Andy Peat: Attention On Data-Driven Retention

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurofitness.co to subscribe and learn more. Of course you do. Which means you need to make a change. And that is what Insight Tracker is all about. Founded by leading scientists with aging, genetic, and biometric data from MIT US at Harvard. InsightTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. So what's their secret? First, InsightTracker uses its patterned algorithms to analyze your body's data and offer you a clearer picture than you've ever had before of what's actually going on inside you. Then, Insight Tracker provides you with a concrete, science-backed action plan for living a longer, healthier life. And it tracked your progress every day, every step of the way. For a very limited time, InsightTracker is offering future fitness podcast listeners 25% off storewide. Visit InsightTracker.com slash future to get your offer code and try to InsightTracker today. But are you leveraging it? And perhaps more importantly, are you saving yourself time and making more money because of it? Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can't until now. Morpheus harms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. The Morpheus platform also provides live heart rate training for your clients that can be tracked and shown anywhere. In the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, internet messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's trained with MorpheusM-O-R-T-H-E-U-S.com. Please go check out our wonderful sponsors. And if you get value out of this show, I ask you to do three things. Please go subscribe, give us a favorable rating, and share this episode on social media or wherever you like to go chat with friends. I am your host, Eric Malzone. And once again, welcome to the future of fitness. Andy Pete, welcome to the future of fitness.

What's up? Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Yeah. You know, just due to pre-recording fodder, I'm pretty fired up for the topics that we're going to cover today. I think they're really important. I think they're really topical. And man, you got a lot of experience in the fitness industry for, you know, dare I say it, a relatively uh young guy. I just put that in comparison to myself. But let's start with that, dude. Like give us your background. How did you get to be the CPO of Lyft Brands? And yeah, give us your story.

Yeah, trust me. Sometimes I feel like I'm 33 going on 83. This and this this this industry, albeit great, can age you dramatically.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm still recovering from gym ownership five years ago.

Yeah, yeah, classic. I know the feeling. Yeah, no, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. And yeah, I always enjoy doing these types of conversations, particularly in the as I as I've started to enter into the North American side of the industry more and more. And yeah, I'll just give a a brief uh background of myself. I'm not very big on talking about myself, but um obviously in context is needed. So yeah, I've been in the fitness industry for about 15 years, I'd say now. I started off as a kid on the gym floor that had a 12-week certification and pistol training and was out, was gonna out there to help people achieve their dreams, but didn't really know why I wanted to be in the fitness industry. I just really knew that at the time it sounded a lot better than being an accountant or a lawyer or something like that. So I was like, okay, I'll do that. So I was the kid cleaning gym equipment, taking people's blood pressure when they joined and and writing up their initial programs and covering the reception desk where needed. And eventually I ended up going to work on cruise ships as a personal trainer, which ultimately is not so much personal training as more about selling and selling a lot of product, which is where I l my knack, I guess you could say, and my flavor for selling in the business side of the industry. So when I came back from cruise ships, I knew that I didn't didn't really want to be on the physical fitness side of things in terms of training people and day-to-day PT. I wanted to be more on the business side and I really did love the industry at that point. I started selling memberships, which is the the backbone of all gyms. Every gym needs members and every gym needs someone to sign members up. So after doing that for a a while and opening up a couple of clubs for some people, I then had the opportunity to be part of the team who brought the master franchise rights for Snapfitness over to Australia and New Zealand. And this was in 2009, so it was pre-24-hour gyms in the Australian and New Zealand part of the world. They were been around for about five years, six years in the US and were starting to really gain some traction. And I was unsure of the model at the time. I thought something's gonna go wrong, something's gonna happen at two o'clock in the morning when no one's around, people are just gonna steal a treadmill. I just didn't know what to think. But I was I was 21. My mentors were the ones who who you know brought the concept over and and employed me and brought me into the business to open the first one, and it was hugely successful. I then, through a stroke of miscommunication from our accountant, was sent the the profit and loss statements for the club I was running, the original Snap Fitness, and I saw for the first time what the financial side of a business actually looked like, and it was extremely lucrative. I was able to gather a couple of buddies together who had some wealthy parents. I at the time my largest asset was a $700 Toyota Corolla that my grandmother had left me.

