Ian Mullane: A Call To Arms for Brick & Mortar

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 futurefitness.co to subscribe and learn more. This show is brought to you by Level 5 Mentors, guiding entrepreneurs to achieve the highest levels of freedom in five critical areas: time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. So here's the deal: entrepreneurs and business owners undoubtedly walk a different path, which means they need a different set of metrics. The great news is that level five mentors has actually quantified it. Yep, that's right. If you go to level5mentors.com forward slash survey, you can take the freedom assessment, get your personal score, and see how you are stacking up. That's level5mentors.com forward slash survey. And don't worry, it's free. Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can't until now. Morpheus arms 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. But wait, it doesn't stop there. 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, in-app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's train with Morpheus M-O-R-P-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. Boom. We're live. Ian, welcome back to the Future of Fitness.

Hey Eric, great to be back.

It is great to have you back. And this I I had the pleasure of thank you for sending me the white paper that you put out. We'll talk about that where people can find it. I did look over it this morning and previous to this interview, and I think you and I agree on so many things. And if there's one thing that I hope that this interview can do is serve as a wake-up call, call to action, stop burying your head in the sand and see what's going on in the industry because 2020 has been one of the fastest accelerations I've ever seen in my lifetime of a particular vertical being in the fitness industry. And wow, there's just a lot to talk about, and then everyone wants to know where it's going on. And so we're gonna dive into all that. But if before we do that, just for people, you guys, I don't know what episode number it was, but it was sometime last year Ian was on as well, and we talked about his company, keepme.ai. But if you want to give us maybe a quick update, how was 2020 for you and your company? And then we'll get into the white paper stuff.

Great. First of all, thanks very much for having me, Eric. I'm I'm always delighted to come back on. And thanks for taking the time to read the paper. I'm looking forward to chatting about that. 2020 for Keep Me. Um, I think we had a realization relatively early on that obviously the year was not going to be as we had planned as most organizations. Um I have sufficient grey hair on my head that allows me to um uh take the experience that I've got and turn that into some action. So we got ourselves ready for the coming nine months, once it became apparent that the world was going to be somewhat different. And I'm pleased to report we we had a good year. That's not the most comfortable thing to say, because I'm a participant in a sector which hasn't necessarily had a good year. But if you want to, well, definitely hasn't had a good year. I I think that if you want to take that and put that in perspective in a positive, it's because the engagement that we continue to have with organizations in the sector were because most of the sector that we were talking to were very much preparing for what was going to be the next stage, and that they felt that now was an opportunity for them to invest both the time and the energy into putting into place the type of tools that Keekme had. So remind uh the listeners so Keekme was uh initially uh built on the premise that there is data within operators that when we apply our machine learning, would be able to give highly predictive understanding of the probability of a member leaving, regardless of what stage they were in their membership. And that proved very successful. We've got customers now in 13 countries. However, what we felt was during, particularly during the lockdown, which the UK went through currently in our third lockdown at the moment, we felt that it would be a good opportunity for us to build out an area which we hadn't yet engaged in, which was on the member sales. Because what we felt the industry could benefit from was not just the artificial intelligence, but the capacity to be able to manage from both pre-membership through to post-membership, and then to be able to centralize that understanding and analytics and insights and actions and engagements around one central record. Because what we found when we spoke to customers was that many of them are using disparate systems with disparate data all over the place. Work processes were falling down between their club management system, their sales system, their MailChimp and email system. So what Keep Me has now given to their customers is the capacity from both pre-sales lead capture, lead management to sales into the actual member management, member engagement, retention, non-due secondary spend increases, and even into post-management, i.e., that when they're no longer a member and giving you the opportunity to continue outreach and engagement and the intention of bringing them back in again. So, all in all, a good year. I say that with full understanding and empathy with the brethren out there that did not, but I hope that we were able to participate and we certainly provided our capabilities and skills to those that we felt we could help without ever being on a commercial footing as well.

