Laura Munkholm:
Everyone. Hi, and welcome to our wallow webinar series. Thank you so much for being on time here prepared and early, some of you. Um, we are gonna get right into content because we have a lot to talk about today, but just quickly before we do, um, many of you might be new to this platform for webinars, so don't be alarmed if you don't see your face here. It's intentional, it's webinar style, a little bit different than Zoom, so you're not doing anything wrong. Uh, we do this so that the content that's being shared is front and center and, um, you know, you're not under pressure to look beautiful while you're sitting watching. The other thing is that we'll be really interactive during this webinar today. So, uh, for those of you who have been to our Wallow webinar series, you know that we always get lots of questions in the chat, and we really do try to get to all of them during the presentation. So I'll be monitoring that, um, and kind of peppering in questions to Eric as he's going through the presentation today. And, um, if you feel like there's something still lingering afterwards, please, please, please feel free to reach out to hello@hellowalla.com, and we'll be sure to either direct those questions to Eric if you need him. Eric will be sharing his information too. Um, Or if you have a question specifically for Walla, then we can dive into it together. So, uh, I am I guess I didn't introduce myself. My name is Laura Mangholm, and I'm the founder and president here at Walla. Thank you for joining us. Those of you who are not Walla clients, I actually saw we have quite a few of you here. Um, this is really not gonna be diving into Walla software in a lot of detail. It's much more about talking about how we can all get better as business owners in this industry. So, um, don't don't worry. You're not out of place. But I am very excited to have Eric Tepper from Selling Wellness here with us today. When we discussed this topic, it really was along the lines of some of the the new regulations that obviously we we've been all talking about, and we had a webinar last week around click to cancel. And, ultimately, a lot of the stress around that, I think, is avoidable. And Eric and I really kind of got nerdy and dove into some of the reasons behind, uh, why this industry has traditionally struggled with retention and what we can do about it now, especially in today's day and age of technology. So Eric, why you should listen to him? He is an expert in all things boutique fitness. He's worked with some of the biggest brands in the world to, you know, individual studios. And after working with, gosh, probably hundreds of individual locations, he has seen it all, um, from the very good to the very ugly, maybe. I fixed everything.

Eric Tepper:
Good way to describe it, Laura. The the very ugly.

Laura Munkholm:
Yeah. And and Eric actually was instrumental for us in designing and kind of rolling out our our lead tracker in Walla. So we really do try to lean on experts like Eric for real time use cases and education on what you're all going through, um, as business owners. So, Eric, I'm gonna turn it over to you and let you dive into the the meat of the presentation today. And for those of you here, if you wouldn't mind, while he's getting started, just pop your name and your studio where you're from in the chat for us.

Eric Tepper:
Great. And and thank you so much for that introduction, Laura. I really appreciate it. You and Walla have been fantastic partners. So let me go ahead and share my screen. Give me one second to queue this up. Okay. And then we got this. Okay. So as as Laura mentioned, you know, my name is Eric Tepper. I'm gonna give you, like, a ten second snippet. Uh, my company is Selling Wellness. I launched that about two and a half years ago. I've been in the fitness industry for close to thirty years now. And every time I say that I look at my gray and my baldness, I'm like, oh my gosh. Um, and I work, um, now with gosh, I think it's been close to a 170 locations across the country in London and in Australia. And what I focus on with clients is we build sales strategies and use sales coaching. So we focus a lot of our efforts on, uh, bringing in new members, right? How do we create an incredible journey where people start to lean towards, yes, I want to be a part of this. And here's the thing, no matter how great you are at what you do, you could provide the most incredible modality, have incredible teams that make meaningful relationships. Um, cancellations are part of the game. It's just a fact. And, um, I had no other way to like I looked at this slide 20 times and I'm like there's no other way to describe cancellations other than they just suck. There's nothing that ruins your day more than a cancellation. I mean, you could have full classes. You signed up four new members today and then somebody walks in and says, I need to cancel my membership and there's an immediate reaction to that, isn't there? There's just like this experience of like a gray cloud moves over your studio and the whole day is ruined. So here's my first invitation to you because the intention of this next forty five minutes that we have together is really for you to have power around cancellations, for you to be able to predict cancellations, and for you to be able to prevent cancellations. Those are the three p's. So let's start with giving some power around cancellations. Okay? What I would say first is to get out of the emotional reactionary aspect of cancellations is to get what's so. And when I say what's so, meaning the actual data behind your attrition or if you wanna call it retention. Um, I have met with owners and operators where they're like, oh my gosh, my attrition is horrible. And then when we actually look at the data, it's actually really, really good. It's just they're so impacted by people saying I wanna cancel. And as a rule of thumb, okay, this is kind of looking broadly at at all the studios I work with and talking with other owners outside of that. If you're below 6% on a monthly basis, you're doing good. If you're in that six, is that Laura, are you kinda seeing the same thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Six to 8%, you're you're doing okay. Okay. You're not doing bad, you're not doing great, there's some room for improvement. And if you're above 8%, well, then you wanna take a hard look at what's going on in your studio. And, you know, the numbers are gonna vary depending on your modality. It might be a little bit different. And the way that, you know, you can measure this using your system, like there's automatic reports, I take a second look. I take what was my beginning member number, how many cancellations did I have, and I divide the cancellations by the beginning number, and that gives me a percentage. Right? And tells me what's going on.

