It doesn’t take long working in a gym to understand the natural patterns of attendance. While there will always be some exceptions (student-heavy areas come to mind), if the area your gym services is fairly standard, you already know the peaks and troughs we are about to discuss
The three peaks are, of course, before work, lunch and after work. The two troughs, correspondingly, come in the mid-morning and mid-afternoon.
People workout around their work and as such before and after work are often hotspots as our members try to push a little extra out of their day. It can be frustrating to watch people try to maximise their scarce time in a crowded gym, knowing if they had only shown up an hour earlier it would’ve been much quieter. But the mid-morning and mid-afternoon lulls don’t necessarily have to be a dead time.
With the right approach, you can turn unused space and predictable trends into a new source of development and revenue, whether it is planning training to get the most out of your staff or attracting new members from demographics who are able to or prefer to train when a gym is quieter.
Today we will be looking at how we were able to turn our traditionally quiet windows into a profitable part of our timetable.
And we will be asking the all-important question: how can your gym make the most of its off-peak opportunities?
Why The Fit Club Decided Off-Peak Matters
It is a sobering truth that most gyms only monetise about 60-70% of their available opening hours. Add in the consideration that membership fees typically account for 70-80% of an average gym’s total revenue and these stats start to show us two important things.
- A large portion of the day is being paid for but not actively generating income.
- The capacity is there for gym owners to diversify their revenue beyond a standard membership model.
When looking at a combination of your unused hours alongside your unavoidable operational costs such as rent, insurance, equipment leases, lighting, and staffing. Something every gym owner has known all along becomes undeniable, off-peak time is costing you money.
Thankfully, it has never been easier to turn this into an opportunity to develop your gym and grow your revenue.
With the gym floor quieter and footfall naturally lower, off-peak is the ideal testing ground. You can experiment with workshops, small-group sessions, practitioner partnerships, or alternative services with minimal disruption to existing members.
It is low risk, high potential, and, with the right tools can be a fantastic way of maximising value from your facility.
Workshops and Pop-up Events
Off-peak workshops are a great place to start as they are a relatively low commitment (in terms of both time and resource) for you, your staff and your members. Not only that, they are also a great testing ground for the running of off-peak events and gauging the interest in these events.
Understanding Demand
If you host a one-off workshop on nutrition and it sells out, you have just clearly identified a demand in your community that wasn’t being supplied. On the other hand, if you run a rowing clinic and the interest isn’t there, you now know future sessions may not land.
As always, your community and their response will shape what you offer and that doesn’t need to be a purely reactive process. Ask your members, whether via survey or more casually and weigh their responses.
A lot depends on your member base and the demand in your area, with some responding to technique clinics for Olympic lifting, barbell fundamentals, or strength sessions. Other gyms have seen better engagement from mobility, injury prevention and cardio machine workshops. Ultimately you know your members and your area best.
Corporate Clients and Local Business
Workshops represent a great opportunity to attract corporate clients. Businesses are often looking for workshops and other events to offer to their workers to demonstrate a commitment to employee enrichment, as well as physical and mental wellbeing.
Managing these different corporate relationships (usually with HR departments or office managers) doesn’t need to be completed either. Here at The Fit Club, we use Ashbourne’s Prospect Management to track corporate interest and keep a record of company representatives we’ve worked with previously.
Finally, don’t underestimate the appeal of a quieter gym. A beginner strength workshop, for example, is far less intimidating and far more productive when members know that they will have space, individual attention, and room to learn. This can help you access a whole type of potential member that might be otherwise reluctant to join.
PT and Staff Development
While internal development and training might not be directly linked to improving your revenue, refining the skills of your staff is nearly always worth the investment. Development and training days don’t have to be logistical chores where you try and fit everyone in at the same time either.
Off-peak periods and quiet spells are perfect windows to:
- Run PT skill-development sessions
- Review and refresh coaching standards and class delivery methods
- Work on programming updates or new class structures
- Train staff on new equipment or software
By making these training and development part of your schedule, your team benefits from consistent engagement and development at a period which might otherwise be dead time. Not only will this help to make your staff feel better supported and more able to do their jobs, it will demonstrate to members that you are being proactive in investing in their overall experience.
Offer shadowing or peer-feedback opportunities
These quiet periods can be a great time to offer shadowing opportunities and gather feedback. Much as with corporate clients, Ashbourne’s Prospect Management has been invaluable for not only automating this staff feedback process but also giving us an area to store the feedback for future use.
By using the built-in forms in the Ashbourne prospect management system, it allows any feedback generated during these sessions to be collected, reviewed and acted upon in an efficient and easily trackable way.
Using these quieter periods to identify the issues, whether large or small, that often go unsaid otherwise can be a great way to make your staff feel heard and appreciated all while getting a clearer picture of what is actually happening on your gym’s floor.
Your PTs and other staff should understand the standard you expect and in turn management should give them the tools and training to reach that standard. Morale can suffer if staff feel both held to a high standard while also being ‘left to it’. Make sure that your staff feel invested in and that their development is being considered and both you and your members will soon feel the benefit.
Practitioner Partnerships and External Services
Off-peak hours have also proved to be an ideal time for bringing in (and testing out) professionals who can help complement the services your gym already provides.
From Sports therapists and massage practitioners to nutritionists and breathwork coaches. Each offers something different and often they prefer the quieter daytime hours. Each specialist can offer a new service that you can advertise on your social media channels and within the facility, drawing members in at a time when they might not come otherwise and broadening your appeal to those potential members in the area.
In order to make members aware that you are introducing these additional services, consider working with these partners to offer a one-off free or discounted session for members. If you are worried about their services being flooded, roll this out slowly across your members.
This is a great way to generate positive buzz for your new specialist partners, all while providing an additional membership perk.
Not only will your members appreciate the variety of services on offer under one roof, you can start advertising to prospective members with an ever-greater list of potential services.
For your gym:
- Can provide additional revenue from room hire, percentage agreements, or integrated services without the need to add new staff to payroll.
- Improves the value of the service that you offer your members, which improves retention.
- Additional advertising material for your social media feeds and in-facility promotions.
For practitioners:
- A ready-made client base, predictable hours, and a setting where they know that their service will align with your members’ goals.
For members:
- Easy, convenient access to specialist support without going to another location. This access helps to strengthen the value of their membership.
Most of these options can be tested with relatively low risk. A weekly physio clinic is easy to scale up if demand grows and easy to step back from if it doesn’t. But make sure you are selective. Anyone working under your roof becomes part of your reputation.
Bringing It All Together
We weren’t happy to write off our off-peak hours as dead time, and you shouldn’t be happy to either. With the right mindset and approach, you can turn those lulls into opportunities to strengthen your revenue, develop staff, and improve member experience.
No matter which approach you choose, whether it is holding workshops, staff development, bringing in a trusted practitioner or all three, it is important to remember: the capacity is already available, your gym is already staffed and that unused time is already costing you money.
With this in mind, making those hours work for you is one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to increase the value of your gym without adding strain to your peak timetable. It also helps demonstrate to your members that you are committed to understanding what they want and delivering services that matter to them.
Gyms that treat off-peak as an opportunity are the ones who can start to build a more resilient, more sustainable fitness business. If you can turn quiet hours into productive ones, you give your members more reasons to stay, and your business more potential to grow.
