Very few independent gyms and fitness clubs can claim to be entirely unaffected by the ebb and flow of the seasons. January means a flood of new members through the door. Summer thins the room out. Some gyms stay steady through it all, others get rocked by the waves. Today we are going to look at the operational habits and good practice that can help make any fitness business steady through the seasons.
Let’s start with reporting, because the owner who only finds out how their gym’s memberships are doing at month-end is already behind. By the time the team has manually reconciled everything into one spreadsheet, it is possible that the slide has been happening for weeks.
Data and Dashboards
A properly functioning BI dashboard can show trends for cancellation, sign-ups, and much more as they are unfolding, not as a patched together summary three months after the fact. We aren’t saying that gym owners need to spend their week staring at numbers, but when it is time to stare at some numbers, make sure they are live, up to date, and didn’t take hours to compile.
While they can be overlooked as simple logistics, the payment processes that a gym has in place contribute significantly to stability, no matter what the season.
Payment Power
Seamless Direct debit collection removes a friction for gyms that can cause a lapsed member to become a lost member. If somebody wants to rejoin come January, that journey should be as effortless as the gym can possibly make it. Motivation is a shaky thing, and it doesn’t take much for someone to put joining up on an indefinite to-do list.
But if they can sign up online in two minutes, there is a good chance they will. If they have to show up in person or call someone? That chance just plummeted. The gyms that make joining and rejoining simple pick up members the ones with a clunky sign-up process lose to a competitor down the road.
Consistent Comms
Regular communication can get left by the wayside when things get busy, but bad optics can cost an independent gym an awful lot in the long run. Member might not pay attention to every e-mail that their gym sends or every social media post that goes up, but they notice when it stops. Think about it like a radio set to low. You hear some parts and not others, but you’d noticed if it suddenly went silent. Outside of all the obvious, direct benefits of good comms, regular updates about events, upgrades, and new features help give members and non-members alike that everything is running like clockwork in your facility.
Flexibility
A poor attitude towards flexibility when it comes to membership handling is where a lot of gyms lose members they didn’t need to lose. The appeal of a hardline ‘stay or cancel’ can feel appealing in its certainty. Afterall no-one wants to give a customer an excuse not to pay his monthly direct debit.
But a member who is going through an injury or a house move doesn’t want to cancel outright. They’d like an option that all-or-nothing. Whether that is a freeze, a downgrade or a pause with a set return date, members remember flexibility, especially from their local, independent businesses
Give members a reprieve and they are likely to remember it. Show members the door? They are likely to remember that as well.
None of this is a substitute for good retention work on the gym floor. Making sure your gym or club is more than a place people go to work out can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Whether it is a series of challenges or events that you run through a slow month, professional and engaged staff, or a class programme that is offering things that no-one else in your area is offering, these are the features that are likely to keep members showing up when the weather or the time of year would otherwise talk them out of it.
Put these measures together and the result is an engaged, proactive business, making the most of its data. One that is offering a frictionless, professional service to its members. A gym doesn’t stay stable through both Winter and Summer by accident. They stay stable because they built strong systems that allow them to predict the predictable and react quickly to everything else.
The rest is consistency, whether it is how the member pays, how they manage their membership or the nature of the communication they receive. Each one shouldn’t feel sporadic or arbitrary, but purposeful and professional.
Our partners over at Kingdom Gym discovered this firsthand when they started working with Ashbourne.
Before partnering with us, everything from membership sign-ups and payments to access controls were tracked from a computer on the reception desk using an Excel spreadsheet. Not only that, they didn’t handle direct debits, so everything was cash.
The outcome was, unsurprisingly, a lack of consistency. Retention suffered, the joining process was the opposite of frictionless and all of this resulted in a lot of wasted working hours for little return.
“When I first came to Ashbourne I was sceptical about putting people onto Direct Debits. After a month or two, the membership increased and it was a lot easier admin-wise” – Karl, Kingdom Gym Owner.
While Kingdom Gyms systems did the job initially, they weren’t built to scale and they weren’t built for seasonal instability. Ashbourne’s services allowed them to enact direct debits and online joining, all while effortlessly allowing 24/7 access and collecting all the data for future use in decision-making.
The effect was transformative and has left Kingdom Gym much more resilient as they move from strength to strength.
And here at Ashbourne we have helped thousands of independent gym and fitness club owners achieve exactly what Kingdom Gym managed. We have been helping independent gym and fitness club owners scale for nearly thirty years, no matter if their goal is to go from 50 members to 500, or 500 to 2000.
So whether it is managing and chasing membership payments, installing innovative access controls, or sleek BI Dashboards at the click of a button, there are countless ways we can help gym owners to sustain and grow 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.
