Apart From Your Club Members That Is Sometimes, when you are a fitness industry small business owner you feel like your gym is a boxing ring with your office right in the middle of it. You might even feel like you are the punching bag from time to time. Owning a small business is hard work and not something to take lightly. Of all the things that will give you stress and worry the one that you must deal with most effectively is financial pressure. That pressure is the question of profitability or the net income that your business brings [...]
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The Value Is Real If You Respect It Yourself One of the things that you learn when you're working as a freelance contractor in the software business (bare with me here) is that you get more respect and more clients if you set a price that represents real value and a living wage for yourself. As a case in point, a friend of mine recently qualified for a certification in network engineering. He now works as a contractor and recently raised his hourly rate by a factor of four. An amazing thing happened when he did it: Customers and prospects, [...]
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Choose Your Application If you could develop a mobile application or app for your gym members what would it be? Would it be purely account information or training records? Would you want to make it a stand-alone Giga-download giant or a lightweight gateway app? Would it help you communicate with your membership or just dole out the advice? I've been giving this subject some serious consideration lately and I'd like to share my thoughts here, as a sort of roadmap. The best part about it is that it's a roadmap to membership retention. Allow me to explain with a simple [...]
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The Gentle Art Of Doling Out The Tasks There is an old aphorism that a job is like a treadmill, one where you have to keep moving to stay in one place. I would ask you, the reader who is also a gym business owner, whether you intended to form a business so that you could pay a lease on a treadmill and walk on it yourself, all day long? Or was that equipment lease supposed to enable others to pay you to work out on it, to your profit? Remember the post about learning what to eliminate? Well, reductions [...]
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When You Have To Do What You Would Rather Not One of the biggest challenges that a gym owner can face is moving the physical location of the business. Perhaps this is even more of a pressing issue if you already have a location that your clients love. Everything else being equal the best advice is to stay put; don't, at least unless you have to. Of course, there are many reasons that you might actually have to move, so I'm not going to go into the whys and what-fors. Assuming that it's a necessity that you move your small [...]
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Building On Previous Discussions Some time ago, Gym Insight was fortunate to have a guest post from Mike Hedlesky. It was an in-depth piece that has been a real asset to the Insight Blog and, judging by the traffic, a useful source of information and validation for the readers. So first, thanks Mike! Second, I thought it might be good to go back, review and build on it with some further insights into running your own small gym business. Training is always easier to impart to your staff when you are clear about the basics of the company vision and [...]
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Sounding The Data Breach Alarm Again Once again I'm writing about the issue of liability in financial data. Data breaches can affect more than credit cards, although the driving force is the card companies' clamp down on fraud and identity theft. As the merchant, that is the account that is taking the payment will soon be responsible for the loss of information and fraudulent payments, as well as the theft and fraud that can be had with stolen identifying information. As the owner of a small gym business this means you are going to need to be extra vigilant. Having [...]
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Updated the Dues Change Report to add year-over-year changes: The Dues Change Report will now show you a comparison with how you're doing from the same date a year ago. This helpful snapshot can show you in a split second if you're making progress or if you need some help! Remember, under your user profile you can have the Dues Change Report automatically emailed to you every night if you turn that option on! Learn More Added welcome letter, past-due letter, and past-due email previews: If you go to your location settings, you can now see a preview of the [...]
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What Is Lean Body Mass Of Your Gym? Marketing is a funny business, funny as in strange but not so much hilarious. You pursue what you think is the best market solution and then it turns out something works better. What do you do? Go after the new opportunity? Ignore it and stick to what you know? How does anyone know what the right answer is? Marketing strategies are changing rapidly for the modern small business. The entrepreneurial concept of the lean startup has taken hold and there are some awesome principles and lessons that can be learned from it. [...]
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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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The Thanksgiving 2014 Gym Insight Blog Post It's Thanksgiving again, one of my favorite times of the year. It's the time to be with family and enjoy the harvest we've reaped. Even if it's been a tough year and there've been so many challenges your head's spinning, it's important to count the blessings and keep the situation in perspective. So there are no references or links for this post, I'm just going to pitch it from my heart. When I say to be grateful facing challenges I mean it literally. When the chips are down that's the best time to [...]
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Change Management Is Risky Business Crunch Fitness is on the market for around $200 million. Wow! Wow, not just because that's a lot of dough but because of the company's unique business model that they use and how it could be hit by change coming in from the outside. As far as I know Crunch is in good shape so I assume there is no need to do some sort of elaborate gym-rescue. If Crunch is a successful company, they need to keep doing what they do best, which is to creatively mix and match classes and fitness trends to [...]
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All of the small business owners I know, be they gym owners or anything else, seem to have one trait in common: They're working all of the time. I can only speak for myself but this permanent work mode has often not felt like work at all. It's been a scramble to make a living out of doing what I love. My colleagues here at Gym Insight seem to feel the same way, judging by their commitment levels. AVOIDING BURNOUT 101: EFFECTIVENESS AND EFFICIENCY Burning the candle at both ends is an apt metaphor for the kind of work ethic [...]
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In the last two years, there has been a huge amount of interest in mobile fitness apps, as confirmed by Google Trends. Fitness apps can be powerful tools for marketing and motivation and there is a new generation of gym members coming up, who expect that they can download an app and immediately get gratification from it. If you don't provide that option they will look elsewhere for their fitness needs. The Fitness App Bandwagon Mobile apps are a very competitive market, driven by many big companies wanting to get their products into everyone's hands. In fact, the market is [...]
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When television production companies catch onto a formula that's cheap to produce and popular with viewers, they really work it for all it's worth. Having an expert, who rescues failing small businesses, is a simple and compelling formula within the genre of reality TV. The premise is usually that a business, in some specific industry, gets help and a makeover just as it's about to go under. The super-expert, no-holds-barred host comes in with a camera crew and they proceed, in a period of about three days, to whamp the tar out of the downtrodden business owner. They clear out [...]
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