Trainers Adopting Tech Could Create New Potential A recent American Council On Exercise (ACE) Survey, quoted by Club Industry Magazine turned up the conclusion that trainers need to be more aware of the potential offered by wearable technology. This refers to the wristband devices such as FitBit that record all your activity throughout the day, from your sleep patterns, to heart rate and calorie expenditure. Well, my natural reaction to that was "don't we all?" However, the point here was that the spread of wearables is making consumers curious about the potential in the data. According to the survey, they [...]
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The Value Is Real If You Respect It Yourself One of the things that you learn when you're working as a freelance contractor in the software business (bare with me here) is that you get more respect and more clients if you set a price that represents real value and a living wage for yourself. As a case in point, a friend of mine recently qualified for a certification in network engineering. He now works as a contractor and recently raised his hourly rate by a factor of four. An amazing thing happened when he did it: Customers and prospects, [...]
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The Value Of Holding Events What do you do for your marketing and promotions currently? Hopefully, you are connecting with local businesses and getting creative with trial memberships. But in addition to that, have you been sponsoring or holding events that bring people into your gym space? These days, you can put any unused capacity to work better by getting involved locally. Do some networking by using a web-based or mobile application like meetup.com and Eventbrite to connect with like-minded fitness fans around you. This can extend to promotions, sponsorships and even to organizing paid events. Get Some Digital Leverage [...]
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Accounting For The Details There are so many ways that paying attention to your costs will save some money and keep you earning a profit. Think of it like lacing your shoes before you workout. A better fit might only mean a slight advantage, but that could be the difference of winning the race or only taking second place. Small savings add up when it comes to supplies. When you factor in the behavior of staff it tends to have an even greater effect. Gym Insight gives you some great tools for measuring things like attendance and payments. There is [...]
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Third Party Confirmations I was just reading the results of a really interesting small business survey, and the discussion about it, on the Club Solutions Website. The point was that community and reviews lead as the driving forces for growth across the spectrum of small businesses. Of 6,000 survey respondents, eleven percent were gym members. The survey showed that there is growth in the economy, small businesses get the most return by providing community, and that small businesses, including gyms, get a lot of mileage from reviews posted by members. The article went on to say that these reviews provide [...]
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Choose Your Application If you could develop a mobile application or app for your gym members what would it be? Would it be purely account information or training records? Would you want to make it a stand-alone Giga-download giant or a lightweight gateway app? Would it help you communicate with your membership or just dole out the advice? I've been giving this subject some serious consideration lately and I'd like to share my thoughts here, as a sort of roadmap. The best part about it is that it's a roadmap to membership retention. Allow me to explain with a simple [...]
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On Orangetheory Joining Communities The new HIIT concept gym business Orangetheory has been expanding like crazy across the country of late. I'm glad to see that there is a fitness ethos behind the boom. It looks like they're selective in whom they hire; only properly trained and certified exercise science graduates need apply. Beyond doing the basics right, Orangetheory is doing something else that I am all in favor of, which is encouraging locations and managers to get involved locally and give to the community as this link shows. Overview Of Fitness Business And Charity Giving back is really important [...]
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Some Thoughts Based On Recent Events Human resources issues may seem like a long stretch for the Gym Insight Blog but this is a serious set of issues that could easily cause any small business to lose the farm. I'm talking about the fast changing and very sensitive issues of equality and diversity in the workplace and the gym. Recent incidents in fitness centers, where the key issues were the poor handling of diversity and the rapidly evolving legal environment, have made this something that every gym owner should be prepared to confront. That basically means getting along with people [...]
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Gather Round For The Gym Insight Founder Story More businesses are creating mobile apps to either support their businesses or from which to bring forth a new enterprise and it is helping smart marketers to promote products and services in the most cost-effective way. The use of any digital offering is an awesome way to bring attention to the core service or product that you deliver. I am sure that you won't be surprised to hear that what we've done here at Gym Insight is a great example. Because I studied and worked as a programmer and also happened to [...]
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Give Great Customer Service To Secure Your Business Future I've come to the conclusion that there's one simple key to effective customer service. It's a principle that's so obvious that it is quite simply missed most of the time. Sometimes genius lies in the simple, the unsophisticated and the literal. The key that I'm talking about here is the practice of hiring only people for customer service roles who are naturally inclined to help others. One of the best business practitioners of this sort of policy is Southwest Airlines, which has long known the importance of finding the right person [...]
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The Gentle Art Of Doling Out The Tasks There is an old aphorism that a job is like a treadmill, one where you have to keep moving to stay in one place. I would ask you, the reader who is also a gym business owner, whether you intended to form a business so that you could pay a lease on a treadmill and walk on it yourself, all day long? Or was that equipment lease supposed to enable others to pay you to work out on it, to your profit? Remember the post about learning what to eliminate? Well, reductions [...]
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You know, we're in a resolutely business-to-customer service industry, are we not? So, you might be forgiven for thinking that attending trade shows would be a waste of time. Don't you believe it for a minute! It may be individual customers that you serve that earn your revenue but it's the relationships with your peers that keep you going. Your business is built on the relationships that you form within the industry and between professionals that makes the best B2C service possible. Let's take a look at trade shows (IHRSA 2015) and what they can do for you beyond being [...]
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When You Have To Do What You Would Rather Not One of the biggest challenges that a gym owner can face is moving the physical location of the business. Perhaps this is even more of a pressing issue if you already have a location that your clients love. Everything else being equal the best advice is to stay put; don't, at least unless you have to. Of course, there are many reasons that you might actually have to move, so I'm not going to go into the whys and what-fors. Assuming that it's a necessity that you move your small [...]
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Building On Previous Discussions Some time ago, Gym Insight was fortunate to have a guest post from Mike Hedlesky. It was an in-depth piece that has been a real asset to the Insight Blog and, judging by the traffic, a useful source of information and validation for the readers. So first, thanks Mike! Second, I thought it might be good to go back, review and build on it with some further insights into running your own small gym business. Training is always easier to impart to your staff when you are clear about the basics of the company vision and [...]
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Sounding The Data Breach Alarm Again Once again I'm writing about the issue of liability in financial data. Data breaches can affect more than credit cards, although the driving force is the card companies' clamp down on fraud and identity theft. As the merchant, that is the account that is taking the payment will soon be responsible for the loss of information and fraudulent payments, as well as the theft and fraud that can be had with stolen identifying information. As the owner of a small gym business this means you are going to need to be extra vigilant. Having [...]
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