Running a small business often feels like crossing the north Atlantic in autumn in a dinghy.  They’re treacherous waters at the best of times but in autumn you face the double threat of icebergs set loose by summer’s warm weather and the onset of hurricane season.  The sailing can get rough.  Even if your vessel doesn’t capsize, you better be prepared to bail some sea water.

This past weekend we hosted our annual team summit with the Empower coaches and support crew.  It was an opportunity both to reflect on the accomplishments and challenges of 2024 as well as plot our course for 2025.

After 2 consecutive years of record inflation, in 2024 we made the decision to raise membership rates by 3%.  It was a far cry from the 15% inflation but based on our growth in 2023 we rationalized that we could shield existing members and pass the difference on to new members joining at the inflation-adjusted 2024 membership rates.  It might have worked if membership growth rates had followed the 2023 trend.

In the first quarter of 2024 our Empower website hosted by Uplaunch averaged more than 400 visits per day on $0 ad spend.  This resulted in a steady in-flow of new leads.  But in April 2024 Uplaunch was bought and killed by Daxko Corp (aka Zen Planner).  All Uplaunch customers faced a forced conversion to Zen Planner’s Engage website hosting and CRM platform.  With the changeover Empower’s daily website visits dropped immediately to 0.  Our new member intake came to a screeching halt.  Even worse, our prospect intake forms were set up incorrectly and it took us until May to figure out why they were not working and prospects could not reach us.  We’d been torpedoed!    

We had the intake forms fixed and with the help of Rockstar and Salsa and the rest of our team’s dedication to social media posts we have slowly but steadily increased our website traffic.  By September we were up to 200 visits per day, about half the traffic we were seeing at the start of 2024 but a marked improvement from April.

Then last month, Music Man identified two other challenges.  The blog posts on our new website were not set up correctly and could not be found by Google search and based on changes in internet standards implemented earlier this year, our email broadcasts which we use to promote programs are no longer compliant and were not being delivered.  We hired a contractor to go in and manually add the correct URL and search tags to each one of our 200+ blogs published since April and at a cost of about $4000 made ourselves compliant with current internet standards so that Salsa’s broadcasts are now being delivered.  Already we have seen an uptick in leads as a direct result of these changes.

Despite our dinghy being rocked by all these setbacks, our amazing Empower team has hustled like crazy and in 2024 we posted record gross earnings.  Unfortunately, our net earnings have declined by almost 50% from 2023.  This reflects the increased costs of delivering our services.  All our suppliers have continued to raise rates in proportion to inflation while we have tried not to pass these costs on to members.  Every sheet of toilet paper, every dry erase marker, Spotify, Zen Planner, Gmail, Hydro, Landlords not to mention contractors such as cleaners, carpenters, etc have adjusted their rates and the result of these accumulated drops in the dinghy sees our vessel riding lower in the water than marine safety standards recommend.

At this time we have made no clear decisions on what measures we will take to course correct except to acknowledge that our continued success in 2025 will require some calculated adjustments.  Our BJJ school raised membership rates by $15 per month in 2024 and is raising them by another $15 per month in January 2025 in order to keep up with the rising costs of doing business.  Our kickboxing school is doing the same.  Even the community centres raised their fees by 17% this year.  Adapt or die, I suppose.  Natural selection is not kind to those who fail to adapt to their changing reality.

As grim as all this sounds, at our summit, we did not dwell on 2024’s shortcomings which can mostly be laid at the door of the captain’s poor course navigation.  Instead, we celebrated how remarkably successful 2024 was despite its challenges as the result of our team’s heroic efforts.  From Friday Night Lights to Celebrating Heroes, to our Annual Awards Gala to the Fraser Valley Throwdown.  Big Cat, Motor and Silk levelled up to earn their L2’s, Shades became Empower’s third CrossFit Level 3 coach.  OG and Shades launched the very popular Family Fit and Lift Over 40 programs.  The Varsity, Fit Over 40 and Homeschool PR programs continue to go strong.  We expanded our lifting platform.  We added Spice, Timberwolf, F-Bomb, Salsa and KMT to the Empower team.  And despite the drop in leads experienced in the second and third quarter of 2024, we still managed to grow our membership.

If 2024 wasn't our best year financially, our team nevertheless kept us sailing forward in the face of some serious headwinds that could have capsized a vessel manned by a lesser crew of mariners (If not for the efforts of the fearless crew…) We’re optimistic for 2025.  We have a great team and a great community!  With a few course corrections and better navigation we can thrive.   As always, we have big, exciting plans for how to serve you better in 2025!  Stay tuned.

Monday

Warm Up
5 min AMRAP
15 Ring Rows
25ft Inch Worm
10 Lat Pull Ups
25ft Leopard Crawl

Tech
Wall Walk
C2B

WOD
21/6-18/5-15/4-12/3-9/2-6/1-3
C2B
Wall Walks