Nice.

And they yeah, we decided to do our own one. I got given a small sweat equity stake to be the ops man, and yeah, during that sort of set me off. So from that point on to now, I we ended up growing Snap Fitness from one club through to about 280 clubs uh in Australia and New Zealand. We expanded it into Asia. We brought another brand in called Nine Round. I personally got into nine clubs myself, and by the time I was 25, I was the the CEO of Snapfits Australia and New Zealand. Then the business was acquired in 2018 by Lyft Brands, who is the parent company for Snap Fitness on Demand and owns a minority stake in in Nine Round, which is a boutique offering worldwide. I I believe you've had Shannon on the on the podcast before, who's a who's the founder of Nine Round and a great human being.

Yep, yeah, Shannon the Cannon.

Shannon the Cannon, that's it, that's right. And uh yes, uh post-that acquisition of our master franchise business, I I stayed on, I had to stay on for an extra 12 months and and wanted to anyway. And then myself and Ty Menzies, who was the CEO of the Australian business at the time, I had moved back to New Zealand at that point. We joined forces, and yeah, two and a half years later, in one pandemic, he's the global CEO of Lyft Brands, and I'm the chief product officer. So I look after all the product essentially in the club. So the technology, the equipment, the the processes that come with that, everything to what the club managers are wearing and and our partnerships as well. So yeah, it's been a bit of a ride now that I say it out loud.

Yeah, man. And to do it all, I guess, you know, once again, I'm putting this on my perspective, but to do it by the age of 33 is you uh you really stuck to a lane, man, and you wrote it out kind of all the way all the way to the top. It's uh it's really impressive. So great story. I so that's what is your role and compass now? I mean, can we dive in a little bit more? And you alluded to the technology and the products, and presume there's a lot that comes under that umbrella. Like, what do you what does a normal week look like for Andy?

Uh yeah, great question. So the role, just to put it into context, the role is a is a new role. I didn't replace someone when Ty Menzies took on the role of CEO of Lyft Brands Globally. There was a very clear missing piece to the company structure, and that was someone to look after the product. What is the product? What is the fitness element to it? What are we offering members essentially to get results? And so that's and that was a that was an area that I had started to started to show some real interest in and put my hand up for and luckily enough to get it. So a week looks like for me is yeah, it's full on. I'm currently in New Zealand at the moment due to I'm supposed to be in Minnesota at the office there, but due to COVID and some visa restrictions, it's yeah, I sit in New Zealand, which is summer, so that's nice at the same time. But it's essentially ensuring that everything that a member sees, feels and touches when they both inquire and come into the gym is a positive experience. So my my I break down gym's responsibilities to sorry, not responsibilities, break down the way a gym needs to operate are is around three pillars. And that's to get more leads, to get more sales, and then to keep more members. Those are three things that a gym needs to do to be successful. The get more leads is the marketing side of it. It's the manager out doing the outreaching, getting promotions in the community. That's not something that I look after, but I look after the minute that they have essentially inquired with the club, and that lead management starts all the way through to then becoming a loyal member. So the get more members and the keep more members part of those three pillars, that's what I look after. Now, what's encompassed in that is the products and processes to do that. So a lead management system, uh a digital experience to onboard them with, what are they doing in their first month of their membership? What's the personal training interaction? Is there a group fitness program? All the way through to what equipment are they looking at and what does the actual physical club look like? What does it smell like? That whole member experience is encompassed in my in my role. Yeah, it's a busy week to answer your question.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, so uh one of the things that we uncovered it, I think is a really important topic. And I've seen it evolve. I own gyms myself for about 10 years and saw this move. And every region's different, right? I think every part of the world, wherever you plant a gym, it's gonna be at a different level of experience and having different things going on. Like being in uh the central coast of California was a highly competitive, very evolved market. There was a lot of options for people um to go uh train in gyms or have personal trainers, or there was beach boot camps, there was large gyms, low cost, there was very high-end boutiques. There was just a million options for the consumer to get in there. And when I first started the whole gym operator thing, it was very much about what I call vanity metrics. How many clients do I have? How much revenue do I have? How big is my space? Very quickly over time, that evolved due to pain, really, from the business side of things of okay, we're looking at the wrong metrics, right? And then we started looking at the lifetime value, the average client value, retention churn. And then things starting to change. And I think that was a very I would consider a progressive market because just due to the age and and the saturation of it, we had to move quickly. And now I'm I feel like a lot of the world is starting to catch up with that market and see where it's at. So the point is marketing and sales are are given. I think a lot of people understand they have to get good at that, but retention seems to still be a mystery and a very difficult thing to do in such a competitive market. So let's dive into that, man. How do you see the the evolution of the focus on retention in your eyes?

