[00:44] The Lost Art of Customer Feedback

[03:18] The Importance of Specific Questions

[06:22] Creating Effective Surveys

[08:24] Attribute Mapping for Business Success

[17:09] Effective Onboarding Strategies

[20:45] Customer Feedback Drives Business Decisions

[23:53] Balancing Innovation and Core Competencies

Jason Fernandez: [00:00:00] They were like, Hey, congrats. You created the worst business model of all time. Like it's impressive how bad that is. 

Dan Uyemura: Welcome to the PushPress Podcast, where gym owners learn to dodge bad advice, crush their competition, and actually make money doing what they love. Let's get after it. Here we are. Special edition of the PushPress Podcast.

We got special…

Jason Fernandez: I appreciate that.

Dan Uyemura: Special education edition, Jason Fernandez here. Um, Best Hour of Their Day. Are you guys Affiliate University - Best Hour? What is – there's two new brands. 

Jason Fernandez: Best Hour is the brand. Affiliate U is technically, would be like a product. A product? Yeah. Okay.

Dan Uyemura: Best hour of Their Day, Jason Fernandez. Yeah. Um, kind of riffing on what we wanna talk about and I think we picked a decently, mildly spicy kind of like, um, a Taco Bell. Mild hot sauce of, of, uh, customer am 

Jason Fernandez: morning. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. Okay. Like maybe they're hot 'cause their hot's kind of mild. That's fair. Hot packet. Okay.

We're gonna talk about. Customer feedback, customer feedback loops, learning from your customers, [00:01:00] which, um, I think is to steal what Jason just said, a lost art, but also something that maybe has been talked about negatively in our space, 

Jason Fernandez: um, by me. So I confess for you, you do. I have, I have, I have crapped on, uh, surveys and, uh, customer feedback many times.

Oh, wow. In my, in my, uh, less educated. Years. Uh, I feel very different about it now. Um, but yeah, I do think it is, I think so, so that, I think there's two concept there. I think there is customer feedback and then I think there's surveys not necessarily the same, but a tremendous amount of overlap. Um, customer feedback is super important.

Um, and for those of you watching that are thinking, should I do this or should I do that inside the gym, we should probably base that on customer feedback, not just think it up in a vacuum. So like when you guys make products or you have a roadmap. I would imagine it's some combination of here's kind of what we see or what we think and we're listening to the customer or the [00:02:00] end user about whether we should do that or not.

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. In the, in the end, it becomes kind of this art of partially what the customer thinks. Mm-hmm. But then you also have to understand half the time, the PEs the customer can't see the world like you do, or where you, you know, like how you're shaping it. So the questions you ask are more important than who you ask.

Jason Fernandez: I think that's the lost art component of it. Yeah. So, um. We get questions all the time, like, should we survey our members? And again, full confession. For the longest time I said Absolutely not. I have since changed my tune and we've recently done this at best Hour. Uh, where we did, did I talk to you about like, we recently did, like a whole attribute map exercise?

Dan Uyemura: No. 

Jason Fernandez: Um, and from that came. Uh, some very significant changes that we made inside of fulfillment. So like, this applies it in any business. It doesn't have to be about a CrossFit gym. But, uh, we went through that process and came to the conclusion there's certain things that we were doing that really people didn't value.

Dan Uyemura: Oh, I think you did [00:03:00] mention in some of this. 

Jason Fernandez: Yeah. And that was really eye-opening for us because now you're, now you're moving into this, uh, potentially like dangerous business world of. Am I putting time, energy, and resources into things that people look and 100% of entrepreneurs have done this, by the way.

Yeah. You just want to get out of that as fast as possible. Um, so what we've been telling people is like, you want to survey people at a very specific moment in time at a very specific, about a very specific thing. So whatever it is you're trying, you can't just be like, how was your experience here? I always like to think of it like this when, uh.

When did you, when did you do your level 1 

Dan Uyemura: 20 0 9. 

Jason Fernandez: Okay. So at some point, if you do your level one, you probably had a scenario where the coach saw somebody in the circle and was like, Hey everybody, we're gonna look at Dan's squat or something like that. It's called an active classroom, and the coach will bring, um, them, the person in the middle, and then everybody will be watching.

And then as a, an evaluator, if I was watching [00:04:00] that, if I had somebody that was gonna be interning on seminar staff, the mistake that would be made was the person interning would say, all right, everybody, let's watch Dan's squat and then tell me what you see. And then they look back at the group and there's eight people watching this, and they get.

