Club profile: Empire Gym
Empire Gym in Savannah, Georgia, is an 800-member, 9,500-square-foot gym with an 1,800-square-foot “Arsenal” space dedicated to group fitness.
Opened in 2023 by Mary and Jamie Cain, Empire gym’s topography also includes personal training, nutritional wellness, and annual community-building challenges. This is Mary’s third gym and Jamie’s second.
To learn more about what it takes to run and sell a successful gym, we asked the Cain’s a few questions.
What’s the most difficult obstacle for gym owners when selling a gym?
The greatest challenge is finding a buyer with enough money, good credit, and a strong work ethic, Mary said. “Jamie and I giggle when members tell us they want to open a gym, thinking it is an easy feat. The gym business is not for the weak or weary. It is a dog-eat-dog world, and you must give all your blood, sweat, and tears to make it work, especially when you are fighting corporate gyms that offer $9.99 memberships. You get what you pay for, but $9.99 isn’t a price point that breaks people’s budgets, so they go for the cheap and easy — even if they don’t use it,” she explained.
What’s the toughest part of running a gym day-to-day?
The hardest part has been to find life/work balance without stepping on each other’s toes, and then bringing work home. We have a great manager at Empire Gym, who really helps us balance all these things and lightens our individual loads, so we can keep work and life separate.
What is the most common mistake you see other gym owners make?
Not being relentless in their pursuit of superior customer service, excellence, adaptability, and growth.
Do you keep an advisory team of professionals?
We speak regularly with an excellent CPA. I [Mary] am also part of a small business organization where I can explore ideas, and we meet frequently with another gym owner in the Savannah area to talk the good, bad, and ugly of what is working and isn’t working.
What would you like see from other gym owners?
I would like to create a yearly gym owners convention, where they could come for a two-day course on how to improve your business year-over-year. I believe, creating a community without fear of competition is beneficial to the progress of all the owners, Mary explains.
Mary’s first gym – the backstory.
Mary launched her first gym in 2007. Named “Body Evolution,” the Macon, Georgia-based fitness center offered members a no-nonsense, unairconditioned environment. It was located inside a cotton warehouse, which historically housed train cars as they transported cotton (an unorthodox start to any gym venture, we imagine). Ironically, this risk-taker was among our first gym management software clients, coming to us after using National Fitness software.
By 2013 she married Jamie Cain and together they opened a second Body Evolution in Columbus, Georgia. Designed along the same lines as the Macon location, the warehouse-style fitness facility thrived with our easy-to-use gym software.
Eventually they sold both gyms to be closer to family in Savannah.
The decision to open Empire Gym came about through conversation after church services. Mary had wanted to open a gym in Savannah for more than 13 years, wishing to be closer to Jamie’s mom and to fill an underserved fitness market. That morning, they followed their calling and let the Lord show his hand..
This gym, though, would be a more traditional, air-conditioned fitness center, financed and built on their own land.
Their gym software mistake.
Unfortunately, when Empire first opened, they chose their software provider based on its ability to collect unpaid dues. However, both the company’s door system as well as its customer service were unpredictable, and the couple switched to yet another software firm.
The second gym software company — which serves the world’s most profitable big-box health club — immediately showed its colors. Sure, it handled collections, but the firm also kept late fees, charged for PCI compliance, and required a proprietary door-access coding system. By the time the Cains switched back to Gym Insight, more than 14% of their revenues were being taken in gym software fees and charges.
Today, Mary and Jamie appreciate Gym Insight’s digital key tag system with its constantly refreshing QR code, which keeps guests from sharing memberships, and our online sign-up widget, which builds revenue from tourists and locals through guest passes.
What does the future hold for Empire Gym?
We are constantly looking for space for another location, but those are few and far between in this area, because it is growing so rapidly that land and buildings are at a premium. Our goal is to build its value and sell the business in about six years, while keeping the building for our kid.
Gym Insight
Thank you, Empire Gym, for participating in our customer profile. Your success is a home run from which we can all learn. The right gym management software helps customers grow and carve out lives full of progress and abundance, which is why Gym Insight continues to create the easiest-to-use, fully integrated software in the industry. Our tools include:
- Member management
- Health club management
- Free Member’s App
- Sales Guru tablet-based sales solution
- Robust reporting
- Payment processing
- 24/7 door access
- Digital key tags
- Effortless data transfers
- U.S.-based free customer service
For more information and a free demonstration, call us at 855-367-4967 (855-FOR-GYMS).