You talk my language now. It's such a such a it's such an interesting topic, isn't it? Because I I'll make a prediction right here and now that within the next three years at Ursa Conventions, there will be more seminars and breakout sessions on retention than there are on sales. And I think that it's a natural shift for us as an industry because we're still a relatively we're still a relatively new industry. We're not we're we're not that old really. We're not like retail or anything like that. And we're still trying to learn how to use technology and how to improve efficiencies. And I think a lot of that is because a lot of the industry out there is what you call your mum and dad independent gym operators. They're not it's slowly starting to change now as as Wall Street's got involved in the fitness industry over the last 10 years. So we'll see some change. But yeah, I agree. I think that the natural supply and demand shift. So there's more gyms now than ever. There's more people using gyms now than ever, but it it's not racing upwards at the same level as the supply. So naturally, there's going to be less people for us to sign up. So we have to keep them longer. And keeping them longer is the big question because no one's nailed it. There's plenty of sales technologies out there. Most people use gym sales or something like that, and it's good for your lead management. But no one's come out and gone, I'm the number one retention tool out there. We've got my zone, which is extremely effective in particularly that group fitness environment and keeping people uh motivated and connecting people community-wise. We've got things like Keek Me AI, which is more of that sort of pro proactive prediction of people who are going to cancel and then hitting them with engagement content to try and keep them longer. But again, like that's not a mainstream offering out there that every gym in the world has. It's coming, though. And I just think that, yeah, the amount of offerings out there for retention is less, but it is starting to improve. There's a lot of startups I've seen that are AI-based, they're content heavy. And as we've moved into this digital world where you essentially gonna offer both a digital experience and a gym experience, I think that retention is going to be all about how do you motivate members both at the start of their membership and more importantly at the middle of their membership in order to stay longer. How do you get the value of the club to live outside of the four walls of the gym? And how do you combine your club with more of a holistic approach to add value? And that's more on the mental side of things and the nutritional side. I'm seeing a lot of shifting in consumer wants towards the mental side and understanding fitness and understanding nutrition. And you just look at the rise of things like Headspace and the car map, those are billion-dollar businesses, and all they do is provide meditation content. The fitness industry is going to have to adopt that sort of stuff somehow as well.

It's interesting, and I love the holistic approach. And then the challenge is this, right? Um, I talked to uh Juliet Storet just about this in a previous episode, is it seems to me, and I've said this a couple of times, sometimes I get in trouble, but I feel like the fitness industry has maybe overcomplicated things over time, maybe to make ourselves more necessary in the equation. When a large majority of people really need to move more, sleep more, uh drink more water, eat better, and that'll get them most of the way. But it's a hard thing to monetize and meditate. And somehow these apps have made money, like you said, billions of dollars off of just making people sit quietly for 10 minutes, right? It's amazing. It's amazing. I use COM. And when you look at that kind of thing, it's like you mentioned the holistic in the other hours when people are outside of the gym. How do you envision that all tying in? Is there any technology that you see is doing it really well? What's your vision for that?

