Michael Plank opened Underwood Park CrossFit in Fort Edward, New York in the fall of 2014.
Plank is a pastor, and he sees parallels between his church work 🙏 and CrossFit. 💪
He opened his gym to help people get in shape and improve their lives.
“I want to build a community and help people become kinder, happier, and healthier,” Plank said.
By 2019 the gym had about 88 members. Plank was ready to grow his membership, but he was wary of adding to his workload.
Plank and his wife are expecting a baby in October, and he wanted to improve automation and streamline his marketing efforts so when the baby arrives, he’ll be able to take time off and the gym will continue to thrive.
When Plank heard about UpLaunch on the Two-Brain Business podcast he decided to give it a try.
“It just seemed really interesting, especially the possibility of improving retention. I felt like there was a lot of potential there,” he said.
31 Members in Three Months
Plank signed up and the results were almost immediate. 🔥
Underwood Park CrossFit gained 10 new CrossFit members in the first month, just from organic traffic.
“People checked out the website … and because of the lead capture and the way it notified staff we were able to follow up super quickly and schedule intros and people came in and signed up,” Plank said.
In their second month with UpLaunch, Plank gained six more CrossFit members.
“Then we also ran an ad campaign for a six week challenge last month, and we got 15 (sign-ups) from that,” Plank said.The challenge participants aren’t officially members, but Plank said their upgrade rate is consistently between 60 and 70 percent, so he anticipates at least 10 of the challenge participants will become CrossFit members. ✅
Along with using UpLaunch for lead capture and member communication, Plank started a mid-week attendance phone call for people who haven’t been to the gym that week.
“If people haven’t been there by Wednesday night we call them and just check in. It’s kind of a lot of work, but it’s been super worth it,” Plank said.
Quality Content
Plank recently began using the former client campaign.
“That’s been awesome too,” Plank said. He said it’s given him valuable feedback from people as they cancel -- giving him insight 👀 into how he can improve -- and he even managed to win back at least three former members in the first two months.
“We’ve just been super happy with it. I’ve been really impressed with the automation,” Plank said.
After joining, one new member made a point to tell Plank she appreciated the quality of the content.
“She said that the content was really well written 📝 and it didn’t seem too pushy or anything and it was just right,” he said.
“We’ve just been really really happy with it, no complaints whatsoever. We waited a little while to pull the trigger on it, and I just feel like it’s been worth every penny. If people are thinking about it, they should just try it out,” Plank said.
Now that Plank has systems established he can feel comfortable taking time off with his family, knowing the gym will continue to thrive in his absence.
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