Every independent gym or fitness club owner reaches a point where their admin starts to fight them. Whether it is membership requests piling up, manually sorting through member status and payment reconciliation or dealing with freezes and upgrades.
All it takes is a payment scheme to lag, a row to be missed, a misplaced 0 and suddenly there is either an unhappy customer or an unhappy bottom line.
Add in that each member of staff has a slightly different process when they man your front desk might handle the same request differently and suddenly what should be one system has about 18 variants.
Suffering from scale and success is a good problem for an independent gym owner to have but it is a problem nonetheless. So if your problems are a growing membership base that is managed through a combination of manual processes, good intentions, and not quite enough hours in the day, read on.
To the surprise of no-one, automation can fix most of this. But we’ve worked with many independent gym and fitness club owners who think that automation will carry more costs than it does benefit. Perhaps that was true in the 90s, but certainly not anymore.
The other big concern many independent gym owners have around automation is the fear that putting their facility’s processes on autopilot means losing the personal, responsive quality that makes smaller clubs worth belonging to. It is a perfectly understandable concern.
In practice, the opposite tends to be true. When the administrative side of membership management runs itself, staff have more time and more headspace for the parts of the job that actually require a human being.
What can go wrong with manual processes and procedures in an independent gym?
The issues that come with manual membership management can range from minor to dramatic, but no matter the size, those issues and errors accumulate quickly.
Whether it is a freeze request submitted by email sits unread over a bank holiday weekend, a member who asked to downgrade their membership three weeks ago that is still being charged the higher rate or a new member of staff that isn’t exactly sure whether to make a change to someone’s membership in the way James showed them or whether to use Maria’s clever workaround.
Each of these are, individually, small problems. But mix them all together and factor in that many can occur multiple times within the same week?
Well then they start to create a gym where the membership records are not fully aligned to reality, where staff are inconsistent through no fault of their own, and where members find their expectations are sometimes just not met.
While the damage won’t be massive and immediate, it will start to slowly undermine the functional, professional image that you should be trying to cultivate as a gym owner. Even if the aesthetic of your facility is aiming for something casual or anti-corporate, people still want the businesses they visit to have functional, professional systems when it comes to finance and member logistics.
It can be hard getting visuals on this problem for an independent gym or fitness club owner who isn’t on the gym floor every day.
In our 30 years working in the fitness industry we have found few gym owners who would disagree that manual systems make it difficult to get a clear picture of the current membership position.
Whether it is looking at which memberships are currently frozen, who hasn’t paid, who is on a reduced rate, which payment changes are pending, how many requests came in this week or how many have been actioned. Everything takes longer to check and reconcile than automated membership management systems.
Without the ability to easily get eyes on that data, running a fitness business means relying on updates from staff and manually compiled reports rather than reliable data.
What an automated membership management system actually handles
When we talk to gym owners about automation, some are worried about a loss of control. But automating membership changes doesn’t mean members fill in a form and then things just start happening without anyone else checking.
Automation means the routine and repeatable parts of the process run on rules that have already been decided, so staff are not making fresh judgement calls every time the same request comes in.
Often people think of the time automation will save, but the consistency it allows is also a massive advantage to an independent fitness business.
If we take a member requesting a temporary freeze, for example. The right membership management system can trigger an automatic confirmation to the member, pause the direct debit on the correct date, update the membership record, and schedule a reminder before the freeze period ends.
Each of those steps happens without your staff lifting a finger and more importantly, with no room for human error. No failed reconciliation and no need to track it through to completion.
From your members perspective, the request is dealt with quickly and efficiently and that reflects positively on the brand of any independent gym.
The same logic applies to any member wanting to upgrade or downgrade their membership. When members wish to move between membership tiers, the billing change happens at the right time, the member receives confirmation of what has changed and when, and the record is updated in real time. No lag, no chasing, no room for error and no uncomfortable conversation when the member discovers on their next bank statement that their change was applied a month late.
Payment changes, once again, follow the same logic. Members have certain expectations and a member updating their card details or bank account most likely believes that they should not be required to call their gym and a manual update this information by whoever happens to be on the desk. Allowing these interactions to be handled digitally, with the appropriate verification, reduces admin time, increases member satisfaction and removes a common source of human error.
Does automation mean less control for an independent gym owner?
