The FitHive - Jacob Hutton

Like what I wanted to get across to people is like it's not that hard to do this. It's just like you just have to sit down and deal with the pain to figure it out. Once you figure it out, you're gonna say, oh wow, I can do this. Like I can definitely do this on my own. And it's gonna give you something that you can use in your gym forever to constantly generate leads.

Hey, what's up, fitness fans? Welcome back to the future fitness podcast and interview series. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and this is episode number 140. I talked to Jacob Hutton. So, Jacob, uh say about it, man. The guy does a lot of stuff. He's a great athlete, number one, uh coming out of college into CrossFit, um, has excelled in uh basically all areas of athletic endeavors that he's pursued. Um, he's also the uh co-owner, I believe, of Fitness Culture. Um he is one of the founders of Gym Builder, uh, which is a lead generation system for gyms. Uh, and now he's developing in the middle of uh knee deep developing FitHive, which is a one-stop solution for CRMs, marketing, uh, and a bunch of other automations for gym owners. And it's it was a cool conversation and just having a unique background and the world he comes from and having done so many things um within the industry. It was a lot of fun. So I think you'll get a lot of value out of it. Jacob's super nice guy and uh really easy to talk to. And uh yeah, it was a lot of fun. So um, this episode is sponsored by elitegyminsiders.com. So it is a Slack community that uh I help manage and develop, and it's awesome. So, what do you get? Well, if you are a gym owner or a fitness professional fitness professional in general, and you want to get actual networking community, not just like a Facebook group that gets you sucked into the vortex of uh cat videos and whatnot, then you want to check it out. Uh, Slack is a little bit different. Um, a lot of the BS is removed. It's just all about communication, networking, and sharing. And uh you can go to EliteGymInsiders.com, fill out the application, and then uh if it goes well, then you're in. We have about 400 people in that group now, and we are starting to offer special deals and uh discounts for people just in the group. You don't have to pay for anything, you just join the group and you get these deals, so why not? And plus, you get to be connected with some of the best minds in the industry. Not a bad deal, right? So go to EliteGymInsiders.com, check it out. And without further ado, this is episode number 140 with Jacob Hutton of FitHive. Enjoy the show. All right, and we're live. Jacob Hutton, welcome, man. Thanks, good to be here. Yeah, great to have you. And uh, you know, people who uh maybe watching the YouTube uh version of this, you'll probably see wow, like if Jacob and I are walking down the street together, people probably think we're twins. Um, you know, just due to our size and our build. We're not related at all.

We get confused with brothers all the time.

Yeah, all the time.

Uh Jacob, man, such a good guy. Uh, really enjoy our conversation. I'm really excited to highlight you because you you man, I mean, talk about like someone who is um you know really in it for the right reasons, but you you've tested a lot of waters and entrepreneurship in this industry. You've um you've done a lot of things, and I think uh you know it's it's inspiration. It's gonna people are gonna learn a lot probably from your trials and tribulations and wins, right? So let's let's start off, just kind of give us your background, give us a little bit of your story.

All right, so try to make it as quick as possible because it's kind of a weird one, like you were saying. So uh started out, I was a college athlete. Once I was done, became a college strength and conditioning coach.

And what did you play?

I played football. I played linebacker at Utah State University. Right on. So after I was done there, um, I was the assistant strength coach at Southern Utah University, which is right up the road from me in Cedar City. Um and while I was there, I was kind of getting into powerlifting, bodybuilding, didn't know what to do because CrossFit never crossed my mind. I was like a CrossFit hater at the time, you know, one of those guys. Anyway, then we uh but my the head strength coach's wife was on the Ute team that had won the games the first time they won, right? So the on the back-to-back win teams anyway, a long time ago. I don't know if you remember, but so Ute won.

And anyway were you on? Tommy?

Tommy Hackenbrook?

She was, yes.

