It’s been a great year for our company and we pray the same for you. Since gym owners such as yourselves are such a huge part of our success — well, you’re almost like family — we’d thought you’d enjoy an end-of-year wrap up. Looking forward to an amazing 2024 and the privilege of watching your gyms grow exponentially! Gym Insight 2023 Social Media Winners: Top Podcast: "Insider Tips for Owning a Thriving Gym with Justin Green." Top Instagram: “Always Remember This Verse…” Top Facebook: “Don’t Let Life Knock You Down…” Top YouTube Short: “Zero to Hero….” Top Blog: “Best Types of Music to Play…” Fav [...]
Read more...
Dear Gym Owners and Gym Dreamers, Your business means everything to us. You are the independent fitness club owner with the courage and conviction to work relentlessly for your own success. It’s a great story, one we cherish hearing every day. At Gym Insight, we sincerely value these long-term relationships with our customers. You feed our most innovative design ideas and keep us excited to create — and re-create — the best gym management software on the planet. This may be because we’re a lot like you — a privately held company growing with a single purpose — to bring profitability, [...]
Read more...
When we started this blog in 2011, Gym Insight was a young company — barely three years old, and still beta testing much of its software. Today, we’ve installed our health club software in countless gyms while cultivating the passion for ingenuity and improvement that brought us here today. Here, we shamelessly pitch why we (still) believe we offer the best gym management software on the market. 1) FREE United States-Based Customer Service This seems like an unusual boast but, truthfully, local customer service is not so common. Our highly praised customer service team is located in the Continental United States [...]
Read more...
As a gym owner, you would already know that the music you play at your gym defines the ambiance and affects the level of motivation for your members. With different personalities coming to your gym, you are probably having a hard time trying to keep everyone happy with the type of music you play. While hardcore bodybuilders are likely to prefer rock and heavy metal, others might be more comfortable listening to pop and blues. The choice of workout music can also differ a lot according to each type of exercise. When deciding which music or radio station you should [...]
Read more...
Is it possible to prosper as a gym owner in a small town? After speaking with several gym owners in cities of fewer than 5,000 residents we discovered it’s a definite “heck, yes!” With the right dedication and planning, you can succeed and grow in any sized hamlet. Advice from our Gym Insight customers on how to flourish as a small-town gym. 1. Adapt to your community’s needs. As Justin Green, owner of the Source Fitness Center in St. Clairsville, Ohio, explained in our Gym Owner's Podcast, the household income for his small town gym are not high. As a result, [...]
Read more...
Interview with Dr. JoAnn Eickoff-Shemek, “Dr. JES,” professor emerita, University of South Florida, expert fitness and law witness, and national spokesperson. Podcast: “The Power of Control: Dr. JES Returns” We’ve dedicated the last two blogs to avoiding gym negligence lawsuits. How to steer clear of legal landmines, and training staff to properly guide members on their fitness journey. Now we are at the final leg – scope of practice. Here, we discuss that wafer-thin line between offering good nutritional advice and stepping outside one's field of expertise. When too much good advice lands you in hot water. In one case Dr. JES recalled, a personal trainer [...]
Read more...
Gym Insight Member’s App Replaces Text Messaging If so, you might want to cut that out. The Campaign Registry (TCR), sanctioned through the federal government, has stepped in and created a labyrinth of new rules, procedures, fees, and fines for businesses who direct-message their customers, effective August 31, 2023. Yep, you missed the TCR deadline. Although the overall intent of TCR is to reduce spam messages sent to consumers, the end result for fitness clubs, and other small businesses, is to throttle text messaging. In effect, every phone number your company uses to text customers for marketing purposes must be registered per campaign. One-time fees, [...]
Read more...
