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The Attract, Convert, Ascend Framework for Filling Your Cheer Gym
Host Dan Cotton breaks down a three-part framework that takes gym growth out of the guessing game and turns prospects into long-term members.
Stop Throwing Darts at Growth
Welcome to another episode of the Cheer Biz Podcast. Host Dan Cotton opens this solo episode by tackling a challenge nearly every gym owner knows well: filling the gym. Too often, growth feels like throwing darts and hoping something sticks. Dan’s message is that the right framework makes growth far more predictable, and that following one exact process will turn prospects into members.
The framework has three parts: attract, convert, and ascend. Dan walks through each one in turn, explaining what it looks like inside a real gym and giving practical examples that cheer gym owners can put to work right away, whether they run a small program or a large one. He also shares that the episode was inspired by conversations happening in the Cheer Gym Owners and All-Star Cheer Coaches and Owners Facebook groups, and encourages listeners to bring their questions there.
Attract: Win Over the Cold Audience
Everything starts with attracting new families, and that begins with showing up consistently on social media with engaging content. Without that presence, Dan explains, your ability to reach new members is very limited. Social content, and sometimes paid ads, is how a gym reaches a brand-new cold audience of people who have never seen it before.
Once those people take notice, they need something to attract them to, ideally an option with a very low commitment level that lets them learn more about the gym. Dan lists open houses, free tours, learn to cheer clinics, giveaways, and birthday parties as the main tools. Some are paid and some are free, but all of them get new families through the door.
Make Open Houses Worth Attending
Dan has noticed open houses falling out of favor, and he believes the cause is poor promotion. Many gyms simply post a Canva graphic, add it to the website, and say come on in, with no incentive and no reason to attend. The result is that mostly warm leads show up, people who already follow the gym or have visited before, while true cold leads stay home because their time is valuable.
His fix is to add an incentive, require registration, confirm attendance, and keep engaging with registrants after they sign up. He contrasts owners who report a hundred people showing up with those who saw only five families, and says the difference usually comes down to effort. Posting once on Facebook is not promotion.
Tours, Clinics, Parties, and Giveaways
A tour, Dan says, is a low-commitment way for families to see the gym, get shown around, and maybe do a skill assessment, but it should also function as a sales meeting. Your front desk should be selling people directly into enrollment. If you don’t have a front desk, his advice is blunt: hire one, or recognize that you are the front desk and get those families converted.
Learn to cheer clinics earned some of his strongest praise. One of his clients was struggling with low registration, so they offered free clinics lasting about three hours, where kids stunted, tumbled, learned a mini routine, and performed it for their parents. At the end came a sales conversion into a class, a half-year team, a prep team, or a novice team. The gym more than doubled its team registration compared with the previous year and picked up new members all summer. Dan prefers low-cost over free, and recommends a sign-up form, an email explaining what to expect, and follow-up by email and text afterward.
Birthday parties are another source of leads that gyms often overlook. Dan is not talking about the family that paid for the party, but the attendees who paid nothing. They have just had a great time in your gym and are hot leads. Giveaways round out the list: offer something like a month of free tumbling, collect opt-ins, hold a drawing, and follow up with everyone who entered. A tumbling class bundle paired with a free private lesson is another option.
Convert: Sales Without Conversion Is Conversation
The second step is turning attraction into paying members. Dan’s saying captures it well: sales without conversion is just conversation. If you host an event or talk to a family but nobody becomes a paying customer, you have made friends and given people an experience, but you haven’t gained customers.
That means having an offer ready during or right after the event, and making it a limited-time offer, such as a bonus for signing up while the family is still in the building. Dan shares a story from a recent sales call he joined for a marketing product, where the rep anchored at $54,000, dropped to $24,000 for system access, and then offered it for $12,000 because he was on the call that day. Dan admired the technique, noting how the price anchor made the final number feel reasonable, especially compared with agencies charging $5,000 a month. The lesson for gym owners is that the offer has to be tailored to your audience. Quoting a cheer one-on-one family an enormous price would just get you laughed at.
Follow Up Until They Say No
Conversion also depends on systems. Dan recommends email and SMS automations to re-engage people who don’t buy on the spot, along with strategic incentives such as limited-time offers, guarantees, and bonuses that make signing up right then more attractive.
Sales call follow-ups matter too. If a family has visited and hasn’t enrolled, they should receive an email, then a text message, then a phone call, and the lead should be worked until they say they no longer want to hear from you. Dan stresses being tenacious and willing to hear no without being pushy.
Ascend: Build the Path to Senior Year
The final step is ascension, which Dan calls how a gym truly fills. The attraction offer is the cheapest, easiest entry point, and few people who come in through it will jump straight into a full-year elite, competitive, travel program. More often they convert into tumbling classes or a session-based cheer or dance program. Those students then need a clear path to novice or prep cheer, and the novice and prep athletes need a path toward elite. Building that ascension plan into your structure is what keeps families long term and raises customer lifetime value.
Dan uses a funnel to explain it. Attraction is wide at the top, conversion is tighter, and ascension should be the tiniest drip at the bottom. If you fill the funnel but members drop out as fast as they enter, you don’t have a funnel, you have a pipe. He wants gym owners to look at every tour and every birthday party guest as a future senior who will graduate from their program in twelve to fifteen years.
Watch Your Churn and Keep Going
Once the system is running, Dan advises repeating it and doing it better, only changing it when it stops working. If people convert but then drop off, attack the problem at the ascension stage by examining churn. He says churn above six percent is a problem for an all-star gym with tumbling classes. A gym with no outside tumbling memberships should be below one or two percent, especially during the season, since team members shouldn’t be leaving mid-year.
His closing encouragement is to resist looking for a life hack or a quick option, because there isn’t one. Build the system as described, and a gym that does it right should be able to grow.