And then I was, they won twice, year off, then I came back on their team where we took third. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that the first year, um I kind of got exposed through them, and then another guy on their team named Mike Cashew, who owns Group Strength and is with WAG now. Do you know Mike at all? No, I don't. Okay, so Mike, anyway, Mike came down as a graduate assistant strength coach, and me and him became like best friends. And one time he was basically just like, hey, if I'm telling you, if you just do the open, you're gonna you're gonna qualify for regionals and you're gonna do pretty good, you know. And so I he convinced me to do it. It was a lot of fun, did the open, went to regionals, did all right, placed like top seven at regionals, and then I just started doing CrossFit. And so it kind of turned my path from being a college strength coach into I really enjoyed CrossFit, and it gave me it turned my path from this is what I always tell people in college strength and conditioning, because it's really fun to work with athletes, don't get me wrong, but you're working with kids that in the weight room they have to be there, they love the sport, but they have to come train, right? And so you have the 30% that don't want to be there every day, the 30% that just love the weight room, and every day is just swinging that middle 40 to try to get them to loving it, you know, and to bring the rest of the group up. So it's like there's a lot of cheerleading involved and things like that. And then I started helping out it across the gym and just helping out regular clients, you know. And I was really, I've always been really into movement and helping people move right and being structurally balanced, and I was actually able to use those principles and help people that were maybe like sitting in an office all the time just feel better when they work out, which is I really enjoyed that. And so once I saw that and I was able to do that, and I was like, man, this is a lot of fun. Um, I don't kind of want to get into the CrossFit space. And so um that kind of started my journey into CrossFit. I started competing. I ended up opening a gym in North Salt Lake at one point, and then we started running six-week challenges, and then we started doing it for other gyms with me and a few guys, and started gym builder, which was a six-week, which is a six-week challenge marketing company still. So we run six-week challenges for people and do some other marketing stuff as well. Um, and then that has now turned into FitHive, which is a gym management platform where we're kind of trying to blend all the stuff that I've been doing in the past um into one platform. But on the way, along the way, like I was a part of helping Mike start Brute Strength. And then during that, I met Steve Cook and we started doing a program with him. And now I have an app with Steve where we do fitness programs for a bunch of people um just all over. You know, a lot of it's primarily his following, but we're trying to build a brand just around fitness culture, which is mine and Steve's brand together, which is the fitness app, and then our gym down here at St. George. Got it. So I don't know. That was kind of a lot.

Yeah, a lot in there. Let's uh let's unpack some of that. So um first of all, what what like how big are you? What how much how tall are you? How much do you weigh?

Um right now I'm like six foot, two thirty-five.

And when you're competing at like a regional level in CrossFit home. Okay, so yeah, it's a pretty funny story.

So my first CrossFit games ever, um, I was pretty arrogant, you know, like because I was able just to like hop in and do things, you know, like, oh, this is easy. So some of the events, I was 245 at the time. Wow.

For people who don't know CrossFit, that's humongous.

Yeah, I was big for CrossFit. So I went in there and I practiced some muscle ups, but I wasn't very good at it, you know. And like I would jump up, fall script, and then it was like stripped over. And anyway, there were a couple events where I was like, oh, this isn't gonna be that bad. And I took like almost dead last in the muscle up event, and then there was a rope time event where I literally practiced climbing a rope maybe like twice. And I was like, oh, this is pretty easy. And that that event was like, oh, it's not so easy. Like I literally from the top, my feet slipped out on one rep, and I just rub burned inside of my face and just fell to the ground.

Brutal. Yeah. So yeah, so you're a big boy for crossfitter. I mean, you look at like you know, the top crossfitters out there, and they're what, like maybe five, six, buck eighty is kind of like the average, you know, for for podium.

Oh, yeah, oh yeah.

Exactly.

You know, I'm curious too. So you know, you start working with, you know, at some point you start working with more general population and not athletes, right? Uh with your training. Um how do people relate to you? So on your size and and stature, like, you know, you you look the part, you look like an athlete, right? Um, do you do you find people find you unrelatable in that way, or do you find it easier for to relate to people, or how do you how do you do that?

Um, for me, and this is what I always tell our coaches, like you gotta have like one of a few different things. You have to be a really great personality if you want people to stay in like you, or you have to know know yourself and be able to help them every day when they come in. So I don't know if people necessarily relate to me, but I try to know as much as possible, and I always try to fix something on them every time they come in. And so that's kind of how I found success when I was coaching people is I would like I like I was saying, I loved helping people with movement. So that's the first thing that I would do. I would try to overcoach them, correct their movement, and always have something to fix. And if it worked, then obviously I don't know about if I had if I was relatable, but we became friends and it helped them, and so they wanted to come back. So that's kind of how I overcome the being non-relatable. I definitely have resting bitch face constantly, and people always tell me that. If I'm not smiling, I just look like a rude person, and I'm kind of intimidating. So I have to try to get out of my comfort zone, smile a lot, and try to help them like fix their movements. So that's basically that was always what I was trying to do.

But you're a pretty introverted guy.

Um, yeah. Yeah. Just naturally I am. I force myself to be extroverted when I'm around when I get in those situations. But like I catch myself a lot, I just think I'm thinking about stuff so much that I don't think I'm rude, but I do things that I'll walk by somebody and just be thinking, and and maybe not, I'll be like, hey, but I won't be engaging. And so I have to force myself to be extroverted.

Yeah, yeah. It's not naturally that way. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, man. Um, well, yeah, no wonder you think a lot, because you got like four different businesses. So I probably stressed out a lot, you know, thinking about it. Um so let's let's break down some of your business, man. Let's um you know, gym builder and the six-week challenge, when did you guys start that?