This crazy hodgepodge of stuff. They're like, oh, his shoes are brown. And like, I don't really like that t-shirt. And it's just like, that's not what I wanted you to see because it was a bad question to your point, right? Like you have to ask a specific question, but if you say, Hey, everybody, look at his knee.

Tell me what you see at the knee, you probably get unanimous answers about, oh, his knee's there. So I think the specificity of it is the most powerful component of getting feedback. 

Dan Uyemura: And then, and then on top of that, I think you take it a step back. To get to the specificity of what you're asking, you have to know, have you have to have an intent for why you're asking?

Jason Fernandez: Correct. And that's, so the, the survey is actually the very, very end of that whole exercise. Like that's the very last thing that happens in the whole evaluation process. Yeah. So when you look at, um, so like in a CrossFit [00:05:00] gym, you would do an attribute map. You would look at what do the, what do my clients value?

And then effectively like, what are we good at? You would prefer that they match. Right. I want to, I want to be really, really good at the things that they care about, and then I put all my eggs in that basket. What you find in a lot of areas is that most people, most gym owners are doing a bunch of things that they like to do, but their clients don't actually really value.

Right. Programming could be an example. Mm-hmm. Like most people in the CrossFit gym don't care about programming. They just don't. Not that program is not important as it kind of gets you the end state, but your members largely don't care. You're spending an immense amount of time and energy resources doing programming or, or, or toying with programs and come to find out like they like more, they want some more social events or they want, um, you know, uh, they like more options in the retail store.

So it's really getting into that. It, well, we found out was we were, we were doing a bunch of stuff that we [00:06:00] had concocted in a vacuum that had tremendous cost, low value. When you look at an attribute map, those are the ones you take off the table. Right? I'll tell you how bad it was when I presented this to some, to some people, I was trying to get some feedback on it.

They were like, Hey, congrats, you created the worst business model of all time. Like, it's impressive how bad that is. I was like, the odds were against all of that line. And they're like, it's impressive. Statistically, you nailed it. You know? Um, and it wasn't like everything that we were doing, it was a, it was a component of what we were doing.

So we had to go back to the drawing board, but first we went and we started asking people a series of questions and then all that culminated in the survey. 

Dan Uyemura: Let me, let me back up a little bit. You said you were antis survey before and now you, something changed your mind. What, what changed your mind? 

Jason Fernandez: Um, I got educated on what would make a good survey.

Dan Uyemura: Okay. So you just didn't know what made a good survey for I didn't 

Jason Fernandez: know what made a good survey, honestly, 'cause I had never been surveyed well. Mm-hmm. Number one. Mm-hmm. Then I didn't understand what the anatomy of a good survey would be. Right. You want to get, I [00:07:00] don't know, how many gyms do you guys deal with that have like a in, in some sort of, um, when somebody off ramps or they cancel, they have a survey that goes out and be like, Hey, why are you leaving?

Uh, is it money? Are you injured? Are you going, like, whatever. And I'm like, that's an example of a really shitty survey. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. 

Jason Fernandez: And it's like I would wanna find out something much more compelling. When somebody's leaving. 'cause that's probably in most instances, take out the, they're leaving or they're moving or something like that.

That's at their greatest point of pain. They no longer want your thing anymore. 

Dan Uyemura: Mm-hmm. 

Jason Fernandez: It would be in my best interest to figure out what that is and try to fix that, because if I can fix that downstream, you're talking about a significant reduction in churn. You're actually getting ahead of it. You're getting ahead of it now.

Yeah. You're not gonna save, you might be able to save that one, but your future self will. Thank you. 

Dan Uyemura: I, and I actually, I would, I would argue that if you try to save them too hard, you won't get real answers because they're gonna feel like you're just coming at it 

Jason Fernandez: from a, this is gonna sound weird in that scenario.

I almost think it's best that you should assume the cancellation. [00:08:00] Yeah. So that you approach this with a very genuine Yeah. Be like, Hey. I know you're not coming back. We missed, we missed, we blew it. Please help me help the next person so that you don't have this, this. Yeah. 

Dan Uyemura: In fact, I, I would, I would wager you have a better chance of saving the churn if you completely approach it from that side than, than some, like, let me fix it.

Can I give you a discount? Tell me what I did. You know it well, here's what, here's what I think here, 

Jason Fernandez: have a much higher chance of that person coming back. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. 

