Breaching the Barriers of the Fitness Business Gyms should always be about positivity and overcoming obstacles. So, it’s worth taking a look at a few of the hurdles you’re likely to encounter in fitness entrepreneurship. I’m not saying you should forge ahead recklessly. You need a plan and contingencies. However, don’t let the inevitable difficulties and the nay-sayers turn you away from your dream of becoming a fitness club owner. Big Box Brands Take All the Business False! You don’t have to invest a fortune in a primo location, lease one-hundred tons of the latest Internet-connected equipment, and then compete [...]
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Building Your Dream by Starting Your Own Business in Fitness If you are the kind of person, like me, who enjoy fitness and being at the gym, the dream of starting your own business in fitness is the logical next step. Fitness is so wide-open because it’s a people business. If you can gain a following of one person, you have a fitness business. That sounds crazy but, if you’re in the right place at the right time, celebrities and the super-wealthy do sometimes hire trainers full-time. That may be a bit extreme and takes a lot of luck. However, [...]
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Survey of What Is On The Horizon for Special Populations in Fitness Specialty Fitness Fills Niches and Gyms Humans come in a delightful diversity of shapes, sizes, and physical needs. I think it is super-rewarding to see people achieve spectacular levels of fitness achievement. It is even more rewarding when you can help special populations take small steps to better health and enhanced mobility. Special Population Niche Opportunities The fitness profession offers opportunities to assist people at all stages of their fitness journeys, as well as their extended sojourns through life. Special populations present you with many unique niche opportunities [...]
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Glittering Membership Management Performance Indicators If you can do things that keep and reduce change to the minimum your club might just be on the path to finding diamonds. Retention is the key concept of club management. It brings your small gym business dreams to life. That is a constant, but, unless your retention rate is one-hundred percent, it means change is the only constant. Setting Retention to Maximum If you have a limit to your membership management capacity, the longer members stick around, the less you have to invest in recruiting new ones. The difference is like that of [...]
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Proper Preparation for The Gym Business Getting prepared and qualified to be a fitness club founder is like laying the foundations for a home or a mighty fortress. The better the foundations, the longer the structure (of your fitness business) will last, and the higher you can build. If you’ve had a long career as a trainer, or been a successful manager for a big box fitness brand for many years, you’re probably ready right now. On the other extreme, if you’re just out of school or starting from scratch, now’s an excellent time to seek a fitness certification or [...]
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Management Metrics and Where You Find Them Like fitness programming, gym business management is about setting goals and defining improvements. It’s how you measure them that provides the framework to get the work done. You can’t know what you’ve achieved until you’ve measured it. Whether it’s measured in lean body mass, inches of muscle, or maximum deadlift weight, measurement tells you how much progress you’ve achieved relative to your workout goals. It’s the same for business goals. If you want a leaner company, better sales performance, or higher rates of retention, you measure your actions to hit your targets. The [...]
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Of Belly Laughs and Leg Lifts I was listening to some comedians talking on a podcast recently. It seems to be a thing in comedy for comics to interview their friends and idols. However, I was struck by the similarities between owning a gym and running a comedy club. The fitness and entertainment professions both appeal to the general public as markets. They each bring in people to participate in some sort of experience. Although, they do it in different ways, perhaps. The Changing Culture of Comedy Lately, comedy clubs are growing in popularity and revenue. The number of would-be [...]
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Insight was my solution for my own gym management headaches. As a computer science graduate and fitness club owner, I had some options. I didn’t hesitate to dive in and write my own code when the business started to get complicated. Great idea, right? Well, it turned into a bigger project than I had expected, which is an understatement! Each solution seemed to reveal new problems, at least in the first version. I’m not going into too much detail because I’ve covered much of this over the years on the Gym Insight Blog. Multiple Gym Management Tool Sets There’s a [...]
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Fitness is one of the more efficient industries, in the economic sense. The same is true about gym management software. It’s a good thing in that competition leads to better products and services. On the other hand, it goes in the opposite direction as well. Economics drives free markets toward commoditization, which means cheap, bland products. Here at Insight, we recognize that, and we work to deliver a stand-out club management platform that defies the odds. As a gym business owner, so should you. The best strategy for small gym business success is unique offerings that command premium fitness club [...]
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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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How Do You Connect With Prospective Members? Across all of the activities that you organize to market your gym business, do you know what the critical touchpoints are in the structure of your membership marketing and management process? Touchpoints are the events and situations that define how you monitor and measure the customer journey that your members experience throughout their customer lifecycles. Converting Lookers Into Loyal Members When a prospect walks into your facility and asks to get more information it is probably not a spontaneous impulse that brought them to that point; they most likely had been thinking about [...]
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When you work very hard to build something significant, and someone makes what sounds like an unjustified remark, it hurts. If you don’t restrain yourself from attacking it can turn into a circus in all the wrong ways. Ever see a minor complaint turn into a public relations disaster? It seems like it happens all the time these days and companies still miss opportunities to turn customer griping into chances to amaze larger audiences. Negative Reviews Can Make Your Service Better When someone makes a complaint in public or gives you a bad review, it’s going out to the whole [...]
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This One Hack Will Generate Early Feedback Here’s a tech term that you can use as a principle to drive your small gym business empire ahead: In tech jargon, they call it Dogfooding. The expression, to “eat your dog food” is not a literal thing, obviously. I don’t think that trend has gotten off the ground yet thank goodness. However, if you don’t take heed and begin to practice this brand-building principle, you might literally end up sleeping in your back office. Dogfooding applies most intensely when you’re attempting to make significant changes. For example, when you roll out changes [...]
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Retention, Retention, Retention! The subject of retention keeps coming up on the Gym Insight Blog because it keeps gym owners in the business. In fact, any business that depends on periodic payments and satisfied customers must make retention a priority. As long as you maximize the length of time that you retain your members, you’ll minimize the cost of replacing them. Retention touches on issues such as membership turnover and the lifetime value of a customer. So let’s review some of the things that you can do to hang on to your clients for the long haul. Build Trust In [...]
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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 [...]
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