each time.  

We created a Facebook group for community. To drive community and engagement each Monday we have a Facebook challenge. These "challenges" challenge the participants to post something around a common theme in the Facebook group each week.

Week one was just “Share Your Why” for doing the challenge.  

Other weeks will be…

• Post your favorite workout song

In a previous challenge we used this strategy to develop a spotify playlist.  This was a massive hit with our clients because when we used the playlist and a client’s song came on they went crazy.  

• Post a picture of a meal

• Post your favorite healthy recipe

• Post a picture of you doing a creative workout move

• Post one thing you have learned so far in the challenge

• Post one takeaway from the challenge that you will continue to do to ensure success

Hopefully those questions spur some ideas if you decide to do something like this.  These weekly challenges are huge because they spur conversation organically rather than just admin posting and hoping people comment.  

We link to our FB group right from inside CC making it simple for the client to complete their FB challenge.  

My gym is in a small town so we can’t employ many of the same strategies that someone in a bigger community can, ie: Facebook ads.  

So, we have had to get a little more creative in how we market.  

I’ll share a few strategies that have allowed us to get 80-130 people in a challenge with a next to nothing ad spend. 

The week leading up to a challenge we host what we call Bring-A-Buddy week where any of our members can bring a friend in to workout with them for free.

We restrict this to to Team Training for organization and space reasons.

Many of those buddies then end up signing up for the challenge because they loved the workouts.  

This is a strategy I believe is vastly underutilized by coaches and I think it has been so ingrained that challenges are individual which puts the blinders on.

Think about this for a second.

You enjoy working with your clients and people tend to hang out with others that are similar to themselves.

Similar in social status, income level, thought patterns, etc…

If you like your current clients, then 1 degree of separation from them is a huge pool of people who are just like your clients.  Probably a great fit for you offering.

When you run a partner challenge you incentivize your current membership based to join with a non-member by giving it to them for 50% off, a free upgrade, or like our challenge they get it for $1.

Any one of your clients that are interested in the challenge, which all of them should be will become your marketing team.  

Then we follow-up the announcement of the challenge and opening of the doors with the Epic Facebook Post on our Facebook business page.  

The Epic Facebook Post is simple.  

Like the post:  1 raffle entry

Share the post:  2 raffle entries

Tag Someone:  1 raffle entry per person tagged

1 free challenge for a member and one free challenge for a non-member.  

The post got 35+ shares, 40+ likes, and tons of tags in the comments.  To be honest, this post underperformed for us and in hindsight I should have boosted it for a few days.

Lesson learned 🙁

Deadlines get people to act.  This is basic human psychology.

Most coaches run a promotion for a challenge with a single deadline, sign-up for the challenges ends at midnight kind of thing.

For this particular challenge we had two deadlines.  The first deadline was about 3 weeks out from the challenge and if someone signed up before that date they got to train for free until the challenge started.

In hindsight, I probably would have shortened this a bit so that “train free” offer was only 2 weeks out.  

Then, we had the second deadline of closing registration for the challenge.  

Having two deadlines also allows us to push our marketing a little harder.  We could push hard leading up to the first deadline, then push hard again leading to the challenge closing.  

This was the first time we had done something like this but plan to continue to use it with future challenges.

Another common double deadline is raising the price at a certain date or giving away something free for the first X people that enter.  

Get creative, utilize your resources, and I bet you can come up with something. 

Another element that I see underutilized when coaches run challenges is not giving clients the opportunity to do more and spend more.  

Here is how we are maximizing revenue for this challenge:  

Supplement discount for challenge members only.  We laid out a challenge pack that they got a steep discount or they would get 10% for the duration of the challenge.  

At our facility we have Team Training (10-25 clients per coach) and Semi-Private Training (4 clients per coach, individualized program).

Semi-private is a premium offering for us.  

We give challengers a chance to add a day of semi-private training at a discount.  They get six weeks for a the price of 4 weeks.  

This is great because many of our challengers who usually only do Team Training will continue to do SP after the challenge.  

We also give a free upgrade to everyone doing the challenge for unlimited team training.  This also helps to “justify” why we are charging for a challenge with current members.  

Other Add-Ons that we have played with in the past include...

• Extra Accountability Success Group

• Kickboxing Academy

• Yoga Academy

• Powerlifting Academy

You just have to find what fits with your resources and market.  

At FF, we didn’t really run with this idea of a distance challenge until a little over a year ago.  We had toyed with the idea and tried running it but couldn’t make it run smoothly.

And honestly, the reason was because it was way too much work.  We wanted to have a workout component, wanted it to be customized to each individual so we tried Trainerize and decided that shooting ourselves in the foot would be more enjoyable then trying to manage the mess that ensued.  

We decided we would have to charge significantly more for our challenge and weren’t ready to do that.

What did we do?

Simplify.  

We decided we didn’t need to do individualized workouts so we wrote up a workout with progressions and regressions, took pictures, put it all in a PDF and then delivered it directly through Coach Catalyst.

The experience was SOOOO much better for the client.  We had WAYYYY less questions and we didn’t have to mess with all the drop and drag nonsense of a workout builder.  

In CC we created two identical programs, one local and one distance.  Then, for the distance program we simply inserted the PDFs of the workouts and made it look fancy by indicating which workout the client was to do on each day linked at the top of each lesson.

This took all of 20 minutes to set-up.  

Simple, professional and automated.  Just the way we like it.  

Here is what it looks like.  

The distance challenge is great for 2 reasons.

One, it allows your clients to partner with a family member or friend that is not local.  After the challenge that person has the potential to be a distance client.

Two, it gives you a down-sell for people who come to your gym but find your pricing to be a “tad bit expensive” which helps you to capture a bigger audience.  For you too, it’s virtually no work as you already have the challenge set-up.  

A cool thing that we do with every challenge is host a giant post-challenge part / potluck dinner with everyone involved.

This is a great community building opportunity and clients love it.  

The process is very simple. Clients bring a healthy dish to share along with the recipe.  This allows people to try lots of different healthy, delicious dishes while only having to make one.

At the party we make a nice powerpoint congratulating winners, awarding prizes, and yapping about anything we want since we have a captive audience.  

We also take all the recipes from the potluck and put them in our ever growing cookbook along with sending out that round of recipes to the challenge participants.  

Just another little perk for joining the challenge, a free tested cookbook.

We have a systemized process of collecting testimonials.  

For one, we collect all our before and after pictures in Coach Catalyst so its organized nice.  In CC, we have a slider bar to make looking at before and afters really slick so all I have to do is take a screenshot and slap that jpeg on the website or marketing material.  

The second spot we request testimonials in our end of the challenge survey.  This survey also gives us an opportunity to improve on our challenges for the next time.

Click here for an example of an old end of challenge survey.  This will get you the basic concept of what we are looking for but each challenge I change the questions as I learn more about human psychology.   

And finally, on the last day of the challenge we make it VERY obvious that we want their help.  

This is a concept I stole from Alicia Streger.  

We post links to our Google page and our Facebook Business page so we can build up our social capital.  

Again all of this is automated within Coach Catalyst so I only need to set it up once and then the system delivers everything. 

We also ask the questions “Did you submit a testimonial” so I can quick see who did and who didn’t after a challenge and give those that didn’t a hard time and guilt them into doing it.  🙂

After a few thousand words much of this may seem like a lot, and it is, but it doesn’t feel like that because it’s all automated.

Every check-in, every lesson, every link, even the testimonials at the end.

I set it up once and then I can just coach.

I hope this got the wheels turning for your next challenge.

As always, reach out if you have questions.  

-Trevor