Jason Fernandez: May, they may not change their, their mind, right? They're on the spot, but they're at least open to it Now they're like, oh, they actually care about the fulfillment here.

Things will probably change at some point, and then I'll reconsider, and then I'll have a much better, um, you know, comfort level going back there. 

Dan Uyemura: Okay. So let's go to your attribute map survey that you did. Mm-hmm. Can you explain the process of like how you thought about it and what you did? So tactically all the way through?

Yep. 

Jason Fernandez: So I was gonna do it completely backwards and somebody saved me from this. 'cause like, when I was learning about this and, and looking at it, my immediate thought was survey. He was like, don't do a survey. [00:09:00] He's like, because your surveys gonna be biased 'cause you made it so it's all, it's only gonna have the things that you want on.

Dan Uyemura: Mm-hmm. 

Jason Fernandez: And therefore, therefore you will get bad or biased data right out of the gate. Mm-hmm. At which point it will not be the outcome. Like 

Dan Uyemura: there's no way it couldn't be biased. 

Jason Fernandez: No, it's 100%. It's 100% biased. So you have to do this in a very, 'cause I think you were doing this recently, you have to do this in a lot of informal settings and you have to ask like.

Guided questions, but you have to leave the specifics out of it. Mm-hmm. So like what the questions we were asking for weeks was, 

Dan Uyemura: was this like an in-person interview? 

Jason Fernandez: We would do it on a small group calls. Okay. And then anytime I had somebody on a one-on-one, I'm like, Hey, tell me this. And I, what I was looking at, I said, Hey, of all the things that we do, what do you value the most?

And what could you do without, I didn't ask them if they liked small group calls. I didn't ask if they liked the curriculum. I just left it completely open-ended. If you interview enough people, it will all start to map into a clean list of things. Um, and we did that for four weeks, [00:10:00] hundreds and hundreds of people.

And then it was very clear, like I didn't even have to run the survey at that point, but that, that was just like the last thing that we did. But it was very obvious. What we should get rid of. So the 

Dan Uyemura: written surveys last? 

Jason Fernandez: The written surveys last. Yeah. That's how we do it too. And the written survey is com is comprised of everything that they told you?

Yeah. So we didn't input anything. We only get, we only put things in the survey that they told us. 

Dan Uyemura: Okay. And, and so one thing I've learned, I'm curious, is this, I think this goes to what you were saying. One thing I've learned in in surveying or questioning CU customers is you don't ask them for one to 10, like, Hey, is our coaching program one to 10?

You do it in, in the lens you were doing it, except what, what I've been recommended is. If you, it's binary, right? My coaching program or my online tutorials. Mm-hmm. Which one, which one is more important to you? And then you do that through a couple products. And when you do that across all your customers, across all the products Yep.

You get the same shakeout. Mm-hmm. But you make 'em go, like you have [00:11:00] to pick one left or right. 

Jason Fernandez: Yep. Yeah. If you introduce any ambiguity, the data is no longer the subjectiveness 

Dan Uyemura: of like, what's an eight or nine or 

Jason Fernandez: Yeah. Who knows? Right? Like, it, it's, it's, it's useful to you. So when we did it, everything was rank order.

So there, there was always gonna be things at the bottom, and that's how you start to sort out and sift through the stuff. Mm-hmm. Because if you're doing this well, you should, let's just say you have like a typical attribute map will probably have what you do. So like if you're looking at XY axis on the Y axis, which is the vertical axis you would look at, you would start at the top.

The things that people have told you they value most. And you work your way down the list. And then on the X axis you have, you would rank them one to five, meaning one I do it poorly and then five were the Okay, were the best at, so it's 

Dan Uyemura: a two by basically creates a two by two box 

Jason Fernandez: very close 

Dan Uyemura: what they like and what you do is Yep.

Jason Fernandez: Good 

Dan Uyemura: or bad. 

Jason Fernandez: Yep. And, and the, the key component is they're, they're very likely will be some things that you're good at that they don't value and that's okay. Because at the end of the day, you need to serve the customer. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. 

Jason Fernandez: But there will be for sure [00:12:00] things that you are good at that they like, at which point now you make the decision about allocation of resources and you say, oh, I'm gonna take all these other things off the board and I'm only gonna do what they like the most.

And this is an interesting exercise because the immediate thought is usually, well, if I get rid of this stuff, they're gonna be upset. It actually works the opposite because. Really what you're getting down to when you're kind of doing this attribute map is you need to be willing to be bad at things.

