The Gym Insight Blog has already taken a look at 2017 trends in gym ownership. However, as you will find below, I currently have doubts about how wearables will fit into 2017. This post is more of a round-up of what the blogosphere is thinking about for the coming year. The beginning of 2017 marks the third year that this blog has covered the trends; follow these links to the posts for 2015 and 2016. How do they look compared to your personal experiences of the last few years? Tech For Gyms Trends Videos for search engine optimization are now [...]
Read more...
How Gym Business Walk Ins Make The Difference Let's talk about why your gym business walk ins can be priceless for you and how to get the best outcomes of their visits. The fitness industry has lots of great people, but maybe not so many of the best salespeople, and I'm OK with that. However, there's often a point in the life of your small gym business or studio when you desperately wish otherwise. The time could arise when you need the best team in the world for closing new memberships. So let's look at why and then address a [...]
Read more...
Giving Back To Your Local Community It seems like schools always need help and, as a local business owner, you have the opportunity to help out by sponsoring a fundraiser that helps schools get the exceptional things that make a difference in education. It might be a great opportunity to give back to your local community and to get a little more involved; there's even an argument that, if you can help, it's a responsibility that you shouldn't overlook. At some point, after you have established your business, and you no longer have the worries of the new owner, you [...]
Read more...
Is There A Fitness Retreat In Your Gym Business Future? Here's something different to consider offering to your members: Organize a fitness retreat. By this I mean a trip to a resort that is conducive to fitness and travel as a group and deliver a suitable set of fitness classes and activities. What would it take to set up a new part of your business that specializes in traveling with members to distant locations and hold classes and activities with them as paying guests? A retreat can be a service that is very profitable. Set Up Promotion And Process Bookings [...]
Read more...
Put your own logo on our PDF membership agreements!: We never intended the ridiculous barbell logo to last for as many months as it has. As of last week, you can now replace the barbell generic logo on our membership agreements with your own logo! Give it a try now.. Learn More Save
Motivation is a most elusive beast. Given sufficient motivation, anyone can achieve the sort of fitness results that they might wish to attain, but relatively few do. The motivation qualification is one of those optical illusions that gets harder to find the closer it gets. As the owner of a gym, boutique studio, or fitness club, you obviously want to motivate your members to turn up and work out; you want to motivate them to get involved and purchase premium products and services. Most of all, you want to drive them to get results, which will do more than keep [...]
Read more...
Finding Synergy Between Group Offerings And Individual Training Small gym businesses usually face crowded markets and stiff competition to add new members. To succeed in the fitness industry, you have to leverage all of your resources to the maximum extent possible. To that end, gyms do better if they can cover broader ranges of organized activities. Group activities and boutique fitness studios provide some useful strategies to increase your success in the fitness business. Gym memberships are essential to the day-to-day operation of your business; they will keep your payroll covered and pay the mortgage on your house, which gives [...]
Read more...
I was just reading about some big-box gym managers earning salaries in the high five figures, without having to risk personal wealth or credit. Well, that $80K paycheck probably helps these big box managers sleep at night, even if they're beholden to the bureaucracy of corporate America. So, how as a small gym business owner, do you get the best of both worlds? After all, if independence is good, then independence combined with prosperity must be better! Automation - Building A Gym That Runs Itself The answer has to be in being smart and efficient, and in this day and [...]
Read more...
Have you heard of the market research term Voice of the Customer? If not, you might take an interest in what it has to offer small gym business owners, even if you only have the resources to apply the principles and not the full process. If you want to get a better return on your gym business investment you need to hear what customers want and use that information to set benchmarks for the quality of the service you deliver. Knowing What Your Customers Want In the excellent leadership book, The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey declared [...]
Read more...
The Latest Gym Insight Turnaround Success Recently, on the Gym Insight Blog, I wrote a post about small gym business turnarounds for struggling gym owners. That post referenced a video published by Grant Cardone, which followed him through the process as he coached a struggling fitness center back from failure. Well, we're celebrating the turnaround success of one of our customers! So, how could I not share the experience? Video Coaching Podcast With Anthony Pasquale Our gym-software and gym management trainer-expert, Anthony Pasquale worked with one of our customers recently, who had asked for help in improving sales. The client [...]
Read more...
It's getting close to the end of the year once again and that means it's time to look at what's on the horizon for 2017. Any new fitness trends that help you recruit customers and earn more revenue have to be good things, right? Well, yes, of course! So, the trends that continue to grow include group activities that are perfect for studios or any floor space, such as dance classes, yoga, and other group activities. The rising fitness trends appear to be the things that get people together to share experiences; these include dance, team training, and other small [...]
Read more...
Do you know what I object to most in the fitness business? It's those big-box chains that sign up members for the low monthly rate, but secretly hoping that customers never turn up to occupy space in any of their one million and six facilities. Low membership fees are fine in themselves, and it's a good thing that gyms give their members the hope of getting off the couch and getting fit. However, it just offends my sense of honor and the principles that got me into the business in the first place. Also, a strategy that delivers premium services [...]
Read more...
Sometimes keeping your small gym business lean is just a matter of tying your proverbial shoelaces, sprucing up your operational practices and squeezing that little bit of extra mileage out of your resources. Even a fundamentally sound business needs to protect itself against the risk of squandering resources and frittering away advantages in a competitive market. Keeping costs down takes a mix of flintiness, shrewdness and negotiation skills. There are different parts of the business that give you opportunities to cut costs. If there is any fat in the cost of creating sales removing it gives you a bigger return [...]
Read more...
Fitness was a $26 billion per year industry at the end of 2015 and it's all too easy to think that taking part is the same as having success in it. That is not the case; the difference is between churning through revenue, where you spend it as rapidly as you earn it (or worse), and making a solid profit on your labors. To achieve that it will require your leadership, a comprehensive map of where you are going, and the right analytics and dashboard solutions to accurately measure the process of getting there. Getting To Grips With Key Performance [...]
Read more...
Going From Zero To One One of the most interesting books about startups and innovation is Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters. The principle is that a running business is one, and you start at zero. Everything that you do in between is the hard work of founding a business. Once you are in operation and making enough income to survive you can think about expanding. Beyond one you can use the principle of duplication to repeat the initial success in a second, third, and further locations, this is the empire-building phase where you go from one [...]
Read more...
