The numbers, and the rules I publish them under.
Every figure here came from one engagement, was measured by the client's own system rather than mine, and is published without naming the business, because that is the agreement.
One club, six months, against six clubs without it
Same products. Same price card. Same market.
A club inside a national health club franchise installed the method. Not a training day. A documented way of selling, run by every consultant on the floor, the same way, every time.
It was not the flagship. At the start of the period it sat behind the network on every yield metric. Attachment under the network average, longest term at 15% against the network's 25%.
| The club, before | With the method | The six clubs without it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upsell attachment | 49% | 86% | 60% |
| Longest term share | 15% | 57% | 34% |
| Premium membership share | 13% | 20% | 14% |
| Close ratio | 78% | 92% | tracked at the club |
The six control clubs are the point. A before-and-after can be a good market or a good month. Six clubs in the same network, over the same six months, selling the same products off the same card, cannot be.
The shape of it
It went up and it stayed up.
Upsell attachment, month by month: 49, then 63, 72, 95, 84, 97. The six clubs without it sat between 52 and 65 all half year. That is where the industry sits, and that is normal.
Upsell attachment, one club on the method, month by month. The shaded band is the six clubs in the same network without it, over the same six months.
Longest term: 15, 13, 21, then 56, 57, 58. The network never got past 36. Look at the shape of that: it did not spike and fall back, it stepped up and stayed. A promotion spikes. A process holds.
Close ratio: 78, 84, 86, 88, 89, 92. It climbed every single month and never gave one back. By month six, more than nine out of ten people who walked in or booked, joined.
These four numbers normally trade off against each other. Push attachment and terms suffer. Push terms and the close rate drops. Here all four moved together and held, which is the signature of a method rather than a push.
What the mix is worth
Percentages are nice. Contract value is money.
Priced as full contract value, the weekly rate across the term plus the start-up fee, every sale at the club carried $1,752 of contracted revenue. The six clubs without the method carried $1,489.
Read that $263 properly. It is averaged across every sale the club wrote. The ordinary ones, the short terms, the lot. It is not the good sales cherry picked, which means you can multiply it straight, and then multiply it by how many sites you have.
The part nobody counts
An upsell is not a minor add-on.
It is a warm client handed to a specialist, and an upsell floor is a rent business. What makes a floor spot worth paying for is lead flow.
At the network's rate, 60 packs walk out of every 100 sales. At this club, 86 did. That is 26 extra upsell leads per 100 memberships, out of the same traffic.
That lead flow took the club's upsell floor from ten specialists to fifteen inside the period. Five new rent-paying specialists, and the ones already there stayed, because steady leads are what let a specialist build a book. Roughly $71,500 a year of recurring rent at one club, from upsell leads alone.
What is counted, so we are clear
The number you just read is the floor, not the ceiling.
Every dollar figure above is contracted membership revenue only, priced on the card, with volume held flat.
Close ratio, retention, retail and upsell rent are all real, all measured, and all excluded from those figures. Not one dollar of the close ratio movement is counted in any money number here, and that alone is whole extra memberships sitting on top.
Every club manager target at the club sat behind at the start of the period. Membership, yield, the upsell floor. By the end, every one of them was met or passed. Not one metric left behind.
A second record. A different vertical.
Same discipline, an apparel brand.
The problem was not traffic. Returns were eating the margin, repeat purchase was accidental, and a database full of people who had already spent real money was doing nothing at all.
What got engineered: size logic that cut the returns at the point of choosing rather than the point of complaining, a lifetime-value path so the second purchase was designed instead of hoped for, a reactivation of past high-spend customers who had gone quiet, and a community so the brand had somewhere to put people who were not ready to buy again yet.
Revenue held while spend was cut, which is a harder result than growing both together. None of that is marketing. All of it is the sale, written down in advance.
The rules
Why there are no logos on this page.
Because I do not publish a client's name without their written permission, and most of them would rather their competitors did not know exactly what changed or when.
If that costs me credibility with someone, it buys it back with everyone who has ever been named in somebody else's marketing without being asked first.
One more thing worth saying plainly: their price card is not your price card. Your inclusions, your tiers and your deals will be different. The mechanism does not care. Same buyers, same products, a different conversation, more contracted revenue per sale. The card only decides how big the number gets.
How the next ones get measured
Baseline first, or it does not count.
I watch before I teach, and your current process gets mapped first. Then a baseline is signed off on your own reporting before anything changes, so movement is measured rather than claimed.
Then the method is taught to every consultant and to the managers, on your floor, on live traffic. Then it is handed to your managers to hold, with monthly reporting per site against that baseline.
It is built to be run by your people, not to depend on me standing on the floor.