Let’s reverse engineer a financially successful gym.
What does a gym need to become/grow more profitable?
Happy members.
That feels like a no-brainer, something not even worth pointing out in an article like this, but it’s a commonly overlooked “ingredient” many struggling gym owners fail to recognize.
They look at the revenue and their overhead and do some Starbucks napkin math, and the pit in their stomachs clouds their vision. They know happy members are essential, but they need money now, not later, so they start looking for solutions that might give them an instant cash infusion to tie them over while they figure out something long-term.
Back to happy members.
What does it mean to have happy members?
The simplest definition is that they’re reliably and consistently achieving their goals.
Achieving goals: This is straightforward on paper but not so much in real life. What if you have a member who signed up to lose 50 pounds, and she’s been coming consistently for 6 months and hasn’t lost any weight?
How do you handle that?
Do you let her keep paying even though she’s not getting what she wants, or do you end her membership and refer her to a facility or individual that is a better fit to serve her?
Short-term thinking says, “Keep the revenue; the failure is on her.
Long-term thinking says, “She needs help we can’t provide here. She would be better off with XYZ gym, and continuing to accept her money is a strike against our integrity and reputation.”
Now that we have “Happy Members” established as a non-negotiable for a successful gym, how do you reliably ensure your members are happy?
This is where the state-of-the-art facility comes into the conversation.
Having the fanciest equipment in town won’t keep your members happy, and chasing that rabbit leads to a race to provide the most novelty rather than the best service.
Most people aren’t looking for a place with the newest, most advanced equipment and wouldn’t recognize it even if they saw it.
They just want results, and the way you guarantee results isn’t by 10Xing your overhead with new equipment every 2 years.
It’s by having a coaching staff who delivers on every promise they make to every client they have. A coaching staff who does that is worth infinitely more than the next shiny “advancement” in fitness equipment and needs to be your top priority.
If you want happy members so that you can have a successful gym, you need a happy and professional coaching staff, and that doesn’t happen if your staff is a revolving door of coaches who see fitness as a side gig.
If you need help professionalizing your staff, book a call
