Anyone who has ran (or, for an even greater challenge, started up) an independent gym or fitness club knows that members leaving isn’t the only thing threatening to damage your revenue streams.
Whether it is losing out on membership fees because failed payments sat unchased for three weeks, an access card was never updated after a membership change, or a wait-listed member never got the email that a space had opened up. There is unfortunately many opportunities for money to get left on the table.
Worse still, revenue leaks can be hard to spot at the best of times, and even harder to spot when a gym’s staff are stretched to capacity.
Every operator working in our industry knows how these gaps start. All it takes is a couple of staff on annual leave, followed by someone calling in sick. It might not even take that, it could just be a particularly busy point of the year with a particularly lean team.
But unfortunately gym admin is rarely considerate enough to pause while you address the backlog, and if it does that might be a sign that there is whole other problem to deal with.
Even with parts of the team out of action, payments still need collecting, failed payments still need following up, new members still need to be able to join. Access still needs updating the moment someone’s status changes. None of it waits for a calmer week, because a calmer week rarely comes.
Manual Admin is only a short term solution
Manual admin errors tend to fall into one of a few categories. Whether it is a batch of reminders that never get sent, access permission that never get revoked or a membership change that gets hastily written down on a post-it note and then forgotten. Each one is understandable, but not only can each one cause frustration, they can each represent a potential loss in revenue.
It is easy to underestimate how quickly it can all add up. A single missed follow-up for a failed payment could cost a gym £30 for a month. Multiply that across even a few dozen ‘failed’ members over a full year, and it becomes one of the largest unplanned losses for a fitness business.
Certainly not a loss that can be taken lightly for many fitness businesses in this challenging economy.
So today we are going to look at how ensure your revenue is protected and the cash keeps flowing.
Payment collection cannot depend on who is in the gym
Direct Debit collection should be the single biggest revenue process in any fitness business, but it is also one that can be easily neglected when a team is stretched. If payment are processed manually, or depends on someone remembering to check a report, something will eventually be missed. It won’t necessarily be down to carelessness, but because payment collection and processing competes for attention with members standing at the desk, phones ringing, and problems that need solving on the gym floor.
Automated Direct Debit collections effective remove that dependency entirely. Now instead of relying on in-facility staff, payments go out on schedule regardless of who is on shift, unaffected by who calls in sick, or goes on holiday, or even how busy the site gets. The process does not need a person to remember it exists. This alone protects more revenue than almost any other single change an operator can make, because it takes the most valuable process in the business out of the hands of an already-stretched team.
Failed payments need chasing
Too often we have found independent gyms that approach a failed payment as a write-off in the making. And we can understand why, chasing takes time. Time that most independent gyms and their staff don’t have.
But there is often a fairly valid reason behind why their members have defaulted, it isn’t uncommon to find that they still want to be a member and that their card had either expired or just had insufficient funds on the day.
So whether our theoretical independent gym collects these missed payments depends entirely on what they do next. If their follow-up happens within a day or two, most of these payments are recovered without friction. If it happens later, there is a greater potential for confusion and discomfort on the part of the member.
Unfortunately these are the sort of tasks that are easy to justify putting on the backburner when a gym is busy. We tend to deal with the problems in front of our eyes.
But it is a task with a shelf life, which is why so many independent gyms and fitness clubs have benefitted from entrust their payment collection and debt recovery to a third party company.
By ensuring that a team of trained professionals are able to chase any failed payments and outstanding member debts, it allows independent gym owners and their teams to focus on the problems in front of them and protects revenue that might otherwise disappear unnoticed into the “we’ll get to it later” pile.
Online joining should not depend on someone being free to process it
A prospective member who fills in a form in-person, or waits for a callback that doesn’t come for two days, is a prospective member who is currently also looking at other gyms in the area. The prospective member that finds a gym’s website online and signs up within the next hour is locked in, and so is their contribution to the gym’s revenue stream.
Manual sign-up processes can work well enough in the early days when a team has spare capacity to process them promptly. But not only do they scale poorly, they are most likely to buckle during the busy periods.
Implementing automated Online Joining not only removes this bottleneck entirely, it frees up gym staff for other tasks. A new member can sign up, complete their Direct Debit instruction, and then gain access without the process requiring the immediate attention of a team member. It allows your members to sign-up in real time, whether it is 3pm on a Tuesday or 2am on a Sunday morning when everyone else is asleep. No enquiry sits in an inbox waiting for someone to have a spare ten minutes, the member and their payment details are in the system, waiting for you come morning.
Access control updates need to happen the moment a member changes their membership.
Access control is one of the places where any administrative delays and inefficiencies can become a visible, physical, often member-frustrating problem.