Dan Uyemura: Mm-hmm. 

Jason Fernandez: You just wanna be bad at the things that people don't care about. 

Dan Uyemura: Well, let's play, let's play a fun game. Whenever I think of two by two maes, I think of, um, a name for every land mm-hmm. That this, this. So, so what we got is like if on the, on the Y Yep. Their value. Yep. And the X is your execution ability.

Yep. So it's like they value it. You're not good. Yep. They value it. You are good. Mm-hmm. They don't value it. You're not good. They value it. You are good. You are good. Can you come up with a name [00:13:00] for each of those that makes up? So like, like what would the name be for like, they value it. You're not good.

Jason Fernandez: They value it. You're not good. What would that be? That would, 

Dan Uyemura: so I'll give you an example in sas, like the, they don't value it. You don't, you don't do it. We call that trash land. Yeah. Right. Table stakes, trash land. Shit. No one cares about, you shouldn't spend a lot of time. Right. So that, that these are the names that like, we've come up or, or like, have come floated around.

So I'm just curious like, 'cause that, that way when I think of it, I'm like, that's trash land shit. Yeah. Yeah. Get outta here. 

Jason Fernandez: I like to think of it as like, uh, the bottom, the bottom right quadrant and all is always like death. Just don't play there. 

Dan Uyemura: Bottom right 

Jason Fernandez: is they don't 

Dan Uyemura: value, 

Jason Fernandez: they don't value it.

You're good at it. You're good at it, but they don't value it at all because now it's just a tremendous, that's a trap. It's a trap. It's, it's a, it's a tremendous output. Output of resources. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. And you, you've, you've, you've biased. You're biased. You want to be good at it. Right? You want it to be good.

You're forcing them to like it. Correct. Maybe they feel 

Jason Fernandez: guilty 'cause they know you like it, right? So they're like, oh, okay. But you have to be willing to let those things go. And it's all falls under this idea of like, Hey, if I wanna be the best in the [00:14:00] world at something, I have to be willing to be the worst.

I always like to give Dennis Rodman as an example. Oh yeah. So anybody who's familiar with basketball, uh, or Carmen Electro for that matter, the, when you ask people, what is Dennis Rodman known for? They're like rebounding. They're like That guy couldn't defense. But that's not why people would pick. That's rebounding first.

He just happened to be a good defender. 'cause he was scrappy. But I would also argue, but that's why he was a good rebounder. Correct. So that is, when you look at that is like, that's why San Antonio took him. That's why the Bulls took him. They didn't took him. 'cause he was putting points on the board. They took him because they're like, if the ball comes off the rim, the odds are that he's gonna get it and we'll get another crack at scoring.

Yeah. And they knew he's not putting up any points. Not a locker 

Dan Uyemura: room influence. Not, 

Jason Fernandez: no, 

Dan Uyemura: none of that. He's actually 

Jason Fernandez: a liability, but they're like, he's so good. Yeah. At rebounding that we'll deal with all the other shit. Yeah. And your clients will try, will kind of have the same feeling, which is like, Hey, if you, if you're so good at this, we'll cut you slack on these other things.

They'll cut you even more slack if you just outright [00:15:00] tell them, I'm not gonna do those things. And they're like, oh, okay. But you're so good at the stuff that they want, they don't care anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's a, it's an interesting exercise and we did it, it was very eye-opening for us. Okay.

And I think about the, you know, so like, if we were to do it for a gym, it would be, let's just say coaching events. And then you might have like a series of, uh, special like, uh, personal training, nutrition, uh, youth classes. And then this will very quickly help you figure out if you should even touch any of those.

And if you have six of 'em on there. It's very likely that you would take the bottom three off the board completely. And it was like, we're just not gonna do these things anymore. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. 

Jason Fernandez: Um, let 

Dan Uyemura: me ask you one thing because, um, I was thinking through a gym, there's only a finite list of things you can do.

Mm-hmm. And like, let's say one of 'em is, I dunno, kids or nutrition. And you're like, well right now our current clientele has not, not bought into nutrition. 'cause I haven't done it. Well, I haven't marketed, I haven't put effort into it. Mm-hmm. When would it be [00:16:00] a, they don't value it 'cause you have the wrong customer there because you haven't tried and so of course you're not gonna value it.