Yeah, I think that there is some technology doing it well, but it's it's a chicken and egg situation, isn't it? Because you could create the world's greatest gym app that encompasses everything nutrition, fitness, mindset, community, rewards, gamification, loyalty, partnering up with different corporate corporates and brands to give discounts based on usage, essentially. Or all of that is some of the things that you know I'm working on to try and nail this retention piece. But the struggle with that is you can't do them all extremely well. And the reason Calm is such an excess successful app is all they do is meditation and they do it extremely well. They don't do fitness, they don't do nutrition, they stick inside their lane. And so as a gym, we're we're gonna be expected, I think eventually to point people in the right direction to help them sleep to better, to help them meditate, to help them move more. Because I agree with everything you just said. Like it's people do just need to do those things. They do need to move more, they need to eat more greens, they need to sleep a little bit better, and they need to drink more water. But I think that gym can can promote those simple aspects whilst um still offering treadmills and weights and group fitness because it's it it is a little bit overcomplicated for beginners, but at the same time, people get pretty maybe addicted's not the word, they get into that habit of moving around more and they start to feel a little bit better quickly. You you feel a difference in yourself before you see a difference, and they want to take that next step in a gym is a good, a good natural progression. Technology-wise, to answer your question, there there are a couple of things I've seen coming out. There's a company called Scipio that I've been working with, which is a I don't know if they've launched it or not, but they they have very interesting software that takes the data from a gym app. So steps, gym visits, calories burnt, it rewards them through a badge system, it provides them their nutrition, provides them some meditation, provides them the workouts, and then essentially all that data that's coming from your phone or smartwatch, the system will predict whether or not that member's engagement is at a risk of getting lower, and then it will automatically promote things like free personal training or put them on a seven or twelve day challenge to re-inv reinvigorate them for a short period of time to essentially try and get them re-engaged before they even have thought to themselves that they aren't into it anymore. I think that that's quite interesting and it takes the human aspect out of it because when you rely on a human to pick up the phone and call someone, they're either just not going to do it or they might not do it well, but you're leaving it up to that particular person. And in the gym world, I don't know about you, but certainly in my days of owning gyms, when you've got a 25-year-old kid on the front desk and your whole retention plan is based on how they what is their skill set on the phone, you're leaving it up to a bit of chance. So I think that's an interesting technology, but I to going back to overcomplicating it, I don't think even I don't even think a lot of clubs out there understand their churn rates. I don't think they actually know what their churn rate is and what it means to save, you know, an extra 1% of their membership base from dropping off. And that's where these management systems like the Glowfox, Mind Body, ABC Financial, like Club Ready. I actually think they need to get their reporting better. And they need to be able to easily show these clubs like what their churn rates are and what it would how much better they would be if they just saved a few more members. And that would make people understand the importance of it first and foremost. So I think that retention is we'll we'll go through. There's a a bit of an education happening now. So clubs actually having attention on retention for the first time and understanding attrition and the equations that it works with, because it's not that complicated. It's just how many people do I lose a month? How many people extra would I be if I reduce that? And then it comes a question of what is going to be my retention strategy moving forward. And I think that's a combination of onboarding members. So what happens when they first join, and what happens in their first 28 days? That's something I'm putting a real focus on with Snap, is is the first 28 days of their membership. Through technology, and I won't give away all the secret source to this, but I will explain the process that I'm using in theory is because I because I didn't make the theory up, but I've put it into practice and built a technology to support it, is that if if we can get a member to see progress in their first 28 days, and progress I define as they've hit a steps goal, they've hit a calories burnt goal, they've hit a strength goal, it can be whatever, and it can be automatic data from their phone so they don't have to do anything. If they can hit an attendance goal, so just by attending the gym, and if they can connect with a fitness professional in their first 28 days, if you do those three things on the 29th day, they should be rewarded with something for doing it. So a bit of a pat on the back, the the the tingly toothpaste, Emmett Williams would say. He says, you know, the reward that people get for doing a chore, and that's what creates a habit. And once they're in the habit of coming to the gym, you then have to have a plan after the 28 days to retain them when that dip occurs. Because the the dip in motivation will occur. And I think that the best way to do that is having milestones to hit for the member, having activities for them to partake in every once in a while. And that's the community feel. And then the end goal is normalizing the the brand within the member's life. And I think by doing that, it's that's where technology comes in, where you're providing them with content on their nutrition. You might be pointing them in the right direction with the headspace side of things, running in challenges, like building friendships at that community feel. And and there's there's I'll steal this from Emmett Williams again. This next point, there's your membership can be broken into three categories. You've got your top 20% who are fit, they're active, they love the gym, it's part of their life. As long as you keep the gym clean, as long as you say hi, they you give them some programming, something new every once in a while, they're gonna stay. Then you've got this bottom 20% who's very hard to keep. They probably had no business joining in the first place, and they're most likely going to cancel regardless of what you do. And then this big middle ground, which you have the opportunity to turn into the top 20%, and that's where your focus should be. That was a massive ramble. I'm so sorry.

