C2GO Newsletter 25th January Featuring Guest Blogger Kelly Reed-Banks

Good morning, I hope you are well and feeling positive in spite of this grey weather? Well if you are the C2GO newsletter aims to brighten up your morning with class ideas, content and inspiration. What’s new? My new series on YOUTUBE • 20 Crunchless Core Exercises click here • 20 Low Impact No Equipment Leg Exercises click here. What’s Coming Up? • Level 3 Pilates Training click here • Social Media and Business Building Workshop Click here •Kelly has written a great article on The Rise and Fall and Rise of the community business which is brilliant – Feedback to us and let us know what you think! I’m traveling to Latvia this weekend to do the Baltic Beach Yogafit Retreat and I very excited as have never been to Latvia – Have you been?  I know it’s going to be sooo cold but the hotel looks so amazing. Full report next week 🙂

The rise & fall of running your own community business – Kelly Reed-Banks  So it’s been a while since I last wrote for Rachel & that’s mainly because I’ve been manically busy with trying to build our business back up after we worked in Saint Lucia for 3 weeks, which is what I’m going to  write about in just a second. Firstly for those of you that don’t know me – I’m kelly, I’m Rachel’s head tutor for Fitness Pilates, and all other qualifications through choreography to go but what I also do is run 2 businesses a long side also teaching in clubs & running orthopaedic 1-2-1 & small group Pilates. I have a community fitness business like many of you reading this & I’m a Kick Start franchisee which I co- own with my husband Jay. I’ve happily been ticking along for the last 8 years doing all the above & owning Kick Start Cambridge for the last 5. Like any of you, I graft, I work long hours & I practice what Rachel & I preach and I love it so when Jay & I were given the opportunity to teach out at the beautiful, precidgious Body Holiday resort in Saint Lucia in September we jumped at the chance! What we didn’t realise was it was going to nearly kill our businesses being away & thinking we could leave other instructors to run them & people would still come was a big learning curve! So I’m not going to bore you with the details but when we came home I presumed that as soon as we came back all our members would be itching to see us & come back to class, but that wasn’t the case. Community classes were dead! Actually the classes that we completely cancelled for the 3 weeks whilst away we’re actually the busiest but the others were like a ghost town! We took it for granted that people would still come, but people come, in the community, for YOU! Not for a Cover instructor. We always say it takes 21 days to make or break a habit and you know what……… It’s true!!! They had got out of the habit of coming & got in a habit of staying in. I worried we’d lost members to other classes & boot camps in our village & area (as there are loads of competition) but they hadn’t! They just had stopped coming all together. So here comes the hard graft! We left the uk when the nights were still light & warm, we came back to it being dark & cold. So for 3 months we grafted, sending private messsges to members, offering free class passes, frequent emails to my mailing list, constant contact in Facebook groups! But now I can happily say classes are booming!!! And it’s not just cause it’s January, because days are still short, dark, wet & cold but we were back visual in people’s minds. Everyone who came to class in the last week before we broke up for Christmas got a Christmas card with a FREE class pass to use before 1st February. I did this on purpose to get people back in class when I knew money might be tight & community fitness classes might go bottom of people’s priorities- it worked!!! My Fitness Pilates classes have always been busy but I now have a waiting list for both my FP classes in the community every week which is nearly as long as my class list! Luckily I still ran Kick Start programmes online while we were away so this just ticked along & Decembers courses were full & my January 14 day Body Reset was the busiest it’s ever been. So if you are struggling with class numbers in the community I want you to know it can happen to any of us especially if you take your finger off the pulse & assume people will just keep coming without you connection with them – remember people come for YOU! So here’s my 5 top tips to reignite your classes  1. Firstly, if class numbers are low in a certain class you need to ask yourself – do you REALLY want to still teach it???? Or have you lost your mojo? Because class participants will know! If you don’t really want to be there, neither will they – so either bin it, put something else in its place or if you do want to still teach it then put your heart & soul into it! Don’t teach toxic classes 2. Secondly, make your community classes the BEST experience YOU CAN! Yes you maybe tired & this might be your 5th, 6th 7th class of the day but for your participants, this is their first! You have no idea what they might have gone through in order to get to your class & this might be their only outlet a week. So they don’t need to know your tired etc, notice them, give a positive comment on something new about 1 person in each class – make them feel amazing & I promise they will keep coming back, others will then want you to comment about them so they’ll keep coming too! It doesn’t matter if you have 5 or 55 people in your class, you should always deliver to the same high standard. Your vibe attracts your tribe! 3. Run a Fitness Day – we run quarterly calorie burner days & well being days which are great fun & members love it! Get another local instructor friends in your area to teach with you do you share the workload but they will help promote it & their members might come too. It really helps participants get their mojo back to come to class – put on special classes that they don’t normally get to attract people to come! Give out goodie bags to everyone who comes which has free class passes to your quieter classes or money off your boot camps or weight loss courses. Get people to pay upfront so you know numbers & if people cancel last minute then you’ve already covered your costs. 4. If you don’t want to run a Fitness or well-being day then maybe do a special monthly ‘relaunch’ or new choreography night per month. I’ve never taught les mills but I’ve always liked the way they do a ‘les Mills launch’ for their new choreography- you have a theme & really make a big thing of you teaching something fresh & new in your class. Or pick it around what’s happening in the year so last year when I taught Fitness Pilates & Dance fit on Valentine’s night – everyone got a yellow rose from me, I taught Fitness Pilates to candlelight & Dance fit all the tracks were themed around love etc, dress code was pink or red & i made some kick start clean sweet treats for everyone to take away. Yes it’s effort & time consuming but this is YOUR business and successful people are the grafters. 5. Contact all your old members, send them a private message via Facebook or WhatsApp & invite them back to class for free. Don’t just assume 1 message will be enough, I had to send some members 3-4 messages over a month before I got them back into class. When you promote your classes on social media, tag them all in and when Someone comments on your post, reply to them as the more interaction you have on each post the more people will see it, even if it’s just a ‘high five’ emoji. Don’t think that by emailing out once a month this will be enough, you need to be sending out weekly emails at least & then daily contact on social media or via WhatsApp groups. Make sure you’ve got FREE Facebook groups running with all your participants in and get them to invite their friends into it. Then give away free little tips on exercise, nutrition ( if your qualified) free workouts etc to keep people engaged. So the moral of the story for us is not to go away again for 3 weeks at 1 time especially in September!!! But I hope that this has been helpful to you! Please feel free to message me or email if you have any comments or questions Much love KRB XX