Yeah, and you know, I want to address too as we get into the topic we're about to get into, is that I have a lot of empathy and sympathy for a lot of people within the industry as well. And having been a TV team owner for so many years, I just got lucky. I got the timing for me, we just happened to be lucky, I had sold and moved on. Um I could easily have stayed there and a situation that a lot of people are familiar with right now. So that being said, let's face forward. Tell tell us about the white paper. Why did you write it?

As you can probably gather from talking to me, I'm not short of opinions. Um and I felt that a productive use of that would be to start putting down on paper a document that could stimulate conversation around what our industry is likely to look like going forward, or potentially what it should look like going forward, taking into account the rapid increase in digitalization that happened last year. I put a conservative for uh conservative figure of about five years acceleration. I know many would put more, and taking into account the considerable change to both the I don't want to call it competitive landscape because I've got a positive view on that, but certainly there is more competition for the fitness consumer dollar, and with that in mind, I felt that it was time to put out there a potential call to arms to bricks and mortar operators to start giving thought to how that business could look like over the next 12 months to five years to be able to participate, prosper, and indeed grow within that period.

So as we move forward, I was looking through the papers, you have some bullet points, right? Maybe the best way to do it would be go through those rules that you had. So I understand that you know that people who are brick and mortar, they're gonna the game is changing. We can go through the millions and millions of dollars that are coming into investment this year, at least especially here in North America for fitness technology. You know, how the consumer behavior has been forced to change very quickly. And we're all wondering what's it gonna look like when everything reopens. But there are certain things that are here to stay. And what do you think those things are?

Well, if I can be as brash as to say that bricks and mortar operators, their demise is overstated. I think that we are going to see some considerable changes to the sector as a whole. I think there are going to be some significant casualties, particularly in the boutique level operators and indeed in the mid-market. But I think that what we need to appreciate is that the stuff that we're talking about at the moment on changes were already present in the marketplace. Mira, Tonal, Peloton, these were not new organizations. They've been operating for some time. Their business models were already proven to a great degree. They've just come through acceleration. The challenges around the actual operators and the competitive situations they found themselves in, the business models and the boutique operators, you know, they were going to find themselves challenged at some stage anyway. There has been a large increase in competition and there hasn't been as much innovation in recent times. And I think the mid-market was going to find itself challenged just because, quite frankly, it lost an identity. What we are now finding is that the consumer no longer is going to view their local club or gym as the guardian of their wellness as such. They intend and will continue to see it as a significant pillar of it, but they've had to, through necessity, find other opportunities. And through that, it's opened up a number of areas. The much talked about Peloton, the much talked about on-demand fitness, whether it be Apple Fitness or whatever, is one aspect of it. But I think it's also given the consumer a better understanding of the price points that are relative to their fitness. So I may have been comfortable paying $50, $60, $70 a month for my club. I now may feel having achieved at a significantly different price point. And maybe with some variety. Maybe I've mixed running on Strava to an Apple Fitness. And then in addition to that, I've started to bring a mindfulness practice in. So I've got a headspace in there, or I've got a car map in there. All of those factors mean that as a consumer, the probability is that when I utilize my temple of fitness, my club, it'll be for a specific purpose. And that's going to be the things which we all hope were always going to be the case: specialist expertise, specialist equipment, and then the much talked about community. Though I still think that can be oversold because I can still see quite a few surveys where people say they don't go to the gym for that purpose, they go for other purposes. I think as an operator, the first thing that needs to be understood in 2021 is that the consumer will not be looking at us as the center of their wellness pillar. They will look at us as part of that. And that means that we need to look at how we are going to continue playing a part in that overall consumer spend that each one of them will have.

Yeah, it's that's a really powerful point. And myself and uh a number of guests on this show in the past like six months, I think we've talked about the decentralization of fitness. How the the gym, the physical location is no longer the central hub. And I know we'll get into that in a little bit. But the central hub is now floating in the sky. Really, you know, it's in the cloud. And uh it's something that and now it's a consumers have a very they don't have one or two options like which gym do I go to get fit. They have they can piecemeal together what their what they want their wellness to be through numerous apps or resources or pieces of technology, and it's it's a pretty cool time for the consumer. We just gotta figure out how the coach and gym are fitted. So rule number two, you say establish your place in the ecosystem. Explain that one.

