Picture swans sitting on a river, big and elegant white birds that glide across the water, seemingly without effort. They make it look so easy, don’t they? They just seem to glide along, with hardly any visible exertion above the waterline. But here’s the secret: If you could see them from the underwater perspective, it would be a totally different story. You’d see their little legs paddling away furiously against the river current, (kind of like that super competitive guy who’s always trying to "win" i
n the spinning class).
That’s why a big white waterfowl, the swan, is a great analogy for your efforts at managing a fitness center. It sets up several very relevant questions that you should ask yourself:
What part of the swan do you want to be?
And what part of the swan is most like your actual role in the business?
Are you like the graceful gliding creature that’s visible above the waterline?
Or are you underwater, doing all of the legwork and desperate to come up for air?
The point here is that by using Insight, athletic club and membership management software, you can have better control and make better decisions. For example, if you’re using a simple spreadsheet to track payments, you have to set up new entries for each new membership and track that they actually make payments when they’re supposed to. Or, if a member questions their accounts, how confident are you about your documentation? Is it really just their word against yours? How do you trace a missing payment? Do you spend your days scrambling to find the answers? Unfortunately that is what happens most often when fitness centers start to have a little success. That is when you need professional software to stay on top.
It’s not that easy to find a software system to manage all of the financial and operational aspects of owning and operating an athletic club. In fact, the market for health club software is over-saturated and overwhelming. So most beginning fitness center owners resort to a simple pencil and paper or spreadsheet system. This manual system works all right, for the first few members, but as your gym business grows, the need to adopt professional athletic club management software will become a necessity. Insight is exactly the application that you need to run an expanding health club, gym, or fitness studio and make it a smooth operation. One that works organically to give you fingertip access to important records, track members effortlessly and helps you also to manage and customize staff and trainers’ access, sessions, and commissions. Insight was designed to handle the exciting but, most often, overwhelming growing pains of your fitness business.
To come back to my analogy of a swan on a river, it might be better to say that your gym or health club is like the swan and all of the hard work you put it is like getting in the water and doing all of the swimming. There’s going to be a lot of hard work regardless, because that is just part of running a business. When it comes to the routine record keeping, billing and organization that keep you above water, you don’t have to struggle. Insight will help you get on top of the swan without having to put on your flippers and get wet.