Laura Munkholm:
And just for context in Walla, the plan gain loss report is gonna be really, really helpful for this because we give you the net gain or loss and the overall retention number in all of those plans. So very just Walla focus. That's where you're gonna find the quickest data.

Eric Tepper:
Yes. So for you Walla clients, that's you know, write that down. That's something that you can go and do today. Now even if you're a studio, let's say you have 5%, right, and that's fantastic. You're still eventually gonna run into a challenge. And and here's the the challenge, I call it like a success challenge, Is the more you're successful and the more your studio grows, the harder it gets to grow. So if you have a 100 members and you're losing five a month, it's not a huge deal because you can easily sign up more than five people a month and have net growth. But when you have 300 members, that's a different story because now your first 15 joins every month are just to break even. So it gets harder and harder to reach that net plus. And we know that our goal is every month. We wanna have at least one or two net growth. Uh, if you're a newer studio, that might be a much bigger number. So what I invite you to do as a kind of a first step is start taking a hard look at why people are canceling. And, um, here's why I say take a hard look. In working with owners and operators, I hear certain phrases that I I invite you to look at as red flags. If you find yourself saying things like most people, all of my cancellations, um, I wrote down some other ones, I just can't think of what they are at the uh, everyone. Oh, everyone's canceling for relocation. Whenever you use generalities like that, inherently it's a lie and not a lie like I'm cheating on my taxes lie, a lie like it's just not based in reality because the truth is not everyone, not most are canceling for relocation. If you have 20 cancellations, there are a certain number that are canceling for relocation and then there's a certain number that are canceling for low usage and there's a certain number that fall into other categories. And if you go into this generalization of, oh, well everybody's canceling for relocation or most, You lose sight of the opportunities to actually impact your number. So this would be the first thing I would say is start to really keep track of this. Um, I know I have clients that, well, I know in Walla you can keep track of the reasons people cancel. I have clients who in their cancellation process, they send like a Google form saying, you know, can we ask you a couple questions? We'd love to learn more about why you're leaving. And they ask why they're canceling. Right? And then they keep that so you can look month over month over month, um, and really get a good sense of of what's happening. K? Okay. So here's how once we get kinda what so, I invite you to look at cancellations from a really, uh, simple view. Okay? And and those of my clients who work with me, you know, I like to keep things super simple, Is that when people say yes to your studio, when they're joining, whether it's on a package, whether it's on a membership, we're entering into a relationship. And like with every great relationship, right, anybody here who's been in a long term relationship, we know that if we stop tending to the relationship, if we stop generating romance and putting forth an effort, the relationship dies. And I have a, uh, suspicion and I invite you to look for yourself in your studio. Don't take my word for it. I think we're really good in the early dating stages. Right? Those first few dates, we show our our best self. Right? We pay a lot of attention to people. We have meaningful conversations. We're interested in them. And then I think what happens is over time, we kinda start to neglect the membership a little bit. And then what happens is the number one question that I get from owners and operators, here's what it is. What should I say to save them? They come to cancel and I don't know what to say. It's the most common question. Well, here's the challenge. That's like, you know, after somebody breaks up with you, you start in hindsight going, wow, Why didn't I do things differently? Right. You know, by the time they show up at your your doorstep to say I'm canceling or I'm breaking up with you, it's you know, most people don't wake up in the in the morning when they're married to someone and say, you know, I think today I'm gonna get divorced. What happens is months prior to that something happened. Yeah. Right? Maybe, uh, they cleaned the floor and their partner came in with dirty shoes. And they said to themselves like, oh, they just don't respect me. I work so hard to make sure the floor is clean and then they bring in their dirty shoes. And as I'm sharing this, I want you to relate it to the studio. Okay? And then, you know, they don't do anything about it, but it plants a seed. And then what happens is like a month later, they leave the toothpaste cap off the toothpaste and it oozes under the gutter. And they're like, now they leave their dirty shoes on. They mess my, now they leave the toothpaste off the cap off the toothpaste. Clearly, they don't respect the relationship and these things start to pile up and they gather evidence until it gets to a point where they say, that's it. I gotta exit the relationship. So if you wait until your clients come in, you've only got like a 5% shot, maybe 10% at at saving them. So what we're gonna do today to actually help you with this is we're gonna look at this from two aspects and here's the two aspects. How do we proactively prevent cancellations before they happen? And we'll also take a stab at what do we do when they show up? What can give us a good shot? Okay. So if if we go back to kind of the relationship analogy, I know most people, there's always a few, but most people, they don't get married thinking I do and in the back of their head they they say, Anne, I can always get divorced if it doesn't work out. On that same token, when people join your studio, whether it's on a membership or whether it's on a package, most are not thinking about canceling the day they join. There's always a few exceptions. Right? There there is. And one of the things that can influence that is how you sell the membership. Like, if you sell and you find yourself talking half the time about how easy it is to cancel and how noncommittal, you're setting yourself up. You're planting the seed in their head. Yeah. But let's assume that we're not doing that. Let's assume that we're doing a great job. We're building value in our community, in our in our modality. And when that person says yes, they're excited. They're like, this is it. I'm gonna be my best version of myself, I'm gonna be a part of this amazing community. And then what happens is along the way something happens and they start to, uh, disengage from the community. Now, why do you think we don't catch that? Well, there's a good reason. So I typically will ask this question of of owners and operators. I'll say, what do your clients think of your studio? And, of course, if you were to answer this question right now, like, if I was talking to you, you'd say my members absolutely love my studio. The problem is we're talking to the wrong people. We're talking to the people that come in every day. So of course they see the value, of course they love your studio and that's what they're gonna tell you. And, you know, let me rephrase, they're not the wrong people, they're just a select group of people. But the people that are not coming consistently, the people that are on an unlimited membership and they show up three times a month or they're on a package and they come in once every other week, we're not talking to them. So we actually don't know what's going on with them. And at a certain point with that group of people, what happens is it starts to become a value calculation. And when I say value, it's not just about dollars, it's about experience, it is about dollars and usage. But, you know, let's say for example and and the number is gonna be different in each studio, and there's actually a place you can go. Like, what I recommend doing is start looking for patterns. If you look at all of your cancellations of the last six months, you'll see certain patterns. You'll see, wow, 90% of them came less than x times per month