Jason Fernandez: Yeah, that very well could be. I mean that's, that's arguably a different exercise of, of selection deselection, like making sure you have the right customer, which you might have to do both of these at the same time. Mm-hmm. So for somebody who has maybe kind of gone down the wrong path, this might take you.

18 months to go through that and then make that fundamental shift over because you gotta slowly, like, you gotta slowly transition away, uh, from the things that you're kind of currently doing. So you do need to be thoughtful about execution once you've come to the pretty binary conclusion that like, oh, we should just not do these things anymore.

Got it. Um, but that's where I think like personal training can fall in that bucket. Uh, and they're usually like, if you wanted, if you wanted things that would, would. Like trigger you that these things should be up for evaluation. They're usually things that you chase for revenue purposes, not for value creation purposes.

They're like, well, I'm gonna do personal training 'cause there's money. I'm gonna do nutrition 'cause there's money. Mm-hmm. But you can do, if you haven't bought [00:17:00] into the y behind it or if, or if you're just not good at it. Right. You know, it's just like, okay, well I, I could get good at that. Now we have a C.

Yeah, it's energy. It's time. Like how long is it gonna take you to get good at it? Like, is that something you even want to do? Um, so the, the, like a good example of surveys would be, you know, better surveys on the backend, right? When you have people that are offboarding. But then also, uh, 'cause you brought up, should we talk about onboarding survey people immediately when they're done with onboarding?

Hey, how was this? 

Dan Uyemura: Lemme ask you a question. This is something we've been kicking around. When is onboarding done? 

Jason Fernandez: Technically never. Um, in my mind, like you're kind of always on it. It 

Dan Uyemura: is definitely a gray zone. 

Jason Fernandez: Yeah, it's definitely in gray, but it kind of depends on how you're. How you design your onboarding.

Right? It's some, like in most onboardings there's like, there's a definitive end date where like you're done, you move into the next phase, right? The, the question 

Dan Uyemura: is that time-based or is that like customer growth based? You know, it could be both. Yeah. 

Jason Fernandez: Yeah, it could be both. I think in most, in most gyms, if we were gonna try to [00:18:00] make this binary, it would be time-based or event based.

Like, hey, once you get to this check mark, you're technically done, and then we move you into next phase or whatever it's gonna 

Dan Uyemura: be. That's, um, it's interesting, I, I've been looking through a lot of data on onboarding. What I realized is that is the biggest hole in the industry at this moment in time. So I like, why do you think that is?

Okay, so I'm building this flywheel. Mm-hmm. This book around flywheel and so people know downloads and flywheels fly. Let me some flywheels. So anyways, the one thing I like, what I'm trying to do is connect the, the flywheel stages. So it's like if you do sales really well, onboarding should be kicked off.

If you do onboarding really well, class delivery should be kicked off, right? Et cetera. As I went through it, what I, the one thing I realized is like all of them work except sales to onboarding. It doesn't matter if you're referred. Yep. If you're a fucking personal referral, like my, bring my cousin in, right?

They churn. They churn less likely than just a ran off the street. It's not statistically different, like six or 7% better. They have a six or 7% better retention rate over six months. 

Jason Fernandez: If they're referred. 

Dan Uyemura: If they're [00:19:00] referred. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It should be 25. 

Jason Fernandez: Okay. 

Dan Uyemura: You know what I mean? Like if my cousin brings me in, like, there's no way you should lose me.

'cause my cousin's there. 

Jason Fernandez: Why do you think that is? 

Dan Uyemura: Uh, well, as long as it's a good fit from the, otherwise, you should have disqualified them. You shouldn't have sold them. Right. But if it's a referral, it's like they've already been sold on the system. They've got a, they've already got social proof because they're getting brought in by whoever's bringing them in.

Theoretically. Yeah. Right. Anyways, I try, I tried to look across all these different slices of data. Um, did they buy a recurring plan? Are they on a punch card? Did they get referred into the clip, blah, blah, blah. And the, the statistical deviance between all of the groups are so minor. 

Jason Fernandez: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Uyemura: I couldn't print any of it.

Jason Fernandez: It was statistically insignificant. Exactly. You know what I've, I've seen, this is anecdotal, like I don't have any data to support this. I just see it regularly is that, um, referrals in a lot of instances are less likely to be onboarded. 

Dan Uyemura: Oh, interesting. 

Jason Fernandez: Yeah, because they just skip it. Oh, they skip it.

They're like, oh, he's good. We'll, we'll, we'll put him in there. Shit, 

Dan Uyemura: that won't show up in the data. 

