30 members joined in one day with an open house event.
- Jimmy Davidson
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
What if you could sign up 15, 20, even 30 new members in a single day?
Not spread across a whole month. In one day.
That is what a well-run open house does. We have done it at our own parkour gym, Freedom in Motion, as well as plenty of other gyms in our mentorship program. Our best days have brought in 17 to 30 new members in a single afternoon.
This post breaks down the exact playbook. Steal it. Run it at your gym.
Let's jump in.
What Is an Open House?
An open house is a single day packed with back-to-back beginner classes.
Each class is short. Just 30 minutes. Think of it like a sample class. A quick, fun taste of what your gym does.
Why would parents join today, though?
Every family who walks in gets a strong offer. Sign up today, and you get $500 or more in extra value. That value can be private lessons, gym clothing, account credit, free camp days- whatever you want to stack.
Open House Day-of flow:
A family comes in for their sample class.
They have a blast.
Your sales team makes the offer.
They sign up on the spot.
Follow up in the following days
Do this over and over, all day long, and you can register a whole month of members in one shot. This play can be run several times a year.
Now let's build it.
Step 1: Set It Up
Every open house is built out of small blocks of time.
One open house session = 20 minutes of parkour class + 10 minutes of sales. That gives you a 30 minute block.
Now stack them. Schedule 4, 5, or 6 of these blocks back to back. Every block is a fresh batch of families and a fresh set of sales chances.
Pick your date. Choose a day when your best people are available. You want your sharpest sales rep, your most fun coaches, and a manager on the floor.
Build your team. A team of four works great:
2 coaches
2 sales team people
A manager (who can take the place of a coach or sales team member, preferably a sales team member)
Pick a day and time people can actually show up. Weekends win. So do days you know your area is free.
Give yourself runway. Set the date more than a month out so your team has the time and space to prepare and so that you can market to pack this event.
Step 2: Market It
An open house lives or dies on whether people actually show up. So you have to market and fill it.
Run paid ads. This is how you bring in brand-new people to your gym. Meta ads do the heavy lifting here.
Paid ads go to a dedicated open house landing page. Here is an example landing page from FiM.
Send them to a dedicated landing page. Not your homepage. A page built just for the open house.
Charge a small fee to book. We charge about $7 per spot. Not free and not a full trial class price:
A small charge filters out the freebie seekers who were never going to buy.
But keep it low as this is half a class. You want the maximum number of people to show up.
Free attracts tire-kickers. A tiny fee attracts real buyers.
Email your list. Blast everyone who is not a member. Old leads, no shows, people who ghosted you months ago. An open house is one of the best ways to wake up a dead list and get them back in the door.
Use dedicated open house ads and copy. Do not reuse your regular trial ads. Build video ads and ad copy made just for this event.
Bonus tip: protect your show rate. You paid to get these bookings, so do not lose them. Send a reminder the day before and another a few hours before their session. More reminders means more people through the door.
Step 3: Manage Your Leads
Every booking should flow into your gym sales CRM. Tag them all as "open house leads" so you can track them separately.
Now here is the rule that makes or breaks your close rate.
Cap each session at 3 to 5 families. No more.
Why? Because that lets your sales team sell one-on-one. Selling to 3 families is easy. Selling to 10 families at once is a nightmare. Your pitch gets watered down and your numbers tank.
Small groups = higher close rate. That is exactly why you run multiple sessions in a row. You still pack the day. You just do it in bite-sized batches.
Pre-create every account before the day. Have your sales team set up the accounts in advance.
That way, when a family says yes, you move fast:
Confirm their card on file is good.
Pitch them.
Pick the membership type.
Close.
Walk them out the door.
Onboarding, welcome bags, and follow up calls can wait. On open house day, speed is everything.
Step 4: Run the Day
This is where practice pays off. Your coaches and your sales team each have a job.
The coaches run the class
Before the day, build one template session that any coach can run. Make it repeatable and make it fun:
Warm up
10 minutes of lessons
10 minutes of courses and games
At the end of class, the coach plants the seed. Something like:
"What part of class was your favorite? Did you love that parkour game we just played? You get so much more of that in our weekly classes. We would love to have you back."
Then the handoff. This is the most important move of the whole day.
The coach walks the student over to the parent. Talks to the parent for a second. Then walks the parent straight to the sales team and hands them off.
Do not point. Do not say "go check in up front." Physically escort the family to the sales area.
Once they are handed off, the coach keeps the kids busy. Hand out stickers. Play with them. Distract them so the parent can focus while the sales team goes to work.
The sales team closes
Now the sales rep takes over:
Show the price presentation for the day.
Run a proper sales pitch.
Reveal today's special offer, the $500 to $1,000 in stacked value they only get right now.
Ask for the sale using assumptive language. Not "do you want to join?" Instead: "Do Tuesdays or Thursdays work better for your family?"
Close.
Log it in the system.
Notice the offer is added value, not a discount. You are not slashing your price. You are stacking on bonuses. Discounts dig a hole in your revenue. Value stacking fills your gym.
Step 5: Follow Up and Debrief
The day is not over when the last family leaves. Clean up your gym sales CRM while it is fresh.
Update three groups:
Buyers. Mark them as members so you can start real onboarding this week.
No shows. Tag them so your team can call them back and rebook.
No buys. Tag them too. Most of these are not a hard no. They are a "not yet." Circle back later.
Then debrief with your team. Ask two questions:
What worked?
What did not?
Write it down. Every open house makes the next one better.
The Real Secret
Open house days are intense. They can be a grind.
But here is what separates the gyms that pull 5 members from the gyms that pull 30.
They practice.
Before the day, role-play the whole thing. Run the flow of the open house. Run the coach handoff. Run the sales conversations out loud. Practice the whole day like a dress rehearsal.
A team that has practiced moves like a machine. A team that winged it fumbles the handoffs and loses the close.
Put in the reps. Then watch one afternoon turn into one of the biggest member days of your entire year.
Need Help Running Yours?
We build marketing strategies, sales systems, and operational playbooks for parkour gyms that make it easy to run events like this open house. Ads, landing pages, scripts, the full playbook. Want to take your parkour gym to the next level? Book a call with us to see how we can help you.
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