That's like about three years ago now. I mean, really how that did start was the first challenge that I ever ran at my gym in North Salt Lake, I I ran with New Yu. And it did really well. And I kind of had some partners at the time that were successful business guys, and they're like, hey, I mean, they were getting when they saw us like paying out, you know, they're like, you need to you need to figure out how to do this on your own because we're not gonna we're not gonna let you just pay someone else to do this, you know, and like we know how to run Facebook ads. And so I had a buddy that was a marketing guy, and we just kind of started putting it together, and that's kind of how it started. So we we ran a challenge at my gym. One of my buddies from my hometown, I got to talking with him, and he wanted to run one, so we helped them out running one, and then from there, kind of just like he told someone else, they told someone else, and then we kind of just started helping people out. So that's how that started, and it was about 2019, yeah, 2016. Because that year I had it was called Rockwell CrossFit. So I was partners with a guy that or with a company called Rockwell Watches, and uh we took a team to the games. I don't know, no one knows that, but we didn't do that great.

Yeah, it's it's interesting, right? The the six-week challenge format and and the lead generation that um is produced has been um undeniable, you know. Yeah, uh how do you see that? Um let me ask you, I here's an interesting question because uh when you look at like the overall strategy of a gym, right? To to build membership, retain membership, like how do you uh how do you think a six-week challenge should be properly utilized? Because I know a lot of people will lean just on that. Okay, so I mean this is exactly why we created FedHat.

Okay. So we are working with all these clients, especially in the beginning, getting some people 500 leads in two weeks, and they get their yeah, it was it was insane. Yeah, yeah, it was insane. I mean, we still it still works that way with some gyms, but I mean now it's closer to probably even like 300 leads for people, right? Um signing up 20 to 50 people, and then that's all they focus on, even though we give them the leads, they're not doing anything with it. And so, like right off the bat, we noticed that people weren't doing anything, anything on that end, and we wanted to develop a system where we could run the challenge directly into their gym management system and then automate follow-ups or like a check-in system with all the extra leads that are coming into their system, and that's really how you're gonna have to use a six-week challenge to actually turn it into something that's gonna work for a long period of time. Obviously, those 50 people that you got to sign up, you're gonna do everything you can to get them to stay on long term. But following up with the leads and getting them in the gym, um, I mean, that's how we use it to be successful right now. So, like even with my gym that I have right now, we're testing a free just two-week challenge because we have a little bit, we have a different gym membership model since we have the fitness culture app. And I mean, actually, FitHive makes it so that every gym can have essentially the fitness culture app for their gym. And so we use our app to run the gym right now. So, like everyone in our gym, we're less expensive than a group training facility, but we're more expensive than your VASA or I guess Gold's gym. Everyone can relate to Gold's Gym, your Gold's Gym down the street. And so for us, most people are on a program because it is more expensive, and we're running two-week challenges for people that are hey, you're a beginner, it's gonna be completely free, and then we get them to sign up after, and we have a coach on the floor that can help them with their program, you know. So we're still using the challenge model to push the leads in the door, and then we follow up with all the leads that come through, and that's how we're like maintaining our our turnover rate, despite getting more people in the door using challenges. Um it's working so it's working really well so far.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So I and that's that's a big part of it. You know, when I was running challenges, um I think it was like 2014, 2015 with New You. And uh you know, I would get X amount of signups, which was great. I mean, the first time I think I got like 40 signups for a challenge, which is awesome. I mean, um, you know, nothing was that effective before. Uh but I I was excited to get, you know, out of let's say we close 40, I don't know, these numbers I'm I'm making these up now, I can't remember exactly. But we got like the first time I did, I got like 240 leads, right? In a matter of a week. I was like, okay, you gotta shut this thing off. This is crazy. Right. And uh um to me, it was I just filled on my email list. And that's that was the most important thing to me. It was like, okay, now I have an email list, I know how to nurture and it turned into kind of a golden goose, right? Because you know, if I ever run an external program, I would hit up that list. I had it somewhat segmented, and you know, all this stuff sounds like to most of you like, oh, it sounds like a lot of work. It's really not. Like it's not that complicated to set up a segmented email list, it'll take you like an hour, tops, right? And then maybe, you know, just nurturing it properly over time um is a big factor. But I think people look at that, you know, the challenge format as like the that's it, right? Well, if we if we get 300 leads and we sign up, you know, 50, I don't know what kind of closure you see, that's it. That's all I need to do. But no, that's you're missing out on on the gold, which is all the other people didn't sign up immediately. And I know uh so dive into that like a little bit about how fit hive solves that problem. Like, how do you guys help the nurturing? How do you guys help effectively um you know make the most of of leads that you can from you know not being from not actually being inside the gym, right?

