Gym Best Practices - Part 2

GymMaster is packed with some great features to help cut administration time. Here is Part 2 of our simple gym best practices to help make your system work for you.

Link GymMaster with your accounting system

• If you keep a separate accounting system, or perhaps you are already operating a stand-alone accounting program, you don’t need to transfer every detail from GymMaster. It is highly useful, though, to transfer your sales totals. The Key Performance Indicator report gives you some useful totals for transferring.
• The figures to transfer are your total payments for each area, so that your banking lines up.
• You also need to transfer your total sales of memberships.
• Income in advance report is useful so you know how much revenue you have incurred in the future.

Monitor your gyms performance

• Talk about KPIs…
• Talk about reports to run,
• Monitoring retention.
• Dashboard in GymMaster. And what bar graphs mean. Showing a picture of that.

Membership retention

• Talk about retention of memberships. And how to achieve this.
• Chase members before there min term, not close to it. There is no point chasing members to come back to the gym 3 weeks before there term is up. You have already effectively lost the member. Far better to get them back into the gym 2-3 months before they expire.
• Members typically go through cycles of exercise. Which can be 3-4 months long of active fitness (Note to self…. We should actually check what membership patterns are and how people go to the gym). As part of that
• If a member stops going to the gym for 6 months, and suddenly comes back in your should treat it as a great opportunity to reconnect to them. Make sure they have the best first day in the gym. Keep them motivated and feeling good about going back to the gym.
• You want to monitor the happiness of a member. Members often slowly start dropping off there visitor pattern before they go off together. Once a member is no longer visiting, it is very hard to get them back into the gym. You want to target them when they are visiting less often.
• If someone is coming to your gym 3 times a week, they will refer business you way. If they are coming once a week, they are content. But if they are only coming once a month you run the risk of losing them as a member.
• Remember though people go through fitness cycles. Its hard to be moved 365 days a year. You just want to make sure they think of you when they want to start going back to the gym.
• Keep there experience in the gym a great experience and they will keep coming.
• Group fitness can also help. Along with if they can bring their friends to the gym.
• Having a great culture in your gym ensures strong membership retention.
• You want to target for 50% of your membership base been active in order to retain your membership numbers. If you drop below 50% you run the risk of been able to maintain membership numbers.

Personal Trainers

• The good and the bad… agrr.
• Great personal trainers will help you retain members and keep members motivated to achieve.
• Bad personal trainers can have an adverse effect on your membership base. Members won’t come in because they don’t want to run into there personal trainer and be under pressure to see them again.
• Make sure the relationships are healthy between members and personal trainers.
• A bad PT will cause members to avoid the gym. And they will leave and go to another gym after there membership term is up.
• Monitor membership retention by personal trainer, it gives you good insight on your star performing personal trainers.

Where to locate a gym

• People want a gym close to either where they work or where they live. So location is key. It is the place they will often go to between traveling back and forth from work.
• Make sure you do your research first on what gyms are in the area. And if any of them are targeting the same membership base that you are.
• The closer you are to transit roads is also good, as it means members can quickly and easily stop in while traveling between work and home.
• Download our eBook for more tips on running a successful gym