Firehall Fitness, Livingston, Montana Gyms in premier destination locations often struggle to keep and retain staff. Frequently located in the world's most beautiful — and expensive towns — it can be a challenge to staff a fitness center from early morning until evening. Now, Gym Insight's digital keytags provide a simpler, more secure way to run a 24/7-access gym with fewer employees. Since their introduction in 2022, gym owners have used digital key tags to successfully cut members’ unauthorized entries while increasing gym owners’ control over their time and businesses. Now it’s nearly impossible for members to “share” a key [...]
Read more...
David Flench, president Medical Fitness Association. Recently our Gym Owner’s Podcast welcomed David Flench, president of the Medical Fitness Association, for a conversation on how gyms benefit from offering medically integrated healthcare services. Here's the lowdown on what we learned. To listen to our podcast, click on the embedded YouTube link. What is the Medical Fitness Association? It is a nonprofit professional membership organization providing industry standards, certification opportunities, educational programs, benchmark data, professional development and networking to improve the operational success of medically integrated health and well-being centers. It strives to be the resource for new and established gyms [...]
Read more...
Brian Way, owner of Iron City Gym in Houston, TX, spoke with us this month on our Gym Owner’s Podcast. The enlightening conversation revealed just what it takes to turn a hardcore $10,000-a-month bodybuilders’ gym into a $130,000-a-month power center of fitness and energy. Persistence, Passion, Purpose: The Story of Iron City’s Success It takes a leap of faith to make change work. And the passion to believe in your decisions. When Brian Way purchased Iron City, he faced the takeover of a gym packed with bodies bigger than he’d ever been in his lifetime. Could he do it? Could he transform [...]
Read more...
It can be scary converting your fitness center’s database over to a new gym management software program. Every client phone number, account, and credit card is listed in that database and now you’re handing it to another firm for import into a new software application. What if something, maybe everything, gets lost? Tangled in a web of encrypted material, like an exploding black hole… Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but converting data from one software program to another is the number-one reason gym owners put off switching gym management software companies. Owners hang on to their old software because they [...]
Read more...
Employee Profile: George Cox, Executive Assistant Former naval officer Lt. George Cox met Gym Insight’s owner after graduating from Liberty University with a Master of Divinity. Lean and ready to find a calling in the civilian world, his modesty almost got in the way of his becoming our Executive Assistant. Luckily, we can spot talent, even if it’s not looking for us. Once hired, we quickly discovered his military training equipped him with a skillset both technically adaptable and highly disciplined — an awesome combination for our fast-growing gym software company. Today, Cox is the rudder that ensures employees are [...]
Read more...
Part II: Creating a Culture of Safety If a member sues your health club for gym negligence, how can you fight the case? Can you create a solid defense that will help you successfully fend off, or at least survive, a lawsuit? To explore these questions, we interviewed an expert in risk management and fitness liability JoAnn Eickhoff-Shemek. Dr. JES, as she is known, spoke with us on our podcast recently, enlightening our team on the critical steps every gym owner can take to reduce their chances of a gym lawsuit. In Part I, we covered waivers, assumption-of-risk documentation and group training. In Part II, [...]
Read more...
Gym owners, wake up! You're all fighting for a piece of the same market — slim, fit people. It’s time to embrace the nearly 70 percent of people in the United States who are overweight or obese. They want to exercise, too — just not for the reasons you may think. For this article, we spoke with Louise Green, founder of the Big Fit Girl campaign. Green is a personal trainer, spokesperson, and author who has created an online community supporting, encouraging, and training individuals in larger bodies.From a founding bootcamp for plus-sized women to creating a weight-neutral fitness movement that includes [...]
Read more...
How can you find good employees for your gym? Individuals who express your values and create an environment in which members will thrive? It’s never an easy task, but we’ve brainstormed multiple ways you can scout and hire good people. These ideas are culled from our discussions with other gym owners, as well our own experiences in the job market. Four tips to finding good gym employees 1. Recruit from your membership The people who visit your gym already love it. Why not bring them in on the action? We’ve spoken with more than one gym owner who found particular members [...]
Read more...
