Pulling Your Small Gym Business Back From The Brink
A few years back, Grant Cardone, the business turnaround expert, responded to the cry for help from the owners of a Gold’s Gym franchise, in Whippany New Jersey, saving them from a foreclosure that would have left the entire family penniless. The video is well worth a watch.
You can apply the key points of what Cardone implemented to any struggling gym. In fact, the methods of organizing and structuring the sales process, the heart of the plan, go for any customer service-centered company. This post is not the first to the Gym Insight Blog on the subject but, like all of the other post that covers similar content, it never hurts to go over the most important things again and again.
The Big Cleanup
Brush up the look of the place; don’t allow any empty shelves or a look of abandonment. Gyms always need to be clean and tidy, period. There is no allowing for trash, smudges, dirt, bad smells, or general untidiness. You need to fix other things like chipped paint and broken equipment at the same time.
Say, for example, if you have eight treadmills and three of them say, "out of order," you have a visual problem as well as an equipment problem. Ideally, when you show a prospect the grand tour, you should not have any broken machines or damage to the building at all, demonstrate pride in your enterprise. Perhaps you might just remove the equipment that you can’t afford to fix and clean up right now.
Review Your Market Data – Do You Know The Numbers?
Go back to basics and dig up the marketing facts. When turnaround experts like Grant Cardone and Jon Taffer come in, they first check on the local marketing situation. The location, geography, demographics, and competition are some information points that you should know in detail. Ask yourself from what area do your customers come? What sort of disposable income are they likely to have?
Learn the benchmarks for the national take-up rates for the different services and facilities that you offer. You may have the capacity elsewhere that allows you to transfer resources to where they will help to build your revenue. Or you may surprise yourself and discover that you have a hidden gem; you may have something that you do exceptionally well but didn’t realize because it seems so normal to you. It might be that your location draws passing traffic that you could direct inside to tour the gym and then to sell services.
Create A Plan To Get People In The Door
Based on what you discovered in your marketing review, decide on the best approach to getting the word out about your gym. Your marketing and promotional efforts should be reinvigorated by what you have learned. Even if it is printing for leaflets or perhaps a targeted Facebook advertising campaign, you need to generate some interest or curiosity that will inspire people who want what you have to make tracks through your front door.
Sell To The People Who Walk In
Find the premium value. Going for the cheapest competitive gym market is a sure way to lose out to the big box outfits that have the lowest costs and the broadest base over which to spread their costs; you can’t and shouldn’t try to fight that. The other way is to find where you deliver the highest value and build on it. So, focus on value to create customers who will appreciate your services and come back for more.
Your walk-in sales process should be a one-two-three straightforward response that whoever’s on duty knows how to lead a tour of the facility and ask questions to set up and close the offer with the best value for a new club membership. The shorter and simpler the steps involved the better it will work.
Get Back In The Game
When you are down to your last dime, get your shoes shined, which means that you should invest what you have left in the thing that is most likely to enable you to generate income. It may be that you are doing this right at a time when cash is in short supply. But you need to be creative; with a solid plan and motivation to succeed you can get your gym back to the point where, to quote Grant Cardone, "The doors are swingin’ and the phones are ringin’."
Bibliography
Fagan, Lawrence. Gym Cleanups Make Good Gym Rescues. July 29, 2014. https://blog.gyminsight.com/2833-gym-cleanups-make-good-gym-rescues/ (accessed September 6, 2016).
-. "Gym Rescue" Your Own Gym without Relying on Randy Couture. July 29, 2014. https://blog.gyminsight.com/1136-gym-rescue-your-own-gym-without-relying-on-randy-couture/ (accessed September 23, 2015).
Grant Cardone TV. Turn Around King Shaping Up the Gym. October 22, 2014. https://grantcardonetv.com/video/turnaroundking/shaping-gym/ (accessed September 6, 2016).