What I'm trying to suggest here is that when you look at the overall fitness or wellness ecosystem, it does incorporate a great deal of different things, as we've just said, whether it be in digital offerings, whether it be let's call it self-propelled. You know, should I now be you know um more interested in going out on my bike, whether I be doing my running, whatever else it may be. The digital offerings that come through actually being served via the phone. What I think is important for operators is to double down on what they believe the value is that they bring to this ecosystem. But what they also need to do is to understand that there has been a change in emphasis relative to the consumer themselves. As a consumer, I now carry around with me on the phone more biometric data than a sports scientist looking after an NFL team would have had maybe five years ago. I now have the capacity to be able to understand my body, my performance, and my capabilities more than at any other point. And it's increasing because not only have we got the over data which is being captured in the likes of our Apple Watch and those types of aspects, an area which I know you have an interest as well, Eric, that there are, as the tools have developed, then the capacity to increase those metrics into more professional areas, such as heart rate variability, which is a subset, has allowed organizations or sorry has allowed the consumer to get an even better idea. Your average consumer these days may be walking around with like myself, I've got an aura ring, I've got a whoop, and I've got a Garmin Watch, ridiculous. I've also got an Apple Watch and a bunch of others. And that's uh that's uh it's a discretionary spend we won't be talking to Mrs. Milan about anytime soon.

I have yeah, I I I have a uh I have a graveyard. Wearables as well. And I've landed on the Garmin in the Morphe. Garmin and Morphe is a bit more.

