Your gym is in the network now, and your members don't know it yet. These pages walk you through telling them and telling your coaches, and through the two things the network needs from you to do its part: your Google review link and your member list.
CrossFit has always had the best coaching and the best people, but every box has been on its own from day one. A membership stopped at the gym's own door, so the member who took a job with travel, or spent a spring driving to her kid's tournaments, was on her own in a hotel gym for weeks at a time.
You just changed that for your gym: one community connected across the country, instead of every box on its own island.
What you joined is a group of independent gym owners who agreed to open their classes to each other's members. Your member on a work trip in Denver pulls up the network on her phone, picks a box and a class time, and she gets a free class there, every year she's a member with you. Same for the week at the in-laws' and the tournament weekend. The more gyms that join, the more cities that covers, and that part depends on owners like you telling other owners.
We want CrossFit to be a lifestyle again. When a brand-new member hears “over the next year, your body is going to change,” they start thinking in years. Then they buy the shoes, they buy the gymnastics grips, and they learn the workouts don’t stop when they travel, because every year they’re a member at your gym, they get a free class at every other gym in this network, across the country.
The deeper your members get into it, the more excited they are, and the more excited they are the longer they stay and the more they tell their friends and family. A member who has been with you for years and knows she has a free class waiting at 100+ boxes the next time she travels has one more reason not to shop for another gym.
Everything on these pages is written for you to hand out: the text messages, the emails, the Instagram posts, and the one-and-two-sentence explanations for new athletes, for your coaches, and for your whole current member list. You paste them in once, and from then on every member who joins your gym hears about it without you writing anything.
Your members won’t hear about any of this unless you tell them, and your coaches won’t mention it after class unless you’ve told them first. So most of what is on this page is telling people: your members, your coaches, and the owner down the road.
Setup takes about 45 minutes and you only do it once. After that, the biggest thing you can do for your own members is get more boxes in, because every gym that joins is one more city where they get a free class, so when you see it working at your gym, tell an owner you respect.
When your members travel, they can book a class at any box in the network, and they get a free class at each one, every year. Their membership does not stop when they leave town.
Every athlete who trains at your gym through BoxEx gets asked to leave you a Google review. The more reviews you have, the more likely you're the gym somebody finds when they search, and it costs you nothing.
When you upload your member list, every person on it gets an intro email from the network, and part of that email asks them to leave your gym a Google review. A follow-up ask goes out after it. So the asking starts with the people who already train with you, before the first visitor ever books a class.
Everybody on your roster the day you joined, members and coaches, is in free and stays free. Your coaches stay free for good, and your members stay free for as long as they are members at your gym.
As your gym grows, each new member added to your roster is $10 a year. That’s it. Billing is automatic from the moment they’re added, and what they get for that $10 helps you sign them in the first place.
There is no contract, no monthly fee, and nothing charged per visit. The only money we ever take from a gym is that $10 when you add a member, so we do well only when your gym does.
How the billing works, so you’re never guessing: everyone on your day-one roster is free, your coaches for good and your members for as long as they train with you. New members after that are $10 a year each, billed when they’re added to your roster. Think about what one member pays you in a year, and how many years a member who stays keeps paying it, then look at the $10.
Our recommendation: just cover it, and tell your members what they’re getting. Word for word or make it yours:
When a coach asks “what do we pay for this?”
If $10 a member isn’t in your budget right now, there’s a second way to run it: have the member pay the $10 as part of joining your gym. Here is what to say:
Run it as a $10 line on registration or a small annual add-on, whichever fits your billing. Either way, the number your member hears next to it is the $50 it actually costs on its own.
None of this replaces anything you already use. The email goes into the CRM you already have and the posts go on the accounts you already run. Start with Step 1 and go in order.
Your member list is uploaded and the announcement is out, so every member has heard it from you and from the network. When a prospect walks in for a tour, you're the gym whose membership comes with a free class at 100+ boxes, every year.
You've run the 30-day review drive and asked the whole roster, and if about one in five said yes, the newest reviews on your profile are from this month. Every athlete who visits from another box in the network gets asked too, and the network does that asking, not you.
By day 90 every tour ends with 'and your membership comes with a free class at 100+ boxes, every year.' And when a CrossFitter from another box in the network books a class with you on her work trip, she signed your waiver before she arrived, she already knows the movements, and after class she gets asked to leave you a Google review.
When a prospect compares you to the box down the road, yours is the membership that comes with a free class at 100+ boxes when they travel, every year. Say that on every tour.
The members who stay in CrossFit for years are the ones who get all the way in: the shoes, the grips, the friends from the 6am class. The first time one of them books her free class at a box in another city for a work trip, CrossFit stops being something she does at one address and starts being her lifestyle, and people stay with their lifestyle for years.
Every athlete who visits from another box in the network gets asked after class to leave your gym a Google review, and the network does the asking, not your coaches. Nobody on your staff has to remember to do it.
When one of your athletes trains at a box in Austin on a work trip and comes back to the Monday 6am class talking about it, the whole class hears that her membership here is what got her in the door there.
You set it up once and it runs on its own after that.