Many club owners will struggle to hit their revenue projections this year. One practical solution is to inspect what you expect from your employees. Creating solid expectations, goals and objectives via detailed job descriptions and annual performance reviews is not as difficult as it may seem and remains the best way to communicate the employee performance you require to meet your annual financial goals.
Here’s the hard part-holding your employees accountable for their performance. Annual performance reviews are important, but inspecting performance must be done more frequently-even daily, in some cases.
Here are some ways to inspect performance in your club.
Maintenance Team
Provide your maintenance team with a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly task list. Run usage reports from your club-management software by day of week and time of day to determine high usage periods. More staffing may be required during peak times to assure a clean, safe environment.
Regularly walk through your club with your maintenance manager (or GM) with the list in hand. Don’t wait for a member to tell you there is mold in the shower, out-of-order cardio equipment or lack of clean towels. Anticipation of this walkthrough usually assures a high level of compliance. How easy is that?
Fitness Team
Retention should be one of the primary goals of your fitness team. Are they calling low users? Are they sitting behind a desk or on the exercise floor interacting with members? Letting your members know you are thinking about them helps with retention. Set realistic daily contact goals including both phone calls and emails and require the team to log their efforts in the contact-management portion of your software.
Run retention reports that include phone numbers and email addresses to make this job easier for them. You can also create a script or list of discussion topics you want incorporated into their conversations or emails. Then review contact reports to monitor progress. If the team knows you are inspecting these reports, this task will not be procrastinated.
The fitness team should be coached weekly on both their contact and sales goals. Do an analysis on your personal training sales numbers. If an employee has missed two weekly goals, it will be pretty tough to make up these lost sales at the end of the month. Staying on top of employee performance can help you meet your financial performance goals.
Sales Team
Inspecting, and supporting, your sales team is critical to the long-term success of your club. The sales team needs a contact-management system integrated with your club-management software to keep track of their prospects: to log tours, TIs, outgoing calls, tours, appointments made, etc. Run reports daily to inspect their productivity. Any new or underperforming sales rep should be coached every day to strengthen his weak areas.
Sales reps should spend part of each day on the exercise floor building rapport with members and securing those coveted “buddy referrals.” A rep sitting at the front desk waiting for TIs and walk-ins is not the goal-oriented employee who will help you reach your club’s sales goals.
Front Desk Team Are your front desk employees on time, in uniform with their name tags on? Do they greet members cheerfully as they enter? The front desk is where the club experience begins. Inspect the front-desk team’s objectives through observation – your own and that of your key employees. Be sure your staff is projecting the image and atmosphere you want your members to experience.
One easily measured front-desk objective is the number of members with status alerts allowed to enter the club. Run a status code report daily to ensure that cancelled, expired or past-due member usage isn’t hitting your bottom line. Discuss these status codes with your front desk staff and work with them to halt any abuse at your club.
Consider spiffing your front desk staff for selling additional services such as tanning, yoga, Pilates and group cycling. An incentive to earn more money may prove valuable here!
Every team member’s job description should include member retention as a goal-preserving current memberships is the easiest way to reach your financial goals.
Providing your team with clear expectations-reinforced with consistent follow up-is the best way to assure your annual sales projections materialize. If your employees are not doing their jobs, you only have your managers and yourself to hold accountable. Initiate a plan of inspecting the expected, and watch your numbers grow!
Kate Dumas is a Sales Associate with Twin Oaks Software. She can be contacted at 866.278.6750, or by email at kdumas@tosd.com , or visit www.tosd.com .