No, it was so good, man. It was so good. And for listeners too, and there's a couple you can go back. I did interview Emmett from My Zone and Ian from Keep Me.ai. Those are fairly recent, so people can go back if they're wondering what it's all about. Yeah, they can listen to those. And ironically, I've been talking to Scipio a lot too. And they're gonna be coming on. Oh, have you? Yeah. And it's been it's been interesting. I really like what they're doing. Obviously, I am a huge uh proponent and nerd on fitness technology and what it's doing for the industry. And yeah, the intelligence, and I think a lot of it comes down to, and I'm sure you guys are uh actively working this all out, is we have so much data, right? We are collecting oodles and oodles of data on our clients and ourselves and our gyms and our so many metrics, but it's just a matter of, and this is where Scipio comes in and says, what do you do with all the data, right? Where are the what conclusions can you come to and how valuable are they? And what do we actually do with them when we get them? I think that's pretty how much of your time is spent on just trying to figure out what all the data is?

Quite a bit because it's a bit of it's a in our organization, it's it's a little bit of a mess at the moment. It's getting better. We're actually going through a migration. So we're we use a purpose-built management system called Fitware, and we're migrating the whole system over to Glow Fox, which is you've probably heard of their member management system out of Ireland. Great guys. Um Connor and the team are awesome.

Connor was on as well, so people can listen to that.

Yeah, you've just got everywhere. Yeah, so that that comes with its challenges from a focus standpoint. That's our biggest project that we have at the moment with Snap, is a data migration, you're migrating millions of data points over from one system to another. It sounds easy, but it's not.

It's not, it makes me nauseous thinking about it because even at a small as a boutique gym owner when we had a migration, it was like awful, man. As I can imagine at that scale.

Yeah. And the in all honesty, the Glowfox guys make it. I've been through some shocking ones in the past, and that they certainly make it a lot easier. It's a credit to them. But to answer your question, at the moment, actually, yes, a lot of my time is spent with with data, and that's trying to it's trying to understand the clubs who have the best retention, for example, what are they doing in our network versus the ones who don't. And a lot of it actually comes back to the things that aren't recorded in tangible, tangible data spreadsheets or anything like that. I'm talking about the the clean clubs, the hello goodbyes from the reception desk, the good personal training culture. Those all adds to greater retention and are all they're not head scratches, they're the basics, but yet knowing it and doing it are two different things. But in saying that, what I'm really interested in understanding is what is the length of stay of someone with a PT versus someone that isn't? What is the length of stay if someone achieves these first 28-day milestones versus someone who doesn't? I've dove into the length of stay and the average yield, so the the average membership rate per member of people who do things like our 28-day or six-week challenges or our partake in group fitness versus those who don't. And it's again, it's not, you can already guess the results, but having the data to back it up simply shows if someone spends more money at the start of their membership, so they they pay on a joining fee, or your club has a high, higher average membership rate, they end up staying longer than someone that gets some massive promo, three months free, four PT sessions. They're essentially not giving you anything until the fifth month. Those are the ones who cancel and cancel early. And again, not a rocket scientist revelation there. But having the data to back it up's been really important and building out this retention process now for Snap. Um, you know, doing some work with Cipio on what they're going to offer in the market, use mid-year in terms of a member app. And it's all backed by what I've seen work through data rather than just gut feel.

