As a gym owner, health club operator, or as a freelance personal trainer, without a doubt, one or more of the following questions crosses your mind daily…

• How much personal training did our Brentwood gym sell last week?
• Who is the top grossing salesperson at our Freemont club?
• How did our Spring Valley team perform against their goals last month?
• How much EFT do we need to set up at our Downtown club to hit our goal this month?
• Which one of our health clubs is selling the most annual membership agreements?
• How much EFT did we set up yesterday?
• How much personal training have we sold so far today for all of our locations combined?
• What’s our total personal training liability right now?
• What is my studio’s retention/attrition rate?
• Who cancelled today and what was the total losses?

These are just a small sampling of questions that can make the difference between health clubs and personal training studios that are just barely making it versus an industry juggernaut.

Take a Hard Look at Your Gym Business

Do you know the answers to all those questions?

Do you care?

How up to date is your sales information?

Do you wait until the end of the month to find out how you did?

Do you wait until the end of the quarter?

Do you even know how you’re doing?

Do you know how you are performing today versus how you did this month last year?

How long does it take you to find that information?

The Reality of Accounting

Even if you have the absolute best accounting team and system in the world, traditional accounting just isn’t set up to answer many of the most pertinent questions for the fitness industry. Even when we invest the time and capital to set up world class accounting, we still must wait until the end of a reconciled period to really know how we did. Now imagine if you not only knew the answers to all the above questions, but you saw them visualized on a comprehensive dashboard accessible to you to see at your heart’s content from anywhere…

Measure, Improve, & Grow

An age old business adage states "What gets measured gets improved." Therefore, you should measure the things that are important to your business.

As a gym owner who had started other companies before (some successful and some not), I knew I had to be aware of when I was in danger of posting a bad week, month, or quarter way before the numbers were crunched by accountants. Having these statistics in advance is the single most powerful tool a business can have. My gym knows if we are slacking on personal training sales way before any accounting period ends and every person in the company sees these numbers every single day.

Power of Daily Reminders

The result of consistently measuring and showing visual results to every person in the company is undeniable accountability. The practical take-home is that when I started doing this for my own gym business, we haven’t missed a goal ever since we started! Our measurements, growth, and profit margins look amazing. It’s nearly impossible to miss a goal when every person in your company is focused on that goal and sees the progression towards that goal daily.

GMS 101

So what is a Gym Management System (GMS)? I believe the term was coined by 24-Hour Fitness, who, to the best of my knowledge, was the first large scale operator to put in place a comprehensive real-time accountability system. The way it was explained to me was that Mark Mastrov made it clear to every person in the 24-Hour Fitness organization that accountability and real-time information were going to be paramount to 24-Hour Fitness’ massive expansion and domination. Their GMS allowed 24-Hour Fitness to scale rapidly, keep costs in check, and hold regions, districts, and even individual clubs accountable for their share of the cash needed to fuel such powerful and rapid industry domination.

Can you build a world class health and fitness organization without a GMS? Maybe, but you’ll be competing against companies who do have such systems, and chances are, they’ll eat your lunch.

GMS 102

Get Insight, the gym management system that I used and developed for my gym! You can try it out for free and see how and where your own fitness business can improve.