If you want to grow your fitness business with adults of a certain age, then you need to do a couple of things to start with, broadly speaking. First, make sure they know that you want them and second, once they check you out, be sure to deliver a great customer experience. Does that sound too basic? I hope it does, but unfortunately it’s not for everyone.

Nick Garrity is a veteran fitness pro and franchisee who has planted his flag in the active aging market here in Metro Atlanta with two soon to be three locations of Alloy Personal Training. That’s the booming franchise business, also based here in the Atlanta area, the brainchild of CEO and friend of ours, Rick Mayo.

On the Optimal Aging podcast, Nick and I talk about why he’s dedicated himself to helping people in this demographic and why we both believe this segment represents the greatest economic opportunity in fitness. We cover content marketing, building relationships and networking in real life, even gasp using printed materials to get your message out there to the folks who need to hear it most, and, ultimately, how you can become a part of their lives they don’t want to do without.

Here are some excerpts of what Nick shared. You can listen to the rest here.

“This demographic is a segment of the population that truly needs to do something. It’s not just physical shape. A lot of this is mental. We just offer something that caters specifically to a population that doesn’t want the loud bells and whistles and the shining equipment. We keep it very simple and our whole goal is to try and make these workouts non-negotiable in someone’s life.”

“They enjoy it so much here, and they’re seeing results… Once that person opens the door, if you don’t make sure that you’re delivering an amazing experience, you really don’t have anything. We have a running joke in here and it’s like the heaviest weight in our facility is actually the front door. Right. Once you get something to open, that it’s on us. It’s on us to deliver.”

“Somehow our messaging has shown them that we can help them. Specifically and this is a different target demographic. It’s over the age of 40. It’s people that don’t want to go to where there’s a giant box gym and they don’t know what to do and there’s a lot of intimidation, people taking selfies and stuff, like our clients are just not looking for that. So what we need to make sure of is, to your point about the music yeah, let’s have music that it’s enjoyable, it’s going to motivate, but it’s not loud and crazy. And actually, because we want them to hear the coach if we’re truly delivering on personal training and every one of our clients has an individualized program in here, they’ve got to be able to hear the coaching, because we want to make sure that they’re training safely.”