Today on the revenue acceleration podcast, my guest is Benji Donhardt. Benji is the owner and CEO of a company called Super Fit Grow. Benjie, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you guys do.
Speaker 2:Hey. Thanks a lot, Anthony. Appreciate the, kind of warm intro. So my name is Benji Donhart. I'm the CEO and Co Founder here at Super Fit Grow.
Speaker 2:In short, about what we do. So we're a digital marketing company that services the health, wellness and fitness industry, basically supporting boutique brands, studios, gyms, to basically grow and get to a level that they didn't think possible through paid advertising, AI support, and a bit of coaching along the way as well. So started from a really, really humble beginning. So I grew up in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, near sort of Richmond, Penrith Way.
Speaker 1:I left school
Speaker 2:in there. Left school in year 10, had a really, really, really tough upbringing. Both parents were alcoholics. And, yeah, basically, I was no good at school. I couldn't concentrate.
Speaker 2:Not that it was an excuse, but there's so much going on at home. I just found school just very distracting. I was always tired, seeing a lot of domestic violence, and I didn't have the best love from from a father figure that's supposed to be looking after me. So that was quite tough. Really led me to leave school in year 10.
Speaker 2:I just didn't like I wanted to get out. I knew that I wanted to be in the workforce and basically, yeah, to be able to fend for myself and support myself. So I did that, left in year ten, which was great. I did a stone masonry apprenticeship, which was at the time at that stage in that sort of era, that was a normal thing to do. Go get an apprenticeship, like a builder or a brickie.
Speaker 2:Something like a stonemason was very rare, but I did that anyway. And it was great. I really enjoyed it. I was in the workforce at 16. I was getting up early at say like ten to four in the mornings and being on the train at twenty past four, six years traveling for like two hours to the city and then walking about two Ks to work.
Speaker 2:Then I do that all the way back home as well. So I did that. And again, that really helped me build up a lot of resilience. Even though I went through a lot of shit as a kid, it helped me build up resilience in the workforce. And obviously, being working a full time job at 16 is not easy.
Speaker 2:Now I look at my 16 year old and like, right, I think he'd be able to do it. I was like, it's changed, but that was my story. So I did that for around seven years. And then 2020, '2 thousand and '8, I've seen an ad for the Navy clearance divers come on TV. So I've seen the ad, a whole show was brought out from it.
Speaker 2:And I watched the show with my mate religiously every second week it was on, I think. And basically from there, I just said, I'm gonna do this. I really wanna do that. That's something that's really appealing to me. So I went and applied.
Speaker 2:And next thing I got a call up, do you want to come in early? There's no spot as a clearance diver, come in early as a bosons mate. So doing things like ship's husbandry, ships diving, weaponry, all that sort of stuff. I joined it, did it, and I absolutely loved it. It was fantastic.
Speaker 2:It was, again, out of the workforce, a new challenge, and it was something that I was uncomfortable. It was a really uncomfortable experience, but at the same time, I was comfortable because it was all the shit I've been through as a child and through my upbringing. And then obviously, in the workforce as an apprentice, back then you get a lot of practical jokes played on you. It's not easy. It's quite hard.
Speaker 2:And when I entered the military at 24, I already had those skills or resilience to equip me for being yelled at, being told you nothing. And it's quite full on in the military.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I did that and it was really, really good. I got stationed all around the world. So up in Indonesia, Christmas Island, all up the sort of South Coast Of New South Wales, down in Jervis Bay, Garden Island in Sydney, which was fantastic, really, really good experience. I did a lot of things there that really sort of helped me transition into my next phase, which is into the health, fitness and wellness space.
Speaker 2:So 2015, I put my discharge paperwork in because I was trying to get onto the clearance toggles And they just kept telling me no, even though I did the acceptance test and I passed it multiple times, twice actually, they still kept saying no, it was all politics. We need you here. They didn't really need me there, but they just didn't want me to excel. And in my mind, I'm like, why the fuck are these guys holding me back? Why are they not letting me, like, give more of myself to the military and to the outfit?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's strange. It is very strange. In the end, I basically just made a decision and it was a pivotal decision and one of the biggest decisions of my life that led me to where I am today, which was, no, I'm gonna put my discharge paperwork in, I'm gonna go up and do a personal training certificate and get into the fitness industry. As soon as I did that, very different story the hierarchy within the military.
