We Launched Another New Business… Well, Kind Of…

We are excited to announce the official launch of our new side project – the GymSites website platform. GymSites.io provides martial arts and fitness studio owners with websites that bring in more members by helping them rank well in Google and offering better design.

Ok, if you’ve been following our journey a little bit it may seem like we have a ton of things going on… and that may be true, haha. But GymSites is really just a little brother to our main web design/digital marketing business Made With Love Consulting and is a spin off of the business we focused on a couple of years ago we called “Brave Gym Marketing”.

Brave was intended to be a digital marketing agency to help martial arts owners grow their gyms through Facebook ads, search engine marketing, and website design.

The origins of our interest in the space started about 5 years ago when Ashley and I moved back to Springfield and started training pretty regularly at a local jiujitsu gym under fourth degree black belt Steve Haydock.

At the time, Steve was running his gym out of his shed and had less than 30 students. Seeing that the quality of his website didn’t match the quality of instruction he provided, Ashley offered to build his website and perform some search engine marketing to help him show better up in Google and other search engines.

This effort went really well. Soon Steve’s gym was the very first result anyone saw when they searched for “Jiujitsu in Springfield, Mo” and, as a result, his gym started to grow.

Then a couple of years later, after Ashley and I had both sold our businesses, we decided to spend some time focused exclusively on helping grow that business through digital marketing. We both had experience in marketing our own businesses, but had never successfully run Facebook ads and we wanted to see if we could replicate our own marketing success in another company.

So in the latter half of 2023 we launched Brave Gym Marketing with Steve’s gym, Kokoro Training Academy, as our first client. We redesigned Steve’s website, wrote many pages of content, designed marketing and sales materials, and started running Facebook ads to drive traffic to his business.

Those efforts were by most metrics a smashing success. In fact, some would say we achieved the “Holy Grail” of marketing, a positive ROI on ad spend. By the end of the year, for ever dollar the gym spend in facebook ads, they earned $1.25 in revenue!

But while we achieved our own personal goal, which was to really feel like we understood how to run a successful marketing campaign for a gym/fitness business, after spending the better part of the year working on this effort we learned a couple of other things as well:

1. We hated running Facebook ads

Facebook’s suite of business tools absolutely sucks.

Their user interface is infuriating. It’s basically impossible to find what you’re looking for because nothing is where you expect it to be and everything is always changing. Even trying to do something simple for your business like set up ads or install a tracking pixel is time consuming and unintuitive.

It’s really hard to build a business on top of a tool that changes constantly and you genuinely don’t enjoy working in.

2. We didn’t want to run an agency

While we liked a lot of things about the work we did and we were tremendously grateful for all of the learning, we couldn’t see ourselves hiring employees and running ads for multiple companies. We wanted to have a small business that could be run by Ashley and myself and running an agency would require hiring and managing a bunch of staff.

3. The website was where the real magic was

During the course of our education it became more clear than ever that simply having a great website that ranks well in Google really was the foundation of the gym’s growth. Students who found the website by searching in Google and resonated with “the vibe” were more likely to become gym members and stick at it longer.

The students that did come in through paid Facebook ads had to be poked and prodded incessantly to even show up for a class, nudged and teased into becoming trial members, and then hand held all the way through the process to becoming full fledged members.

The fact was, they weren’t looking for a gym to begin with. We had advertised to them and said “Hey, you should come try out our gym”. Their motivations for joining were totally different than someone who had come to an internal realization that joining a martial art was something they wanted to prioritize.

Upon reflection, all of this ultimately led to us pivoting to create GymSites.io, a web design platform focused on helping martial arts studios and fitness studio owners build high quality, conversion focused websites with just a few clicks.

I spent another 6 months working on building the platform and then, last week, we launched with our first live client, Unity Wellness Midtown, a spa, wellness studio, and jiujitsu gym in Springfield (they also have a great kids jiujitsu program).

Our hope is that, over the next couple of years, we can form some partnerships with gym management and fitness CRM software providers to offer websites to their customers. Additionally we’ll be focusing on getting our site in the top search results for keywords like “martial arts web design”, “fitness web design” and the like so that potential customers can find us when they’re looking for a new site!

That’s all for now. On to the next adventure!