Laura Munkholm:
and

Eric Tepper:
they were on an unlimited membership. Or if they were on an eight time membership, they came less than x times a month. And, you know, I know for myself, so like I besides belonging to like a big gym, I belong to a studio, a yoga studio. When I and I'm paying for an unlimited membership and when I go, the amount of times that I planned on, which is twice a week, I'm not thinking about what I'm spending. I'm thinking about how much I love my classes, how much I love the instructor, how much I love the community. When I look at certain months where my schedule gets crazy or I'm traveling and I don't go, I immediately start to think about, you know, I'm spending, like, $24 a class and I'm not that connected and da da da da da. And I start having that conversation. That's like the dirty floor conversation. That's kinda when it starts to shift and they disconnect from belonging to our community. So with that insight, what would you wanna start to look for? Here's what I say you should start to look for. And again, your number might be a little bit different, it might not be less than nine times, it might be less than than eight times. It must be might be less than 10 times. You have to kinda figure it out for yourself. But every month at the beginning of the month, who are my unlimited members who are coming in less than x times? Who are my eight time members Who are coming less than eight times or less than six times or whatever that number is? How engaged are they with other aspects of the studios? Do they show up to our social mixers? Are they reading our emails? Are they interacting with our social media posts? And, uh, maybe are they commenting positive comments or are they commenting negative comments? Whose classes are they coming to? You know, if their favorite instructor is only on the schedule once a week, I gotta figure out a way to to plug them in to someone else they'll love. Um, how quickly, if they're not on a membership, how quickly are they going through their their, uh, visit package? You know, if they have a five pack or a 10 pack, are they coming in once a month? You can guess that if they are, they're probably not integrated into your community. So these are all signs that if you take a hard look at the beginning of every single month, you can start to identify who are my risky people or my danger members. Okay? Alright. So now we've we've got some measures in place and we can start to in our studio of two, three, four, five hundred members, we can start to see here's potentially people that are, uh, are risky that may not be integrated. So what do we do about that? Right? This is why y'all came is how do I save them? So if you think about why do people join your studio in the first place, There's kind of three pillars. One is they have goals, right? There's something they want to achieve and they saw your modality, whatever it is, as the right fit for what they want to achieve. And it's not necessarily a physical goal, their goal might have been to belong, right? And they loved your community. But typically they do have some kind of fitness, wellness, um, health goal. And what we do was the right fit. Two, is there was something about the community. Right? The community was warm. It was inviting. They felt like they connected with it. And the studio world is very much about connecting to the community. We know that. And then the last piece is they had a killer experience, whether it was the right play track, whether it was the right lighting, whether it was the interaction with the instructor or the front desk, the experience was amazing. And what happens is when they, um, they stop being integrated, they forget these things. So we wanna start to reconnect them and remind them about it. So, um, I'll share with you, like, a quick little story. I was running a a personal training business. This was years and years and years ago. And, um, we were killing it. We had people coming, writing, like, $10,000 checks to train, and it was great. And then the economic crash of two thousand was it eight, I think, happened. And our our members, they weren't, you know, starving. It's just their portfolios were going from 10,000,000 to 7,000,000. Right? And they started, yeah, started looking at their finances and saying things like, I'm in great shape. I'm spending a thousand dollars a month. What if I just take my trainer out for beers and, you know, once a month and it'll cost me a $100? And what they said