Speaker 2:They all kept reaching out to me, tried to keep me and get me to stay. I just, my decision was made and I left. So I left in 2015 and I started a gym with two friends. It was the fourth F45 studio in the world, which is pretty cool back in 2015. Yeah, I saw.
Speaker 2:Great experience. And I learned a lot of what to do in leadership within the military, but a lot of what not to do. So I took all my learnings and applied it when started the gym and it it took off. We absolutely killed it. We smashed all records.
Speaker 2:Opened, we maxed our capacity in like the first year. And then I've become that little sort of voice in my head come again, I started to become a little bit like nervous and a little bit, oh, a bit bored. I've got like, my feet are getting itchy. I want another challenge. So at that time, the F45 brand was exploding into The US and I put my feelers out there, started reaching out to investors and investor was opening a studio in San Fran.
Speaker 2:So I went to meeting after meeting, got approved and he said, yep, you're the man for the job. We wanna send you over there and run the studio. You can have an equity stake in the business as well. Everything's good. I'm on Cloud9.
Speaker 2:I'm like, Yes. I left a seven year relationship for it as well. Not that I was happy in that relationship, but left the relationship. And a week before I left, a week before we're meant to leave, the investor called me up and said, there's no more gym. There's no more opportunity.
Speaker 2:It's gone. I'm pulling the pin. Yeah. Don't wanna do this anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically got cold feet and just stopped. Oh, geez. I am sitting there going, what the fuck am gonna do? So basically jumped on the plane anyway, went over there and just just went over there and experienced the culture and started going around door knocking, asking me for work as a fitness coach and a trainer and just experiencing their culture over there because it's very different to Australia. And kept getting told no, no, no.
Speaker 2:And then as soon as I flipped the switch and said, look, don't wanna be paid because I had a lot of savings. They, yeah, the bestseller said, Yeah, you can come and do this. You can sweep the floors. You can be an assistant coach, which I did, which was fantastic. And that's where I really knew that I had a special gift inside of me that I could thrive in really uncomfortable situations and in different cultures and I can make, like I can make it work,
Speaker 1:right? Yeah, right.
Speaker 2:So did that for about three years and then that led me to, I really started seeing the birth of Super Fit grow was at that point where the industry was just before COVID twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. Basically, I've seen a huge gap in the market for people knowing how to sell and coaches and trainers knowing how to sell and managers. They didn't really know. So through the time I was doing in The US, The US had been built off door knocking and learning how to sell. So I built up those skills while I was over there and I started a small consulting firm.
Speaker 2:So basically, yeah, I used to walk into gyms and talk to the owners and then I'd do a secret shop and then I'd write them a report. And then I'd basically then say, here's what you need to do to get to from this many members to this many members and increase your revenue. Then I go in and help them that way.
Speaker 1:That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's pretty cool. Like when I look back, I'm like, fuck, I can't believe I used to do that. It's just something we do now, like with AI and everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, from there I did that and built a really good small business. Along the way I met my wife as well, which now we have five kids, which is awesome. I inherited four, I've got more on my own. And then I met my business partner, Michael, and he was from a corporate world marketing background and very, very smart guy, super techy, super switched on, like organization, like so perfect. We're on the opposite.
Speaker 2:I'm more visionary, not really organized, but very, like a very strong vision, really strong leader, and skill set that he didn't have. So we did a few tests once and then Super Fit Grow was born and the rest is history. That's how that's how we started.
Speaker 1:Wow. Willie. Thanks so much for sharing your backstory.
Speaker 2:And by
Speaker 1:the way, I don't think the first time we chatted, we knew that both of us come from Western Sydney. So I grew up in the Blue Mountains, so not far from here mate.
Speaker 2:Oh, so whereabouts?