And I'm a big fan of my Garmin for a number of reasons, but I like my whoop. My whoop has changed my behavior more than anything else. And and it's done that because A, it's it is completely designed to be only 24 hours a day, seven days a week. B, even the battery element of it is recharged whilst it's on my wrist. But it gave me the if if you are a not if you're not a fitness professional, then being able to operate off one simple metric, i.e. the recovery metric, is a great way to start measuring the effect that behaviors have on your day and on your body. However, if you've got more of an interest, then having the capacity to measure both HRV, arresting heart rate, and then having a look at how lifestyle choices drive some of this. So I have the capacity of a number of products to be able to enter in the behaviors of the day, like for instance, did I take magnesium, did I fast today, etc. etc. And then statistically, the tools then have the capacity to understand whether they had an effect or not. My my point on rule number two is one where I'm looking through the rules myself here, and I'm wondering whether this is a valid time to do it, but I'm gonna say it is, and it and at the risk of repeating myself. We should not see operators rushing to make provision for digital workouts. It is an expensive distraction during a time where concentration on other areas of the business will be critical. No doubt cash on the balance sheet is not anywhere near as strong as it was 12 months ago, 18 months ago. So there needs to be other focus. Digital delivery is going to confuse and indeed will cost. But more importantly, it's an incredibly challenging area to engage in. There's a reason why Peloton calls itself a media company and not an exercise company, right? There's a reason why they have some of the most accomplished professionals you could possibly find from broadcast there, and that they spend hundreds of millions every year on the content. Whether it be talent management, IP management, music management, these are challenging areas. And that's before you even work out how you get your talent within your organization to consistently be able to deliver a product which is on brand. What I'm trying to encourage here is that there isn't a drive to competition with players that quite frankly live and breathe this stuff every day. What I'm trying to suggest is that we as operators, bricks and mortar operators, have had a place in the consumer psyche for decades as a place where you go to get better at fitness, improve your wellness, your health, etc. So let's double down on that aspect, but let's acknowledge that with every change that's coming around, what partnerships can we establish to leverage our position better? What elements of the consumer's new behavior around their whoop and their garment and their auras can we bring in? And I I give a I give an example, I believe, in the paper. Currently, when I go to see a personal trainer, the inferred contract, or should we say, even the non-verbal contract, will be that they will do their very best to get the best out of me over a period of time, 45 minutes an hour, whatever it may be. And the unwritten contract is that they'll do it consistently week after week without me getting bored. Because if I get bored, I'm not going back. However, when I when I turn up to my PT sessions, I'm in a variety of states. But my training does not change. My PT will maybe consider bringing it up a bit, bringing it down a bit, doing different aspects of it, maybe a little bit more concentration on functional or whatever. But that does no way takes into account this physical state that I arrive. So imagine if I turned up and I, Eric's my my PT and I walk in through the door, and Eric says, Ian, I've just been looking at your data, my friend. Yeah, Pala, you've been pushing it a little bit this weekend. I don't think sleep's been great. Recovery's not looking fantastic. Tell you what, today, what we're gonna do is we're gonna concentrate on recovery, and then we're gonna we're gonna get a little bit of stretching him, and then we'll look at form, right? We're gonna introduce a few next edges, but it's gonna be predominantly around form. Now, can I suggest that we start upping this hydration just that little bit? That's been dropping, and as you can see, the sleep has also been there as well. We did have a lesson for Friday uh or a session on Friday. If we do a slower one today, I'll move that one Friday through to Thursday. How does that change the dynamic between me and my coach? He's then my coach, he's my PT, but he's training me to the optimal because the following Thursday, when I come in, and my everything about what I am telling, not what I look, it could be a positive and happy and healthy looking fella, but I may be an absolute mess inside. It's like you're ready for a PB day, my friend, right? You're you're ready, yeah. Everything about you is dialed in. Let's nail it. Let's today push it to those levels. It is that type that will get me keep on coming back. And that data is not something which is challenging or difficult for an operator to get their hands on. If I have a relationship with a PT, I'll be more than happy to give them the access via my Apple Health, Google Fit, whatever else it may be that has that physiological data in there. And that's going to change the relationship as well. Because we can then move from using that data from that PT to how about suggestions around what classes to take this week for those group exercise guys, for instance. You know, anyone who's interested in that aspect, we can push it. It's a level of personalization which can be done at scale, but the probability is going to drive the type of behaviors that are going to help us with retention, help us to grow the business, help us with loyalty, and help us position ourselves is not just a place where you can go where there's a wide array of equipment and then this community spirit, which apparently is enough to keep me coming back again and again, regardless of the fact that we see 60% of our customers leave on an annual basis at best.

Yeah, man.

You're speaking my language, Ian. You really are. I I love all this. What I see is that there's a certain type of maybe PT or personal trainer who traditionally just counted reps and had the same program every time the person showed up, and now with this access to data and the ability to we have the ability to really rise up to play bigger role as a coach. And there's a big difference between a personal trainer and a coach. And a coach sees the big picture, is able to strategize, and really get the best results by factoring in everything, not just the three hours of the week that you get with your clients. Yeah, it's spot on.

