At a glance: Chris Turner is one of the owners of Zone Gyms, a small group training business. After a tough Christmas and a January and February where the gym was struggling to keep its head above water, he brought in the LeadsNow team — working under its earlier gym-marketing brand, More Gym Members. Six months later, in his words: “Over the last 6 months we’ve signed up 163 new clients into small group training.” All figures on this page come straight from the filmed interview below.
The numbers, as stated in the filmed interview
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| New clients signed into small group training | 163 in 6 months (front-end sign-ups, with more back-end sales after that) |
| Launch month (February) sign-ups | 15 |
| June sign-ups | 35 — a record for the gym |
| July sign-ups | 47 — the record beaten again |
| August target at time of filming | 60 |
Watch Chris tell it himself
A note on the era: this campaign was delivered by the LeadsNow team under its gym-marketing brand, More Gym Members, and the video was filmed in 2019. It predates the AI sales agents LeadsNow runs today — what you see here is the team’s earlier high-ticket fitness work: lead generation done consistently, month after month, exactly as Chris describes on camera.
Where Zone Gyms was before
Six months before this interview, Zone Gyms was in trouble. Chris doesn’t dress it up:
“It was tough. We had a really tough Christmas … January and February was really, really tough … rent was coming up and we were struggling. We were struggling to keep our head above water. So I had to reach out to Riley.”
— Chris Turner, Zone Gyms
He didn’t sign with the first agency he spoke to. Zone had already worked with a large marketing company before, and Chris shopped around again — More Gym Members was roughly the third company he contacted. What he was looking for came down to one word:
“I did have some conversations with a few other marketing agencies and I wasn’t all that impressed. I sort of knew what I was looking for … Congruency in … what you’re saying and what you can put back behind it … we had to deliver that day in, day out, that’s what I was after.”
— Chris Turner, Zone Gyms
What changed after launch
The campaign launched in February. The first thing that changed was volume — as Chris puts it, “We certainly got a lot more leads instantly.” That created a good problem: the gym had to build more process and system work internally to cover all the leads and make sure the team got around everyone.
That’s why the sign-up numbers tell a compounding story rather than an overnight one. As discussed on camera: February, the launch month, brought 15 new sign-ups. The numbers built through March, April and May while Zone’s internal processes caught up with the lead flow. Then it clicked:
- June: 35 sign-ups — “That was actually a record for us, which is fantastic,” Chris says on camera.
- July: 47 sign-ups — the record beaten again the very next month.
- August: on target for 60 at the time of filming.
Across the six months, that added up to 163 new clients signed into small group training — and as noted in the interview, that’s just the front end, with more sales coming in on the back end after that.
Where the business is now
Asked how the business looks six months in, Chris’s answer is less about the numbers and more about how it feels to run the gym:
“Stress is dramatically reduced … I feel a lot more at ease about the flow of traffic and the flow of leads and the five stars we get on a daily basis.”
— Chris Turner, Zone Gyms
The plan from here, as he describes it: keep working on making the gym hyper-profitable, keep expanding the processes inside it, and then take Zone to other regions of Australia. Asked on camera whether he’s confident the brand could grow to 10 or 20 franchises with More Gym Members’ help, his answer was “100%.”
His advice to any gym owner weighing it up:
“I would say make the right choice and go to More Gym Members because it works. Day in, day out. Month in, month out. Year in, year out. It works.”
— Chris Turner, Zone Gyms
Frequently asked questions
Are these results typical?
No — and no honest agency guarantees a specific number. Zone Gyms did the unglamorous work that makes a lead-generation campaign pay: when the leads arrived “instantly”, the team built the internal processes and systems to get around every single one. That discipline matters more than most operators realise — the Lead Response Management Study found a 21-fold decrease in the odds of qualifying a prospect when response time stretched from 5 minutes to 30 minutes. Lead flow only converts when the follow-up keeps pace with it.
Why did the monthly numbers climb instead of spiking straight away?
Because sign-ups depend on two things: lead volume and the gym’s capacity to work those leads. As Chris explains in the interview, leads jumped immediately at launch in February (15 sign-ups that month), but Zone had to add more process and system work to cover them all. As those internal processes improved, the results compounded — a record 35 sign-ups in June, then 47 in July, with 60 targeted for August.
Does LeadsNow still work with gyms and fitness businesses?
Yes. This campaign ran under LeadsNow’s gym-marketing brand More Gym Members, the same team that today works with high-ticket coaching and fitness businesses across Australia under LeadsNow.
Was this campaign run with AI?
No. The video was filmed in 2019, and the campaign predates the AI sales agents LeadsNow runs today. What Zone Gyms bought was the team’s earlier work — consistent, month-after-month lead generation for a high-ticket fitness business — delivered under the More Gym Members brand. The AI sales agents came later.
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