And that's I think that's the age we're in, man. I think just that whole conversation of there's so many people have maybe been on around the industry for a long time, and they'll say stuff like what's you can't be how like so Morpheus, I'm very bullish on in a recovery management system for clients and coaches, where we we can actually tell, we can have insights into the autonomic system about how you're actually recovering. And a lot of old older school coaches will say things like, I just ask them how they feel. And okay, cool. Good luck with that. We'll see, we'll see how that turns out. Because the fact of the matter is like the consumers are demanding more and more of us as trainers and coaches, which is a huge opportunity. We can really become a very professional industry because we have more tools. Ten years ago, or even six years ago, or five years ago, I would say that I started to hear clients say, Hey, what do I do with all this Fitbit data? Or and now, if you don't have a good answer for that nowadays, there you're not going to be seen as professional as you could be. And I think that's a big thing. And I think have getting past this, this is a relationship-based business, and it is. But we have so much more to back it up to make the relationships even better. And we can't ignore all the data now. It's just too, it's the elephant in the room.

I think it's also the aggregating several data points over just having one. So fit, for example, is a good one, right? You've got you wear a watch and it tells you your steps and your sleep patterns and all that sort of stuff, which is cool. It doesn't, it doesn't tell you the amount of times you've been to the gym or anything that happens within the gym on a non-step or cardio-based manner. And I think that a good place to start with gym apps or gym technology is taking data from, say, a Fitbit, from the door access system, maybe from their cardio or strength machines at the same time, from their MyZone, and pulling it into one centralized place that that that I don't know, gives them a score or gives them a badge or reward. Because I think that's going to be more important. One thing that's not going away is is wearable tech and and data in general when it comes to health and fitness. In fact, it's getting more into the health side as well as the fitness side, particularly through Apple and places, things like Amazon Halo. And gyms need to be able to understand that data and they need to be able to understand how they can be relevant with that data at the same time, whether it be using Amazon Halo wristband, telling people to measure something that they're doing in the gym through it. Like that it's it's gonna be part of our society. And yeah, technology companies and fit in the fitness industry soon will need to be able to really simplify and make and also make it fun, make the data fun for both consumers and gym, particularly independent gyms that don't have the infrastructure, yeah, to be able to understand, digest, and make relevant.

And that's it, right? It's the okay, now what? Yeah, all this data. And that's always the question that the consumer or even the coach asks. Okay, cool. Now I know all this, but now what do I do with it? And it's uh, yeah, I think companies are looking to solve that or are gonna be really successful. And Morpheus, obviously, which I mentioned with Joel Jameson and what they're doing, and then Insight Tracker, which is a uh a sponsor of this show, and how they're taking all this information now, you know they're gonna make it available to the fitness and health coach and make them look more intelligent and knowledgeable and get better insights. I think that's a huge thing, too, is how do you arm the coach and the gym owner to look really good? And ultimately you can do that and everybody wins.

Yeah.

Do you do you think that people do you think that members are wanting to not only use the data then but be rewarded for it somehow? Do you think that tangible rewards for for hitting metrics is is going to be applied in the future?