It works. And I think you know, the what that does is it plays into the next rule we've talked about, striking a balance between physical and digital. What we need to do is to utilize digital to emphasize the skill and to emphasize the unique selling point that we as bricks and mortar operators have that digital do not. And that is that in-person, that is that community, that is that facility which has both the required equipment for the customer and the member to actually be challenged, but also for them to get away from their everyday existence into a safe space for them to work on their wellness. But you know, to try and just play that as your only card in an environment where you've got some of the biggest, smartest brands in the world that work to an innovation culture day in, day out, that can work with technology, that have got capital that the fitness industry could only ever dream about having access to, as well as talent, would just be naive. Because, and I'm as again, what I am not saying is that Apple Fitness and these guys are going to come in and close down the fitness industry. They're absolutely not. But the winners and the losers in this sector will be the ones that adapt. And there will be a large percentage of this sector that will not adapt because we've seen multiple changes over the last decade, and that still hasn't been the case. I'm still privy to conversations where people are comparatively proud at the fact that they've got a mobile offering that they can give a membership app where you can check in via Bluetooth or something along those lines. That was fine in a sector where that was viewed as innovation. The new players that have come in, they don't look at that as innovation, and they are going to turn our worlds upside down relative to it. But let me strike why I believe that's a positive. I'm speaking very bluntly here, and I'm well aware that there will be a number of people who will not like what I'm gonna just about to say. We as a sector have not seen an increase in penetration in the marketplace for years, if not even a decade, but I'm gonna say at least five years. Every year, with this statistical analysis we put out that wouldn't really pass muster on most places, we place out a number which suggests that at best we are seeing flat market penetration and mature markets, North America, Europe and Australia and New Zealand. What I believe is going to happen, and not COVID-related, but with the increase of digitization and the advent of the digital players, is that we will finally see as a sector a new step up in penetration, where the product offering is sufficient that it is going to engage a new audience that will come into the overall fitness marketplace, which will present an increased opportunity for bricks and mortar players that have established their place in the ecosystem and can provide an offering which will be complementary to the new player that's coming in because they will have a both a joint view. So I think this has got this has got upside. I don't see this as having downside, and I do think this is additive to the overall market because, quite frankly, I don't think we see some of the big players that have engaged in this marketplace choosing to do so if they hadn't looked at the potential size, and it was never going to be based on their current predictions of what we believed the market to be at. It was always going to be on multiples of 50 or 100 times that before one of these guys was going to start getting engaged and putting in the capital which we're now seeing deployed.

Yeah. Yes, to all of that. I feel like in some ways kind of talk into myself because I I agree and I'm not scared to say things that make people uncomfortable. But that is where the industry is going. And we've traditionally, and these numbers have been accepted only we only get about 20% of the market that comes to the gym at best. And that leaves a huge market piece that we just haven't figured out of touch in now we have ways to get to them. And uh that's a good thing for everybody. We just gotta figure out the best way to leverage it, and everyone's gonna have a unique way to do it, and there's a lot of ways to win here. So I think it's good news. I really do. So tell us about rule number four.