Yeah, so I mean the way that we have set up is that you can run the entire campaign within your hive. So there's landing page builder in there, there's form builders, appointment scheduling, um, automated text from your appointments, and then also drip campaigns, right? And so there's a tagging system so you can tag people when they come in, just like your standard things that you would need for any software to run marketing campaign, right? It's all on just one system. And so when the leads come in, they're gonna come into your system in fit hype, you can tag them. Um, and then it's basically just a follow-up system. When I mean, obviously, you're gonna have the people that book and show up. If they don't show, there's a no-show system, it's the automated text to get them back in. Um, but let's just say all the people that we're talking about, all the people that don't actually schedule or come in, right? But all those like say extra 250 leads that didn't schedule an appointment and aren't responding. So um basically with Fed, we I mean we just throw them in a drip campaign, right? Kind of like what you're saying. Segment the email list through tags, tag them as whatever type of lead they are, and then put them through a drip flow, and we also do a lot of automated text things where there's also a two-way text system in there, so we can personally reach out to the to the to the people and have more of a personal touch instead of just always hitting them with an automation. And then right now we're building a follow-up system, which we don't have done yet, just to alert gym owners, because we're kind of that's kind of like the problem we're seeing now is it needs to be easier, it always needs to be easier, right, for people to do stuff, and so it's kind of an alert system, like hey, this person hasn't been followed up with in the last week, like follow back up, you know what I mean? And so just within the system, you can go over, text them, follow up, check it, and then move forward. And so it's really just automating your follow-ups just within one system. The problem that we were having before was people just didn't really have a good way to do that automatically, and we'd send them the leads in a spreadsheet and they didn't know what to do with them. And so just by having it, having all the leads in the system, being able to throw them in a drip campaign or a text campaign, and then also being able to personally follow up with them and text them within the system. We're hoping it's gonna make it a lot easier. We don't have a ton of gyms on right now, but our goal is to build a system that just makes it a lot easier. And it's exactly what you said that that we kind of realized when we started working with gyms, because we it's not that hard to set up a marketing campaign like this, right? It really isn't. It's just the initial work is hard. There's a lot of hours, you have to figure out a software, you have to figure out multiple softwares, you have to figure out a landing page builder, you have and like you have to connect to a form that connects to a different scheduler, that sends a text, that you'll have to send an email, and all these things have to connect, right? And so figuring out how to do all that is just a nightmare, but once you do it, it's like super easy to run these campaigns and get them going. And so our goal was to basically kind of create a click funnels type thing inside of your gym management software where people wouldn't have to figure it out at all. It's already figured out. It's basically one of these things where you just need to know how to connect a Facebook ad to your landing pages and potentially retarget based off landing page views, your video views to get people back through the funnel. And so, yeah, that was like we just know yeah, the pain point was, I guess what I'm trying like what I wanted to get across to people is like it's not that hard to do this. It's just like you just have to sit down and deal with the pain to figure it out. But once you figure it out, you're gonna say, oh wow, I can do this, like I can definitely do this on my own. And it's gonna give you something that you can use in your gym forever to constantly generate leads. Not even from a six-week challenge, just marketing in general, knowing how to knowing how to create a campaign to bring people in, you know. And we know we know people aren't always gonna want to do that because the Facebook ad side is a little bit more technical as far as depending on how deep you want to get into retargeting out video views or landing page views or different pages and what content you're gonna hit them with. Um so our goal is to create an academy to show people everything that we've tested in our gym and so they can try to create it themselves.

Um, and then if not, hopefully they'll have stuff through Gym Builder to help run their campaigns, you know. So that academy is within FitHive. Is that right?

Yeah, so that's one thing that's not built yet either, but within the it's finally built, and so now we're gonna try to start putting in the educational pieces into FitHive just to teach people how to use basically how to run Facebook ads. Because I know that a lot of people will probably want to, like some people will probably want us to run them, but I want to be able to, if people don't want that, just to teach them how to do it on their own, you know.

Yeah. I think the challenge with a lot of gym owners, um, you know, especially the owner operators, is that they want all this stuff, uh, but they want it done for you, but they can't afford the done for you solution, right? Um, which is you know an issue. And that's yeah, I think it's a pretty fair, fair statement. But it there is a lot, right? Like you gotta understand Facebook ads and and how that whole thing works, um, how to create the ads and imagery and the videos. Um you have to have, you know, something like lead pages for the actual um you know, sales pages, and and then you gotta have an acute. Software, you know, to do the scheduling, and then you gotta have a type form type thing for you know, and people are probably listening to me like F that.

Exactly. Instantly we just noticed, like, it's almost this is what I what I used to tell people. It's like when someone, like if my accountant was trying to explain to me how he's doing his job, or just want to be like, no, no, just do it, just do it.

Right, yeah, exactly.

Like when we try to explain to people, they'd be like, nah, I don't care, just do it. Like, I don't want to hear about it. It's like, yeah, well, I mean, you could probably do this yourself. Like, nope, just do it. Like, you just do it. I'll pay you, you do it. And so that's kind of how it is. And so we're trying to make it so it's even that much easier. So hopefully people want to kind of do it themselves a little bit, you know.

Yeah. But it's not, you know, it's not. It's it's kind of um, once you get all the pieces in play and you you know, um, you know, I built out my f my own after doing you, I built out my own campaigns too, but it was for like, you know, um more personal training, high-ticket items. Yeah. And uh, you know, it worked well. Um what kind of offers do you guys when in like gym builder? What what what kind of offer do you guys send out there? Or is that uh secret sauce?