was, I'm traveling. Take me off the schedule and I'll call you back when I'm back. Well, at first, we were like, well, they travel, but then all of a sudden we noticed like six people a day just happened to be traveling. And what we realized is they weren't connected. So we put a measure in place where about every eight weeks, we sat down, we started talking about what they'd accomplished, what their goals were, and what they were working on now, and what the recommendation moving forward was. We started putting more social mixers into the mix, like creating more than just a place where people came to work out. We elevated our in studio experience. When we did all of this, our attrition literally went away, like completely, like there were months we didn't lose a single client. So I would say once you identify these people, start to have conversations starting with goals. Like, call up Laura and say, hey, Laura. You know, I I realized I hadn't talked to you in a little bit. And I know when you first joined, you you were talking about marathon season. And I know marathon season is right around the corner. How's your training going for that? And can I make some recommendations on some classes that could really support that? Right? To try and get the reengagement there. You could also at that point, if Laura says like, wow. It sounds amazing, Eric, but life is just so crazy right now. I just don't have the time. I'm traveling, dah, dah, dah. Proactively saying, you know what, Laura? I got it. We we wanna help and make it comfortable. You're paying for unlimited use. Let's let's downgrade you. Right? Let's bring you down to to two visits a week or or eight times a month. I don't and and then when when life gets a little easier, we can always revisit that. When you take that proactive approach, while in the initial you're thinking, oh my gosh, I'm gonna lose revenue. You will gain a member for life instead of having somebody who's thinking they're spending too much for your services. So then the other piece of this besides the goals is to focus on community and experience, create more than a place to work out. You know, you can create theme classes, member socials, and you can do it for virtually no cost. You know, we used to partner with, like if there was a new wine bar in the area, we'd say, what is your slowest night of the week? And, you know, if we were to bring you 25 people, would you be willing to give them a free cocktail and put some snacks out knowing that you now have 25 new clients. And they were like, sure, it costs us nothing. And then we'd call it a member mixer and we'd get people in and they absolutely love it because they're then integrated with the community. Yep. Okay. So this is more on the prevention side. Laura, was there anything you wanted to add on, like, identifying or, you know, proactively?

Laura Munkholm:
Yeah. So I think right now, the biggest challenge for a lot of studios is, okay, great. Yeah. That sounds amazing, and I wish we all had time to be hunting all of this information. I'll get into details on some of the the upcoming things. But just quickly, um, your audiences in Walla are a fantastic way to highlight these folks. And you can do all of this now. The groups that he mentioned in, like, the, you know, people using their eight pack only six times or fewer in the last thirty days or unlimited members under x amount of times, people who haven't been in in a certain number of days. That's really the point of audiences in Walla, is to make sure that those people don't fly under the radar, and you have no idea, and then they step in your door and cancel. You're like, oh my gosh. How did I forget about Eric? He's he used to come all the time. But it's true what you said early on. We we just think about the people we see all the time. And, you know, I I often find that it's, um, you know, people are so grateful when you do reach out, when you do send a personal note, like, hey. It's been a while. Not not a generic automation, we miss you, but an actual what's going on? Like, how was that marathon training? How did the marathon go? Did the yoga class help, or did your strength training here put you in a better position? Um, so anyway, please, please, please leverage audiences. And if you've never built audiences in Walla before, in our sales and marketing course, you'll be able to find really key audiences that we see as as kind of indicators of this type of thing, and we'll give you step by step on how to build them.