Speaker 1:Glenbrook actually, just up there. First couple of stops up the mountains there.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. I remember I used to play footy against Sydney Plains and Katoomba and remember going up there all the time.
Speaker 1:Lower Blue Mountains. I played for Lower Blue. We might've played each other. Yeah, probably. Who were you playing with?
Speaker 2:I was playing with Richmond, the Hawkesbury Hawks and the Windsor Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. I played Hawkesbury quite a few times. So yeah, it'd be interesting. We'll have a chat later or maybe we did end up paying each other. Cool.
Speaker 1:Cool. Well, yeah. Thanks for sharing your background, mate. Coming from that school of hard knocks area and, being able to parlay that into something useful in the business world is, is really cool. So when you found your business partner and you started Super Grow Fit, how did you get your first clients there?
Speaker 1:I know you already kind of were doing similar stuff, but how did you get your first clients with Super Grow Fit? What kinda challenges did you come across, if any, and how did you overcome them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. So when we started, he had a handful of clients. I had a handful of clients. We're doing sort of cross sell. I was passing marketing over to him, and then he was passing all the sales and lead nurture stuff to me.
Speaker 2:So we did a few cross clients and then that we went That's when we realized both of their powers and both of their unique skill sets were so powerful for the industry that we should basically form Super Grow. So we formed Super Fit Grow, and then obviously he acquired my clients, I acquired his, and we just merged them. But then my clients had an option for marketing, and his clients had an option for the sales. So we did that, and then we really heavily relied on my network. So my network being for the industry at that time, I've been there for about eight years.
Speaker 2:Really, really just used a lot of my network and just, you know, doing like looking at my private Instagram channel and looking at who the gym owners that I can pitch that what we're doing now and how powerful it is. So basically we did that. We joined a few different, obviously, marketing programs. We did that. But looking back, they were really bad.
Speaker 2:They weren't great. But it was really just networking and partnerships. That's my strength. So getting on the phone and just talking to people and really leading with value and trying not to lead, like, really pushy sales sort tactics. It's who we are.
Speaker 2:It's never been who I've been, and it's not who we are in the company. So I'd say relationships and partnerships is the best way we grew.
Speaker 1:That's all. Okay. That's great advice. Yeah. Definitely forming that relationship is a strong foundation for for a brand new business.
Speaker 1:And what about now? What are you doing as your your main way to generate leads and and clients?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So exactly the same way. It's been like, it was the cornerstone of how we grew to start with. So that is the major and core pillar of our lead generation strategy is brand first. So we want that brand to be trustworthy, we want it to be authentic, transparent because in the marketing world, it's not much transparency, especially in the health and fitness industry.
Speaker 2:Because after COVID, everyone was a Facebook expert. They do a course and then they're charging ridiculous money. They're under delivering, they're overpriced. There was just no trust there. And people would jump from agency to agency to agency and not have much trust.
Speaker 2:And one on one thing is customer obsession. So I'm a people person and I'm obsessed with humans, with our customers, making sure that they're getting the absolute best service possible. Example, like we've had a couple of clients of late that haven't been the happiest, but it's purely been not through results. They're getting great results, but the service has been a little bit like a little bit slack. We've gone through a bit of a company restructure, new account managers coming in or performance coaches.
Speaker 2:And just during that period, if they've been missed or a call's been missed or they haven't responded to an email on time, the client's been unhappy about that. That's like, that's what we have to make sure. We are making sure now that everything is client obsession. So client obsession, customer first, then results come like any sort of relationship. We are running obviously paid media as well.
Speaker 2:We're partnering with a lot of big brands within the industry. So big brands like f forty five, x b o's, they're usually franchise groups that have a lot of different brands underneath them. We're partnering doing partnerships, webinars, and, and in addition, the lead generation strategies through a community driven resource community. So basically, come in there, they can learn about what we do, there's resources, templates for sales scripts, marketing master classes, sales coaching programs that are in this community. They can come in and see what we do.
