Solutions On…

The fierce competition in the health club industry has grown more intense. Many clubs are being forced to lower their dues, or increase services to stay competitive. How do you differentiate your fitness center from the rapidly expanding $10-per-month chains? Let’s start with some of the obvious basics that have been around for years. Clubs [...]

Pilates continues to top industry growth charts, and program directors, like myself, have experienced first hand the success of complimentary Pilates mat programs. However, fee-based Pilates programs continue to be an area of growth in many health and fitness clubs. Greenwood Athletic and Tennis Club experienced a banner year in 2012, producing $600,000 in gross [...]

Would you eat Jell-O with a fork, or hammer a nail with measuring tape? In some cases, you might be doing this in your club. You’re actually attempting to solve problems, but you don’t have the solutions. Maybe it boils down to just not having the right tools for the particular solutions. Take a look [...]

Free, fun and fitness — that’s what “Shape Up Downtown” is all about. In the spring of 2012, O2 Fitness launched an outdoor group fitness class series in Downtown Raleigh, N.C., which was called “Shape Up Downtown.” Residents participating in the series gathered for energetic, intense and entertaining workouts, at no expense. On a city-owned [...]

As I speak with owners and managers of clubs, quite often the discussion leads to the subject of revenue tracking and receivables. It’s amazing how infrequently a club is aware of its outstanding balances, deferred revenue, held deposits or even gross and net billing per month. More often than not, this is due to poor [...]

One resolution I had for 2013 was to systematize hiring at Fitness Together. After reviewing many options, I decided to use the “Everything DiSC Workplace Profile” to help lower turnover and improve my hiring process. The DiSC profiling system has been around for over 30 years and has been used to improve teamwork and communication. [...]

When I was a club owner, if you walked into my office, the first thing you would have noticed were the book cases filled with color-coded, three-ring binders. The blue ones were for my daily reconciliation reports. The green ones were for my weekly employee time sheets. The black ones were for my monthly EFT [...]

Part of any good marketing director’s job is to find a fun way to simultaneously engage members and encourage them to become brand ambassadors. By utilizing a member rewards program, clubs can put these two key components successfully into action. Recently, O2 Fitness, with locations throughout North Carolina, started its own rewards program, “O2 Rewards.” [...]

The banking industry has created a system of billing customers that is very complicated and virtually impossible to understand. The itemizing of costs can be even more confusing if you are entering into an agreement with a credit card merchant company that has allied with your management software company. Today there are even more costs [...]

It’s January, and at a personal training studio, that means a bounty of new clients with resolutions to get in shape and lose weight. At my Fitness Together studios, we can always bank on getting busier this time of the year, with the addition of new clients. But, we also know that January is the [...]