Glittering Membership Management Performance Indicators If you can do things that keep and reduce change to the minimum your club might just be on the path to finding diamonds. Retention is the key concept of club management. It brings your small gym business dreams to life. That is a constant, but, unless your retention rate is one-hundred percent, it means change is the only constant. Setting Retention to Maximum If you have a limit to your membership management capacity, the longer members stick around, the less you have to invest in recruiting new ones. The difference is like that of [...]
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Make Your Name in The Business As an independent gym or fitness club owner, have you considered your personal brand? I'm not talking about the fitness club brand of the gym that you founded (or plan to start). What I mean is your public name and reputation as an entrepreneur. If you have worked with an executive coach, you may have heard of personal branding. Chief-level executives, ambitious corporate VPs, and high-tech start-up founders often work with a coach. The goal is to enhance your credentials and be more valuable as a leader and public figure. Personal branding opens doors. [...]
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Policies Policies Policies Have you ever heard about black swans? If not it's because these birds are alien to the Northern Hemisphere. When you think of the graceful birds that inhabit lakes and rivers, you probably think of a magnificent white waterfowl with a long and graceful neck. These dark, red-beaked swans are native to parts of Australia. If you see one in North America, Europe, or other parts of the world, it's likely to have escaped or wandered off after being introduced by humans. Most people don't know that black swans exist until they see one, and not many [...]
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Let's Talk About Success What does it mean to have a waiting list? First, you should be thrilled that your fitness club is so in demand! If you have a strict upper limit on capacity such as class spaces adding new members beyond that limit can be a dangerous game. When your gym is overcrowded, service delivery tanks and cancellations skyrocket. Keep A Steady Buzz with A Waiting List You might even want to have a contingency plan that includes cutting off new memberships and waitlisting applicants to prevent chaos. If your gym gets overcrowded or the staff overwhelmed, service [...]
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Powering Your Way Out of The Twilight Zone Picture yourself on a treadmill and the faster you walk or run, the more new clients you add to your gym membership base. At the same time clients are dropping out and, to stay in business, you have to keep adding new ones to replace them by running faster. The metaphor of the treadmill could become a nightmare if your client acquisition doesn't keep up with your cancellations. This picture shows the paradox of retention, and if you're struggling, it's like watching yourself in an episode of the TV classic series, the [...]
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Wearables Have Hit The Big Time for 2019 According to Club Industry, one-in-six consumers now use a wearable digital device, such as a smartwatch or fitness tracker. In the valuable 18 to 34 demographic, the trend is even more pronounced, with one-in-three. It's starting to look like there's a critical mass of people out there, for which you can enhance your gym business with the data that they'll help you gather. You can add a new level of experience for your membership with gamification features. In return for the improved experience, you'll get a stream of insights into the workout [...]
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To Change Or Not To Change Are you thinking about starting a new gym business or changing the direction of the one you operate now? If you're not, I'm not suggesting you should, but if things haven't worked quite the way you planned or, if the market has peaked and begun to tail off, you might be wondering about making a change. The choice between staying the course in a mediocre business model and finding a new one that's better is the conundrum of the ages. There's even a name for the syndrome that business owners and entrepreneurs face, it's [...]
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Four Organizational Culture Types Did you know that there are four different categories of organizational culture? I didn't. Some researchers at the University of Michigan figured it out, and I'm glad they did. So, let's take a look at these four cultures and see how they show up in with the fitness business. Business schools that develop management theories have been covering the structures of companies for decades. Formal structures have the backing of authority; they are the written tables of organization, policies, and procedures. The formal structure of your company goes all the way up to the corporate documents [...]
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Swinging The Lead in Your Sphere of Influence In entrepreneurship, business ownership, and in fitness management, leadership is what you bring to the gym as a founder or manager. It is the one factor over which you have the most control and which makes it possible for small startup gym business owners to fight their way into crowded fitness club markets. As I haven't written much about leadership lately, I think it's time to share my thoughts on the subject once again. Leadership is the interpersonal skill that you exert to influence other people to work with you and do [...]
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You may be thinking, "OK, Gym Insight, what are you doing posting about esoteric mathematical concepts like Bayesian Priors?" First of all, it's 2018 and living in the future demands that we apply futuristic methods. Second, I promise not to start quoting mathematical equations. Finally, there is probably something that any fitness business owner can learn by using a little statistical discipline to their business model. What Is This Bayesian Thing? It is more than a method; it's a way of looking at the world. You have a position, a view that you formed for whatever reason. You can test [...]
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Categories for client programming must align to sales goals and be complementary to one another. After all, the most fundamental activity in any business is selling. In a people-business like fitness, it's as true as ever; gym business owners have to do some selling to survive. Fortunately, you don't have to start again from scratch to get every sale. The secret is that, as your gym members come to you on a regular basis you have a warm and receptive audience for your products and services. Your Client Programming And Sales Audit If you have never done such an exercise, [...]
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Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Know This Secret There's a secret to business and entrepreneurship that they don't teach in business school. It's something that the smartest investors in the world of startups all understand instinctively. The venture capitalists of Silicon Valley know that, to find an investment that returns big rewards. VCs give checks to dozens of small companies in the hopes of finding one or two that grow explosively. Why is that? The simple truth is that most ideas for startups in the tech industry just don't work, which is why you'll hear tech industry insiders referring to the [...]
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Sometimes it's when you go against the grain that you do your best work. If you're in a competitive marketplace, (and let's face it, in this industry, who isn't?) you have to fight for every advantage. Your membership retention rate is one of those things that can make an impact in the profitability and survival of your small gym business. I certainly don't think small gym business owners should completely ignore how well they retain their membership. However, if you're working on a shoestring budget and living in the back office because you can't pay yourself a salary, maybe it's [...]
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As an enthusiastic new gym owner, you've probably already found a place in the market with enough potential customers to build a business. Once you commit to your particular niche in the fitness business, there's one thing you'll need. It's the information about customers and sales that will take you from the initial idea to a sustainable and profitable asset. More precisely, it is the ability to gather, organize, and exploit information about any prospective customer that comes into contact with your business. If you want to find the insights within the fine-grained details of the piles of data that [...]
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Continuing Trends in 2018 One thing is sure about the summer of 2018; fitness businesses aren't going to disappear anytime soon. While it's technically possible to do all of your workouts from home, that is not the choice that people are making this year. What's hot in mid-2018 is the human connection. The word of the season appears to be "continuation" as wearables continue to lurk in the background, HIIT continues to grow in popularity, and group classes continue to fill the need for social engagement in the lives of many. Meanwhile, the spread of IoT connected equipment may influence [...]
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