Speaker 2:And then when they're ready, then they can reach out to us. It's not, you're not coming here, we're sell you something you don't need. We really wanna make sure that we're selling our product or bringing people onto our products that are ready, that understand what we do, that 90% of your sale is done on the marketing, basically.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great point too. Mentioned about a customer that you got that wasn't necessarily in bad results, but just the actual service was a little bit lax with them. And I think that today, when we're all glued to our screens, when you actually do business with someone and you're paying good money for a service, even if you are getting results, do want that human connection these days. And I think that's what AI in particular is now making it even harder to actually connect with the the end person behind everything.
Speaker 2:Exactly. A %. Yeah. It's all about the customer, and it's just it shows like every little slip we see, we learn from it, and we make sure it doesn't happen again because it can be simple as not responding to an email in more than twenty four hours. And people like customers, like, they wanna be heard.
Speaker 2:So you know, you're not being heard, it gets extremely frustrating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. So I'm sure you guys have got a million success stories. I know you're generally targeting the fitness industry and the health and wellness industry. Can you give me an example of some specific target markets and some success stories in those target markets?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Definitely. So target markets are obviously Australia. We've got APAC as well, and then The US. The US has just taken off.
Speaker 2:We've formed a lot of strong partnerships there, and that's probably about 70% of our business now and 30% is is APAC. Right.
Speaker 1:I want
Speaker 2:try to open it up a bit, but The US is so big, there's just so much opportunity there. Like in California, there's as many gyms and fitness and wellness in California as there is in the whole of Australia.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:no doubt it's gonna be a lot larger. Yeah, it's crazy. So a couple of the success stories, we had a client in Singapore. They were getting like, they were really struggling. We were trying to figure out what, like, obviously, what can we do to decrease the lead cost, increase their conversions, and we're stuck a little bit.
Speaker 2:So we did a bit more research. We tried a different approach, and we ended up dropping their lead cost by, like, 50%. So it was sitting at around sort of $40. We dropped it to $20 or below, which is fantastic. And their conversion rate increased to 50%, which was absolutely sick.
Speaker 1:What type of business was that? Was that a gym or was
Speaker 2:that studio. Yeah. Fitness studio. Boutique fitness studio in Singapore. And Yeah.
Speaker 2:We just and the hardest thing with us is we the creative is, at the moment, the main driver of results within marketing because as you can appreciate, there's so much happening on social media. If you're not standing out and being different and being disruptive and actually like stopping the scroll, you're not gonna get any sort of attention. And then the messaging has to connect with that consumer on a personal and emotional level, because we're in an emotional industry. Buy a gym membership or wellness or health because you're not happy with how you feel or how you look. It's gotta level.
Speaker 2:So that's what we did with that location. Just absolutely, yeah, just they were nearly on the verge of like, oh, we wanna stop. This isn't working. And then we've pushed through, we made them, like held them accountable and said, look, you just have to test a few more things and we did it and now it's flying. Like Ridiculous, which is good.
Speaker 1:That's one of them.
Speaker 2:Another one we onboarded in his first month, the guy over in Northern California. He in his first month had 35 sales in his first month, which was incredible.
Speaker 1:Is this another gym?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Another gym. It's more of a strength and conditioning gym. Open up, he had 42 members, and then after his first month, he was at 77 members, which was fantastic. So he grew almost too quick, and then we're like, woah.
Speaker 2:We gotta sort of slow down a bit because he's Yeah. And then and this is the thing with paid ads. Like, when you're running paid ads or you're running paid media, it is so scalable and it can get very dangerous for a lot of people that aren't ready. That's why what we do is very customized approach. We wanna understand the business.
Speaker 2:We wanna understand that the mechanics behind what they do because it's all good and well growing. But if you grow too fast, you can piss off a lot of members. You can also, like, grow the wrong way. If you grow too quickly, it can cause more problems than if you grow at at a sort of more steady rate.
