As a manager or owner of a small business you never have enough hours in the day to do all of the things that need to be accomplished. Work will pile up rapidly. How do you find a way in to the jungle that demands that you figure out what truly needs most of your attention? Having the right gym management software system does help, but there's also one interesting insight to look out for in the stats. The (Gym) Insight of Vilfredo Pareto Possibly you've heard of the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule. The Italian economist [...]
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Looking to increase your gym’s revenue quickly without bumping up marketing costs? Anthony Pasquale, Gym Insight Sales Manager, recorded this excellent video to help gym owners discover new ways to expand and increase your club’s earnings through soliciting corporate accounts. We thought there might be even more to learn about this subject, though, so we decided to look a little closer at his suggestions. Strategy #1 — Explore corporate accounts and gym reimbursements. As Anthony states, corporate accounts are an awesome way to lower a member's out-of-pocket gym costs without reducing your monthly fees. In these cases, a company — usually the [...]
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#GymInsight: Flexing muscle in an industry growing as fast as the Internet. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube Why go social now? Over the past 13 years, our company has grown from two gym owners-turned-software-developers into a buzzing hive of professionals, each offering talents that enlarge and improve our software’s capabilities. At Gym Insight we created our gym management software to improve how fitness businesses were run. From converting “pen and paper” gyms, to competing against the world’s largest software management companies, Gym Insight has charged forward on a relentless path of improvement. Through reputation, word-of-mouth, advertising, and now social media, our [...]
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Welcome to our monthly customer profile. This spring we are speaking with Claude Mumpower III, owner of Iron Mayhem Strength and Conditioning in Bristol, Virginia. He brings an optimistic, growth-focused perspective we are excited to share with you. Lessons learned while growing a gym Mumpower established Iron Mayhem in 2014 after retiring from a career in law enforcement. His first fitness center maxed out at 2,000 square feet, which he quickly outgrew. Unfortunately, Mumpower jumped into his next location without vetting the lease and found an expensive secondary agreement that cost him both time and money. Using that mistake as a lesson [...]
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Welcome to our newest series within our blog. Here we profile employees from throughout our company to both introduce them to you, our valued clients, and spotlight their unique contributions to Gym Insight. We believe each employee offers a special blend of talents that together create the robust set of gym management software tools our fitness club owners enjoy. Dancing with Natalia Natalia Schulte, our newest sales manager, brings a sprightly enthusiasm to her job with Gym Insight. We’ve asked her to support our Head of Sales, Anthony Pasquale, in our critical mission to grow Gym Insight’s core customer base [...]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GHsKOL5wZk Reduce paperwork this New Year by implementing a gym management software system. How Does It Look? What Does It Mean? What Needs To Be Done? It's a great time to draw a line under the past year by looking at what was good, what was bad and what looks to be changing. I'm not talking about Taylor Swift or politics here, but specifically in the marketplace that you serve as a small gym owner. I've been writing about a lot of different topics this year and it's worth a review to remind readers of what's been covered and some [...]
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How does your gym sell personal training packages? Does your fitness staff avoid bringing the idea up with prospects, afraid they’ll walk right out the door? They shouldn’t. In fact, personal training services should be sold at the point of sale – when new health club members first tour your gym. We all know personal training is good for a fitness center’s bottom line. A client who hires a trainer stays on at your health club three times as long as a regular member. It’s a win-win. Selling personal training To sell personal training effectively, your gym needs a standardized [...]
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How Gym Business Walk Ins Make The Difference Let's talk about why your gym business walk ins can be priceless for you and how to get the best outcomes of their visits. The fitness industry has lots of great people, but maybe not so many of the best salespeople, and I'm OK with that. However, there's often a point in the life of your small gym business or studio when you desperately wish otherwise. The time could arise when you need the best team in the world for closing new memberships. So let's look at why and then address a [...]
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Retention, Retention, Retention! It seems like retention is one of the biggest topics here at the Gym Insight Blog. Well, it is a critical issue that you absolutely must address. That's because holding on to your membership is the difference between success and failure in any people oriented business; it's the difference between sleeping in the back office and purchasing a comfortable home with the profits from your successful fitness center. Your marketing goals must be to gain new customers and hold on to the ones that you already have, these are two complementary but different functions in marketing your [...]
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Disruption is that thing that happens when an established way of doing this or that, or your network suddenly discovers that it has new competition, from out of nowhere, overnight. Technology is disruptive because it is evolving and emerging so quickly. Customer service is disruptive because most companies do it so poorly and, when done well, it generates such a powerful connection with the customer. Ideas are disruptive because they are the source of all innovation and change. As the pace of change continues to accelerate it become harder to anticipate changes and at the same time more desperately important [...]
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Because The Bigger They Are... As the big guys get bigger, and keep pouring cash into their fitness center locations, you might think that they would be impossible to beat. It's just a fact that large corporations have all the money and other financial resources at their disposal that anyone could wish for. That does not mean they have a monopoly on innovation or competitiveness. The independent gym owner can still do much to fight back effectively because having capital resources is only part of the equation. You have to have a human side that doesn't crush customers in the [...]
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This month, Gym Insight had the honor of welcoming our two thousandth customer! This is big news for us because we still pride ourselves on bootstrapping our company. We believe that the focus is customer service and providing innovative software to keep even the smallest fitness studio two steps ahead of the big-box franchise down the street. Our reputation and the the quantity of customers that we service, speaks for itself. This family business grew organically and is here to stay. Come on aboard with us to enjoy personal communications and streaming updates and features of the next generation gym [...]
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Doing Well By Doing Good Membership retention is the one weightiest factor in running your business, after winning initial sign-ups. I've been reminded of this because, according to the author of the book Blue Zones, Dan Buettner, almost all of your members will drop out within three years of first signing up. This is your recidivism rate. Improving and extending these numbers will reduce the turnover rate at your gym. The Importance Of Membership Retention Your revenue is going to benefit from marginally extending the averages on your memberships. Revenue comes from your subscriptions and if you are doing the [...]
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One of the most disruptive trends in technology in the last few decades has been the leveraging and (pardon the fancy talk) disintermediation of the old ways that made the wheels of commerce go round. That means that new technologies that are labor saving and disrupting of the status quo cause big changes. Here's an old-fashioned example: Long before there was MS Word there were typewriters. These days, typewriters are an antique collector's pride and joy, more than objects of any functional uses. For previous generations the typewriter was a labor saving essential for the workplace. Companies had entire typing [...]
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Fitness trends have had lots of ups and downs that are related to culture and fashion. But there is also an influence on trends that comes from the innovations of technology. Still it's hard to read the tea leaves out beyond a year or so, as the apparent trend today can quickly show itself to be a fad that disappears overnight. In the gym business we always have to keep a lookout for what is coming because it can determine the capital investments that we would make and nobody wants to take six months to refurbish for the latest thing [...]
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