It’s been said that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Not true.
What’s even more flattering? When someone in your industry walks into your business and says, “Hey, what you have going on is awesome, and I want it. You’re doing this better than me, and I want my business to be like yours. Could you please sell to me?”
That’s exactly what happened, four years ago, with the personal training program at North Point Fitness in Roswell, Georgia.
“What ended up happening was: North Point existed for about 20 years, and someone had asked us if we had ever thought about helping out clubs. And we really hadn’t,” said North Point Fitness’ general manager, Joe Rummel. “We knew we had something special, but we didn’t necessarily think we had anything to sell. So, out of that came Alloy Personal Training Solutions, the consulting business.”
“It really was this one local guy standing in our space saying ‘Wow, this is really cool. Can we have this in my gym?’” remembered Rick Mayo, founder of Alloy Personal Training Solutions and North Point Fitness’ owner. “Now we’re in every environment from – you name it – Crossfits to 200,000-square foot tennis centers to everywhere in between.”
Fast forward to 2015, and you’ll find Alloy’s program being used in 40 of the 50 states, plus DC and Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Alloy’s program was formed by packaging the entire personal training program and supporting business model at North Point Fitness, including its philosophies, the best business practices, the revenue model, compensation model, training methodologies – everything really – into a streamlined, turnkey solution that a licensee can set up in their own gym and watch their growth explode.
Where has Alloy found its success? Personal training, as with any service, is fundamentally about delivering results – which in personal training comes down to changes in body composition. What Alloy has done is create a scientifically-designed program that consistently delivers results with a scalable, customizable package that can be tracked, measured, and proven not only by the results in the gym, but objectively on paper.
Layered Tiers: More “Products on the Shelf”
As Alloy’s genesis was born out of North Point Fitness’ success, it continues to remain ground zero for Alloy’s solutions.
“The club is really our lab, if you will. We run this really high crazy volume of personal training through there – 60,000 sessions a year – and from a programming standpoint that is where the product for Alloy is really born, vetted, and tested,” said Mayo. “[Alloy’s programming] is literally the program we ran in our club the previous quarter.”
Everything that Alloy distributes to its licensees is first designed and tested at North Point Fitness. To this day, North Point Fitness remains Alloy’s proving ground where new programs and business practices are vetted. If something – whether it’s a new workout, business model, or anything related to the program – is successful at North Point, it is incorporated into the Alloy program and exported out to all licensees.
What Mayo delivers through Alloy is a tiered system to allow more people to get involved with personal training at whatever rate they are comfortable with. There are four basic tiers: each at an increasing price point:
- Do-it-yourself, with a plan designed by a trainer
- Large group training (15+ people) classes – yoga, boot camps, etc.
- Small group training (2-4 people) – people who share one trainer
- Traditional 1:1 personal training
As you get closer to 1:1 personal training, the price increases.
These tiers allow each individual to find a level of personal training that works with their budget and their comfort level. Not everyone will be able to afford expensive 1:1 training sessions, nor will they necessarily want that type of interaction of they are just getting started. Alloy simply has, as Mayo puts it, “more products on the shelf.”
However, Alloy’s program goes beyond the four basic tiers. Within the tiers themselves is a leveling system that appropriately places an individual in a specific class or workout program based upon their current fitness level. There are progressions and regressions designed for each program to match the personal development of each client.
In the large group training tier, for example, there are three options: Foundations, Afterburn, and Industrial Strength. These levels are designed to group people of similar fitness levels into classes where they will get the appropriate training and challenges without feeling intimidated by people who are at a higher level of fitness.
Within the small group training setting, Alloy’s program can prescribe different levels of intensity on a singular exercise as a situation requires due to the varying levels of each client’s personal fitness. For example, in a hypothetical group of four clients, imagine that one has never been inside of a gym before and this is literally their first day with a trainer. If a coach plans to use pushups as a means to develop upper body strength on that day, that coach can assign the beginner to do elevated pushups while the other three perform a more advanced form of the pushups, such as weighted pushups in Olympic rings.
This allows Alloy to offer highly customizable, tailored personal training that is suitable for each individual to meet their particular needs and fitness goals at every stage of the process. Once a client is set in a tier and level, it’s time to start putting in the work and start seeing results.
