With more people adopting healthier lifestyles, gym memberships are set to continue rising over the next couple of years, giving gym owners an opportunity to cash in. While it is possible to make good money through your small gym, the prospect isn’t as easy as it might seem initially.
Becoming a successful gym owner is a reality for many fitness-minded people who have learned business skills. The most important ingredients for success as a gym owner is the ability to: 1) gain a customer, and 2) keep a customer doing business with you.
One of the most common problems many startup gym owners experience is low attendance, which is directly related to not only gaining new customers, but also retaining customers.
In other words, many people sign up for a gym membership and attend only once or a couple times, never to be seen again. If you’re looking to succeed as a gym owner, you need to offer a high value membership experience that incentivizes your clients to keep coming back.
Here are nine things you can do to be a highly successful gym owner:
1. Invest In Safe, Cutting Edge Equipment that Your Customers Value
To succeed in the gym and fitness business, you’ll need great equipment that your members value. The sole purpose is to heighten the customer experience based on what is most important to your ideal customer. Remember, your ideal customer that fits squarely in your target market may not care about the most expensive Cybex Functional trainer when a pull up bar, a tire and medicine balls are always available in a great airy atmosphere.
Alternatively, you don’t necessarily need sophisticated and expensive equipment if you don’t have enough space or your gym room is too tiny. As long as you provide your clients with quality equipment that they can use, they receive great training and support from you and your team, and in an excellent atmosphere they enjoy, you’ll do great.
With this being said, you need to ensure that your gym equipment is safe 100% of the time, with zero exemptions. Nothing will ruin you faster than an unwanted injury. Spare no precautions when it comes to developing a safe environment.
2. Make The Sign-Up Process As Simple As Possible
The simpler and easier the signup process for your gym is, the easier it will be to acquire customers.
For this reason, you should get rid of any hurdles that could potentially discourage your customers. For instance, you can incentivize customers with a discount or free bonus for setting up their online account, fill out their signup form where customers can fill out most of the paperwork, then have them sign a final contract at the end of the on-boarding process.
Make this process fun, make it a valuable experience for your new members and fill it with bonuses and swag and make the sign up process truly a life-changing experience — because it is!
Done right, this is an opportunity to be far far different than 99% of the gyms today who offer little extra value at sign up beyond a sales pitch, an enrollment fee and little personal care after sign up.
You can be far far better.
3. Establish A Solid Marketing Strategy to Gain New Customers and Keep them Coming Back
Even if your gym has all the bells and whistles of the most current and modern fitness center, you’re going to have a hard time gaining and keeping clients if you don’t have an effective marketing strategy.
Marketing is where you can truly shine and create a massive difference in the marketplace and for your customers.
Building a good marketing strategy not only attracts new customers to your business but also keeps your customers coming back more often.
This will enable you to keep your sales revenues high so that you can have plenty of resources to pay your fixed costs — leaving you with ample free cash flow to continue to grow your gym and fitness facility — and thereby grow your brand.
For your marketing strategy to be successful, you’ll need to combine both in-person and digital marketing strategies.
Here are three important ways to get your gm marketing strategy started:
- Unique Selling Proposition vs. Value Proposition (with examples)
- How Do You Target New Customers? (6 simple steps)
- What is the marketing mix and why is it important? | The 4 P’s of marketing
4. Consider Buying A Fitness Franchise
While opening an independent gym business can be satisfying in itself, you’ll have a higher chance of success in your fitness niche if you buy a fitness franchise. This is largely because with a fitness franchise, you are buying into an existing framework of business success.
Joining a franchise allows you to be a part of an existing brand. In theory, the brand you choose should translate into a:
- Reliable method of gaining and keeping customers
- Potentially higher monthly sales revenues
- Net income and free cash flow, faster and
- A better personal and business financial statement (for you!)
While these outcomes do very frequently happen, they are not always the case. It is up to you to do your due diligence, meet the franchise support team and other franchisees, and make your own personal risk – reward assessment.
