When I first opened ACLAÍ back in 2013, after scraping together the capital required to open a gym from savings, loans, and selling my car, I kind of felt that the hardest part was going to be getting the doors opened on day one. Alas, I was mistaken. In reality, the most fun part of the early days was shopping for fancy gear, kitting out the gym floor, and imagining how busy things were going to be once those doors swung open on day one. The real difficulty came in the form of figuring out exactly what kind of a training facility was to be, what services we would offer (and which we would not offer), and the figuring out how to get people to know that we existed!
And so the story begins. I wanted to make the business a success and was reading as much as I could and trying to learn about marketing, advertising, and promotion all at the same time as getting the primary services up and running. I tried many things when it came to marketing and promotion, some with limited success in the early days, and the rest, lets just say they were expensive but valuable lessons for the future.
One of the most cold-sweat inducing and cringe-worthy experiments to this day was a campaign that I organised that caused more grief than anything else, and cost more money than I had to play with at the time. Of course, I want this post to provide some useful information and insight into the approach today, which is a product of learning by trial and error, but allow me to show you how not to organise a marketing campaign if you are starting out in business. So my idea was to run a ‘competition’ of sorts, whereby the person who put in the best effort and showed the best example over a 30 day period would win an iPad, and a substantial donation to a charity organisation of their choice, and everyone would get a t-shirt for taking part. The cost of entry was quite low (€140) or something like that, and I estimated that if 100 people signed up we would have enough for the ‘prizes’, the t-shirts, and a little end-of-month celebration for everyone who took part, and also make a bit of profit at the end of the day.
Oh was I wrong! What transpired was about 7 participants, and the stress of having to pick one ‘winner’ from a small group of people who I formed a bond with most of them, and having to deliver on the prizes and promises, as well as paying for the coaching and program materials for the month. It ended up costing the business just short of couple of grand all in. I suppose I should have just cancelled it when we didn’t get the initial numbers, but hey, we were just starting out and I wanted to see how it would go! The biggest lessons from this campaign included:
1. Don’t over promise things based on high numbers of participants when you are just starting out. If no-one knows who you are its going to be a big challenge to get the numbers in to match the ambitions, and will likely leave you high and dry.
2. Our approach is not about competition against each other. Its about helping each individual with their requirements, goals, and challenges, and helping them become a valued part of the training group that are working on their own goals as part of a group of people with similar ambition, not AGAINST their peers.
3. 30 day challenges is the opposite of the approach that I want to promote when it comes to health. Health isn’t about fast results, and fat burning training sessions. Its about long term enjoyment. The pursuit of mastering skill and movements. Sharing real food. Building self-confidence from the inside out. Building a lifestyle that makes you happy. Just my own opinion of course!
4. Better to charge more money for a higher quality service, and deliver the goods at a level way above the standard, than charging less money and not being able to deliver the goods to your own standard.
In Part 2 of this series, I will bring you through the methods I have been using to build ACLAÍ as a successful, fun, ethical, and quality based business since the experiments of 2013!