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How to Price Cheer Gym Classes and All-Star Teams Correctly
Cheer Biz Podcast host Dan Cotton, author of Charge What You’re Worth: The Cheer Pricing Handbook, walks through the exact formula he uses to help gym owners set tuition, raise prices with confidence, and finally get paid what their programs are worth.
Why So Many Gym Owners Get Pricing Wrong
On this episode of the Cheer Biz Podcast, host Dan Cotton returns to one of his favorite subjects: pricing. Cotton, who coaches hundreds of gym owners through NextGen and wrote Charge What You’re Worth: The Cheer Pricing Handbook, has spent the last four years obsessed with helping cheer gyms charge what they’re actually worth. He opens the episode by admitting that his own gym got pricing completely wrong for years after he took it over, making nearly every mistake an owner can make along the way.
That history, he explained, is exactly why he keeps returning to the topic. Even gym owners who have read his book and run the numbers through his pricing calculator often still haven’t made the changes their pricing needs. He described a recent conversation with a client who admitted she’d just raised her prices, but still needed convincing that another increase was overdue. Pricing, Cotton said, remains one of the top ten questions NextGen’s coaching clients ask, which is why he wanted to walk through his full framework again.
There’s No Simple Formula, But There Is a Process
The first question Cotton hears constantly is simply, what should I charge? His answer: it depends. Pricing isn’t straightforward math, he said; it requires looking at a gym’s demographics, its offerings, and a range of other factors. The baseline methodology, along with a free online pricing calculator, lives at thecheerhandbooks.com and in the Cheer Pricing Handbook itself.
The starting point, he said, is to price each product category separately rather than setting one blanket rate. That means running the calculation individually for class tuition, private lessons, an all-star or elite program, a prep or novice team, dance, and any other offering a gym has, rather than assuming one number works across the board.
The Class Pricing Formula, Step by Step
Cotton walked through his calculator’s logic using classes as the example. Start with payroll: figure out what it costs to staff that class for a month, and base it on the gym’s highest-paid, most experienced coach rather than an entry-level rate. His reasoning is that every class should be able to support having the best coach teach it, since that’s what actually drives retention and product quality.
Next, calculate the gym’s total monthly expenses, including everything that goes out the door. If an exact monthly figure isn’t available, Cotton recommended totaling the past year and dividing by twelve to get an average. From that total, subtract payroll, since it’s already being accounted for separately, and any all-star-specific costs, like competition fees or uniforms, that are billed to families separately. What’s left is the true monthly cost of operating the gym.
From there, decide how many classes the gym runs per week and what percentage of total expenses that program should cover. A gym that’s tumbling-only might expect that program to cover close to 100% of expenses, Cotton said, while a gym with a small class footprint relative to its all-star program should set a much lower percentage. He cautioned against picking an unrealistic target, like expecting classes to cover 60% of expenses when they make up a fraction of total revenue, since the math simply won’t work out to a workable price.
Multiply total expenses by that percentage to get the dollar amount the program needs to cover, then divide by the number of weekly classes to find the cost per class. Add the payroll cost calculated earlier, and that total is the base amount the class needs to bring in. Divide that figure by the gym’s enrollment minimum, the fewest students it would run a class for, to find the baseline per-student price, then layer on a profit margin. Cotton recommends starting around 30 percent, to land on the final tuition rate.
Applying the Same Model to All-Star Teams
The same process applies to all-star programs, run team by team rather than as one flat number. Cotton’s gym uses an enrollment minimum of 15 athletes for its elite team, for example, and prices around what it costs to staff and run that team at that size. Go above the minimum, and pricing can loosen slightly, though coaching costs typically rise too as more coaches are added.
Knowing When You Can Raise Tuition
Beyond setting an initial price, Cotton addressed one of the next most common questions: can I raise tuition? He pointed to a few signals worth checking first. Is the program actually delivering value? Is churn at or below roughly 6 percent, a sign that families are satisfied? And are classes close to full? He described a conversation with a gym owner who was essentially capped, unable to add more class times without expanding into days she wasn’t sure would convert. In that situation, Cotton said, raising prices is the right move, since demand supports it and any families who leave can be backfilled at the higher rate.
He added that gyms priced significantly below where they should be, especially small programs with only around 20 students, should raise prices as soon as possible, since the total revenue at risk from losing a few families is small compared to the upside of correcting the price. Timing also matters: raising prices a week or even a few weeks after the last increase is too soon, but a few months out, it may be reasonable.
Should Current Members Keep Their Old Rate?
Cotton was direct on the question of grandfathering: in general, no. All-star tuition, in particular, should increase for everyone each year, roughly in line with inflation. His own gym didn’t raise tuition this past year after a large increase tied to a new building, and he said in hindsight he regrets not still pushing a small increase.
For gyms considering a broader price increase, he described the hybrid model he teaches at conferences and in the book. Around September or October, raise the price for all new members only, keeping current members at their existing rate for the time being. Let that new, higher rate run for a couple of months, which also functions as a live test: if tour conversion holds up, the price is working. Then, typically in November, let current members know that starting in January, their rate will move up to match everyone else’s. By that point, the funnel is already full of members paying the new rate, softening the impact of any members who choose to leave.
Timing Increases Around Your Own Calendar
Not every gym needs to follow a September or October cycle, Cotton noted. Gyms that run on a fiscal or all-star re-enrollment calendar can shift the same model to April or May instead, starting new members at the higher rate in the spring and moving existing members up around re-enrollment.
His own gym raises class tuition every January and all-star tuition every May. January through April is when his gym earns the most class revenue and sees the fewest drops, so he wants the new pricing in place for that entire window. May tends to bring more natural attrition anyway, as students convert into all-star programs or move into other sports, so that’s when he pushes the all-star increase.
