Your Training Gym's Real Competitor Isn't Another Gym

Your Training Gym's Real Competitor Isn't Another Gym

Brandon Smitley totaled 1,377 pounds in the 132-pound weight class — more than ten times his body weight — and broke his own all-time world-record squat at WPC Worlds in 2016. Then a freak accident in training ended his full-power career while he was still in his twenties.

What he did next is the part every facility owner should study. He opened THIRST in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 2018 — and moved the scoreboard from the platform to the P&L.

"Running a business almost checks that box," he told me on the Athlete Builder podcast. "There's always something you can do better, whether it be increased revenue, decreased expenses, new client acquisitions."

That's a competitor talking. And when a competitor of that caliber runs a private training facility an hour down the road from mine, I want to know how he thinks. This conversation delivered — on the business mix, on where the sports-parent dollar is actually going, and on the argument independent gyms are uniquely positioned to win.

The business mix is a decision, not an accident

Ask most gym owners how their revenue breaks down by population and you get a shrug. Ask Brandon and you get numbers, instantly.

Youth athletes are 70 to 75 percent of the business. Powerlifters and strength athletes are 20 to 25 percent. His remote coaching roster is capped at 28 clients — "That's my cap. So I'm basically full." When a competing gym started winning members on convenience, he priced the fix like an operator: "It's a couple thousand dollars to get an extended-access door... let's just bite the bullet and do it."

And the part that separates owners who last from owners who drift — he knows which population is there for the margin and which is there for the mission. On the strength athletes: "I'm a meathead. If I was not a meathead, I'd kick them out in a heartbeat... but from a business perspective, I had to make a business decision."

Every population in your gym is a choice with a margin attached. The owners who thrive size those populations on purpose. The owners who struggle let the schedule decide for them.

The real competitor isn't the gym across town

Here's the reframe that makes this episode a buyer conversation and not just a meathead conversation. The dollars your facility is losing aren't going to the other performance gym in your market. They're going to a ninth month of travel ball, another showcase, another set of lessons.

Brandon's read on that industry is blunt: "There's no development in this... It's literally a talent identification thing." The showcase model doesn't build the athlete — it sorts athletes who were already built. And the return on that spend? "Statistically, the way it is now — no, you're not" seeing it, he tells parents. "You might as well just put that money in your pocket and go on vacation."

The funnel doesn't move either. By Brandon's numbers, 5 to 7 percent of kids go on to play college sports — and that percentage holds no matter how many families pay for exposure. More kids chasing the same funnel doesn't widen the funnel. It waters down the leagues.

If you own a training facility, that's the argument your marketing has to win. Not "we're better than the gym down the street." The argument is: development beats exposure, and here's the math.

The counter-offer only a training facility can make

The independent facility's edge is that it can quantify development — and almost nobody else in the youth sports economy can.

Brandon runs the math on pitching as the example: "Why are you going to spend $50 an hour on pitching lessons when you can get that three to five miles an hour of velo by just training two times a week for a year?" Then the line that should be on a wall somewhere: "Two times a week for a year isn't sexy." But the kid who builds the base first walks into his junior-year lessons throwing harder than everyone — and then the skill work amplifies instead of compensates.

The prescription his staff gives nearly every athlete costs nothing: "Go to bed half an hour to an hour sooner if you can. Get off your phone less and eat more protein." Do that plus two hard sessions a week and, in his words, "you're basically taking free steroids at this point, because most kids aren't doing that."

I made the same case from the owner's chair: "If no one's lifting, I can make you the strongest or the most resilient or the fastest kid on your team — then you're probably going to win." Everyone in that dugout already knows who the strongest kid is. Everyone knows who's fastest. When your facility can name the number and move the number, you own the conversation with the parent — and the travel-ball pitch starts sounding expensive.

What "I want it" actually looks like

Every owner hears the same sentence in the intake meeting: my kid wants to play in college. Brandon's answer is a set of questions: "Is your nutrition in the top one out of 100? Is your sleep in the top one out of 100?... If those questions are no, then you don't want the Division One as bad as you think you do."

And when a family wants to know what the standard looks like, he tells them about one of his athletes. No team sports until eighth grade because the family couldn't afford them. Raised by his grandmother. In the gym at 6 a.m. year-round — football season, wrestling season, summer, it didn't matter. "I want to go to Harvard. That was his goal. He applied to every Ivy League school... Harvard was the one that took him." Brandon's summary: "When people tell me they want something — that's what it looks like."

Notice what that story is doing for his business. It's his best marketing asset, it's true, and it cost him nothing but attention. Your facility has these stories too. The owners who build a system for capturing them stop paying for trust.

The weakest-link sell

Brandon came up through the conjugate world, so it's no surprise the episode kept returning to the oldest rule in that book: you're only as strong as your weakest link. My definition of a limiting factor is the same conversation: "It holds you back. You can't progress past that... Once it's exposed, stop doing everything else you're doing — because this thing has literally stopped you."

That rule is also a sales system. The facilities that win the parent conversation aren't the ones with the best equipment — they're the ones that can diagnose the weak link, name it in plain language, and show the plan to fix it. It's the same reason we built theAthlete Builder Scorecard(athlete-builder.com/assessmenttest) — a ten-minute diagnostic that scores an athlete across six blocks and hands the coach the weak link in writing. Diagnosis first. Everything else follows.

If you own a facility

This is the kind of operator-to-operator conversation I'm having every week right now — the business mix, the diagnostic, the retention math behind a youth performance gym that lasts. If you want to compare notes on the machine behind it, book a Game Plan Session: link.closersoftware.com/widget/bookings/ab-gameplansession.

Or just answer this one: what's the hardest conversation you have with sports parents? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Win the Day. Stay Relentless.