Nearly every independent gym and fitness club plans for January and as a result the internet is awash with articles, blogs and think-pieces about how to make the most of the January-Joiners. But fewer plan for September, and today we are going to talk about why that is no different from leaving money right on the table.
It’s because for a lot of independent gyms, September is the second real peak of the year. School terms restart, routines reset, and as such, interest in fitness starts to rise once again.
So today we won’t just be looking at how to get the members through the door, that should already largely be happening, we’ll be looking at what happens in the two or three weeks after they’ve signed on the virtual dotted line.
Dealing with September Spikes
A spike in sign-ups can’t be viewed as an isolated event. It is a positive event, of course, but it is as much the beginning of a process as it is a victory to be celebrated. Every new member who joins in September needs a payment method set up correctly, they need access sorted so they can actually get through the door, they probably will have questions in their first week, and there is a good chance they will show up wanting to book a class or another specialised service the gym offers.
Of course many gyms have some of these tasks automated, such as access controls, online joining and payment management. But multiply that by thirty or forty new members in a fortnight and you’ve got the potential for quite a queue at the front desk that has nothing to do with human error and everything to do with processes and procedures.
Member Sign-ups: Online Joining and Automated Direct Debits
New member sign-up is unsurprisingly the first place this additional pressure starts to show. The approach should always be to lower the barriers to entry where possible, and that means a gym still walking people through a paper form or a slow manual process loses start losing members before they’ve even joined.
A prospective member who was motivated to join on Sunday evening but can’t join unless they are physically in the gym might not retain the motivation to sign up at all. Conversely, online joining lets someone sign up and pay in one sitting, without waiting for a callback or a desk visit, captures people at the exact moment they’ve decided, rather than the moment staff finally get round to processing them.
It is why seamless payment setup is such a vital part of the online joining process. Automated direct debit setup removes that step from a busy staff team’s plate entirely. Not only does this mean that more members can be processed, no matter the time or number, it also means that each member receives a better, more controlled service. No longer will a prospective member have to sit in a queue waiting to setup their payment because they happened to walk in at a busy time.
It is a common throughline in this article, it isn’t whether or not the system works most of the time, it is whether it works at the busiest times. It is a distinction that can make a significant difference to the bottom line.
Automated Access
Access (and by extension, access controls) is the next area where things can start go wrong, and it can be a real pain point for both revenue and member satisfaction.
After all, a member who’s signed up, paid up, and turned up ready to train, only to find something wrong won’t be impressed. It could be that the queues are too long, or the turnstile is broken, or even that people are able to slip through via codesharing.
It can come across as disorganised and oversubscribed at best, and downright incompetent at worst.
A member’s access experience will be very clear cut, either it’ll go well, or it won’t. And if it doesn’t, they will most likely have to wait. Waiting means either time out of their day or time out of their workout and neither will make them value your facility’s brand and service more.
That is why automated access controls that activates quickly after someone signs up online without staff intervention sends a powerful message early on. It tells them that your facility ‘just works’, and that’ll send a message of high value and professionalism to every member that walks through the turnstile in September and beyond.
Prospects
As we touched on earlier, prospect follow-up gets sacrificed first when things get busy. It feels intuitive, but in the long run it does more harm than good. A gym under pressure focuses on the members already through the door and lets enquiries take care of themselves.
The logic is a sort of “either they’ll show up or they won’t” mentality, and when someone is faced with a list of names, e-mails and numbers, that is almost understandable.
This is where the value of a prospect management system really shines through. Any service that tracks who enquired and when can be vital for establishing a simple to manage pipeline to make the daunting task of prospect management much easier.
Membership Admin, Class Demand and Keeping an Eye on the Numbers
Membership changes have a habit of piling up during a busy month. Upgrades, downgrades, pauses, someone adding their partner onto a family plan, none of it looks like much in isolation, but multiply it across a hundred new and existing members all adjusting their accounts in the same fortnight, and it becomes a genuine drain on staff time. A gym that has the systems to either deal with it quickly or let members select the option themselves frees up staff for the interactions that actually need the human touch.