First of all, I love that you're asking me questions. I love it. It's always great. I do. I I think having some sort of gamification and seeing and and people starting to slowly understand, like once they get to a couple milestones of why this is important. Beginning buy-in, okay, why is A plus hours of sleep so important to you? And then how do we start to gamify it? And then you start to see the rewards not only externally, but maybe just like, hey, you did like calm in in mind space, right? Mindspace build building. So you made a streak. Congratulations, you did 10 days in a row. How do you feel? And you're probably almost always going to feel better. So you start to show people the rewards, not only externally, internally how they feel. I think it's really strong. And I like what you're going with. Like maybe we need, and everybody can have their own different definition of it, but like one kind of singular fitness score that people can see and they can see it go up and down. With Insight Tracker, they have this really cool thing they started called inner age. So, like, how if I'm a 44 male, what's my internal age? Like, how old is my is my body like biologically? I thought that was a really cool match. Like, as soon as I got it, I'm like, oh, cool. I'm I'm actually a couple years younger, but now I want to be 10 years younger. How do I do that? So I think there's a lot of really cool ways to do that and get the the consumer way on board. It's gonna be interesting.

Yeah, I know yeah, e eGym do something similar with their bio age via their their app as well. And yeah, things like that is what it does is it gets people curious, particularly the beginners into fitness. Like they you can't overload them with too much because they just won't continue it long, particularly at the start of the membership. You have to ease them into the habit of coming to the gym. And something like a bioage is a good way. It's kind of it might be somewhat gimmicky in terms of the presentation of it, but it's interesting and curiosity sometimes is is enough to get someone to continue to come back for the f enough times in the first couple of months to form that crucial habit. Once they're in the habit, it's all about being prepared for that middle drop in motivation that will come at some point. And that's where most people leave, is when they're not re-engaged in the middle part of their membership, when that first drop in motivation comes. They they the club just has no idea that A, that's where the member is, and B, if they do, they're like I said, they've got that 25-year-old kid on the front desk rigging them up, trying to re-engage them. And yeah, it's just not it's just not going to work anymore.

So yeah, that's a really interesting observation. It is that middle piece, right? To get people off the couch, they obviously come in motivated just to sign up and write a check and get started. There's a certain amount of motivation that gets them through the door, but then sustaining it over time. I never here's an interesting observation I have. When I packaged up my businesses to sell, and I didn't really track these metrics until the very end, but I'm glad I did. I wish I'd done it earlier, but I'm glad I did eventually. I found out that if one of my clients, uh if my clients stayed for over six months, there was a 50% chance that they would stay for over three years. Nice. And that was a month, and that was really, and especially for people who own boutique gyms and you want to sell it one day. Know that metric.

Yeah, that's value right there. That's a that's great for a prospective buyer to know.

Yeah, and it was it worked, right? It gave the the buyer a lot of confidence in moving forward. So that was hugely beneficial.

Yeah.

Before I run out of time with you, Andy, I want to address something that we had talked about before too. And today, let's see, today's recording is March 9th, 2021. The lockdowns are lifting. And where do you think one year from now, just to give us a time stamp, uh with all the connected fitness and home fitness versus there's the constant conversation chat about are people gonna go back to the gym? Um I think you and I agree on, but maybe explain what's your thought process and that and where do you stand on that?

Sorry, where do I stand in the area of like yeah?

Yeah, because during the pandemic, everyone invested in home fitness and people started digital fitness, and now everyone questions like, are droves of people gonna come back to the gym, or is home fitness here to stay in digital fitness is gonna take over? Where what's your thoughts on that?

