Make Your Name in The Business As an independent gym or fitness club owner, have you considered your personal brand? I'm not talking about the fitness club brand of the gym that you founded (or plan to start). What I mean is your public name and reputation as an entrepreneur. If you have worked with an executive coach, you may have heard of personal branding. Chief-level executives, ambitious corporate VPs, and high-tech start-up founders often work with a coach. The goal is to enhance your credentials and be more valuable as a leader and public figure. Personal branding opens doors. [...]
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Gym Management Software And An Inquisitive Mindset I think there is only one way to survive in the fitness industry in the next few years. As a gym business owner, be ready to make changes quickly and often. Be curious about what's around the corner. The changes that are going on around us right now are world-shattering, and you have to keep up to survive. There will be many companies that get lost along the way. Insight gives you the gym management software tools to respond proactively to changes. Of course, other things demand your attention too. But First, The [...]
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Fitness clubs should always have new projects in development and owners should be continuously searching for the next big thing in gym business niches. Special populations represent many different niche specializations that have been boiling up for some time. Reaching out to special populations will benefit everybody involved. Your club can grow in a new direction, a part of the community that might otherwise be underserved gets a new resource, and your trainers can justify adding a new certification that will be a positive step in their careers. Special Populations Within The Community The need to support special populations is [...]
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Getting Organized Is The Key To Winning Organizing your gym members, prospective future members, and members at the edge of retention, is much easier if you have an automated system to manage the process. It's one thing to have a list of customers and something completely different to have a system that maintains your contacts with them and reminds you of important dates and alerts you to changes. In fitness clubs, Gym Insight is your best tool to stay on top of the customer juggling game. It is a specialized package that, among other things, does the parts of customer [...]
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Let's Talk About Success What does it mean to have a waiting list? First, you should be thrilled that your fitness club is so in demand! If you have a strict upper limit on capacity such as class spaces adding new members beyond that limit can be a dangerous game. When your gym is overcrowded, service delivery tanks and cancellations skyrocket. Keep A Steady Buzz with A Waiting List You might even want to have a contingency plan that includes cutting off new memberships and waitlisting applicants to prevent chaos. If your gym gets overcrowded or the staff overwhelmed, service [...]
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Powering Your Way Out of The Twilight Zone Picture yourself on a treadmill and the faster you walk or run, the more new clients you add to your gym membership base. At the same time clients are dropping out and, to stay in business, you have to keep adding new ones to replace them by running faster. The metaphor of the treadmill could become a nightmare if your client acquisition doesn't keep up with your cancellations. This picture shows the paradox of retention, and if you're struggling, it's like watching yourself in an episode of the TV classic series, the [...]
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The Short Answer Is Still "No!" That guy who wrote a book about having a business in only X hours per week now has a book out about fitness. OK, that's nice. So, completely separate from that, what I'm wondering, is whether there can be a gym business that you can run on half a workday per week? I've gotta say, I'm skeptical about the whole short-time easy-money approach to anything. If you're already the owner of a small fitness club, just the title probably made you roll your eyes, right? I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that anyone who follows [...]
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To Change Or Not To Change Are you thinking about starting a new gym business or changing the direction of the one you operate now? If you're not, I'm not suggesting you should, but if things haven't worked quite the way you planned or, if the market has peaked and begun to tail off, you might be wondering about making a change. The choice between staying the course in a mediocre business model and finding a new one that's better is the conundrum of the ages. There's even a name for the syndrome that business owners and entrepreneurs face, it's [...]
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You may be thinking, "OK, Gym Insight, what are you doing posting about esoteric mathematical concepts like Bayesian Priors?" First of all, it's 2018 and living in the future demands that we apply futuristic methods. Second, I promise not to start quoting mathematical equations. Finally, there is probably something that any fitness business owner can learn by using a little statistical discipline to their business model. What Is This Bayesian Thing? It is more than a method; it's a way of looking at the world. You have a position, a view that you formed for whatever reason. You can test [...]
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Categories for client programming must align to sales goals and be complementary to one another. After all, the most fundamental activity in any business is selling. In a people-business like fitness, it's as true as ever; gym business owners have to do some selling to survive. Fortunately, you don't have to start again from scratch to get every sale. The secret is that, as your gym members come to you on a regular basis you have a warm and receptive audience for your products and services. Your Client Programming And Sales Audit If you have never done such an exercise, [...]
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Gym equipment is evolving rapidly, and we see some highly innovative designs coming down the line. New machines and systems match physical activity and data science to improve the workout experience. I think we can expect to see some amazing new gym equipment products emerging in the next few years. The company I'm writing about here, Tonal, might be one of them if it can be successful with its recently launched fitness system. As Described by This Week In Startups A recent posting by Jason Calacanis on his podcast, This Week in Startups is an interview with the founder of [...]
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So, What's in Your Gym Business Bag? If you're like most people, your personal gym bag carries a bundle of practical and commonsense workout items. These things express your personality, values, and workout intentions. However, the contents of your gym bag also hint at hidden opportunities to fine-tune the business model of your fitness club. For an insight into what your ideal customers want, look into your own gym bag and apply the lessons to your customers and your business model. Most likely it includes the usual gym clothes and shoes, towels, and personal items. Perhaps you have weightlifting gloves [...]
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Sometimes it's when you go against the grain that you do your best work. If you're in a competitive marketplace, (and let's face it, in this industry, who isn't?) you have to fight for every advantage. Your membership retention rate is one of those things that can make an impact in the profitability and survival of your small gym business. I certainly don't think small gym business owners should completely ignore how well they retain their membership. However, if you're working on a shoestring budget and living in the back office because you can't pay yourself a salary, maybe it's [...]
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There's not much that a little creative ingenuity can't overcome. The fitness industry is one where you can get a start with or without vast sums of capital to invest. While it might seem easier to do with truckloads of financial backing, there are plenty of things you can do to get started or at least boost your business to the next level. 1. Be The Expert Focus on what you do best. That thing that you're most confident about and for which you have the most experience, this is what management gurus call your core competence. The knowledge that [...]
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As an enthusiastic new gym owner, you've probably already found a place in the market with enough potential customers to build a business. Once you commit to your particular niche in the fitness business, there's one thing you'll need. It's the information about customers and sales that will take you from the initial idea to a sustainable and profitable asset. More precisely, it is the ability to gather, organize, and exploit information about any prospective customer that comes into contact with your business. If you want to find the insights within the fine-grained details of the piles of data that [...]
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