So, Should You Pursue Alternate Income Streams or No? There comes a limit to the number of memberships you can sell, which is a good thing. You hit the ceiling for your single gym it means you’ve maxed out the potential for monthly subscriptions. To go further, you have to sell more to the same people with alternative fitness club revenue streams. There’re some alternatives to this alternative, but they may not be the best choices. You can do the big-box corporate brand shuffle, which means over-selling memberships and hoping they don’t all turn up. Instead, you have to connect [...]
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Structure Your Offerings with Client Programming for Fitness Client programming is your menu of good things that you offer your market. In the fitness business, it’s one of the fundamental dimensions that define a successful training practice. The big-box fitness brands can afford to stand back and cover all of the programming bases. As a small gym business owner, you are probably better served if you focus on one or a few. The irony, of course, is that the corporate brands would do better if they could do the same. However, in my experience, excellence doesn’t scale all that well. [...]
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Breaching the Barriers of the Fitness Business Gyms should always be about positivity and overcoming obstacles. So, it’s worth taking a look at a few of the hurdles you’re likely to encounter in fitness entrepreneurship. I’m not saying you should forge ahead recklessly. You need a plan and contingencies. However, don’t let the inevitable difficulties and the nay-sayers turn you away from your dream of becoming a fitness club owner. Big Box Brands Take All the Business False! You don’t have to invest a fortune in a primo location, lease one-hundred tons of the latest Internet-connected equipment, and then compete [...]
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Building Your Dream by Starting Your Own Business in Fitness If you are the kind of person, like me, who enjoy fitness and being at the gym, the dream of starting your own business in fitness is the logical next step. Fitness is so wide-open because it’s a people business. If you can gain a following of one person, you have a fitness business. That sounds crazy but, if you’re in the right place at the right time, celebrities and the super-wealthy do sometimes hire trainers full-time. That may be a bit extreme and takes a lot of luck. However, [...]
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Survey of What Is On The Horizon for Special Populations in Fitness Specialty Fitness Fills Niches and Gyms Humans come in a delightful diversity of shapes, sizes, and physical needs. I think it is super-rewarding to see people achieve spectacular levels of fitness achievement. It is even more rewarding when you can help special populations take small steps to better health and enhanced mobility. Special Population Niche Opportunities The fitness profession offers opportunities to assist people at all stages of their fitness journeys, as well as their extended sojourns through life. Special populations present you with many unique niche opportunities [...]
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Promote Your Fitness Club with Private Label Branding Nothing brings credibility to a small fitness club like a unique fitness concept built around a strong brand. As long as you have a robust gym management software system as a foundation, you start to develop streams of income that complement your client programming. It also helps to have your brand on merchandise and products for sale in your gym’s store or front desk. You don’t need much floor space for these high-margin sales. Now, you can even add custom merchandise and e-commerce pages to your club website with ease. This is [...]
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The Sound of Fitness Club Amplification Feedback loops are weird. Put the front desk mic up a little too close to the speaker just one time, and everybody loses their minds (I swear it was an accident). That characteristic squeal is a feedback loop of amplification that builds on itself quickly to an unbearable screaming limit. In fitness training for clients, you see something similar, but in a good way. It’s a much more gradual loop of growing fitness and confidence that translates into confidence and enthusiasm that produces a stronger workout ethic in your clients and better physical results. [...]
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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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Personal Branding Revisited This is a follow-up piece to my recent post about Personal Branding for Fitness Entrepreneurs. There's a lot to cover in the topic, as well as about branding in general. Also, once you have it as part of your entrepreneurial mindset, branding is as powerful as a clean and tidy gym in drawing new members through your front door. As a fitness professional and business founder, you should consider that your personal name is an asset worth building, as well as the brand of your gym business company. If some big box fitness brand offers you many [...]
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Proper Preparation for The Gym Business Getting prepared and qualified to be a fitness club founder is like laying the foundations for a home or a mighty fortress. The better the foundations, the longer the structure (of your fitness business) will last, and the higher you can build. If you’ve had a long career as a trainer, or been a successful manager for a big box fitness brand for many years, you’re probably ready right now. On the other extreme, if you’re just out of school or starting from scratch, now’s an excellent time to seek a fitness certification or [...]
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Summer 2019 Professional Fitness Equipment Like all of the other trends in the world, the fitness industry is splitting to extremes. On one end, it’s all simple things that promote core strength and resistance training. On the other, it’s the technology that pushes the envelope. Not to worry, Gym Insight is here to sort the trendy tools from yesterday’s devices. Fitness is, after all, a niche in the consumer marketplace. It branches into segments and subdivisions based on demographics and income levels. So, Let’s look at those trends or at least, point to authoritative sources about them. Opposing Trends in [...]
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Management Metrics and Where You Find Them Like fitness programming, gym business management is about setting goals and defining improvements. It’s how you measure them that provides the framework to get the work done. You can’t know what you’ve achieved until you’ve measured it. Whether it’s measured in lean body mass, inches of muscle, or maximum deadlift weight, measurement tells you how much progress you’ve achieved relative to your workout goals. It’s the same for business goals. If you want a leaner company, better sales performance, or higher rates of retention, you measure your actions to hit your targets. The [...]
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Of Belly Laughs and Leg Lifts I was listening to some comedians talking on a podcast recently. It seems to be a thing in comedy for comics to interview their friends and idols. However, I was struck by the similarities between owning a gym and running a comedy club. The fitness and entertainment professions both appeal to the general public as markets. They each bring in people to participate in some sort of experience. Although, they do it in different ways, perhaps. The Changing Culture of Comedy Lately, comedy clubs are growing in popularity and revenue. The number of would-be [...]
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More Business Hacks for Ambitious New Gym Owners There was a recent report in Club Industry that Kohls, the retailers are partnering with big box chain Planet Fitness. It seems that the shrinking need for bricks-and-mortar store space led to a creative opportunity. That’s definitely a “get lemons, make lemonade” solution to the changing retail market. In the fitness industry, creative thinking can be the difference between getting kicked to the curb and pivoting to a new business model. Obviously, in this case, hacking means finding low-cost gym marketing solutions by applying creative thinking. So, why not use some creativity [...]
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Insight was my solution for my own gym management headaches. As a computer science graduate and fitness club owner, I had some options. I didn’t hesitate to dive in and write my own code when the business started to get complicated. Great idea, right? Well, it turned into a bigger project than I had expected, which is an understatement! Each solution seemed to reveal new problems, at least in the first version. I’m not going into too much detail because I’ve covered much of this over the years on the Gym Insight Blog. Multiple Gym Management Tool Sets There’s a [...]
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