Well, I again I think this is pretty much repeated in many respects. You know, what I'm trying to suggest here is that the competition post-COVID to some degree was starting to get talk around the aggregators. I think the aggregators are gonna come out of COVID very strongly at the moment, they're having a terrible time. But the reality is that the consumer at re-entering the marketplace is going to look for more flexibility in their arrangements, they will have, as part of their plan, the possibility of maybe spending two, three, four, five, six, eight times a month in a particular facility or facilities. So I think the aggregators do play a part. My point on rising up to the competition was more of a case of let's understand that it's not necessarily the players that we believe it to be. I certainly think that in a two years we will look back, and many of the brands that we associate with leadership in our sector will still be in place. But I believe that there will be some new entrants, or there will also be some brands that were viewed as fair-to-middling performance that have attacked this as the great equaler. Because when you remove scale around site capacity, when you remove the ability to have the incredibly large membership as being the main area due to the quantity of sites you've got, and you move the relationship to the levels we're talking here, there's probably going to be organizations that are going to be able to move the price point up, and it's been a race to the bottom for a long time now. As well as that when we start to see retention moving from an industry standard of 40% up to 70%, 75% and 80%, that in itself becomes a self-fulfilling flywheel that sees growth continue and develop and enhance. And I think that we will see lifetime value of members increase considerably because the relationship is going to be deeper, more meaningful, and will play a part. You know, I am more likely to establish a relationship with a bricks and mortar organization that is one part of my wellness infrastructure. And because it's one part, I may be going between multiple parts, whether it be a digital offering, whether it be my Peloton at home or whatever, but I'm likely to stay longer because overall I've distributed rather than having one failure point. Because I think we all are aware in the industry that when P members join and then when we see them move off and no longer attendance, no member has ever said it was down to them. It's always going to be down to the availability of the facility, the classes just didn't suit them, this type of stuff. This flexibility will change. And then I guess the final point on this one would be that I do believe that the mobile phone is the ultimate consolidator in our industry. I believe now that when I enter a facility with the amount of biometric data I have on it, but I also have the capacity to get access to world-class coaches in strength and conditioning, in Pilates, in yoga, in any number of disciplines that I choose to have, whether I'm accessing it through Apple Fitness or whether I'm accessing it through the likes of the Peloton app. And then if we want to take a lesson from what these individuals have done, those organizations have done, one of the things that ties them together, on top of great content, which in a bricks and mortar environment doesn't need to be digital, that can be your star instructor that stands up in front of that class of 40 every week. But they integrate the metrics and the performance, even the gamification that gives me a further momentum and motivation to get engaged in that class. And that I think is a unique opportunity for again, we've you know just restating the obvious here, but there are lessons to be learned. You and I have both heard organizations or people say, Peloton, I have to be selling. Listen, we've had exercise bikes for 20 years, and you know what? It's at the end of the day, it's an exercise bike. Yeah, okay. So, how many exercise manufacturers, exercise bike manufacturers have got quarterly revenues of 750 million, three-quarters of a billion dollars? How many of them have got, how many exercise organizations have got three million customers with a 93% retention rate? The answer is zero. So it is time to stop looking at the digital players and assuming that they are likely to blow out, burn out, or do whatever. And I think in Peloton's case, the recent acquisitions have suggest they've got much bigger plans before. But to understand what it is about them. I've heard on a regular basis, and you probably have heard it yourself, but you're not going to get the community. You bloody well are, my friend, I can assure you. I am not the type of person you ever want to see wearing spandex inside an exercise club on a skin. God forbid anyone has to see that bar my poor wife. However, my suggestion would be internally, I do go on Peloton very regularly. And with that being the case, I am actually do have a feeling around the community aspect. I've watched, as I would do, their digital evolution over the last two years, whereby it's gone from the passion that people have to get a shout-out for the hundreds ride, the 500s ride, the thousand ride, to now it being day streaks, high-five virtuals, which you can give on the screen, hashtags. There's a multitude of things. Probably appeals more to the millennial market, but that certainly doesn't seem to be in the demographic when they do their filings around their quarterlies. So there does seem to be a very strong community spirit around the digital, and I think that could be learned. I would point anyone to wanting to question that community aspect to take a look at the engagement around social media about a Peloton compared to any one of our major brands that operate in the marketplace. I have a previous incarnation social media business I sold last year, and that analytics tool was used to lize very clearly to understand what level of engagement a brand was gaining in its community. And Peloton was totally off the charts. We had the you know the ones that were even close to Peloton, were the type of brands you would expect to, or it they would be very small boutique operators that is incredibly passionate followings as well. But when you looked at any of the broader market participants, a their social media game was at best amateur, but it was most certainly not engaging. And it certainly did not have a community that utilized it for anything more than to moan about the shower heads being broken when they last visited.

So, rule number five, Ian, reimagine the customer journey. Tell us about that.