Whether it is a member who cancels but manages to retain access their access credentials, a member who upgrades but is still being charged the old rate or a member who upgraded but can’t get access to the full facility due to an admin error.
Each of these is a small operational failure with a direct cost, and each becomes more likely the moment a team is too stretched to manually cross-reference membership status against their access control system.
This is where Access Control’s integrated into membership management software can close the margin for error by linking entry directly to payment and membership status. When a membership changes, when a payment fails, or when a member cancels, access updates automatically.
With a system like this in place, nobody needs to remember to cancel specific aspects of a member’s access and nobody needs to manually check who is allowed through the door that day. The system reflects the current state of the membership in real time, something that matters most when staff have the least time to check it themselves.
Membership changes, class bookings and reporting all carry the same risk
Continuing along the same theme, this pattern has the potential to repeat itself across every corner of a gym’s administration.
It could be a membership downgrade logged in a spreadsheet, or a class booking taken over the phone and never entered, or a reporting task that gets pushed back a week, then another. These will all most likely seem sadly familiar to anyone who has worked in an independent gym or fitness club using manual administration.
But none of these tasks need to become a liability, especially when there is already more than enough for a gym’s staff to be attending to.
Automating membership means that any changes made, whether an upgrade, downgrade or freeze, takes effect immediately and therefore consistently, rather than depending on someone to input the necessary information manually across linked systems.
Meanwhile automating class bookings removes all sorts of busy work, a phone call here, a paper list there, to say nothing of the tedium of managing a manual waitlist. Instead members get to book, cancel and get notifications. A better service for less effort, with no control ceded by the gym owner or his team.
And Automated reporting means that accurate data is only a few clicks away, rather than the culmination of hours of reconciliation. All of this can make a massive difference when it comes to organising a proactive, responsive strategy to protecting your revenue while growing your fitness business.
Automation does not replace people. It protects the work that keeps the business moving
None of this is us making an argument for either cutting down on staff, or for treating members as cogs in a machine. Done well, the opposite is true, as automation can empower staff and allow members to be treated with more personal care.
When Direct Debit collection, failed payment follow-up, online joining, access control and reporting run automatically, staff are freed to do the parts of the job that genuinely require a person. Whether that be coaching, welcoming new members or resolving queries at the front desk.
Member Support exists for exactly this reason, sitting alongside automation rather than replacing the need for it. Automation handles the processes that can be standardised and need to be processed without error.
People handle the moments that require judgement, empathy or a decision that a system cannot make. The two shouldn’t be in competition. A gym with strong automation and a present, engaged team is in a far stronger position than one relying entirely on either extreme.
CrossFit Tyneside: Living proof that automation is essential
CrossFit Tyneside is one gym that has felt the practical difference this makes. Working with Ashbourne, the facility moved to an all-in-one membership management system that automated billing, payment tracking and renewals, alongside integrated member communication, and had it fully operational within a week.
CrossFit Tyneside felt the results of their decision immediately.
By introducing both automated billing and payment tracking, Ashbourne was able to reduce late payments and cut down on admin errors that had previously required manual attention.
Not only that, new members could sign up digitally and therefore immediately, getting instant access to the gym, rather than waiting for a staff member to process their details. Membership plans could be tailored to different member needs without creating extra administrative work for the team.
Ashbourne was also able to provide CrossFit Tyneside with a fully branded mobile app for their members, giving members a direct way to book and cancel classes, manage waitlists, track their progress and receive push notifications for announcements, promotions and class reminders.
This app was built for full integration with Ashbourne’s existing systems, giving CrossFit Tyneside the polish of a bespoke app without the cost or lead time of building one in-house.
Integrated access control removed the need for manual check-ins at reception altogether. Members simply use their membership card to enter, with the system instantly confirming their payment status and flagging any account that needs staff attention. The result was constant, secure access for members, a lighter workload at the front desk, and stronger peace of mind for staff and management, knowing the door only opens for members who are genuinely up to date.
As Andrew at CrossFit Tyneside put it: “Really, I struggle to fault the service.”
For any independent gyms or fitness clubs managing the same daily pressures, whether in staffing or in admin or making sure revenue is protected while a small team covers a great deal of ground, automation might be the answer.
And here at Ashbourne Membership Management provides the systems that keep these essential processes running, whatever the week throws at a team.
Whether it has been via installing and maintaining innovative access controls, chasing down non-paying members, or setting up a members mobile app, we have ensured that thousands of gym owners have the best tech, secured revenue, and fantastic customer service.
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.
Now that it is confirmed that the UK will find itself with yet another new PM, the time for the fitness industry to make our voices heard is now.
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. Andy Burnham or whoever is to become the next leader of the United Kingdom will have tough choices to make, and it is our job to highlight that this common sense policy will have fantastic benefits for people up and down the country.
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.