Yeah, it's it's a great question, and you you see so many different opinions on it, don't you? And for the listeners out there, just remember that everyone's comment on the future is an opinion because no one has a crystal ball. So just remember that because sometimes I think we get we get lost in expert advice and they they don't know either. It's just that they maybe have a more educated opinion than others. My opinion would be I I personally don't believe that home workouts are going to be as big as what people may think that they are. I don't believe that this whole theory of the pandemics let everyone know that they can work out from home. Why do they need a gym? I don't think that's a thing. I personally don't. You cannot replace the motivation that comes and the benefits that come with having having a gym that you go to because A, you've got to get in the car and physically go. It's a lot, it's a lot more of a disciplined effort towards your health and fitness than knowing that you've got a treatment downstairs. Because we've seen from the 90s when the retail fitness boom happened, that they don't end up being used that often. And the same thing's gonna happen here, in my opinion. So I think that anyone coming out of a lockdown should see a rise in in memberships. I think that there's a bit that there's disposable income that's not been spent in the last 12 months with holidays and in that normal sort of uh expense line that that we as humans are used on a yearly basis with holidays and going to see our in-laws and families and things like that. We just haven't been able to do that. I would hope that people have got outside and walked around, they've done some sort of home fitness, they've signed up to Apple Fitness Plus or Fitness on Demand or one of these things, and they've got a taste for it, but they want more. And that more is the gym, the more is the being able to max out on the weights or use a cross-trainer and a treadmill or not just a treadmill at home. Gyms are here to stay. However, I think that the expectation now is that gyms have to have some sort of digital experience that goes with it. I think that you're going to have to offer something that can cater for home in case there is more lockdowns. We've got another maybe nine to 12 months of this before everyone's all vaccinated. And having a home offering is not a bad idea, whether it be on-demand classes or whether it just be home workouts. But even more important than that, those added value points of content to live at home with your members in the line of nutrition, in the line of mindset side of things. And I think as well, the gamification around movement in general and using different data points through a digital experience is going to be really important for your attention. Because unless you're a gym that has 200 members and you can service every single one of them extremely high, it's extremely hard to talk to everyone all the time. So you can do that via technology. The brand can live with the member outside the four walls of the gym. Like imagine if you uh were out walking the dog and your phone vibrated and you you pulled it out and the gym is giving you a congratulations thumbs up because you've you've just hit a hundred thousand steps in the last week or something like that. But it's coming from the gym, it's not coming from Apple or Google Health. That that type of constant recognition and pat on the back, both in and outside the gym, is what will build brand loyalty. And it says to the member, hey, I'm here to support you both at home, in your kitchen, when you're outside walking around, and all the equipment that we have is going to add to that. And just remember that's the biggest difference between us and these consumer-facing fitness apps out there, is we have a full gym to all the equipment, we've done the fit out, we offer programming classes. Any consumer app still requires the person to do the workout at home. Uh, with us, and well, I also mean the fitness industry, moving into this digital age, we'll be able to offer a programming-based experience the same as the consumer app, but you get a massive gym with it. How are they going to compete with that? So that's what I personally think. Gyms aren't going anywhere, but a digital experience with your membership will become and should be now a bit of a norm. And that that will allow the gym to get the data that's needed to then build out their attention strategies. You have to get that data from somewhere, and technology is where it comes from. Everyone has a smartphone and everyone works out with either a smartphone or watch on them. So it's an easy, it's low-hanging fruit to be able to get that data. And you'll see more technologies like Scipio and and whatnot come out that allow you to actually do something with that data.

Awesome. Yeah, man, I agree. I think it's great. Andy, I really appreciate your time. I want to respect it too as we bump up on the hours. If people want to get a hold of you or find out more about you and what you do, where do you send them?

Normally just LinkedIn. Look up Andy Pete and Chief Product Officer for Lyft Brands, is probably the go-to. So yeah, and happy to uh I'd love to connect with anyone who wants to connect and talk retention. And yeah, particularly very interested in any supplier out there who has any sort of new innovative softwares or processes, in particular the process to match the software. I find that there's a lot of tech out there, but no one has the the implementation plan. And that's where things fail. Yeah, appreciate being on this on the show. It's been fun.

Yeah, man. It's been a ton of fun. I really appreciate it. Ladies and gentlemen, Andy Pete.

Thank you. Enjoy, thank you.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This was your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Futurist Minutes. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes, and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify, Catbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me, simply go to the feature of fitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I'd love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Falzone, and this is the feature of fitness. Have a great day.