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 [...]
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Put Some Life Back In Your Marketing There is always more room for another list on the Internet, particularly when it is as important as reinvigorating marketing strategies for small gym business owners. There may be more relevant marketing ideas that only you can know about driving your business ahead. So, while you ponder on what business marketing ideas will give you a boost, read through these seven marketing tips for gym owners, and perhaps you will find something that inspires you. 1. Free is worth more than any discounts The first tip is a warning with a healthier alternative: [...]
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Orangetheory Fitness Goes Full Wearable Some gym equipment comes and goes as fashionable or convenient to the user. Other gear just turns up one day, and then you wonder how you ever got along without it. It's beginning to look like a solid bet that wearable technology for the gym is here to stay, and it soon might be indispensable too. The Wearables.com website has just posted an exciting article about the wearable tech in use at the Orangetheory chain of gyms. It is an excellent example of how wearables and fitness make such a great pair. This class-based exercise [...]
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Building A Business In Fitness A recent post on the Club Solutions Magazine's website reminded me of how proactive you have to be as a business owner; in the gym management business you live and die by your ability to lead. As an independent gym business owner, you've probably found the key to your success is working with people to achieve a common objective. The goal of your business is to inspire and assist in the growth and improvement in the physical health of all of the people around you. It's the ultimate secret to success in fitness; you have [...]
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Owning A Gym Probably Will Not Kill You Spartan Race exhorts you to push harder! So says Joe De Sena who we have covered in the past and presently has a new book in print. Spartan is the endurance fitness event company that is De Sena's brainchild; he's a believer in finding the edge of exhaustion, and then to start doing some real training. Endurance events provide a test that few other things in life can do safely. There are plenty of things that will test your endurance unsafely; war zones, being lost alone in the wilderness, but I think [...]
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On today's screen cast we teach a new gym owner the basics of gym sales and marketing and how to discover and improve areas of your business that are failing. (more…)
What is marketing about if not finding new customers? And when business is at its slowest surely that is the time to shift down a gear and get the marketing efforts going properly. Marketing is about customers, who they are and what they want, as well as how you can mold your business to pick up some new members. You can bring in new members who want what you have and to do it at the lowest possible cost to you in the process. Of course, marketing takes an investment of time and energy, if not capital. If you are [...]
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Retention, Retention, Retention! It seems like retention is one of the biggest topics here at the Gym Insight Blog. Well, it is a critical issue that you absolutely must address. That's because holding on to your membership is the difference between success and failure in any people oriented business; it's the difference between sleeping in the back office and purchasing a comfortable home with the profits from your successful fitness center. Your marketing goals must be to gain new customers and hold on to the ones that you already have, these are two complementary but different functions in marketing your [...]
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I Am About To Contradict Myself Strange as it may seem, this is a rebuttal to my previous post about boosting revenue. Yes, increased margin is good, but too much of a good thing can take your gym off focus, especially in the early days. Some of the most successful companies have the simplest offerings, i.e., they stick to what they do best. In that post, I gave a list of different things that gym owners and managers can do to boost revenue, based on the various points on the profit and loss statement and how you can leverage them [...]
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We turbocharged our integration with MailChimp!: We now send the following additional information to MailChimp so that you can run your most targeted email campaigns ever: account status, birthday, visits in the past 30 days, visits in the past 90 days, and visits in the past year. Send a notice to your inactive members to get back in the gym, or just wish them a happy birthday! If you haven't set up a MailChimp account for email lists, it's time to start! Need assistance? Ask us - we're happy to help! Save
Keyboard Shortcuts!: We've added several useful keyboard shortcuts to help you get around Insight quickly! Simply type the '?' key on any screen in Insight to pull up the list of shortcuts. You can also access the list of shortcuts by clicking on the '?' icon on the toolbar and then selecting Keyboard Shortcuts.
Do The Dip With Your Credit Card Chip How are you doing with taking credit cards at your gym or studio these days? The term is "dip"; you dip your chip card to pay now. That is, of course, if your gym is using the EMV chip card slot on the merchant terminal, rather than still swiping the magnetic strip. As a quick reminder, magnetic strips are "bad" because they carry your account number and information in the open, for anyone to read. And that is what criminals have been doing; they are reading the unscrambled account information on magnetic [...]
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Take member pictures right from our website!: Now when you click on an existing member picture or the 'Set Picture' image on any account, you can take pictures with any webcam you have attached to your computer or the built in camera on your phone, iPad, or laptop!
I recently finished reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, which I thought was a fascinating life story. There are so many things about this guy that pertain to any business that it's an irresistible topic to tackle on the Gym Insight Blog. But I promise to visit the subject only one time, unless there is a call for an encore in the comments of course. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple computers, Next, and Pixar Entertainment was a complicated person to be sure. On one hand, he had a genius for design and business. Jobs had an amazing eye [...]
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If you would like your term and prepaid accounts to automatically convert into open ended (paying monthly, weekly, annually) accounts at the end of their term all you have to do is select the Auto renew option. Start by pulling up the account that you would like to automatically convert into an open ended account and then click on the Edit button. From the edit account screen you will see the Auto renew check box. If you check that box, the option to specify a Renewal amount will appear. The Renewal amount is the monthly amount that the converted account [...]
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