Speaker 1:So talking about growing, the big topic these days is AI and how AI is helping people do pretty much everything. Right? So in our business, we focus on B2B outreach using AI and we have a outreach system that basically takes care of all of the initial communication and then the actual appointment setting. And that takes off a lot of time off the sales representative table so they can then focus on some higher level things. Can either schedule more demo or discovery meetings, or they can work in other areas or even schedule more meetings for people they've already got in their sales pipeline that might need a little bit extra time together.
Speaker 1:So how are you guys using AI in your business to either help behind the scenes with your employees and or with your clients?
Speaker 2:Yep. Great question. And I think the topic of AI, especially in our industry, I don't know what it's like for others, but to start with, we're learning from a lot of other industries because I feel the fitness industry is very slow to adopt new technology because we're not a technology industry. We're a very sort of in person, that sort of it's a very slow industry to adopt technology. So with regards to AI, we're using it for our clients basically to save them time.
Speaker 2:So one instance is conversational AI. So instead of having a salesperson or a gym manager texting the leads and following up on the leads. That's all done through AI. So conversational AI, hooking them into appointments, following up on leads, mentoring those leads, asking the right questions on a real personal level. People like, Oh, but it's not personal enough.
Speaker 2:Well, I disagree because the way we're setting it up is to be very question based, very curious and acting like you're a person asking questions, even to the way you set the time that the text message goes out. So if someone submits a lead form, they come through, then you're not gonna send it immediately in the first like minute. It will wait usually five minutes or three minutes. So it seems a little bit more real rather than just instant. So there's all little things like that.
Speaker 2:There's a way you set your sequencing of messaging and putting spelling mistakes in the templates can be a real way to just look make it look like it's human and not correct grammar. So when it's too perfect, it almost looks too fake. So we launched Voice AI two weeks ago and it's absolutely mind blowing what that's doing. So that's basically a phone representative, a virtual assistant, an AI assistant that's calling the leads as they come in within the first five minutes. We've already had one client at three bookings, which has been great.
Speaker 2:And I've listened to the calls. They're not perfect, of course. They're not perfect. And they're not going to be perfect yet. But it's still doing the grunt work of contacting the leads as soon as they come in so a human doesn't have to do it.
Speaker 2:But what it's doing is exactly. Yeah. It's setting up a consultation or a sales call for that gym owner or for that gym manager so they don't have to do the heavy lifting. It works exceptionally well after hours as well. On weekends, maybe you're at a lunch and you're at a meeting, you can't contact that lead.
Speaker 2:It does that work for you. So we're seeing some great early results there with our clients. They're getting pretty excited. So that beta should be finished in four weeks. And once that's finished, we can go to market.
Speaker 2:Then the next step will be will be actually selling introductory offers. So selling introductory program like a might be $30 for three sessions or $75 for a week, whatever that is, we'll be doing that. In addition to voice mail on the website, so instead of having that's happening in the next two weeks, I think. So instead of having like a bot just sitting there answering questions, and it's actually live on our website too. So you can go and have a check it and give us your feedback.
Speaker 2:Basically, you go to the website, can then, it'll talk to you and ask you questions and it'll answer any frequently asked questions that we get. Again, you can do that. We can put that on our client's website. So again, you've got Phone Voice AI, you've got the conversational, and then you've got obviously the web, which can then book someone into a session or into a sales consultation. Internally for ourselves, we use it.
Speaker 2:I think people get the whole AI piece wrong. They feel like, how can AI do this for me? And what can it do for me? Where the way we look at it and everything we're learning and listening to it, how can AI help me with this and make me a superhuman employee? And it's not going to take my job because I know how to use AI.
Speaker 2:And if I don't know how to use AI, then I'll lose my job. That's the way we're looking at it. We're teaching our staff is you need to be able to use AI to make what you could usually take you two hours to three hours or take you fifteen to twenty minutes. Because it's so powerful what we can do now. Like every single call now within the business, we've trained our staff that every internal meeting or external meeting, basically, we train the GPT to give us a rating.
Speaker 2:Act as So I did it the other day on our leadership meeting. Act as our chairman and mentor, and please give me feedback on the way I structured and the way I performed in the leadership meeting on May 2. And then it will give me a whole feedback of areas of improvement, what I did really well, what I need to get better at. So we're constantly improving, getting better. That's one way we're using it internally.
