Jeff & Vern Gauthier – From Overworked Personal Trainers to Skilled Fitness Marketers
By Sean Greeley
Over a 2-year period, Jeff & Vern Gauthier, owners of Fit For You Health Club, Traverse City, MI, have literally ‘transformed’ their business (and their lives) from overworked and stressed-out trainers, to serious fitness marketers… driving leads and sales like crazy for their business.
And they’re also tremendous leaders, who built a heck of a team that gave them a whole lot of freedom to get away from the business and do the things they like to do. See how they did it in the video above.
Sean Greeley
Podcast Transcript
Jeff Gauthier
The reason that I was looking for something was because I knew there had to be something better. We were running our business. Well, actually, we were working in our business, we had really no idea how to run the business. So we knew we needed help. And auto closer, was the thing that we came across. That’s what we seen. When we talked to Sean, he led us more towards a C four, which included autoclave. So we thought that was the direction to move.
Here’s how I heard about NP, I was actually sitting at my desk, reading club solutions. And I’ve picked up a few different ads out of there. And all of a sudden, I come across this MP. And what they had to say in that ad really intrigued me.
Vern Gauthier
We went to Florida for our first training session for NP four c four. That’s how it all started. And at that point, we we were looking for audit closer, that was our biggest thing that we were looking for. During the entire day of the C four program. We Jeff and I both kept looking each other going, when do we get to sales? When are we going to get to sales? They’re going all through this all this stuff. Other stuff, stuff we really don’t know much about. We’re gonna know about sales. How do we sell our program? How can we make more money? So that’s what at the end of it, we finally got to auto closer, but then we realized how much we just learned through that entire day, and how much we needed to learn from there. So that was our first program. That was the first one that we started with. From there. Then we went to Rainmaker, Rainmaker came out right after that. And that was another big program. It was really quite a large program for us to start with, because we’re still still quite new to NP as it was. So it was really big for us to start with, but we dove into it. And we took one bite at a time and we did get through it and we were able to start our implementing our first our first campaign and got my first lead and I’ll never forget it, it was it’s, it was the greatest thing in the world to actually hear my phone go off and have a look at it and it was a lead. And then we went to our first auto closer our first sale our first consultation. It was nerve racking because I had set it up the day before so it was nerve racking. I thought about it all night long. Got into the sale. And it was first thing in the morning. And I sold the person right off the bat. So that was really good to have that that first sale. And from there Jeff took off with with auto closer and he was just closing sales like he couldn’t believe at that time. I was still in personal training. So I was doing a lot of training. He was doing just the sales at that time. And it was incredible how much he was doing it was every time I talked to him it was another one sold another one sold another one sold another one sold. And I’m thinking oh my god, we don’t have to work anymore. We’re done. This is it. This is it is we’ve hit the mother lode,
Jeff Gauthier
the C four program this program, right here’s what we started with. It does have a lot of the other programs but once we got from here, and then we joined up to the VIP, the VIP brought us into deep core duplicator Auto closer. I mean, a lot of these programs were still implemented in the C four program. But I am Rainmaker. Like I said auto closer. As you can see, I’ve got a shelf full of stuff here now that every piece here, I’ve went through I’ve studied it. And if we haven’t implemented it’s only because I haven’t studied it through totally. We’ve tried to implement every program they have. They they make it nice and easy. We have CDs for everything that’ll walk you through it. And then they have the paperwork that’s right there for you all your tools. They have magazines, little clips, it’ll take you through everything. And then the amazing part, as we got into the VIPs commander was huge. This was one of the programs that like I say it was implemented into the C four. But once you get the whole program, it takes you a lot deeper and then you understand it a lot more. And then along with that all of a sudden we start getting these three inch binders that they started telling us build your own system. So we did this is our binder for this year, that we’ve put our total marketing program together for the whole year. This is something totally new to us. Now we’re organized. We know what’s going to happen every month. We have different internal external campaigns that have been sent to us through NP. I continually study this, like I told you, I take Friday’s off. Every Friday, I will take something home. If I’m not going over numbers, I might take something different home to study on. I’ve went over him quite a few times. So and every time I learned something new, this is just a little bit more of the stuff that we implemented. The different things that we put together, we wanted a sales chart right in our view so that we could constantly keep track of the sales charts. Now we did something on our personal training. If you look this board over, you can see our rules on marketing, our mission statement, our values, we’ve got everything up here, our org chart, our visions where we want to take our club, and then we put our charts up so that we can track everything as we’re going.
