Health Club Management

Managing your health club is all about systems. Systems make your life easier, make your fitness business run more smoothly, and increase your likelihood for success.

It's not enough to simply be a good leader or to have employees you can delegate to. Managing a health club means making sure systems are implemented, goals are reached, emails are answered, bills are paid, membership dues are received, employees are productive, member concerns are handled, profit centers are profiting, everything is clean, decisions are made, opportunities are sought, and everything is working and running smoothly.

Seem overwhelming? Without systems and the knowledge to handle everything, it certainly can be. An elite health club manager must embrace the idea of systems, develop them, and implement them. Here is a short list of some of the more important systems you'll need to develop and adhere to. Of course, you can always hire Fitness Marketing Group and we'll guide the entire process for you.

You need systems and strategies to help maximize revenues, cut expenses, and continually monitor the financial status of your club. A proper financial platform is critical to the performance of your fitness business. No matter what your budget, FMG will help you structure these systems to maximize profits and efficiency.

You will want to develop an Operations Manual, making sure you have ALL systems documented so that everyone and everything is working efficiently. You will need to set goals and deadlines for you and your staff on an ongoing basis. You will also need to identify which tasks take priority and identify high capacity staff members to delegate appropriate tasks to.

We lay out step by step the best practices for hiring employees, customer service, and day-to-day management of your club. Checklists, hours, cancelations procedures, billing management and collections are just the tip of the iceberg. You must be clear with your staff the proper policies and procedures in your club, helping you run a more efficient and professional business.

You will ALWAYS BE MARKETING! This is one of those non-optional parts of running a health club. Yes, you can get away with not cleaning under the treadmills for a while, or forgetting to stock the fridge, but marketing...marketing can never stop. At any given moment of any given day, you should be able to name off at least a half dozen different ways your club is currently being marketed. If you can't, you need to get your marketing plan in place. The strategies don't need to be expensive; in fact you should be focusing on strategies that cost nothing! Guerrilla marketing typically generates a much higher response rate than traditional marketing. FMG will guide your marketing process based on proven methods that have generated millions of dollars in membership revenue worldwide. Visit our Resources Page and fill in your Club Profile for a complimentary consultation.

Retention is arguably the most important factor to long term success in your health club. However, before we can discuss how to improve it we have to identify exactly what it is and how to measure it. Contrary to popular belief retention in our industry is not measured by the amount of new members vs. the amount of lost members, it is measured by how long a member pays you before he or she eventually cancels their membership. FMG will help you implement programming aimed at increasing your average retention rate.

This goes for hiring, firing, promoting, training, managing, and everything in between. Your staff needs a leader and they need to know exactly what they should be doing at any given time. If your staff operates without a plan, then you will never experience the success at your gym that is possible with appropriate systems. You have to always remember that you cannot rely on your staff, you can ONLY rely on systems.

Chances are that you are owner/operator of your fitness business and the buck stops with you. Every tough decision, ever marketing piece, system implemented, new staff hired...they all go through you. And while everyone turns to you for guidance, where do you get guidance? Are you confident that your concepts will be successful? Are you ready to pull the trigger on decisions that will have thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars riding on them?

Every business needs help. It is those owners and managers who reach out for help who are the most successful. Yes, we do as well. FMG partners with club consultants and gains experience from hundreds of clients worldwide. Not only that but we invest tens of thousands of dollars every year to attend conferences, purchase programs, and participate in mastermind groups inside and outside of the fitness industry. You must always be willing to invest in your knowledge. Teach a man to fish...