5. Understand Your Competitor’s Customer Value Proposition
It is easy for people to tell you to, “Watch your competition”. But what does this mean exactly?
Watch them do what?
Pricing strategy? Ads in the local newspaper? Their email campaigns? New year’s special? Approach to weight loss? How do their trainers operate? How do their managers dress?
Yes, and more.
The first step in carefully watching the competition is to determine their Customer Value Proposition.
The Customer Value Proposition is far more than just a unique selling proposition (USP).
The Customer Value Proposition is how they separate themselves from the competition, at a high level strategy and business operations level. It is deeply ingrained into their hiring procedures, their balance sheet, their management training, the equipment they choose, their inventory levels, their approach to customer service, marketing and more. The Customer Value Proposition is their core fundamental business model and research shows there are only 3 models. They are:
The good news is most companies develop their strategy by accident, with no real clear value proposition. This means the opportunity for you to dominate your chosen marketplace is virtually unlimited.
For examples and how this works, go here to see more about Anytime Fitness.
As long as you are moving forward with a clear Customer Value Proposition, over time, your competition will become less and less relevant.
6. Incorporate Gym Management Software
Your gym management software is extremely important and not to be taken lightly.
Your software literally helps you make better decisions.
Not just for collecting and managing your customer list, but for billing, reporting and future forecasting.
And depending upon the scope of the software, your daily operations, personnel planning, personal training services and revenue forecasting will be totally dialed in. Further putting you in front of competitors.
Not only will your data-driven marketing become easier and more efficient helping your to make better marketing decisions, but your excel-based and google sheets decision modeling to help you forecast daily operations, personnel scheduling, and inventory control will be far more advanced than anyone else in the business. Plus your marketing and business analytics will be dialed in giving you more control over your database management and customer survey information as well as determining ROI on your ad campaigns. And possibly most importantly, your approach to how you communicate with customers via your customer’s Recency, Frequency and Monetary Spend business analysis will be far more sophisticated than anyone else in the gym and fitness business.
Now you can see that your gym management software plays a huge role in your gym operations.
7. Encourage Customers To Get Active in Social Media and Leave Positive Reviews
It’s no secret that most customers today take reviews very seriously when gauging whether or not to engage with a business or purchase a product.
Since people generally tend to trust the opinion of other customers than they do business, requesting your clients to leave reviews can significantly boost your brand’s visibility and draw more customers to your business.
The first and most important place to start with your reviews and social media is with your Google Business Profile, formerly called Google My Business.
As a gym owner that serves local customers, Google Business Profile is absolutely worth it. The Google Business Profile service is free and is a core component of any local marketing strategy.
Whether you provide products or services, Google Business Profile provides an easy to manage interface that lets you feature your most important business information which can be listed in local search results, as well as provide a valuable tool for customers to leave positive reviews. Go here for more information about how to set up your Google Business Profile.
8. Provide Your Employees With Good Training
As a gym owner, you’ll need to ensure that all of your employees understand your brand and everything your business offers.
This important part of your gym and customer experience is deeply tied to your Customer Value Proposition and should not be taken lightly.
For example, if you choose to compete on the Customer Intimacy Customer Value Proposition, the staff you hire must be warm, communicative, service providers totally focused on staying ahead of your customers.
Alternatively, if you choose to compete on the Product Leadership Customer Value Proposition, your staff should be trained to stay focused on providing cutting-edge R&D in developing the highest quality product in the industry.
As you can see, there are vast differences in the training procedures and staff expectations.
At a bare minimum, your staff should be knowledgeable on every bundle, course, product, or service that you’re providing and have the know-how to up-sell or cross-sell.
9. Be A Good Student
The fitness industry is constantly evolving and it may seem like new trends emerge almost daily.
You’ll need to keep learning to stay on top of new developments. Not only investing into industry continuing education, but also staying on top of business trends.
Doing so will give you a wealth of ideas that you can use to re-energize your gym, and gain and retain your competitive edge.