The concern that automation removes control is often based on a misunderstanding of what good automation looks like. With the right membership management system, control doesn’t disappear, it is reinforced.
The rules, procedures and processes that previously relied on human implementation are now instantly applied.
A well-configured and well-integrated membership management system lets independent gym owners decide who can approve what and when.
A front desk team member might be able to process a standard freeze request but not a custom payment arrangement. In turn, a manager might have visibility of all pending requests and the ability to override a decision while the owner, of course, can see everything.
This is a level of control that nearly all manual systems are unable to provide, where usually it is unclear who approved what and on what basis without a significant deep-dive.
Approval workflows add another layer of control, accountability and protection for both the facility and staff.
No matter the idea, whether it is a request that falls outside normal parameters, a freeze extension beyond the standard limit, or a membership rate that does not match any existing pricing tier, any of these can be directed automatically to whoever is required for sign off on them, with a record of the decision kept on the system.
That level of accountability is something manual processes within an independent gym can almost never produce reliably.
And that is all without too much focus on a gym membership management system’s ability to generate reports. The ability to have real-time visibility on everything from membership status and pending changes to frozen accounts and upcoming billing gives independent gym owners a reliable, update to date picture of their business that manual record-keeping cannot match.
The member experience side
As we touched on above, most members don’t lose much sleep over the mechanics and procedures that their gym uses internally. They just want any request they make to be acknowledged and resolved quickly and correctly. An automated membership management system makes this much more likely to occur.
If a member submits a freeze request on a Sunday evening and receives an automatic confirmation within minutes, they are happy, they know the request has been received.
If a member gets a message three days before their membership freeze period ends, reminding them that their membership will resume and giving them a chance to raise anything. They will feel that your independent gym is attentive, regardless whether it was an automated message or not.
If a member upgrades their membership plan and immediately receives confirmation of their new payment amount and billing date, they have no reason to doubt as to whether the change went through and whether your systems are actually working.
The best part is none of these communications require the staff time that a manual response would, and they happen not only faster, but provide greater reassurance to members for it.
All of these automations just run via a membership management system in the background, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, creating the (very accurate) impression that your gym is running professionally and without issue.
This is the sort of ease of use and competence gets noticed when dealing with independent local business, and as we all know in this business, positive word-of-mouth is never a bad thing.
Scaling without drowning in admin
We have seen it a hundred times, a successful independent gym with 200 members starts to find manual processes become more and more painful.
And as that number starts to get higher, they become even more unworkable.
The amount of admin generated by membership changes does not grow in proportion to membership numbers. It grows faster, not only because a larger membership base produces more requests, it also produces more edge cases, more errors, and more opportunities for things to fall through the gap.
Gyms that automate membership management early find that growth does not bring a corresponding increase in administrative burden. Membership management systems are able to scale and handle the volume without hiring additional staff.
We are all proud of the unique relationship that independent gyms and fitness clubs are able to have with their members and automation doesn’t dilute that. As a company run by, and for, independent gym owners, we here at Ashbourne know that all too well. Automation, done properly, protects those qualities we all value as the club grows, rather than letting it become diluted and diminished by the weight of admin that comes with a larger operation.
And here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been helping independent gym and fitness club owners scale, whether they have a membership of 50, 500 or 1500.
Whether it is managing and chasing membership payments, installing innovative access controls, or creating, setting up, and maintaining their websites, we have ensured that thousands of gym owners have been able to spend more time growing their business.
If you want to see how a company made by and for independent gym owners could help you deliver even more value to your members without losing any control over how your facility is run, don’t hesitate to book a demo with our in-house, UK based team today.
Fair Rates For Fitness
If you are reading this, you’ll forgive us if we assume you are someone who cares about the UK’s fitness industry. If so, there is something we’d like to mention, something important to all of us working and operating within the fitness industry.
Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been proud to work in this dynamic, innovative sector for three decades. At time of writing the UK government has decided to increase business rates as part of the latest budget. While we are always happy to pay our way, we believe that these rates do not acknowledge the incredible benefit that independent gyms and fitness clubs bring to society.
Every party manifesto claims that they want the people of the UK to be healthier, happier, and more active. But when the time comes to match action to rhetoric, our industry is too often left out.
So, if you want to make your voice heard alongside the hundreds who have already acted, follow the link here to Fair Rates for Fitness, a campaign being championed by our partners over at the Gym Owner’s Forum.