Jason Fernandez: Correct. Yeah. That's the weird little [00:20:00] underlying. So 

Dan Uyemura: maybe it is 80%, but the ones that actually. Or the ones that don't get on onboard are like, well, I don't really get it. And they quit. Right, because you didn't, 

Jason Fernandez: you didn't integrate them properly.

Like they skipped onboarding. You didn't, you skipped like the most important piece, which is like getting them ingrained in the gym, the culture, everything that is important to you to grow, whatever that is. 

Dan Uyemura: This is a great example of like how antidote beats data. So good. Where was I just listening 

Jason Fernandez: to?

Were maybe, were you, did you guys talk about this on a 

Dan Uyemura: podcast recently? Which one? 

Jason Fernandez: That exact where? Uh, anecdote Beast. Yeah. Anecdote Beast Data. This is such a good example. The Jeff be the Jeff Bezos thing. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's a perfect example of like really being. Connect in tune with your business and be like, like, 'cause you're right.

That's never gonna show up anywhere. 'cause nobody's tracking how many people did onboarding. Unless you, unless you click 

Dan Uyemura: a button that says like, I'm skipping this guy right past onboarding, which nobody does. Which 

Jason Fernandez: nobody would do. Nobody does that. So, but that, but if you're paying attention and you look at that and you're asking good questions on the back end, you could pick that up.

Mm-hmm. It would be hard, but you could pick it, 

Dan Uyemura: it, it would be antidote though. It would be like my [00:21:00] feeling. But then you could go test it. But, but, but, so that's how we loop. That's why customer feedback's important to us. Right. 'cause eventually it's like that feedback is like, oh, okay, well we have to actually get a signal that someone's done onboarding that's clearer mm-hmm.

Than just 30 day signals, you know, like they're xrays to be a I finished this, or I started this. Yeah. Check the box. Yeah. They went through it. That's how like antidote becomes data 

Jason Fernandez: is like this loop of, of discovery. Uh, but yeah, that's the, the attribute map is an interesting one because I, dude, you guys deal with even more gym owners than we do, but they're always looking for other stuff.

But they're, most of the time we're just guessing as gym owners we're like, well, I think this 'cause the gym over there is doing it and this is what I heard on this podcast, so like maybe I should try that out. But there's no, there's no. Analysis on what that's gonna cost me from a timing perspective, how I would implement it.

Like how are we measuring effectiveness when I change this thing inside of the gym? Yeah. So it's, it's bad all the way around. Like you made a change with no forethought and then you didn't [00:22:00] measure whether it was, if the baseline was unclear. Yeah, it, so it's just a, it's a shit show from start to finish and then, and then six months later, a year down the road, you can't figure out why nothing has really changed.

You're like, oh, well retention isn't better. Length of engagement isn't better. Uh, sales aren't improving. Well, it's because you didn't, you didn't sit down and, and go through the exercise of like coming up with measurables on top of that and say, how do we, I always like to think, how do, how do I determine if I'm gonna kill this idea?

Dan Uyemura: It's a good way to think about it. 

Jason Fernandez: Like, 'cause you're gonna kill a lot. We 

Dan Uyemura: need, you need the data to give you the proof. Yeah, this is a killable. Yeah. I'm 

Jason Fernandez: gonna do this, but I want, I want something that's gonna tell me this is good or bad. Yeah. Because otherwise I'm just gonna float off into oblivion, do a ton of this, and get nothing.

Yeah. There's 

Dan Uyemura: nothing worse than having like 18 initiatives kind of floating around. You know what I mean? It's like do less in 

Jason Fernandez: that scenario. Yeah. So, well y'all 

Dan Uyemura: get bit by that. I think PushPress was definitely there. 

Jason Fernandez: Well, I don't, I don't think anybody's immune to it. Yeah. I just think you are less susceptible and the errors are less egregious if [00:23:00] you.

Pump the brakes and you think about it a little bit more analytically. Um, but the, I think the key to it is there it is a balance between the conversation and the analytics. Uh, yeah. Is really where like the magic happens, where you be like, okay, what I see, what I think, what they say matches the numbers.

Another good example would be everybody wants a 2:17 PM class. Who is everybody? Should we do that? Mm-hmm. Does that even map out? Do we have the personnel for it? Like what would this do to the business? Like all those things, because you didn't start, you didn't talk to enough people say, and you find out, oh, it's not everybody.

