WELLNESS MEANS BUSINESS • EPISODE 08
You May Not Need More Clients:
3 Ways to Increase Revenue in Your Fitness or Wellness Business
Learn why getting more clients may not be your biggest growth opportunity—and how to identify where your business may already be leaving revenue on the table.
TOPICS: REVENUE GROWTH • CUSTOMER VALUE • REVENUE OPPORTUNITIES • BUSINESS KPIs
Do You Really Need More Clients to
Grow Your Fitness or Wellness Business?
When fitness and wellness entrepreneurs want to increase revenue, the first solution is often predictable: get more clients. That usually means spending more money on advertising, social media, lead generation or another marketing campaign.
But more customers aren't always your greatest revenue opportunity.
There are only three fundamental ways to grow revenue in a business: get more customers, increase the amount customers spend, or increase how frequently they buy. And small improvements across all three can create significantly greater growth than focusing on customer acquisition alone.
For a fitness or wellness business, additional revenue may already be hiding inside your existing customer base, pricing and packages, wellness services, upgrades, recurring programs, former-customer database or retention strategy.
That's why the first question shouldn't automatically be, “How do I get more clients?”
A better question is: “Where is my business currently leaving money on the table?”
Before investing in another marketing tactic, understanding which of the three revenue opportunities has the greatest untapped potential can help you determine where to focus your time, money and attention.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
The three ways to increase revenue in any fitness or wellness business
Why getting more clients may not be your biggest growth opportunity
How small improvements in customer count, average purchase and purchase frequency can compound into significant revenue growth
Why your existing customers, former customers and prospects may represent untapped revenue
How pricing, packages, upgrades and recurring revenue can increase customer value
Why tracking the right KPIs helps you identify where to focus before choosing your next marketing strategy
What Are the Three Ways to Increase Revenue in a
Fitness or Wellness Business?
When fitness and wellness business owners think about increasing revenue, most immediately focus on getting more customers. But customer acquisition is only one of three ways to grow revenue.
The three are surprisingly simple:
Get more customers. Increase the amount each customer spends. Increase how frequently customers buy.
The real power comes from understanding how these three numbers work together.
Imagine you have 100 customers who spend an average of $100 twice a year. That's $20,000 in revenue. If you increase only the number of customers by 10%, revenue grows to $22,000.
But what happens if you improve all three numbers by just 10%?
Now you have 110 customers spending an average of $110 approximately 2.2 times per year. Instead of $22,000, revenue grows to approximately $26,620—an increase of about 33%.
That's the power of compounding small improvements across your business.
For a fitness or wellness entrepreneur, increasing average customer value might mean creating better packages, adding appropriate wellness services or modality upgrades, or giving clients additional solutions that complement what they're already buying. Increasing purchase frequency might come from recurring wellness programs, improved retention or giving existing customers compelling reasons to use your services more consistently.
And yes, attracting more customers may still be your greatest opportunity.
The point isn't to choose one revenue strategy forever. It's to identify which number represents the greatest untapped revenue opportunity in your fitness or wellness business right now—and then focus your strategy there.
Keep Listening
NEXT EPISODE
More Leads Won’t Fix a Broken Sales Process: How to Convert More Leads Into Paying Clients
Learn how to identify where prospective customers are dropping out of your sales process—before you spend more money trying to generate more leads.
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Full Episode Transcript
Prefer to read? Explore the full transcript of Episode 08 below.
Read the Full Transcript +
You May Not Need More Clients: 3 Ways to Increase Revenue in Your Fitness or Wellness Business
I need more customers.
I hear that a lot from business owners, and sometimes they're absolutely right.
But sometimes more customers are the last thing they need.
Because before you spend another dollar on marketing, there's a much more important question you need to answer:
Where is your business actually leaving money on the table?
And that's exactly what we're gonna get into today.
You're listening to Wellness Means Business with Casey Conrad.
I'm Casey Conrad, and I've spent more than 35 years helping fitness and wellness businesses grow. If you've got expertise, a product, a program, a service, a wellness modality, or some combination of those, but need to build a better business around it, you're in the right place.
Wellness Means Business gives independent fitness and wellness entrepreneurs practical strategies to attract more clients, increase sales, grow revenue, and build stronger, more profitable businesses.
So, let's get down to business.
Why would I possibly tell a business owner that getting more customers might be the last thing they need?
Because I've learned over the past 37 years that there's a danger in jumping from, "I want more revenue," to, "Therefore, I need more customers."
Yet it happens all the time.
Business owners self-diagnose the problem as, "I need more leads," or, "I need more clients," and then they immediately prescribe the solution:
"I'm gonna hire a social media firm. I'm gonna run a promotion, an ad, launch a campaign."
And that's often price-driven, which is another conversation for another day.
But notice what just happened.
They prescribed the solution before they ever diagnosed the real problem.
That's a little bit like walking into a doctor's office announcing, "Hey, I've got this problem, and I want this prescription written for me," before the doctor has even looked at you.
They have to examine you first.
So, what if you're trying to solve the wrong problem?
Before you go spend another dollar trying to get more people through your doors, I want you to answer a different question:
Where is your business actually leaving money on the table?
Because if the problem is somewhere else in your business, sending more people into it might just make the problem bigger.
I wanna step back before we get into our content and share a story with you that you may or may not have heard before.
It's 1995.
My book, Selling Fitness, had been out for three years. It was translated into multiple languages. I was speaking and touring all over the world. I was in go-go mode—about 220 days a year in an airplane, a train, a rental car.
I was on Piedmont Airlines one day in business class, and there was this 16-page magazine in the back pocket.
I think the cover said something like, "How to take your business from where it is now to where you want it to be."
And remember, this was before cell phones, tablets, laptops and things like that.
So reading was your primary pastime on a plane.
Long story short, in the back of that magazine—which was really a dedicated 16-page magazine—there was a little form that you could fill out and fax in to get an audio cassette tape.
Now, I know I'm dating myself with both of those things.
But I faxed that offer in, and I got this audio cassette in the mail a couple of weeks later.
I was enthralled with the content.
The guy's name was Jay Abraham. Maybe you've heard of him. He's a worldwide marketing guru.
Every single month after I got that first audio cassette, I got in the mail either this multi-page newsletter packed with ideas or an audio cassette tape packed with ideas.
Maybe it was a year or so into this when one day I picked up the phone—and yes, remember, this was a phone with a cord that sat on your desk, and there was no caller ID.
It was one of his salespeople.
He started talking to me about how things were going, and of course I was a raving fan at this point, so conversing with me was simple.
He started telling me about a three-day event that was happening in LA, and the agenda was amazing.
And here was the best part.
You only had to send in a deposit check. You didn't actually have to prepay.
Once they got your check, they sent you 48 audio cassettes that were last year's event—the whole thing recorded—that they wanted you to listen to before you came.
Then you flew out there, on your own expense, of course.
It was Friday, Saturday, and then on Sunday at noon you could decide whether it was worth it or not.
They had all of the checks or your credit card at the front of the