Asking for (More) Business After the gym membership sale, what comes next? A fist bump and a calendar check? Excited smiles and vow to “see you tomorrow!” Or, perhaps, just one more ask? Leaping past the traditional goodbyes after a sale and staying in place to ask for referral business is the difference between a good close and a great one. According to consumer research group Nielsen, 92% of people trust referrals from people they know. So why would you not use this moment to secure a name or two of someone who might also benefit from exercising at your gym? [...]
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Price Presentation In our first two blogs in the How to Sell Gym Memberships series, we discussed two critical techniques – how to establish an immediate rapport with new leads and the essential elements of a proper gym tour. In this piece, we explore presenting price. While this can feel like the scariest moment in the sale, it can actually be the simplest — if you’re prepared. Here are the three rules to remember about price presentation. 1 — Limit membership choices. By the end of the gym tour, it’s time to present the price. Start by ensuring your gym presents a streamlined, easy-to-understand [...]
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Every gym owner intends to run a profitable health club, but reaching that goal can feel impossible. There are, however, small effective steps you can take today to position your studio for a stronger, healthier future. These good habits start by conducting a line-by-line review of every expense and considering new ways to run an old business. Accountants and business analysts recommend printing out a 12-month profit-and-loss statement twice a year (or even quarterly) in order to accurately appraise every company expenditure. Although such effort sounds tedious, watching every penny is the only way to ensure you’re not wasting money. As [...]
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Don Roberts’ Fit 24/7 Gym keeps things simple. His gym does not boast a sauna, day care, or exercise classes. Customers know to follow the rules or get kicked out. And his club is open every day, 24 hours a day, frequently without a single employee on premise. Stripped bare of any extras and run entirely by himself, his 550-member facility in Durango, Colorado, has been profitable — very profitable, he insists — from day one. The key to making money is minimal expenses and 24 hour access. The advantage of 24-hour gyms In a time when nearly 20 percent of gyms closed permanently [...]
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Let’s be real. Many gym owners run their clubs via spreadsheets and direct deposit. We call that “pen-and-papering” a gym. How do we know? Because we owned fitness studios for decades. That’s why we started Gym Insight. We know the right gym management software can help owners grow their gyms without costing them a fortune. Profile of ProFitness of Greenville, South Carolina In 2014, Pete Marston bought a small, struggling 24-hour gym with a friendly crowd ready for a hands-on owner. The recently retired manufacturing executive ran the club without gym software, manually renewing clients. It was time-consuming, but he [...]
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How does your gym sell personal training packages? Does your fitness staff avoid bringing the idea up with prospects, afraid they’ll walk right out the door? They shouldn’t. In fact, personal training services should be sold at the point of sale – when new health club members first tour your gym. We all know personal training is good for a fitness center’s bottom line. A client who hires a trainer stays on at your health club three times as long as a regular member. It’s a win-win. Selling personal training To sell personal training effectively, your gym needs a standardized [...]
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Let’s deep dive into digital fitness’s world of one-on-one coaching software products for gyms, health clubs, and boutique centers. The streaming market is broad and rich with choices. However for this blog, we explored three well-known companies. Let's look at Trainerize Trainerize is designed specifically for the fitness industry. Its software offers an integrated platform for owners to manage their fitness training from a single spot and offers a new service – online personal training. Owners can choose from a custom-branded fitness app or white-label their own to build brand awareness. Content capabilities include lifestyle, nutrition, and general wellness coaching, [...]
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Choosing the right club management software is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as an owner. Whether you run a single-location Muay Thai studio or a multi-site full-service gym, controlling costs, managing employees, and tracking clients are the cornerstones to your success. If you don’t know how much money you’re spending – or making – then your very job is at risk. Ironically, many fitness companies who sign-up with well-known, heavily-advertised gym software products are forced into that very position. Like a wrestler flat on the mat, they concede control of their business to a third party by [...]
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In the modern era, few businesses can get by without taking advantage of all the myriad technology upgrades available. Utilizing the best business software can propel your gym to a new level of productivity, security, and success. What can great gym management software do for you? Save time and money When your software takes over the automation of menial tasks and shoulders the burden of the everyday work load, your staff is set free to do more important work that only humans can accomplish. Your employees' time is much better spent in face to face interactions with clients and trainers [...]
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Data Is The Answer But What Is The Question? Whether you are a new club owner, a professional trainer, or a veteran of fitness club management you can always benefit by extracting more information from the data that you generate in your gym business operations. With every transaction or response received from prospects or members, you create data. This might come in through your payment system, setting up a new account in your membership management system or getting a response from an email blast that you send out to a list. In most cases, these days the data will come [...]
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People Person Persona Are there gym member personas that describe the typical groups of members of your fitness center? In marketing, a persona is a profile of the ideal customer for your products or services. You create them as character sketches of the consumers or businesses most likely to benefit from your fitness center. Well-researched customer personas will also help you grow your membership and profit margin by describing the patrons who are right for your business goals. Professional marketers who specialize in inbound marketing strategy use as many personas as required to define the buyers for their products and [...]
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It's Not What You Think So, what does a small fitness business or startup look like? From the outside, it might resemble any one of a variety of business models that have nothing in common. Inside it's likely to be a different story. Your business probably has an architecture that fits into a format that any gym manager will recognize, a club with a subscription membership. It's a service business that has consumers for members. You have to deal with a competitive market, fight against lots of similar companies, and also contend with the giants that have unlimited resources. These [...]
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Sometimes you have to do things that you know will be risky and time-consuming. Risky things are only worth doing if the change that they bring is transformational. That is why Gym Insight has become an expert at helping our customers change from outdated, piecemeal gym management information systems to something that ties your business and membership together. Transitions And Transformations In The Fitness Industry Running a gym is a way of life as much as a job, and if you own the business, you have a calling that takes over your life. If you've been conducting business the way [...]
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Do you know what I object to most in the fitness business? It's those big-box chains that sign up members for the low monthly rate, but secretly hoping that customers never turn up to occupy space in any of their one million and six facilities. Low membership fees are fine in themselves, and it's a good thing that gyms give their members the hope of getting off the couch and getting fit. However, it just offends my sense of honor and the principles that got me into the business in the first place. Also, a strategy that delivers premium services [...]
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Fitness was a $26 billion per year industry at the end of 2015 and it's all too easy to think that taking part is the same as having success in it. That is not the case; the difference is between churning through revenue, where you spend it as rapidly as you earn it (or worse), and making a solid profit on your labors. To achieve that it will require your leadership, a comprehensive map of where you are going, and the right analytics and dashboard solutions to accurately measure the process of getting there. Getting To Grips With Key Performance [...]
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