It's like Dan and Nick. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. That's an interesting feedback is like in our world, because we were so empathetic to our customers, gym owners, gym owners, it's the same. It's the exact same you hear four times and it becomes everybody. It's everybody. 

Jason Fernandez: So I, anytime I hear everybody, I always question everybody.

I always [00:24:00] wonder who's everybody? 'cause it's not everybody. It's usually a subset, you know, a very small minority of people. And usually it's people we like, right? Right. Like, we wanna help them. Right. I recently had somebody come in and uh, they're like, we should start a kids program. And I was like, I'll bite.

We have people that wanna do it. I'm like, cool. We're never doing that. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. 

Jason Fernandez: I just told him, I was like, we're never doing that. He's like, why? I was like, we don't have the resources. It creates conflict on the schedule from our primary customer, which is you. And now I'm robbing Peter to pay Paul. 

Dan Uyemura: Mm-hmm.

Jason Fernandez: But earlier in my career, I'm like, yeah, we should, we should absolutely do that. With no forethought for like age groups. What, like what market do we even have access to to get this thing off the ground? None of that. It was just like, oh, somebody wants it. We'll make it cool. 

Dan Uyemura: In there. In there. Yeah. Cool.

Okay. So actually let's go back to that two by two matrix and then we'll wrap it up. Yep. Um, which quadrant do you think is the most important quadrant for a gym owner to f pay attention [00:25:00] to? I, I think the, what'd you say, the bottom right is the worst one to be in 

Jason Fernandez: the bottom, right? So if you were to just draw a mean line, just diagonally through the whole matrix.

Yeah. Effectively, you would want to focus on the every budget, everything above the line, 

Dan Uyemura: over the line, 

Jason Fernandez: above the line. You would wanna figure out what those are. 

Dan Uyemura: Even when that mean line is in the, they don't value it and we're not good at it box. 

Jason Fernandez: Um, if they don't value it and we're not good at it.

There's a, I think there is a time and a place for that. Um, an example would be, that would be cutting edge stuff. Correct. And there's a very specific subset of customers where that is valuable. Yeah. 

Dan Uyemura: That's like innovation land. Correct. It's either trash land or inno potential innovation. 

Jason Fernandez: And that's where it's dangerous, right?

So you have to really, like, I'm sure you guys have, uh, customers that fall in this box and we have customers that fall in this box. So anytime we're gonna be playing in that box, I really wanna. I really wanna be very selective with the people that we pull in to play in there. And I will tell them outright, I'm like, this is beta.

You guys are gonna help us [00:26:00] figure out whether we should do this or not. And if we don't like it and you don't like it, we're gonna kill it. But there's a. There's a very specific group of people that are willing to do that with you. So you have to know who they are. Got it. Who they, they want to, they want to experiment with you and they want to, it's actually you.

There are some of your best customers actually fall in that category. They want to help you grow. They're a little bit more advanced than a lot of scenarios, and they're like, Hey, I would actually love to help you guys make the next thing. 

Dan Uyemura: So in, in that regard, they meaning the single logo? Mm-hmm. Might value it.

Yep. But the whole doesn't. 

Jason Fernandez: The whole might not. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Because you're an experiment. Well, it's, yeah. It's like 

Dan Uyemura: AI three years ago Correct. Would've been that bucket. 

Jason Fernandez: Correct. Like, we should, should we do this? Should we not? So yeah, if you wanted to kind of evaluate it, you would look anything above that line that, just straight 

Dan Uyemura: along the mean line.

I mean, if Straight As you could. Yeah. And then as, as a guideline. So if, if it's in the, we value it, we're good at it, they value it bucket, but it's like trending down towards the, they don't value it side of things. 

Jason Fernandez: You would, [00:27:00] you would consider cutting it. 

Dan Uyemura: Interesting. Okay. Yeah. '

Jason Fernandez: cause you, well, because you have to, you have to factor in that, 

Dan Uyemura: I guess their value is more important than anything else.

Jason Fernandez: It is. You know, and, but you have to factor in as like, that's where the, could we be good at that question comes in. Mm-hmm. And the answer might be no. So like, they might value it a lot, but like, we just can't play in that world. Yeah. So like, we just have to take it off the table. You know, like for like for us, like, we're not getting into the SaaS world.

