It’s not about having the most technology, but rather the right equipment that is going to help you run your small gym business most efficiently. By running your club resourcefully, you’ll get into profit sooner and make the quality of your offerings better. Technology is evolving so rapidly now that you can check in every six months and find new solutions for just about everything.

The hazard of occasional check-ins is that you might have missed something in the months in between. The right technology for small gym businesses is that which disappears into the background, allowing you to focus entirely on the tasks of creating the right experiences to amaze and engage your membership.

Beware Expensive Technology Solutions

For brands that want to have customer resource management (CRM) and content management combined with social media, some of the big budget solutions are actually wonderful. Salesforce is like power tools for CRM, Constant Contact and InfusionSoft have all kinds of gadgets, and Hubspot, which is an outstanding service if you have the cash to burn, does all of that and puts the cherry on top with training too.

The other thing that these highly refined professional services have in common is the ability to transfer your bank balance into their hands. For a big box gym with deep pockets, they will provide lots of help, for the rest of us, there are simpler, less expensive options.

Where budget is no object there are enterprise resources planning packages that go even further and will integrate all of the functions into one system; this is nothing new. What is new is the ability for you to DIY some simple integrations that will automate your business.

Clouds That Bring The Technology To You

Fortunately, there are more new cloud-based services now than you can shake a stick at, as they say. Rather than an expensive email marketing service that does everything, some apps, such as MailChimp provide free services to do the job for small mailing lists. Use services like Twilio to message clients to remind them of upcoming events and training appointments. Who needs an email server when you can use Gmail, at least until you are profitable?

These services work even better when you can link them in ways that were recently only available through multi-million dollar ERP integrations. It is your capacity to code and your imagination that set the limits. However, if your only digital skill is signing up and filling in a few forms you still have some fantastic options. You can use these apps to hack cloud services together via their APIs. The challenge becomes finding the ones that are relevant to the applications you use, and that can bring them together in truly useful ways.

Tie It Together With Zapier and IFTTT

The apps that take it to the next level, like Zapier (rhymes with happier) will help you by turning basic software integrations into a matter of a few form-fills. Zapier and IFTTT act as go-betweens for different cloud based services using the published application programming interfaces (APIs) for a broad range of cloud services. They continue to expand and adapt, as new services and technologies develop. If such API-based automation technology can save your team a few minutes every day it’s worth it, right? That adds up to hours or even days of labor per year.

While these Software-as-a-Service vendors provide some fantastic products and services, they charge prices that only the larger corporations can afford. You can find a huge range of digital resources that do not cost as much and connect them using APIs. You can use the Cloud and API-based services to eliminate the need for expensive enterprise software and services.

Accessing The Seventh Habit Of Success

In the classic book about performance and achievement, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the author Stephen Covey wrote about sharpening the saw.

So what does this mean for you as a small gym business owner? In my opinion, it means that you can have technology that makes your life and operations easier, yes, but it also gives you something more. It gives you time and resources to focus on developing your career and human resources with fewer distractions, to sharpen the saw.

If you replace a little time spent on administrative tasks with increasing your productivity and capabilities it reduces costs and increases your power to perform. For your staff and you, this should mean achieving new certifications that expand the capacity of your business to meet the needs of your clients and members.

Technology Gives You The Space For Fitness

Technology is the key to fitness extent to the degree that it makes it easier to run your business and deliver an awesome experience for your members. There is no point in pumping your cash into expensive conventional software that works best for your big-box competitors. New solutions are emerging every day that makes doing business in the digital world just a regular part of operations.

Gym Insight provides software solutions that help small business owners like you stand out as personal and authentic alternatives to corporate brands. When you can manage your operations, membership, and payment solutions smoothly and seamlessly you can compete as your own professional fitness brand.

The future is coming at us fast as new cloud apps, digital devices, and hardware tools come out daily. Here at Insight, we are glad to have an opportunity to be part of these rapidly changing times.

Bibliography

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-. Gym Management Software As A Service. December 23, 2014. https://blog.gyminsight.com/3004-gym-management-software-as-a-service/ (accessed August 16, 2017).

-. What You Need to Know About Personal Trainer Certification. October 15, 2013. https://blog.gyminsight.com/1970-what-you-need-to-know-about-personal-trainer-certification/ (accessed August 16, 2017).

Guay, Matthew. Blog Home 101 Smart Ways to Use Social Media Automation for Sales and Marketing. August 8, 2017. https://zapier.com/blog/social-media-automation/ (accessed August 16, 2017).