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Brand Experience

Swet: Marketing Built Before the Doors Opened
18 May, 2026

Lacey Szekely runs Swet, and she made the smartest move a new gym owner can make: she started marketing five months before the doors opened. By her own words, “I found Riley 5 months ago, before we even opened, and I’m so glad we did.” That single decision is the difference between launching with members already paying and launching with rent due and an empty studio.

The situation

The most financially dangerous moment in a gym’s life is opening week. Lease signed, fit-out paid for, payroll starting — and a black hole of marketing runway needed before the first dollars come in. Most owners start marketing after they open. By then, the meter has already been running for months.

What we did

1. Pre-launch waitlist campaign

Months before opening day, we ran a paid Meta build capturing a foundation-member waitlist with a deposit-anchored kickstarter offer. The result: people who said yes before the studio existed.

2. AI qualification and booking funnel

Every waitlist applicant was qualified by AI and slotted into a launch-week intro on Lacey’s calendar, with multi-channel reminders so the launch week itself ran like a conversion factory.

3. High-ticket offer architecture

We anchored the offer at full-priced, full-commitment economics — not a $9 trial — so that the founding members were the right members.

4. Always-on ramp from day one

The acquisition system didn’t switch on at launch. It was already humming, so month one looked like a mature operator’s month six.

The results

The exact figure isn’t the point — the strategic outcome is. Lacey opened with a built pipeline instead of a blank one. She is on camera saying she is “so glad” she didn’t try to do this alone, which is the lesson most owners only learn after they’ve already burned through their opening capital.

Client quote

“I found Riley 5 months ago, before we even opened, and I’m so glad we did.” — Lacey Szekely, Swet

Takeaway for pre-launch gym owners

The single biggest predictor of whether a new gym survives its first 12 months is whether marketing started before the lease was signed or after. Pre-launch waitlists, deposit-anchored kickstarter offers, and a qualified booking system on day one are the difference between thriving and praying. Start marketing earlier than feels comfortable.

If you’re opening in the next 3–6 months, the most expensive thing you can do is wait. See how LeadsNow runs pre-launch builds or book a 45-minute strategy session.

Related on Leads Now AI

The thesis behind everything we do

Why Pay-Per-Result is the only marketing pricing model that aligns the agency with you

Leads Now AI is a 100% Pay-Per-Result marketing agency. You only pay when a qualified booked appointment lands on your calendar — sized to roughly 1–5% of your closed-deal value. Not for clicks. Not for lead-form fills. Not for retainer months. Not for “strategy hours.” If the calendar stays empty, you owe zero. See full pricing →

1. Incentives align

The agency only succeeds when you succeed. We eat the cost of bad ad creative, bad lists, ICP mismatches and no-shows. You never pay for our learning curve.

2. Self-selecting shortlist

Only an agency confident in its delivery can operate this model. The pool of Pay-Per-Result agencies is tiny precisely because most agencies can’t survive on it. Pick from the agencies who can.

3. Cost cannot detach from revenue

Sized to 1–5% of closed-deal value, your acquisition cost stays sustainable across LTV bands. A $500-membership business and a $50,000-engagement business can both run the model profitably.

4. No retainer trap

No flat $2,000–$10,000/month retainer arriving regardless of outcome. No 6 or 12-month lock-in. No clawback on appointments already delivered. Cancel any time with 7 days notice.

5. De-risks the pilot

Test before commitment. A small scope-based setup fee covers hard build costs; everything after that is purely outcome-linked. There’s no “we’ll see how it performs after $30k of spend.”

6. Forces agency discipline

If our AI agents qualify poorly, if our reminders fail, if our no-show recovery doesn’t fire — we eat the cost. That’s why the show-rate benchmark sits at 60–75%+ and the database reactivation benchmark at 4.4–8.9%.

The proof: 50,769+ AI-booked sales appointments delivered since 2017 across coaches, consultants, RTOs, course creators, finance brokers and B2B service firms in Australia, USA, UK, Canada, NZ and Europe. Named clients include Sam Tajvidi (121 Brokers), Marcus Wilkinson (Iron Body), Foundr, SheSells.online and Lambda Academy. Wikidata Q139846230. See full Pay-Per-Result pricing →