Eric Tepper:
Yeah. Laura, that's that's such gold. You know, the the generic we miss you, um, I think at this point, people have enough experience that when they see that, they immediately think it's like a reminder. Oh, I'm not coming and paying you.

Laura Munkholm:
Exactly.

Eric Tepper:
Right? They know it's automatic. It's a triggered thing. But actually reaching out to somebody and saying, like, I know you just had a little one. How are you feeling? How's how is adjusting to life? Yeah. Right? Stuff like that is is, um, invaluable. That that's really the magic that you cannot put a price tag on. Okay. So, hopefully, by doing all of this, we've now prevented some people from showing up on our doorstep saying, I need to break up with you. But even if you do all of this, there's still gonna be some people. So how do we, um, how do we address those? What do we say? Well, what I'll share is it's not so much what you say as much as your approach. Because I would guess that if I walked into any of your studios and said I wanna cancel, you have all the right answers. Right? Your team knows exactly what to do. Try and put them on a freeze. See if you can downgrade them. See if you can, uh, you know, make sure you tell them about the thirty day cancellation notice and and get them, you know, back into the studio. Right? These are all kind of our standard approaches that universally are are are kind of the same. How well does that work out for you? Probably not very, especially the, we'll just put them on a free why don't we just freeze so you can think about it? Then you have somebody on your books who you're not getting revenue from, and then they come off of freeze and they say, now I wanna cancel. And you say, well, you still have to give me a thirty day notice, and the whole thing goes sideways. K? Here's how I invite you to approach this, is if Laura comes in and says, hey, I need to cancel my membership. Instead of going into automatic response, start by being empathetic. Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. What's going on, Laura? Right? And really coming from a genuine place of being curious what's going on in their life. Right? Because we know there's always a solution for whatever's going on for them unless they're relocating. Okay? If Laura's moving out of the city and moving to a whole another state, there's nothing I can do to keep her. Okay? But for everything else, being curious and being empathetic from a place of really caring is going to open up the door. Now here's something that's a little, um, tricky, okay, that I'm gonna I'm gonna share with you. And this is kind of like in the human nature. So we, like all of you on this webinar, Laura, myself, we're all humans. We have human brains that are built for survival. And what that means is that everything kind of occurs on a threat level. It's a flight or fight mechanism that's meant to keep us safe. And when when something happens that doesn't line up with the way we expect it to go, that kicks in and immediately we're on the defensive. So if I if Laura comes in intending to cancel and I give her some obstacle, well, why don't we do this instead? It immediately triggers a defense mechanism. Science shows and and I do a lot of work like I worked with this brain science scientist where they put a, uh, like a swim cap with sensors.

Laura Munkholm:
You

Eric Tepper:
can see what happens in the brain is if you agree with people, if you validate them, what happens is the defense mechanism goes down. So if I say to Laura, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. What's going on, Laura? And she says, life is just too crazy for me right now. My immediate instinct is to say, well, why don't we downgrade you or why don't we freeze you until life, you know, calms down? That's just gonna cause an argument. Instead, I wanna validate what she said in her experience by saying, oh my gosh, yeah, it sounds like life is so crazy right now. I really get it. And and we don't wanna add to your craziness. We're here to support you and help give you some relief. Now I know some of you are like, well, when do I ask them about staying and stop the cancellation? Right? It's not about that. It's about creating an opening and creating that I'm here to help. And when I validate using the words yes and, yes or agreement what it does is it brings down the warning, right? They feel heard, they feel validated And then when I use the word and, it creates enough of an ambiguity that Laura leans in to hear what is the rest of what that is behind that and. So that's where you wanna start with everybody is I'm so sorry. What's going on? And then, oh, wow. Yeah. I mean, I get it. You're you're just you're spending too much for only coming three times a month. I would be upset too. I hate when that happens. Now there's an opening to ask some questions. Now we can offer questions that lead to solutions like, you know, Laura with your new travel schedule and and being so stressed and life so crazy, do do you think if you came in just a little bit, like, once a week or twice a week, that it would help reduce your stress? Okay. I got an idea. What why don't we do this? Instead of just disconnecting completely, it sounds like you're here on the weekends. Why don't we bring you down to a once a week membership so that you can come in on the weekends and relieve that stress? And then when when life gets a little bit easier, we can always, you know, re upgrade you to have more access. Would that would that be more comfortable? So using that using that yes and approach to bring the defense down. Okay? This is something that takes a lot of practice, and you have to work with your teams instead of going into the automatic response. Now, even if we proactively identify people, there are gonna be ones who show up and even if we do a great job with the people who show up, there's going to be some we we just can't save. So what do we do with those people? I recommend leaving on the best of terms. Meaning, there's there's ways that we can, uh, depart where they feel really appreciated. And I'll give you one that really is a winner. Okay? Um, and I I was working with a company, like, right at the 2020. Uh, I don't like to use the word pandemic. It was, like, 2020, and we still have people canceling. And what we started doing is we started saying, you know, we do have a thirty day cancellation. Of course, they'd be like, oh, I don't want thirty days. And say, but I tell you what, whether you use that thirty days or not, we're gonna give you a gift certificate for thirty days in the gym, and it's good for up to a year from now. And you can if you're not if you're moving away, give it to somebody who one of your friends who's here. But hang on to it if you live locally because you might decide you wanna come back, and and we're here when you're ready to come back. We actually got quite a few people who within six months would come back and use that one month and they'd end up rejoining like a 100% of the time.