What do you mean?

Uh when when like you're sending out ads, right?

Like Oh yeah, the biggest thing, the thing that works the best, honestly, is just creating scarcity by saying, Hey, we're in a challenge, we only need this many people, and it's basically just one of those things. Scarcity. They have to apply to get apply to get into the challenge, and that always helps people get into. But we don't do free offers, if that's what you're wondering. Like we don't we don't like the free model because in my mind it just makes the gym owner look bad. Like there's so many complaints and they get bad Google reviews. When you tell, I guess I guess I gotta, if I say what the free model is, like there's some people that will run a challenge to say, oh, free six-week challenge, you know, and let people go all the way through thinking it's free, show up for an appointment, and then all of a sudden you tell them that oh, it's only free if you lose 4% of your body fat in the next six weeks or something crazy like that. And yeah, like so we we've never done that, and we're not going to, and we're more up front, but it's just one of those things where it's kind of we create inclusivity like anyone can do it, and also like scarcity, we're only gonna be opening up to this many people, and that for us has worked since we started, you know. We just we refresh obviously we're refreshing what we're doing, the copy, the the the ad, the ads that we're using, but other than that, like the model hasn't really changed a lot for the six-week challenges that we're doing.

Yeah. Well, it doesn't need to. The only thing is it just can't be overused, like you can't use it all with like in a market, right? Because it'll drive people crazy and then you'll end up yeah. Here in St.

George, there's like a guy down the street that I think he started working with gym launch, so like he kind of learned how to run his own campaigns. And he would run them on like every every right when you would get done within the news, he'd launch again. I swear he ran he ran like 10 challenges within like a few months of opening, and I was like, dude, you gotta stop doing this. Like, no one's ever gonna sign up for a challenge again.

Yeah. It's sports earth. Like you just can't do it, right? There's you you can't do it that way. And um, you know, it's interesting. I mean, and you know people uh talk about gym launch and and what they're doing and seem seem to refrain from using the name, but I don't I don't care. Um I don't like what they're doing, right? I don't I don't I don't think it's good for the industry, I don't think it's good for gym owners. Um I think it's predatory. And uh, you know, the gym launch people want to come and talk to me about it. Let's do it. We'll do it right here.

Um but I just yeah it is.

Um and uh, you know, I had some coaches who started that like that, and that's been a here's the thing none of it is an original idea. None of it. This whole thing started, you know, that whole concept started years and years ago, decades almost. And uh he's just taking ideas uh that pre-existed, you know, just like very few original ideas in fitness in general. Um repackaged it, used it, and uh the best probato is now he's telling everyone that um you know you have to switch to a hybrid model because the the group class model is dead. Uh no, it is not. Like not at all. Not at all. It's better than ever, right? Look at F 45. Yeah, look at F-45. Barry's boot camp. Should I keep going? Like there's just there's all of them. Like every single people love group classes, and I don't think that's changing anytime soon. It's really just kind of, I think it's just starting to get um, maybe it's getting close to a peak, but it's far from truth that that's dead. So if people are listening and they're like, oh yeah, maybe he's right, maybe that the group class model is it. No, it's not. You just need to tweak something in your mind.

I know from personal experience that it's definitely not, because the gym that I have right now isn't a group class model. It's only come do your own thing and we'll give you a program. And I'm trying to create a group class model soon because there's just people that like if I run a challenge and we train as a group, like they're not gonna train unless they come back for the group. And so I'm missing out on these people that because we we try to like my idea was to get like get them on the app and get them doing their own program, and then during some parts of the day, we have coaches on the floor that can help them out, you know. So we bring these new group of people in and say, hey, between uh 5.30 and 7 and from 5.30 to 7.30 p.m., you can come in and get a get help until you're more comfortable just like working out on your own, you know. But we still just have the fall off, and the feedback is I like working out in a group. People that don't come in or they quit, there's like, I just like it better when we were working out in a group and I I want to stay in a group, you know? Yeah, so yeah, it's just it's definitely never gonna die. There's people, I mean, I like to work out in a group too sometimes. If I'm gonna use conditioning, like I'm not trying to do that by myself.

Yeah.

So and like 90% of the successful group model is the conditioning aspect. But across the, yeah, you're gonna go in there and lift, but people want to breathe hard. F-45 is all you just go in there and you're doing survey and breathing hard. And so just group conditioning is never gonna end just because it's way more fun.