Delivering Results
Any personal training program will be judged by its clients on if the coaches and trainers can deliver the promised results. However trying to show results can be problematic when using traditional metrics, like scale weight and BMI, because they don’t tell a client or a coach if actual, valuable changes are occurring. That’s why Alloy, joining a growing number of facilities around the world, places a high premium on body composition analysis. After having thrown out body fat measurements out of the program 10 years ago due to problems with inconsistent measurements resulting from using skinfold calipers, North Point Fitness brought in an InBody 570 for its body composition analysis.
The InBody 570 is a body composition analyzer that uses direct segmental multifrequency bioelectrical impedance analysis (DSM-BIA) to measure the composition of each of the body’s five segments. It is able to determine Lean Body Mass, Fat Mass, Body Fat Mass, Body Fat Percentage, Total Body Water, and much more. Most importantly, the results of the test are printed onto a results sheet that a coach can use when counseling a client.
This result sheet has been a real eye-opener for clients at North Point, both prospective and current clients, especially when they are first shown their body fat percentage. However, instead of being a discouraging experience, it’s been a motivating one:
“What I didn’t know was whether [showing clients their results] was going to be a negative thing or not. But it wasn’t. It ended up being an extremely positive experience ultimately for the client,” said Rummel. “[The clients] would literally sit there and then say nothing because it’s hardly ever a good number when they first start. And they would pause, and they would say something like ‘Alright, I guess I need to do something about this now.’”
The body composition analysis scan is one part of the complete physical evaluation each client receives when they sign up for personal training at North Point Fitness, which also includes a functional movement screen, strength test, and a medical/injury history questionnaire to ensure that clients don’t get hurt during the program and get placed into the correct level at their chosen tier.
You can have the best services in the world, but keeping clients can prove challenging if they lose focus and drive because they feel they aren’t getting a return on their investment by not getting the results they want. Alloy has a system in place for this, too.
A Proven System, Keeping Clients Invested
Alloy’s success is built upon many things, not the least of which is that their product – personal training services – actually works. It’s hard to find fault with success, and it’s even harder when you can see your own results put in front of you in a carefully organized, scientifically-validated sheet of results that tracks progress over time. That’s exactly what the InBody sheet does, and North Point uses it to validate their program with new member signups to great effect.
In order to attract new clients to the personal training program, Alloy has designed a free trial “challenge” of their program to attract new members to sign up. These most frequently take the form of 30-day trial memberships but can also be as long as 8 weeks or as short as 21 days. A complete physical evaluation occurs at both ends of the trial period, including an InBody body composition analysis.
Integrating InBody body composition analysis into Alloy has produced some surprising results. Mayo and Rummel have always been confident in the effectiveness of their programs, and the success of North Point as a facility and Alloy brand as a personal training brand speaks volumes. However, the results they have been able to prove to their clients using the InBody results sheet have been remarkable, even to them.
“In 100 trial memberships, in 98 or 99 of them the results that the client got were astonishing to the client, but probably more astonishing to us because for 23 years we had no way to formally see the results on paper,” he said. “I will say that when we first got the InBody, I told [North Point Director of Training] Matt Helland, ‘There is no way I’m doing an InBody reassessment 21 days later; there’s just not enough time for these people to make a change.”
“Well, I was wrong. There was.”
Once the trial period ends and the trial member becomes a full client – which 7 out of 10 do, according to Rummel – the client continues in the tier of their choice and progresses through the leveling system to reach their desired level of fitness.”
However, once the clients have had that positive, motivating experience with seeing their results on paper, they come back for more. North Point offers packs of InBody body composition tests bundled with 1:1 fitness counseling at any stage in a client’s exercise journey to provide coachable moments that benefit both the gym and the client. “It’s just another touch point in a coaching-based facility that gives us the opportunity to restate our position and what they need to be doing or maybe shift gears, or maybe guide them into another solution,” said Mayo. “It’s key for us.”
In this way, Alloy provides exactly the right type of training for each individual client based on their own specific needs at that moment, and they can verify that they’re assigning the client to the correct level because they have the client’s body composition analysis results right there on paper for both the client and coach to learn from.
The best part? Everyone benefits.
The experience makes the coaches better because they can actually see the end results of the programs they assign, and it keeps the client invested in their own fitness because they have the opportunity to see their efforts – whether good or bad – revealed to them objectively on paper.
The future for Alloy Personal Training Solutions? “Complete world domination!” jokes Mayo. “We have this big lofty mission statement that basically says we want to be the world’s leader in personal training systems, and I feel like we’re doing our best to get there.”
It’s hard to argue with that when the proof is right there on the table in black and white.
To learn more about Alloy Personal Training Solutions, visit them at www.teamalloy.com.
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