Speaker 2:Then you've got the whole marketing side of things. You can have AI tools that help optimize campaigns. So for instance, if your lead cost gets above a certain height or certain price, then it will completely switch it off and then start optimizing or giving you optimization suggestions so we can speed up that process. So there's that. We're looking at AI agents in q four.
Speaker 2:So we wanna have everyone in the company by the start of next year has got an AI agent to support them in what they do. So for scalability purposes, instead of having to hire more people, we basically have an AI agent and even my assistant will have an AI agent. So instead of like looking for flights herself, she'll have the agent like, there'll be a prompt, go and look for flights. Betjie's got to New York for this conference. We wanna go in for five days.
Speaker 2:We want flights around this price, and we want a hotel in this price range, and AI will go and do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's awesome. That's really cool to hear your, your thoughts on how you see AI as as a useful tool to be able to leverage people's time rather than taking out other people's jobs. That's the exact way that I see it. And, you know, to to kind of put a picture to it, you know, like the the movie Avatar when they jump in those big robotic things and they can you go you can lift a thousand kilograms of everything, you know, and do all this stuff really fast.
Speaker 1:That's how I I kind of view AI too. It's like putting on a robotic suit every morning. And if you know how to use that suit, you can get a lot of stuff done really, really quickly and still be yourself and still, you know, be a human, but just be on the ball and get so much more
Speaker 2:stuff done. But we secured a financing option for our clients last week, which is absolutely game changing in our industry. So we secured that financing option. Now our whole sales process is gonna change. We've an additional offer or additional program we can offer.
Speaker 2:What I did after, like I did a call with a financing company that we're partnered with now, and he ran us through the exact process and how to do it. So I recorded the call, popped the Fathom link, put the whole transcript into ChatTVT and said, please act as our sales director and create a process for our sales executive, Trent, to be able to sell this in with ease and not obviously have a complicated process. It just builds it all for me. That's now the foundation, created a working document with our CMO and also Trent. So now we all can work on it together and and improve it over time.
Speaker 2:But for that grunt work, it would have taken me to do it on my own probably a couple of hours. Remember it was done literally literally seconds, like minutes done in.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:awesome. How can it help me with what I'm doing is better than how can it do it for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's great advice. Awesome. And just to finish off, I really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1:If you could leave us with maybe the biggest piece of advice after, after all of your experience pre scaling Super Fit Grow, what's the biggest piece of advice you can give to other CEOs or founders that are just starting out either in the SaaS or agency niches to help them maybe avoid some of the mistakes that you made?
Speaker 2:Yeah, just number one thing is like, it's fucking hard. It is brutal and wake up every day knowing there's gonna be a challenge there, knowing there's gonna be a massive failure that you're gonna learn from. Every single day, you have to have the resilience to keep pushing forward. The only reason people aren't successful or they don't like continue on and they don't become an 8 figure or 9 figure business is typically because they quit. A prime example, we got hacked in 2022
Speaker 1:and thousands
Speaker 2:of our clients' dollars, thousands of our dollars stolen, and we thought it was over. But obviously through everything I've been through and even my business partner, looked at how we can push through and we got through it. So I think just learning to get your teeth kicked in every single day
Speaker 1:and keep looking forward. Gotta
Speaker 2:learn the art of accepting rejection. You gotta get rejected all the time. Like, then people are gonna tell, no, that's a stupid idea. You can't do that. You've gotta fucking do it anyway.
Speaker 2:Because you wouldn't take risks. That's honestly, like, you can have every tactic and all this and everything. It's art of rejection and learning how to accept rejection is the best tool to have.
Speaker 1:That's some awesome raw unfiltered advice. I appreciate your time today, mate. I wish you all the best with Super Fit Grow in the future, and look forward to seeing where you guys are in another twelve months.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it, really. Thanks for having me on, Anthony. I'd love to do another one as well in that call.
Speaker 1:Sure. We're fine at all. Alright. Sounds good, mate.