Yeah, and it's social, right? And it's something that um I mean, I you know, I get to work with F-45 um in different aspects, and you know, looking at their gyms and and the classes, like it's just it's a it's a party, you know, it's fun, right? And uh I think that's one thing that they've done well. Maybe it's that Australian uh influence, you know. Yeah, it's it's just good fun. And uh, you know, I think as fitness professionals too, I I and I speak this as completely as me being super guilty of it. You know, I I always wanted the purity of the fitness, right? I saw the beauty and the training and the programming and um and all of that. And uh it turns out most people don't give a shit. No, yeah, oh yeah, they just want to feel you know they want to have a great hour, right? Uh they want to, it's just a checkbox thing, like okay, I gotta check that off for my day. Did I work out? Check, good, move on, right? Um, but we always want to make it bigger. And there's a certain percentage of the population that will love you know, beautiful program design and and all that, you know, and you can find those clients, they're not uh as prevalent, but for the most part, people just wanna just want to move, they want to find a place that they actually enjoy the exercise, so it doesn't seem like a chore. Yeah, and that's where class comes in. It's undeniable, right? 100%, yeah, you're 100% right.

Because I was, I mean, obviously, my background is strength and conditioning, so I started as a crossfoot hater and fell in love with it, and started as a you have to have a perfect program and realize no perfect program, number one, and people aren't trying to be the strongest guy in the world, they're coming in here just to like be able to move and be healthy and feel good. And so I've I obviously I've completely changed my mind and I agree with you 100%. Yeah, yeah. That's that's really how it is.

And don't hurt them, right?

Yeah, don't that's the biggest thing, don't hurt them. And that's and that you can still get people to do a huge variety of different movements without doing something that's gonna potentially hurt them.

Yeah. On that one, it's like I've seen that a lot in CrossFit. Yeah. But but and like I'm not saying CrossFit's not safe.

I mean, you probably this this thing's beaten to the ground, right? That's just there's so certain movements you shouldn't do with certain people. And so that's one reason that I think F-45's done so well too, because they kind of exclude those movements, but they have so much variety that no one ever gets bored and anyone can do it. Yeah.

It's not technical. You know, and that's the challenge that um CrossFit has had from a marketing standpoint is you know, you it's really it's r it's challenging to have a low barrier offer in CrossFit unless it's like a challenge format. It's the only thing that seems to work because um, you know, you we used to back in the day, right? Oh eight, oh nine, when we opened you, we would just you know, people join, okay, throw them in class. Yeah, they'll learn. And uh turns out that wasn't the best way to do it. And it is hard, man. It is. It it's difficult to you because you know, you you work in, I mean, you look at Olympic lifting, weightlifting alone, right? Olympic style weightlifting. That's a lifetime of mastering. It really is gymnastics. Are you kidding me? Like exactly, yeah. Like, and that's just two components of it. And then you get in all the other stuff um that comes into to cross, and it's really hard to just and I talked about this in an episode with Luke Armstrong from F-45 um last year. And you know, the beauty of an F-45 model is that you know, people can come in and they can essentially just with an introduction session, they can jump right in and they'll they'll get a good workout. You know, they don't need to be coached a ton during a class. So it's it's scalable. And that's you know, you look at what franchises are scaling nowadays, it's usually the simplicity of a model, right? And then some size some sort of tech.

Yeah.

And those two things, um, and then just systems that are sound, right? Concrete systems, and that's what allows people to scale their locations like that. So it's um speaking of gyms, man, tell me about you know uh fitness culture, because you you have you do I we're just shitting on hybrid. Um, but you guys, that's what you do, right? Or I was. That's kind of what you do, right? You do uh tell me about the model that you guys have at your gym. It's interesting.

Yeah, it's not I don't know, it's not really hybrid because you don't do anything.

Okay, I misspoke. I guess well, I guess it kind of is for like the two-week challenge people, but I'm trying to make it hybrid, so yeah, you're right. Um anyway, we've only been open for a little over a year now, but we kind of like my idea for the gym, we opened it. It was we already had an app that we were using, and we needed a physical, a physical location really that we didn't open this as we want to start a new gym model. We opened it as I can't walk out of anywhere with Steve without him just talking to people for three hours because everyone knows who he is when we go into a gym. So we needed a place where we could actually film content and get stuff done for our app. Um, and so we opened the gym here, and the model that we run is um we're kind of in the middle from as from a price perspective. We're not as cheap as Basa or Gold's Gym, we're not as expensive as CrossFit, we're like right in the middle, and people pay to basically have a gym that's not busy. If you want to do your own thing, you can come do your own thing, but then also for a very, a very, very small price, you can use our app to get a program. Not everyone's not everyone in the gym is forced to get a program. Um, and the reason that I didn't work in the price of the app into the gym membership is because I didn't want people that weren't using the app to think like, oh, I'm not gonna work out here anymore because I'm paying for that, you know. And so basically, people can just come do their own thing or come work out with our app, and then we have coaches on the floor during certain periods of the day for people that are new, don't know, don't know how to use the app, and like won't help with the program, just won't help with their form.

Yeah. That's interesting. So, what is the price point? What's the price point of your gym?

