From Military To Two Thriving Gym Facilities Ricky Berry Of RB5 Shares His FMA Journey With Us

  How did RB5 get started?

Ricky: When I first took the leap into being self-employed I rented space in another small local gym and built up my business little bit by little bit. One of my clients gave me the details of a contact who owns the building my business is now situated in. I had a look around and set up RB5 from then.

  Why bring Fitness Marketing Agency (FMA) on board?

Ricky: Before I hired FMA I was spinning lots of things like training clients, doing the marketing, filming content, doing the analytics for our website and of course all the team meetings. This was bang, bang, bang, next to each other and I completely stopped training myself because my first priority was the business. I couldn’t carry on like that, it was not healthy for myself. 

I met Ben from FMA at a fitness convention and immediately hit it off. I could relate to his past and his experiences and how it could help me going forward. From a few live events we stayed in contact, then through Facebook I became a client.

  How has FMA helped your business?

Ricky: FMA has helped me get to grips with technology, how to streamline the online marketing of RB5 and improve our lead conversion. Running a business nowadays requires digital marketing and there is a lot of technology to get involved with. Now I am quite tech savvy, I used Clickfunnels, I did active campaigns and infusionsoft, but as you know it is quite time consuming to master those and get things running. So what we have done is off loaded all this to FMA.

  How does it work?

Ricky: Whenever a campaign goes live, we have a strategy call at the start of the month for the following two months so we know what content to actually produce and what we need to send to Fitness Marketing Agency. Once we have sent that we have to give it an approval and then the campaign goes live. The following part of that is dead easy. We just get all the leads, we contact them and convert them. Marketing and all the strategy behind it can take up a hell of a lot of time, particularly if it is not your main focus. The best thing we ever did was get FMA on board.

  How has FMA changed your business?

Ricky: Since being a client of FMA we have grown our business from 15 clients all the way to 130 – enabling us to open up a second facility. One of the main benefits of being a FMA client is that the community is outstanding. Being a business owner is very lonely, you can't share personal information with all the competitors for obvious reasons. Being part of this wider FMA community, outside our area, means if I have problems we can share them and we then get solutions straight away. We give something and we get something back and that is a really powerful thing, I find that one of the main selling points of being part of FMA.

  What would you say to anyone sitting on the fence?

If you are sitting on the fence, my advice would be just go ahead and do it. Like most people, you are looking for the next instruction. Whether it is a PT who has a 1000K following on social media, or some kind of guru. It is fine to do their courses, but you are only getting the information, NOT someone doing the hard work for you. FMA teaches you the information, but at the same time they implement all the marketing strategies too. So with FMA all my marketing is done for me. 

I was constantly progressing my skill set and knowledge, doing mentor-ships, coaching classes and various courses. At first impact of this was huge and I started getting some great results for my clients.

However, I got to a point where I realised knowing more about anatomy and nutrition was not going to get me any more clients. So my focus swapped to the business and marketing side.

  What made you choose the Fitness Marketing Agency (FMA)?

Josh - I first came across FMA when I started receiving very clever pieces of marketing through my own door from others in the fitness industry. I really enjoyed the thought of doing that own kind of thing with my own business. 

  How did you market yourself prior to FMA?

Josh - We had got better at marketing and were having some success with certain campaigns we ran. However, when it came to building landing pages, Facebook, I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was hit and miss, one month we might get a campaign out there – but I would need to do the landing page, write the copy and I had no direction with what I really wanted to do. So it was all about random. 

  What impact has it had on your business?

Josh -  Since working with FMA, not only are we getting more leads and clients from our paid advertising we are also getting more from organic feeds too. They have enabled us to create a foothold locally now, where only this morning a prospective client sat in front of me and I asked them where they had heard of me and they said ‘you’re everywhere!’

FMA has enabled us to do that. They have ensure there are more eyeballs on our content locally, complimenting the other things we are doing outside Facebook. They have helped us grow not just the leads and sales by direct response ads where we are selling to the market, but also by generating more enquiries and conversations with potential customers through interest pieces. I put that down to having a consistent, strategic, marketing platform.

  What impact has it had on your fitness business?

Josh - Over the last six months we have been a lot more strategic and systematic with our marketing, specifically on Facebook. This elevated our client numbers from 65 to 84. The reason I trust FMA with our marketing efforts is because you have got experts there who direct you and give you focus. They are full of ideas on stuff you can implement. So you don’t need to take up valuable head space wondering what your next video should be, or what your next Facebook ad should say. There is a team of experts that are always there, to answer and questions you have or address and queries. Or simply, help you implement some of the marketing tools we know work. Knowledge is only power if you know how to implement that knowledge, that is what FMA is all about

  Any advice you could give to other business owners thinking about using FMA?

Josh - One bit of advice I could give to any business owner out there in the fitness industry is to out source the aspects of your business which you are not intrinsically motivated to perform or do not have the particular skill set required. As you will get faster, more effective results if you trust someone else with these aspects of your business and you will learn more doing this process.