Laura Munkholm:
Oh, man. That's awesome.

Eric Tepper:
Yeah. Yeah. It's really great. Because I know for most studios, it's like that thirty day out, people are so like upset about that. Right? What do you mean? You didn't tell me when I signed up and had to be thirty days, which we did. Right? Yeah. And it's like one, like, let's get the most out of the thirty days. So that that's an approach I would take as well is you're gonna be here. What what are you gonna be doing next? Oh, you're gonna go and, you know, do yoga lotties. Fantastic. Why don't we take the next thirty days and get the most out of this so that you really start off consistent with your with your new practice?

Laura Munkholm:
Mhmm.

Eric Tepper:
You know, let me help you book some classes over the next thirty days. Right? And then if they're still pushing back, it's give the the the gift certificates so they can come back. You know, the most important thing is it it's not you. It was us. We failed somehow. And, um, I'll share another quick little story. Um, I had a client who, um, they came in. She said I joined a year ago. I was all excited. And, you know, I had every intention of coming, taking the classes, losing weight, maybe doing some training. I haven't been in since. I need to cancel. So I said, I'm so sorry. I said, we let you down because when you came in, I know we made a promise that we would help you reach your goals. And the fact that you slipped through the cracks, that's on us. So, you know, we ask for a thirty day. Let's let's make the most out of it. Would it be okay if I put you as a trainer on me so you could at least take that thirty days and and really, like, get your best step forward? Right? She's like, I, you know, I got I ended up gaining weight. I wasn't happy, and she had no plan moving forward. And, um, she goes, well, if I use that trainer, then you're gonna want me you want me to spend more money on training. And I said, yeah, absolutely. If it's gonna work, If it's gonna help you get what you want. And, you know, she she took it. She ended up buying training, but she ended up happy because she got what she wanted out of it. So, um, um, with all this in mind, where do you go from here? Like, where do you start? Because I know that this can be a little bit overwhelming and the the hardest part is, like, where do I start? I have limited resources and time and attention. So here's what I would recommend. One, start looking at data for danger signs. And I know there is a lot of great data in Walla that you can easily access. And I would set like here's the few danger signs I'm looking for. Right? Don't look at everything because you'll get lost. Pick three or four points. This next one, I'm a little on the fence about, which is don't poke the bear. Okay? If you have somebody and this is, like, everyone's gonna have a different view on this, and I'm totally open to your feedback on it. If someone has not checked in and it's been more than two months, if you start saying, like, hey. We noticed you haven't been here in two, three months. It's kind of a reminder they've been paying you for two or three months and not not coming at all. So, um, I will say most studios, they leave that population alone. And really the solution is don't let people get to that point. Yeah. Let them go sixty and ninety days without checking in at all. That's the worst. Um, have conversations about goals and about community by creating ways to make us more than a place to work out. You know, create events, fun events, do challenges. You'd be blown away how much people love putting a sticker on their personalized bingo board. It is crazy. There's no nuts for it. You'll have a 100 bingo boards and people are like, I need my sticker. Use use charity, you know, have your your members rally and come in work out for charity. And if they do leave, make sure that you make it on great terms. You know, don't make it argumentative. It's just not worth it. You know, you have somebody who just, like, they give you such a hard time, they're gonna leave a negative review, always have them leave on good terms and invite them to come back. And most importantly, if you have some invites from the invites, insights from this conversation, don't let them sit as insights. Actually take a second right now and write down the action you're going to take because the biggest disconnect that I see in studios is like, I'll have a session with them and they go, oh, this is a great idea. This is a great and they jot it down. And then when I meet with them a week later, I say, so how did that go? They're like, oh, I didn't implement it.