Um, we're 60 bucks right now, which probably sounds cheap to you, but in this area, it's like a really hard sell. So we had to find out because St. George is a little bit smaller, and you have all the the bigger boxrooms here are just 10 bucks a month. And so we kind of pick the middle road. Uh, it's been working out pretty well so far. I think if we were in a different area, we would definitely go closer to 100 and be fine. But people, I mean, I don't know if I don't know if I want to say this about St. George. People are watching this from St. George, but people just don't people don't spend as much money on their gym membership here. I think one of the reasons is it's a super active community. There's so much stuff to do here, hike, bike. And so the last thing that people are gonna spend a ton of money on is coming to the gym because the gym is just to help them go ride their bike, or you know what I mean? Things like that, and so they don't mind just no boss. So we had to price it at a point where people weren't just overwhelmed.

So, how does the app work? Is it individualized? Or is it is there an assessment that people go through up front? Like, how does how does that whole thing work?

Yeah, so the app is we do it more goal-based, so we have a bunch of different programs. Um, I'm actually working to get a lot more for our gym in the app, just for our gym-based programs. The ones that we have online are kind of catered to the following that Steve has and the fitness culture now has, which is it's more bodybuilding type followers, and we're trying to introduce them to more like structured strength progressions and structured balance programs. But basically, there's like a functional program, which is more has CrossFit, CrossFit style. We don't call it CrossFit, but that's why we call it functional. Not because of CrossFit, because people that don't like CrossFit don't want to say they're doing CrossFit, but like you know what I mean. But yeah, it's more just stuff that that you would see at like F-45, you know. So finishing with those kind of Metcons and things, but still with the strength progression. But anyway, we have functional, we have lean, swole power, which is more powerlifting based. So we just basically have programs for goals and then abilities, and people come back. Like we we don't really put them through an assessment, we kind of, which I should probably do a better job with that, but it's more just I haven't had enough time to put in place, I guess. So I'm trying to find our assessment, is kind of I guess there kind of is an assessment when people come in for if they we do like a free two-week challenge and they're using the app, it's kind of like up to our coaches to be like to guide them into the right program based on how they perform. And we try to in those get all beginners because honestly, like our other programs, besides our couple beginner programs, just aren't really beginner-friendly. Yeah, you know, they're more just for our our following online. And so we try to get beginners, but if there's more advanced people, we'll tell them, like, hey, I don't think you're gonna like the build program, so let's move you into power if you're more interested in getting strong, you know. And so that's kind of where we assess them is during that two weeks and then move them forward that way.

Interesting. Is there a lot of people who use your app outside of the gym?

Oh, yeah. Well, it's way, it's it's way more outside of the gym. Like our online business is definitely a lot bigger than the gym business. The gym business is kind of I haven't put enough time into it yet, but I'm trying to get it working this way to see if it'll work as a app-based gym model.

Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah. Um does anybody else do it that way? Does anyone else do an app-based gym model?

I don't know. I haven't heard of anyone that that doesn't know. I mean, I know there's a lot of probably a lot of people that use true coach and things like that in their gym. I just don't know if there's anyone that that's all they kind of do in their gym. But that's all we're doing right now. That's why for fit hive, we did design it so that people could could run this model. So if I get it to work, everyone, every everyone that has the app, but it has like basically essentially a very similar app within the software that they can use for their gym. Um, and so those are kind of the other pieces of educational pieces that we're gonna be putting out on like if this is successful, the stuff that we've done to make it successful, and kind of give them systems on how if they want to run the gym this way a little bit, they could they can use what we've done here in their gym. So yeah.

What's what's timeline on FitHive? Can people access it now? Is it available in a bit? Uh what do you guys think?

We have gyms on Fit Hive right now.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, so they can like it. It's uh our website's just myfithive.com. And yeah, we have about 60 gyms right now. Um, but we're growing, we're growing steadily. Um, but it's just one of those things where when we took on the project, we had a bunch of beta gyms, and then we kind of realized there's all these things that all these people want, and then from there kind of had to play catch up to get back to where we are now, and now we're kind of back to building the things that we wanted to build in the beginning to try to make it easier for gym owners to get clients to follow up with them, things like that. So we're trying to make it more. I mean, the idea from the beginning was to give people a cool app that we because we had already kind of used the developers that I had to develop this app, so put something like this into a gym software, but then also blend that with gym builder and be able to basically be a marketing software that also runs your gym. And that's our that's our goal. And it's it's definitely been a challenge. We have some great developers that are crushing it, but it's just a lot of features, and so it's been a bit of a challenge, but it's getting better, it's getting better every month. New rollouts, new features every month, and so we're almost right where we want to be right now, and so I think I'm excited about the future, so it should be good.

Yeah, it should be, and that's that's the challenge with gym software. I mean, there's there used to be just a couple, right? Yeah, kind of like Mind Body, uh Zim Planner, and like a couple other ones, right? I think front desk was around back then, maybe. Um but now you know there's there's a lot of that, and you know, I I would imagine for you it's probably a challenge too. Like, do you go very, very specific on what you do, right?