People want that stuff. But I'm like, I don't know shit about sas. I mean, I know some stuff about it, but I'm like, we're not gonna be. The best at that. So it makes no sense for us to redirect off the thing that we're really good at. And so, and this is the whole exercise, right? So what you end up doing when you work through this process is you end up cutting a bunch of stuff and then you reallocate all that time and energy towards the things that they want most.

And you double down and you make it better, and you make it better again, and you make it better again. And then that's where you make the happiest customers of all. 

Dan Uyemura: Mm-hmm. 

Jason Fernandez: Uh, so it's a, it's an interesting exercise in every, I don't know anybody. That hasn't gone [00:28:00] through that and made errors there, but once you kind of learn that you're a little bit more cautious about how and why and when you do things, which is really important because as a gym owner you have limited time and resources.

Yeah. So it's like you shouldn't be exploring all things, 

Dan Uyemura: so, okay. Uh, well, I mean, that was a, a podcast about customer feedback and it spun off into, um. A pretty cool matrix on how to evaluate what you should and shouldn't do, which I guess is kinda like custom customs, but it's 

Jason Fernandez: based on customer feedback because you're gonna need them Yeah.

To help you fill the matrix out. Yeah. Um, it's just not necessarily like, are you happy with this? It's more along a kind of a value creation, value capture discussion, I guess. 

Dan Uyemura: Right. Okay. Um, so let's wrap that up. That, that was, uh, that's pretty good for time. Right. Okay, cool. Let's wrap that up. Um, I guess for a question, I'm gonna ask this, if you.

Haven't or have been afraid to ask your customers for feedback, um, directly. [00:29:00] That's a shitty question. That's a bad one. Um, let's flip it around. Yeah. Well, fuck it. If you, if you haven't or if you've been afraid of asking your, your, um, your customers a question, and you might have changed your mind in this episode, and you do ask them a question, do ask 'em, fuck man, I'm fucking this up.

I think you're 

Jason Fernandez: doing great. 

Dan Uyemura: What the hell is a good question for this? Or should we just 

Jason Fernandez: kill it without one? What, so you're trying to, we just, 'cause people 

Dan Uyemura: email us, que like, we ask 'em a question and they email us the, you know, just like feedback shit. 

Jason Fernandez: Yeah. I think, um, 

Dan Uyemura: oh, like maybe what's, what's in your trash land that you need to cut?

Let's do that. 

Jason Fernandez: Well, so there's two, there's two ways to phrase the question. One is, what do you, what do you value the most? Like, what do you love? What could you not do without? And then what do you like? But if we got rid of it, it wouldn't change your opinion about us? Or was it to ask 

Dan Uyemura: the customers. 

Jason Fernandez: Yeah.

So you, you, I think you have to ask it from both angles because you want both ends of the spectrum. I wanna know what you love, I also [00:30:00] wanna know what you kind of don't really care about. 

Dan Uyemura: Mm-hmm. 

Jason Fernandez: That helps paint a, a, a, a more clear picture about what you might be doing. That is that you should just stop doing it immediately.

Right. 

Dan Uyemura: And there's actually one thing I want to, I wanna double click on before we end the episode that I think is super important, um, for me at least. I do these live with customers first. Yes. Because you wanna start to, you want to get to know like what questions you're asking. How are they, you know, how are they feeling about them?

How, how are they responding to them? Um, so a real low fidelity way of doing this, so you can just do it tomorrow, is just take a customer to the corner, take 'em off for coffee, and just start asking some questions about what they value they don't value. Um, what is important to 'em, what is not important to 'em, and just see where they take you with it without getting too prescriptive about what you're asking.

And then just use that information to start inform you on like what the next series of questions can look like. 

Jason Fernandez: Yeah. The you'll, the, the questions will get more and more refined based on the answers that you get from them. And that way that's where you start to get like to the, to the meat Yeah. Of, of the issue there.

Okay. And, uh, but super [00:31:00] important. 

Dan Uyemura: Cool. So. Go talk to somebody in your gym, get some, uh, feedback from them and understand what they are liking in your gym and what they maybe don't care about so much. And shoot me an email podcast@pushpress.com. Let me know if you find out anything. Cool. All right. See you guys.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the PushPress Podcast, where we help gym owners, entrepreneurs, and fitness enthusiasts thrive with actionable insights, inspiring stories and strategies for growth. 

Nick Reyes: Don't forget to follow the show to stay updated on new episodes. And if you're ready for more, join our free Facebook community for gym owners.

Check the show notes for the link and we'll see you next time. Keep raising the bar for your business and community.

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