Laura Munkholm:
Okay. That's such a good point. I I think I don't know. I was just gonna say we can for those of you that wanna hang on, um, I can literally show you at the end of this how to build one or two of these audiences if anybody wants to to stick on. So I'll do that when Eric wraps up.

Eric Tepper:
Yeah. That would be great. And I'm actually I'm wrapping up, Laura. So you can Okay. Start sharing them. What I'm gonna do is because I know Laura I'm gonna stop sharing. I'm gonna put my contact information on the screen if that's okay, Laura.

Laura Munkholm:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Eric Tepper:
And then and so, you know, take a screenshot of it with your your phone or, you know, write it down. This is my email and my phone number. For those of you that I work with, you know that that the beginning of our relationship started with, how can I help you? So I will answer anybody's call. I will answer anybody's email and I will always make time to have a, how can I help you, uh, conversation? And whether you you decide to work with me or I can recommend you somewhere else, as long as you get what you need, that is the most important thing for me. Right? Because that's why I, that's why I got into this business. I wanted you as an owner operator to thrive because this is a business of the heart and to see people who love this and love people fail just doesn't work. It's like a no pass for me. Alright. So I'm gonna stop sharing my screen.

Laura Munkholm:
Yes. Awesome. Well, the first thing I wanna show you guys just quickly, and part of the reason we we put this together is because as as I've been thinking about, as we as a company have been thinking about how to make this easier on you, we realized there is a tremendous amount we can do with AI right now. And we have a very exciting I'll give you guys kind of a teaser view of what we're gonna be launching in the first half of this year. Um we essentially know that digging for all of these people and trying to figure out who to talk to when is quite impossible, especially for those of you who are owner operators. You know, maybe you're doing it by yourself or you have one or two front desk staff people or a manager helping. So let me share just a quick little peek into the the attrition or kind of churn risk or prediction that we're looking at. So what we're working on right now and will be rolling out very soon is being able to score your clients as a risk and essentially see, you know, if I click on Sarah, why she is a risk. So we can look at her last booking, things like what her average cost per visit is right now, how far she lives from the studio, or, um, you know, her visit trends and member usage. So we've got a really clear view of why something's going south in the relationship. Maybe her favorite instructor left the studio or she's been, you know, not opening emails lately. Lastly, we can look at review sentiment. So if she's leaving reviews that used to be five stars and now they're starting to be four or three, we can understand the sentiment is declining or improving. So these are all gonna be things that we're we're trying to arm you with. So it's not going in and really, um, you know, hunting on a day to day basis. It's gonna be floating to the top on an aggregate basis. Here are the people that you absolutely have to talk to. Now, again, like I said, you can do this in audiences right now, and I'll jump in and show you guys. Um, it's it's really easy to do in audiences right now, but not aggregated, so we'll get there. Um, let me share my my screen so I can take you into audiences. Alright. So for those of you who are on the marketing suite, you have unlimited marketing and sales Suite you have unlimited audiences, you can build as many as you'd like, and you now have collections. So these are basically groupings of audiences that have something in common. So you can see here I've got milestones or class pass prospects, and then I've built one that's called Churn Risk Members. So when I click in here, um, and actually those of you who aren't on the Marketing Suite can still build three audiences at any given time with two conditions in each. So a lot of these you can still build and you can always just do it once a month and then replace with another audience, but the marketing and sales suite will give you ability to get more granular. But you can see here I have eight pack low use. So for those of you that have maybe an eight times a member a month membership, um, I can see here. Here's what's happening. I can click on each one of them, text them, email them, uh, right from this collection. But let's add an audience. Actually, let's go into audiences and build one from scratch so you guys can see. Um, this one probably would be helpful for all of you. Let's say unlimited, um, low use. Um, any of you who are franchises, you can select here whether it's gonna be, like, which franchisee, if it's gonna be all, and then you can decide if it's gonna be two associated contacts. So anybody who has ever interacted with that business or just home contacts only. So here I'll say, um, monthly unlimited members with fewer than, let's say, eight visits last thirty days. Or you could say, you know, 16 visits last sixty days, however you'd like to do it. Um, so I will start by adding a condition, and I'm going to say class plan status. So this is gonna give you an option here at the top to let you decide which one you're talking about. So in this case, I'm gonna go to my Monthly Unlimited Membership, and I'll say that they have Current Active status. So I don't want people who are paused. I don't want people who have canceled recently. I want active monthly unlimited membership. And I'm going to add a condition here that says their class check-in activity was less than or equal to eight check ins, and I'm going to say relative to today within the last thirty days. And I don't care what class, doesn't matter to me, but maybe you do have a specific teacher or class name or something you want to look for here, you can get much more granular, and then I'll save that. So now I can view the contacts in that audience, I can add that audience to a collection, um, but this class check-in activity condition is gonna be really important in any of the audiences you build for, you know, specific use decline over time. So this is one that anybody could build. This is I'm trying to make it so everybody or or marketing suite can do this. Um, okay. So there's one. And sorry. Frog in my throat. If you wanna do this for an eight times a month or four times a month and you wanna see people who have fewer than six visits or five visits, you do the same thing. You just select the eight times a month membership at the top and then less than or equal to five visits or four visits, um, and it will show you the same thing. So I'll stop sharing now and pop back in and see. Good, Hallie. Glad this is exciting. Let me do the question. Do the risk levels show up on the class roster so our desk staff and teachers can take action during class? Um, Hannah, that's a good question. I I as as of right now, we do not have it there. It's gonna be really in this kind of AI center of churn risk that that we're designing out. Um, but great call out. We're we're still in kind of the final stages of building this, so maybe I'll Natalie reach out to you and do a little investigating on on what else you'd like to see there. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. It was hard to see on the split screen. Okay. I should have shared my screen with a different view. Let me just give you guys a, uh, quick view of that audience on a bigger bigger view so you can see here. Um,

