This Week on Barbell Business, We Interview AJ Roberts to Discuss

• The importance of patience as a business strategy
• How to identify your “brand heroes”
• Why it’s okay to be polarizing
• How to build community
• Why none of this works if it isn’t fun

This week, we took a trip to fabulous Las Vegas to meet up with old-school Barbell Business podcast host and two-time world-record-setting powerlifter AJ Roberts (Instagram: @ajroberts). He’s one of the few people in the industry with a very solid perspective on both business and training, and he’s one of our favorite speakers of all time. He gets it, and he’s great at helping other people get it, too.

AJ breaks down what he considers to be the three pillars of running a successful gym: sales, marketing, and experience. If you’re like most box owners we know, crafting a great client experience comes naturally to you, but sales and marketing might feel like something gross that happens on the used-car lot. In this episode, AJ offers insight that helps gym owners better understand what we already know: At the end of the day, we’re selling people happiness. AJ calls the style of onboarding he uses a “prescription selling system,” where you are the doctor of fitness: A person will tell you their symptoms, and you prescribe a solution to it. It’s an authentic, non-skeezy outlook that gets the best results not just for your clients, but for your business.

But there’s always a catch, isn’t there? Sometimes the prescription needs to be for that potential client to walk right back out the door. Maybe they can come back in like six years when they’re ready for you. That’s why we spend a lot of time this week talking about your ideal client. This is the person you are most qualified to serve, and who you’d most like to serve. To cultivate this tribe requires a knowledge of who you are and of what you want. And you have to know who the clients are that you don’t want, too.

Listen in for an inspiring and practical pep talk from AJ. No matter where your gym is on its path to awesomeness, this episode will help you solidify your thinking about what you want your gym to be.

Also, here is the link to download the Class Shadow Scorecard mentioned in the show.

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