Or yeah, no, the thing is it is all-in-one now, and that's a challenge because we were selling it as an all-in-one, and then there's just over the last year, there were so many features that other people had that we didn't know were a big deal to people that we had to play catch-up on.

Yeah.

Because there are so many different softwares, and so we get someone to come over and be like, oh well, I really need this. Yeah, like, all right, well, we're gonna do our best to make that happen for you. Let's go. Yeah, and so it kind of put us off track for the reason that like we want to be really good at this, put us off track from that, the marketing aspect. But now that we've kind of played catch up, we're back on track for that.

So right on. Right on. So uh what what is just to give you an idea for the listeners too, if they go to myfithive.com, right? Uh what what are the costs for a gym owner? How are you guys pricing it now? What does that look like?

Um so the way that we are doing it right now, since it's all in one, uh, is just 250 bucks a month. And that's to get everything. And so we're we've been playing around with trying to make uh trying to split it up, like everyone. I mean, everyone splits it up and like you can get these features for this much, this for this much. The reason that we went just one price was that we really wanted to push the marketing side, and if you're using those marketing features, you need everything else that we built, you know, and so that's kind of why we just put it at one price, and we've been going that way so far, but yeah. For right now, if you go look at if you go right now and you want to sign up and get a demo, it's 250 bucks a month. Um, and that could change in the next six months, though.

Yeah, that's fair. I think it's great pricing. I think it's right there. Yeah, I think it's great.

We do have I mean we have stuff like two-way text inside of the inside of the software, just things that I guess our goal was to get rid of all these different softwares, like the uh MailChimp, uh, for using entreporter, infusion soft, and then Scipio, like all these different softwares that people are paying for to run their campaigns and just put them all in one. And so, I mean, if you if you count the cost of all those things, it's not like way, way more than 250 bucks a month, but yeah, that's kind of why we priced it the way we did. So I mean, I'm not saying that I think it's too expensive to be like, no, I just think um you know that's why we only have one price, is what I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah, it makes total sense, man, and keep it simple, right? Um, people can budget it, and you're right, when you start adding in all those softwares that people use, um I'm often surprised when I look at my credit card bill. I'm like, man, am I using all these? Yeah, kind of. But not enough to like justify the price all the time. But yet, you know, I don't know. It's yeah, it's wild. I can pick up software subscriptions in my sleep somehow, apparently. No, I need to. Yeah, I think on my wife checks that stuff. Um awesome, man. Well, Jacob, if people want to find out, uh, you know, obviously myfithybe.com. Um, what are some of the other places online that they can go and and learn more about you and what you do?

Um, well, yeah. Oh, just about me, not about fill.

Oh yeah, so gymbuilder.com is the six-week challenge company that we have, and then just me personally, um, just fitnessculture.com, and then my Instagram is just Jacobut1, which I post like once every three months right now.

Yeah. Well, I saw it too. You have a you have a tremendous amount of followers, dude.

Uh well, the thing is, my business partner, Steve Cook, so if I look at my followers next to his, it's nothing. Yeah. How many do you have? His is uh like 2.3 million. I have like 70,000. Yeah, I have like 70,000. So yeah. I feel like I don't have any followers, that's probably why I never post, but dude, I have like a thousand, I think.

I don't know. I've checked. Uh so those all those numbers sound crazy. 2.3 million. That's like another job, right? You gotta maintain your Instagram account like that.

Oh, okay. No, that like is his job. He's got over a million on YouTube, too. So he kind of does like he is an influencer. Yeah, absolutely. He's putting out three videos a week on YouTube that there's vlogs of his life, and so it's a full it's a full-time job for him just to maintain his social media.

Yeah, fascinating. Right on, man. Well, Jacob, thank you so much for for spending your Friday with me. It's been awesome. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, we'll uh we'll talk soon. All right, see you. Hey fitness fans, don't leave yet. It's your host, Eric Malzone, and I have a quick favor to ask. Actually, three favors. So, number one, if you're a fan of our show, I ask you to do something that takes under three minutes. Go to iTunes, please, and subscribe to our show. Please, please, please. It means so much to us. It's so important. And then give us a favorable review. We would really, really appreciate it. And uh, I can't tell you how much it means and helps us out. So I know it takes two minutes of your day, and uh it means a lot to us. So please do that. Number two, go to our YouTube channel or Fitness Marketing Alliance, and uh please subscribe to our YouTube channel there. Number three, if you like this episode or any of the episodes that we've released, share it on social. That's huge, that's a big deal for us. And we're we put a lot of work into these episodes, uh, trying to give you great actionable content uh for the fitness industry. So that would mean a lot. And that's it. So we have some big plans coming up for this show. I'll be talking about that in the next couple episodes. But thank you so much for listening. It means so much. And uh if you have any questions, please reach out to me. I'd love to hear from everybody. Eric, E R I C at Fitness MarketingAliance.com