What has the greatest impact on the experience your clients have inside your gym?
For those of us in the fitness industry, the first things that come to mind are things like programming, the friendliness of staff, and the amount of equipment.
While those things DO matter, they’re afterthoughts for most of the people who walk through your doors.
They care far more about seemingly small things like cleanliness.
People despise working out in dirty gyms.
When we polled the @activliferx Instagram account with over 65k followers, lack of cleanliness drove more people to leave their gym than anything else.
It wasn’t because they had old equipment or even too little equipment.
It wasn’t because the coaching staff wasn’t knowledgeable enough.
It wasn’t because they didn’t have class times to fit a variable schedule.
It’s because they felt gross about working out in a place that wasn’t clean.
Put yourself in the shoes of the average person, and this makes total sense. Would you want your shirt to be black or, even worse, covered in dog hair every time you got on the floor to do a burpee?
How would you feel about making a financial sacrifice to train somewhere that the bathrooms felt like a scene from The Walking Dead?
Take it even further.
Most people don’t feel comfortable in a gym environment; they feel self-conscious and out of place.
They feel vulnerable.
Is it right to ask them to be vulnerable in a dirty gym?
They don’t think so, and that’s why they find a different place to train.
So that begs the question, how clean is your gym?
If it's not a point of pride, you can be certain you have clients who are less than enthusiastic about touching certain surfaces or using the bathroom in your facility. For better or worse, that’s the sentiment most of them will use to judge your business.
On the one hand, that can feel harsh and unfair, but in reality, it’s a massive opportunity because most gyms haven’t made cleanliness a top priority.
Making cleanliness a top priority is an easy way to stand out.
Making it a point of pride will set you apart.
If you and your staff can't stay on top of it to the extent that you're willing to post something on your social media pages at least weekly, proclaiming to the world that you have the cleanest facility in town, hire someone.
Hire them and THEN tell the world.
People in your town will take notice, and they'll walk through your doors.