Well, I'll give you a very quick situation now, right? So the customer journey to an operator is related to how they operate with me when I enter their premises. But I think that we can look at, and I can talk about another time, how we how you would refine that. I want to just present the type of customer journey which is entirely possible now, as of now. So Eric wakes up in the morning, the first thing that happens is that his phone gives him a prompt to remind him to hydrate at the start of the day. It then suggests to him that, based on the agenda, because it's linked into his Google Calendar, that he has the time to do a mindfulness exercise utilizing the car map. It even can suggest the time duration that this actually occurs. Eric's aware that he should do this because he is aware from his whoop wearable the actual massive impact it has had since he started to do it on his overall recovery, HRV, and sleep. Having completed those two, Eric's actually not working from home today. He's traveling into the city, he's going to have to do some aspect. Now, because he's got his whoop, his whoop has, with along with his diary, has been able to understand that he has got a recovery score of 73 today, which means he's primed to push himself. However, he's in the city. But because of the integration with an aggregator, Eric is served up as he's traveling in to the office with three suggestions of places where he could utilize ClassPass with appropriate times, taking into account his calendar, that importantly would deliver the intensity based off the published elements that come through on the schedule. Eric sees that, he confirms it, presses the button, he's booked in. 20 minutes, 30 minutes beforehand, as we all well know, Google Maps fires up and tells Eric he should leave now, taking into account conditions. He turns up, he shows the phone, he moves in, he does his work out. All of the time, all of these biometrics and these are being managed. As he comes out, he's reminded to hydrate. And because he's been utilizing the Luma nutritional tool, he's given a good understanding of what macros are needed before the end of the day. Coming up to seven o'clock, further reminder on the hydration aspect, a summary of the day, and a suggested time to go to bed so that he could have the optimal sleep to make sure that he gets up the following day in an optimal situation. That is entirely probable, possible, and able to be delivered today. There is nothing about what I have just suggested that could not be delivered. And in fact, I very openly and I've shown people, I operate in that way. I use a variety of different things to bring together my technology to give me that type of capacity. And that, what that does is it starts to build the type of fitness regime and protocols and habits that we want everyone following. Because regardless of whether they're doing it inside our site or outside of our site, people that are following that type of discipline have a higher probability of continuing with all of their physical relationships that they may have with operators because they play a part in it on this side of things. I could go into what happens on the internally on the customer journey, and I've I've made suggestions in the paper, and I hope that people have the opportunity to read it. But what I could do rather than do that is go into the final rule, which is the automation. And inside an organization, I I when we first started up, we always had to fight against this dogma that you can't use automation or lack of personalization. And it was like, okay, first and foremost, whenever we did any investigation, most organizations' view of personalization was using the member's name rather than a membership number. That wasn't quite what we expected when we were working towards utilizing automation. The second thing is, automation is done to make sure that we are consistently doing the tasks that we as humans fail to do at a sufficient quality or quantity. So there will be a number of tasks within an organization which just fall by the wayside because of priority. But when it comes to increasing sales, when it comes to increasing conversions from sales, when it comes from maintaining memberships, the vast majority of the progress that can be made is by consistently and constantly delivering what you're supposed to be doing. And in many cases, we're resource-time, particularly now in this environment, where we don't have the resources possible to be able to deliver what we would like to be able to do. And therefore, by pre-utilizing automation to do these things, we free up both the capacity to be able to do valuable engagements with humans on humans, but also to make sure that things are done on an accurate and a consistent basis. So let me finish in somewhat with an example, and this is an operational one now. I may, and this is that this is a merging of AI and machine learning and automation, the most basic ones in some respects, but I have a membership. I have a membership of, let's say, a thousand members, right? My platform looks through each one of those members, and using machine learning and AI, it can identify the ones that have the highest probability and interest in personal training. So, first and foremost, that means that a thousand people are not receiving a do you want to do personal training email because it's not relevant to everybody and can also trigger negative responses as well. Unsubscribed, it can wake up people that have been sleeping, etc. etc. So now, out of that thousand people, it identifies that currently there's 325, right? Out of those 325, it can then segment them and say, if I offer Eric five sessions at a price, Eric could probably buy 10. So I serve Eric a 10 offer. With Ian, Ian's never done it before. So I think five, he's probably gonna say no, but one, he will take it, right? And by going through with automation, you can identify the people most likely to engage with your commercial offer. But then you can segment that down to make sure that you even tailor the offer to them. Then take it one stage further. It's live, this is live understanding. Is that don't serve to Ian with the text offering a picture of a buff 23-year-old because he's well past that stage now. That ain't happening. And in fact, you could end up upsetting him. So serve with them the correct visual. So for the organization, they put an asset library in there that says that's for this age group, that's for that gender, that's for subject, that's for that subject. And the AI then matches the commercial offer to the member with the visuals and then makes sure it happens. That means 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you have got a tool which is understanding and analysing which of your members wants to engage and spend money with your organization, as well as the added retention benefits that comes from people doing that. I'm aware, in fact, you can have a look on either the Keep Me blog or even I think on theirs as well. Willows in Australia utilized this approach for the first time in December, and they had the largest increase. They're not uh they're a long-term operator, the largest one-month increase in non-JU secondary revenue ever. But they also had their highest open, they also had their highest engagement, and they also had the lowest unsubscribe. All of those are incredibly important variables when you're putting a campaign together. Selling a shitload of PT to one organization or one person is great, but if 73% of people unsubscribe because they didn't want to get it, you're in a lot of trouble. So, this type of aspect can do, and I'm not going to air it now because. Of time and that, but I could give you 25 examples where operators are now automating at scale with personalization aspects of the business which allow them to concentrate on the human aspects more themselves, but more importantly, guarantee day in, day out, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that tasks that should be done are actually happening.