Vern Gauthier
In 1986 is where it all started with a small local competition. I won the competition and that hooked me from there. From there, we went a lot of local competitions and to regional competitions and into state level. I won the Michigan State Championship in 1989. Moving on to a junior national championship in 1989. I took third place in the USA in 1990. Moving on to the national championship in 91, and one that that is a top Amateur Championship for amateurs, and then I moved down to professional level and competed for three years. And then I bowed out and I help other people to achieve their goals. I live vicariously through others.
Jeff Gauthier
We both competed in the Michigan went right along into the nationals. The only problem was is he won the nationals. It took me about nine more years before the best I did was fourth in the nation. And that’s what this is right here. I play sports in the nation when I was 41 years old. So my career I kept going for about 10 years after my brother did. And he’s about six years younger than I am. So I held out for a long time. This is my fit for you bike, I built this from the club, the club was the theme of the bike. And you know a little bit after I started getting some free time. I found out I didn’t have anything to do. So I started getting into Harley’s and then I thought I’m gonna build one. So I took the club is the theme. If you look real close, you can see on the front wheels, I had fit, I designed these wheels and had them cut out has dumbbells right into the wheels. paint job is myself when I was competing, my brother and I there are different pictures put together on there. If you come around this side of the bike, you can see I’ve got a shifting linkage in there. That’s an actual dumbbell that I had fit boy put into this was a fat boy, a Harley fat boy when I originally started, there’s a lot of custom design on here. If you look at the handlebars, you can see these girls, I’ve rode this bike to Sturgis a couple of times, it’s been a very nice bike
to get into the full community of NP is pretty spectacular. You know, Vern and I are kind of, you know, we live in northern Michigan, we’re loners up here. So that’s kind of the way we are. So it’s been a little bit more of that might be another big challenge that we’ve had is to develop getting into the community more getting into the blogs, we have started doing that a little more, I’d have to admit that we didn’t move in that direction, because we didn’t see the advantage to it. As we’ve been on some of the calls and talk to some of the people. Now we can see more advantage to hearing more of the people that are in the same business that you are their trial and errors because they are the same. Everybody’s going through the same thing. We’re all trying to achieve the same thing. You see that there are a lot of people out there that care about the employees or and the people that we’re trying to help. You know whether it’s weight loss or just straight fitness. There’s a big community out there of everybody and the NP is very helpful. When you start talking to them a little more. People are really ready to open up. And I think NP keeps innovating and changing things to keep it on the cutting edge. There’s been times when it’s like okay, what more can they teach us? And you know what, they come up with something more they can teach us So we are really, really ready to learn. Probably one of the biggest things that that gym owners think they need is sales. That’s basically when we looked at the C four program, it was auto closer that directed us there, it was the sales that we knew what we needed. We thought we had the rest of it under control, we were working in the business just fine. We’ve been in business for 20 years. Now, we didn’t realize that maybe you don’t have to live month to month to see if you’re going to be able to make payroll this month. And you know, now don’t get me wrong, we’ve done it for 21 years. So it’s it becomes we’re How can you keep wondering, you know, you’ve done it for 21 years, but you do. And it gets to a point where it’s not just sales you need, you need everything. And NP is something that they have it they have everything that you could want. So it is a program that we’ve looked around, we’ve used other people, but most of the time, it was in sales, and and it worked for a short time, but we didn’t have the rest of the programs to go along with it. So if you’re sitting on the edge of the fence, wondering if you should hire NP, take one call from them just listen to a little bit of what they have to say. And believe me, we’ve been some of their testimonials. So those are real. And we really did make a change in our lives. In 12 months, we’ve turned our business around from working in our business to totally running our business now. So it makes a world of difference.
Vern Gauthier
I would tell somebody that’s sitting on the fence if you say you’re on the fence when deciding on this program, because that’s where I was at. And when Jeff came to me with this program, the way I saw it was another diet pill. It was just another way for somebody to get our money, and we really didn’t have the money to give away. So it was I was very skeptical and really looking at all the testimonials and stuff I did I thought this is this is all fake and it’s just a way for him to get my money and they’re gonna come teach us something that we already know. And then and that’s gonna be the end of it. And it was not that and that at all we learned so much from it. So if you are on the edge and sitting on the fence, I would say definitely jump in, jump on the other side and see what it’s like.