Eric Tepper:
There we go.

Laura Munkholm:
Class plan status and then class check-in activity. Hopefully, that's a little bigger for you so you can see the difference. So less than or equal to eight. And then when I was adding those conditions, it's the, uh, class plan status and class check-in activity were the two there. Yeah. And and you can do another one that's really good to do is that same thing, Class Plan Status and Check-in Activity with exactly zero visits in a certain amount of time because it's you know, catching those people quickly is better than waiting till that forty five or sixty days, like Eric was saying. Mhmm. You've really lost the ability to, you know, win them back at that point. Yeah. Okay. I know we're at time. Hopefully, that was helpful so you guys can take at least one specific step with those audiences to catch those people, assign it to a staff member, make that part of a a daily or a weekly checklist. And this is I mean, prevention is fantastic. Then then the click to cancel rules are not gonna be a big deal for you. Most of the people canceling are canceling for a legitimate reason. So

Eric Tepper:
Yeah. Yeah. And and even when they because there was a question on there, Laura, and I know we're at time about the thirty day notice and, you know, what I recommend is, you know, check with your legal in your state. My understanding is as long as we tell them upfront in their in their agreement that they sign, if we tell them there's a thirty day, we have to make it easy like Walla is doing with the click to cancel, but we can still ask that they honor the thirty day is my understanding. Yeah. K. In reading The

Laura Munkholm:
Danielle, who we had do our last webinar, essentially framed it as it's it's not legal that goes beyond the term of the contract. So if the contract was a year, if the contract was six months or whatever, requiring it outside of that, I I believe. But, again, I I'm with you, Eric. Neither one of us are attorneys, and we are not here giving legal advice, but we want to make sure that you have resources for that. So, um, you can pop into our previous webinar and click to cancel, reach out to Danielle. She is fantastic. Um, but, anyway, that's that's where we are. Yeah.

Eric Tepper:
And I'm really looking forward to your predictive being able to score your your members. I mean, that's really you know, to be able to real time identify those people easily, that's the name of the game. That that's the win.

Laura Munkholm:
Yeah. We're excited. It's it's the fun of getting to be innovative as a tech company right now in the world of AI. So, um, Amanda, I'll just quickly, Amanda is asking if there's a way for members to see other members who sign up for the same class on the app. Not right now. Um, that is not something we're we're currently working on, but good idea. Please put in a feature request for that, especially with specific stories or use cases because I think it's it's nice for our product team to hear. Alright. Thank you everyone. Eric, it is such a treat to have you. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. I, uh, will see you guys next month on our Walla webinar series. We'll be releasing the details soon. And please reach out to Eric. He is a tremendous source of knowledge, help, and will definitely help move the needle on cancellations in your business.

Eric Tepper:
You are very kind. Thank you, Laura. And thank you to everybody who attended and watched this. Just appreciate you taking the time out of your day.

Laura Munkholm:
Awesome. Have a great Thursday, everyone. Bye bye.

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