As a professional fitness operator, with interest in the Gym Insight Blog, you probably know how to prompt reflection and planning for your members and clients. Working with clients and giving them feedback on their workout regimens and redirecting them for better results is a fundamental part of the fitness profession.

When you use the tools of your business as the keys to leadership, you’ll go much further, stay in business as long as you want, and make a higher level of profits in return. Like the classic leadership book by Stephen Covey, reflection and planning give fitness club owners a synergy that multiplies your investment.

Reflections In Training

Leading people to fitness is what the gym business is all about, and you might even provide this service without thinking about it too much; it’s just what trainers do. Reflection and planning are two sides of the same process; they’re useful beyond service delivery. You can apply the principles to other vital aspects of the business, for the betterment of everyone involved.

Deliver service to clients and improve their health and fitness through course corrections and encouragement. The results will be that members get better results from their sessions as they work with trainers to adapt and plan their workouts to their growing fitness.

Members who show progress are the best advertisement for any fitness business. When people go from being the before picture image to the buff-looking guy or gal in the after image, they get compliments. There’s nothing like getting fit to put your clients in an enthusiastic state of mind; that’s when your gym strikes the vein of pure gold that’s word of mouth advertising.

Extend your relationship with your members, so they look to you as a leader in fitness and the source of success. The gold you’ll be mining is members who tend to stick around longer. Take care of your members, and you’ll raise your retention and reduce the time and investment you spend prospecting to replace cancelations.

Planning With Your Employees

Applying reflection and planning to the internal operations of your company is the key to managing people and you want to have the best-trained and motivated staff possible. Taking the time to work with your employees to reflect on their performance and develop their career plans is the win-win option.

When you work to develop your staff through reflection and planning, it changes the workplace dynamic completely. You transform from boss and outsider into the coach who helps workers continue upward on exciting career paths.

Everyone wants to feel acknowledged and believe they can move ahead. The benefit to you is greater loyalty and motivation from your team. Your employees are likely to have better interactions with your membership, and that will improve your employee retention too.

Reflections On The Fitness Business

If you take the roles of leadership and staff development seriously, you’ll get back many more rewards than you give out. You deliver the wins that return more successes to you on multiple levels. At the highest and most abstract level, you can use the reflection and planning process to keep your fitness business going in the direction that provides the best return on investment for you and your investors.

You may be a hyper-independent trainer who bootstrapped your way into a profitable business. Alternatively, you could be responsible to a raft of partners and board members. In any case, sitting down alone or with your stakeholders to reflect and plan will make the right outcome more likely, than if you just assume that everyone understands your intentions and performance.

A Process For All Fitness Business Aspects

Finally, when inefficiency blunts your results, you figure out how to improve, the way a woodcutter would sit down and sharpen his or her saw. Reflection and planning are more than a service you deliver to your members, it’s a process that you can apply at all levels. To succeed in fitness, you have to be the coach to your customers, investors, and the stakeholders who believe in your enterprise.

Bibliography

Fagan, Lawrence. Building Value In Gym Ownership. November 15, 2015. https://blog.gyminsight.com/3564-building-value-in-gym-ownership/ (accessed January 2, 2018).

-. Ease Your Gym Management Burden By Learning How To Delegate. August 18, 2015. https://blog.gyminsight.com/3428-ease-your-gym-management-burden-by-learning-how-to-delegate/ (accessed November 14, 2017).

Nejtek, Ashlee. The Importance of Reflection and Planning as a Fitness Professional. April 5, 2017. https://www.fitnessprofessionalonline.com/importance-reflection-planning-fitness-professional/ (accessed January 2, 2018).

Su, Amy Jen. The Questions Good Coaches Ask. December 12, 2014. https://hbr.org/2014/12/the-questions-good-coaches-ask (accessed January 2, 2018).