You know, giving people a lot to think about on the brick and mortar side or the individual coaching, the I guess the fitness professional and the facility owner. There's a lot, there's a lot to work with here. And I think it's if I was listening to this for the first time and I was a gym owner and these ideas were new to me, I'd probably stop, rewind, and listen to the whole thing again. And uh start to take diligent notes on the things that you need to do to be successful moving into the next one to five years uh or longer. Because it's it's I can't disagree with anything you said. I can't. I think I agree with just about everything. And you know, we're a little bit dusting off a magic a magic ball and looking into the future, but really this is most of this stuff is not futuristic, it's now. Like this is happening right now.

I think we know, Eric, the one thing that we know people are not gonna say in 12 months' time is man, those digital guys, what a joke they were. Or or man, God, I wish I hadn't wasted my money on this digitization business because it really was just a flash in the pan, and it really is no more than an analog business at all. Must open another few sites, right? That's not gonna happen. We're still gonna we're gonna see massive consolidation, huge MA in our sector, definitely. But yeah, the what's going on at the moment is going to continue at pace, and the the massive acceleration we have seen, it's not gonna that's gonna decrease. It's just that I don't want to call it Pandora's box, it's negative, but the cat's out of the box now. You're not gonna pull it back in, right? So this thing's gonna run and run. And to what degree it runs, we don't know. But what we can guarantee is that any operator that decides that they're going to sit here and allow the environment to change without them trying to participate, evolve, or whatever. Companies like living organisms, if they do not evolve, they die. We've already seen that in our sector over the last six months. We're gonna see a lot more of it over the last 12 months, and we're also going to see a number of them that are gonna thrive and thrive big. This is a massive opportunity for some organizations because it's going to level them up in areas they couldn't possibly hope to have been competing with some of the more established players previously.

Yeah, well said again. Ultimately, there's a lot of change. Change is picking up pace, and you have two options. You can embrace it or you just get run over by it. And that's the way it's always been. It's just the way it is. Yeah, it's true. Where do people find you in the white paper publication you have and all the good information you have out there?

Uh the web the webpage for keep me is keep me.ai, as I think we said at the time, and uh we will that the white paper is uh due out at the start of February. Um I if I can establish with people now, it's not a quick read, as we've seen. I have opinions, and Eric has been brave enough to read, but yeah, you're well through the 30 pages of this. But what I've hoped to do here is to start a conversation, and a conversation's a two-way. My my personal email is ian at keepme.ai. I'd be delighted to engage with anybody that operates within our sector, whether it be on the vendor, whether it be in a consultant, whether it be on an operator, around what their thoughts, feelings, and ideas are, and certainly to put me right as well, because you know, these are my opinions. They are hopefully well formed, but they are certainly open to change, adaption, and evolution. So please feel free to engage with me. I'd be delighted to have an ongoing conversation as we look to make sure that everybody gets to benefit from the changes that we're gonna see.

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back on. I think we'll be having you probably on some point uh later this year as well. Just get an update and see and see what's actually taken place since this conversation. So really appreciate it. It's always a pleasure. And uh, thanks for coming back on the future of fitness.

Thanks, Eric.