If your club has developed a proactively dynamic and interactive Standard Operating Procedure [S.O.P.] that has drastically reduced your membership attrition rate, please do not read this article!

However, if you are looking for some additional strategies that more and more progressive clubs are successfully using to drastically take control of our attrition problem, please continue reading this article.

Our approach to membership recruitment, to membership retention and membership referrals is so simple, that most clubs miss this point! The solution is about people… it’s about the people who use our facilities, the members and the people who work for these fitness centers, the employees. The progressive clubs view these “people” as assets!

The Management of Club Assets

At a minimum, our clubs have two types of assets: our members & our employees. Like any other business, we should have (1) incorporated the recognition of our employees and our members as assets when we had developed our brand, and (2) we should have developed S.O.P.s that support the management of these assets as part of our business platform. Our reality is that we have missed this opportunity to either recognize these two distinct groups as assets, and have failed as managers to manage-up these assets for the benefit of our clubs.

The benefit to the clubs… these employees can be proactively positioned to support the management of our members.

These assets are so close to us, that we cannot “see the forest because of the trees!”

“In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, produce, and profits. People come first.” – Lee Iacocca – Auto Executive

The Management of Employees

Here are a series of questions for each reader of Health & Fitness Business to consider:

What would happen to your individual club’s membership recruitment, retention & referral programs if we had managed our employees as an asset who would do some &/or all the following?

1. Your Group Exercise Instructors started to tie their individual successes to the success of your facility and started to refer to “We” instead of “I” when they speak to their students.
2. Your Group Exercise Instructors started to refer their students to your club’s personal training program for additional services because of weaknesses/challenges that the instructors saw in their students during their classes.
3. Your Group Exercise Instructors started to do fee-based Group Training Programming.
4. Your Personal Trainers started referring their clients to specific Group Exercise Programs because those programs would supplement the client’s personal training sessions.
5. Your Personal Trainers started working with their Group Exercise counterparts to learn how to teach Group Exercise Classes/Programs; and, heaven forbid, even want to learn “how-to-count” music.
6. Your Personal Trainers started to incorporate Group Exercise skill sets into their repertoire so that they can do more fee-based Group Training Programs.
7. Whenever your Personal Trainers are away on vacation, their clients are encouraged to train with other Trainers so that their clients can stay focused on their individualized fitness programs.

Whenever I present these points to Club Owners, Managers, Instructors and Trainers, I get a responsive look like a deer staring at the headlights of an on-coming car!

No way! It would never happen! These groups are too segmented! This is too much trouble because they each have different goals, objectives, and focus!

We agree with these responses. However, the potential upside from successfully managing-up our Fitness Team members has been itemized in CHART “A”. If we are able to manage &/or coach our employees to have these skill sets, then I submit that this potential upside is totally worth the stress and aggravation!