Do you want to work in an office cubicle? I didn’t think so. I don’t either, but if you do, you certainly don’t want to be working in a cubicle in the back of a gym. You want to be in a big office somewhere with glass walls, photocopiers, fluorescent lighting and a different necktie for every day of the week. On the other hand, if you want to work at a gym you really don’t want to be stuck in a cubicle in the back office.
Most people who take up a career running a gym do so with the conscious intention of not being part of the usual nine-to-five daily grind. So, as a gym owner or manager you really don’t want to spend all of your waking hours chasing down membership files and buried in paperwork, do you?
These days, paperwork is general-purpose business software that wasn’t designed with any particular business in mind. I’m talking about bookkeeping and accounts packages and spreadsheets or a homemade database. This may work somewhat but information gets lost in the cracks and gaps between applications. You end up spending hours figuring out what went wrong. If you try to keep records on paper or in spreadsheets there are a lot of things to deal with, as I’m sure you know. Things like employee sales commissions, tracking membership data including turnover, retention and attrition, payment tracking, billing and processing. You have to juggle so many different things to make a gym function that it’s way too easy to lose files.
The smart solution is to install proper gym membership management software like Insight. It really ties the gym together, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of reasons to automate as many functions of your daily gym operations as possible. The first is what I started out with here: if you wanted to be an office jockey you probably wouldn’t be managing or owning a gym, right? Second, if you’re in the back office who’s watching the front? Staff turnover has a cost and if your trainers and front desk staff feel neglected and under-trained then they might choose to move on. That leads to you having to make the time and take the effort to hire new staff or add supervisors. That means more paperwork and higher payroll. Finally, You don’t want to hire in more office staff than you have to. Trainers and front desk staff that work with the membership can add value by selling services and products. When you bring in extra people in the back, to sift through spreadsheets, you are adding to your overhead costs without adding anything to the bottom line.
When I developed Insight, what I found was that if you get it all down to a science then you only need to be in the gym as much as you want to be. If you have the right system, your gym really should run itself. I know this because I set up Insight initially to automate the operations of my own gym.
What I mean when I say "pull your head out…" is don’t be distracted by paperwork. Don’t lose the big picture of your business because of stuff that can be handled automatically by Insight. Running a gym can be a great business that takes care of itself and gives you the freedom to do what you want, when you want. So sign up for the free trial. What have you got to lose?