The road to becoming an owner of a successful new fitness club can seem daunting and a long struggle. But there are a number of ways which you can improve your chances to getting there.
Here’s a few tips to setting up your new fitness club for success.
Equipment & Tools
Choosing the right equipment is key to not only saving money in ongoing maintenance and repairs but also client satisfaction. If you’re claiming to be the best crossfit gym, you better ensure you’ve got high quality barbells and bumper plates. Similarly it’s important for member retention to have quality member management software, billing systems, CRM’s/Marketing and other tools.
Branding
Branding your facility should communicate who you are to your audience clearly and consistently across all of your marketing channels. Take into consideration who your target audience are, their interests and how you would like your club to be perceived.
If you’re not the creative type, you can always find graphic designers and marketing consultants in your area or online. There are also websites such as fiverr and upwork where your club can get design work done cheap from freelancers.
When deciding on finalizing your branding, be sure to take advice from friends or family within your target audience. Just because it looks good to you, it doesn’t mean it’s going to appeal to your customers. Get a second opinion (or two)! Send messages or share an anonymous google form on your facebook timeline asking which logo your friends prefer.
Creating Website
Creating a website for your club is relatively easy in today’s day and age. You don’t have to be particularly tech savvy to create one with the tools at your disposal. Platforms such as WordPress or builders like Wix and Squarespace.
For some clubs, this will service their website needs to get information across to their members. However, to create a USEFUL website for members, you want to add a bit of functionality to your site. Functionality includes online sign ups, booking classes online, personal trainer appointments etc. Click here to learn how to easily create a useful fitness club website.
Foundation Memberships
Before opening your new club, establishing a foundational base of members helps cover some costs and reduce stress. A trend among new clubs is to do this by offering “Foundation memberships”. These are a limited supply of memberships offered at a discounted rate and usually lock-in members for 12 months. A limited supply of 100-200 memberships at a discount is great for creating a sense of urgency for impulse sign-ups. It’s also a great market penetration tactic for taking members off pre-existing competition.
It’s easy to set up this foundational membership - book a demo to see how this can be done in just minutes within GymMaster.
Establish Multiple Revenue Streams
Diversifying your income away from solely relying on recurring memberships not only gives you the ability to make more revenue per member at your club - It also gives your members a better club experience.
Offering products such as headphones, towels, coffees, pre-workouts and protein saves your members from going out of their way to prepare for their workouts while also benefiting your club with supplementary income.
Popular secondary services for fitness clubs to generate additional revenue streams include personal trainers or nutritionists doing up plans and routines for clients, workout classes and recently - meal preparation services using external prep companies.
Reinvest
A good new club reinvests a good portion of their income back into the facility for the first few months at least. It’s almost guaranteed that things pop up which you didn’t think of or account for in the planning of your facility. Maybe your members want different sized weights or are missing a certain type of attachment to use with your cable pulleys - these types of things are always going to crop up when you first invite members into your club, having funds set aside is important to keeping these new members happy and loyal to your club.
Software
We’re a bit biased, but running your club shouldn’t mean sitting at a desk all day and wasting hours on billing, sending emails to members and running check-ins. You should be interacting with your members, making them feel welcome at your club and getting to know their needs to constantly be improving the experience which your fitness club offers. It’s 2019, automation and simplification are key to making your job stress free - give your club a head start and book a demo to see how we can set your new club up for success.
Now that you’ve got an idea on some of the best practices for success of a new fitness club, it’s time to build anticipation among your target audience and get those members in the doors. Check out how you can get your first 100 gym members here.
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