Spin Class Admin Shouldn’t Feel Like Spinning Plates
Nowhere does growth show up faster than in class booking, and it can start creating a negative experience very quickly to boot. A class that normally records just under-capacity suddenly being maxed out every week is a problem every gym owner wants to know about quickly.
Popular is a good problem to have but when the regulars can’t get into their class, a gym’s success is of scant comfort to them. A reactive class booking system allows independent gym owners and managers to quickly identify any potential problems caused by an influx and solve them quickly.
And that same ‘popularity pressure’ that can cause headaches for class admin can also manifest at the front desk. A member query is like a piece of string, it takes as long as it takes. And all it takes is two sticky wickets and suddenly there might be a line going out the door before long.
Because more new members mean more members to ask about billing, about a pass that isn’t working, about a class time that’s changed, about freezing a membership before a trip away. Most gyms can deal with ‘the usual’ number of enquiries, but in the unusual months it is vital to have automation doing as much of the heavy lifting as possible so staff can deal with the more bespoke task of handling member questions.
Sadly reporting is another function that is all too tempting to drop when a gym gets too busy managing administrave tasks. But reporting is vital insight that gym owners can least afford to abandon. A growth period is when it matters most to know which channel is actually bringing in enquiries, which classes are properly full rather than just busy-looking on paper, and where cancellations might be creeping up even while the sign-up numbers look strong. Without visibility from something like a seamless BI Dashboard suite to reduce the amount of time spent manually running reports, important trends won’t be identified until weeks later, and at that point the damage might already be done.
What Growth Looks Like When the Systems Catch Up: Team Rees
Richard Rees ran into this exact problem as his gym, Team Rees, started to expand. But the journey to his solution started with a visit to another gym rather than a simple purchase.
After seeing how one of Ashbourne’s partner gyms, The Fit Club Redditch, had automated its sign-up process, Richard came away wanting the same for his own gym. Paper sign-up forms were still the norm at the time, and it was obvious they wouldn’t hold up much longer against the pace the gym was growing at.
What replaced the paper forms didn’t have to be complicated. A couple of iPads went up near the entrance, and joining became something a new member could do themselves in the time it used to take to find a pen. “We’ve gone from paper sign-ups to a couple of super-sleek iPads in the gym with a hit-it, sign-up now button,” is how Richard puts it in an interview, and that’s really the whole story. Referral and discount codes moved into the same system, so an incentive that used to mean someone manually tracking who referred who now just runs on its own.
Access came next. Richard invested in turnstiles alongside fingerprint scanners, a decision he later called one of the best he made as the gym scaled. The benefits went beyond simple convenience. Knowing exactly who was in the building at any given time improved fire safety and member tracking in a way a staffed front desk never quite managed on its own, and it meant staff were no longer spending their day policing who walked through the door. Unauthorised entry (and the lost revenue that comes with it) stopped being a background risk as it was essentially stamped out overnight.
Team Rees’s experience is a useful illustration of everything this article has been building towards. Growth on its own doesn’t strain a gym. The absence of systems built to handle it does. Richard didn’t wait for a crisis at the front desk to force his hand, he saw a better way of working elsewhere, adopted it, and freed his staff up to focus on members rather than admin. That’s the real benefit of getting these systems in place before a growth spike arrives.
Not only does it prevent any damage to the member experience, it reinforces the quality of a gym’s brand with every exchange.
And Team Rees is one of only thousands of partner gym’s we’ve helped deal with the surge months and maximise their revenue. From our sophisticated access controls to our painless payment automation, every aspect of our service has received praise from across the industry over the course of the last 25 years.
So if you want a system that works as well in the busy periods as it does day-to-day, you are in the right place. 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 us here.
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.
