Two Distinct Types of Members
One type of person who joins your club is the committed exerciser — one who has made exercise a habit in life from an early age, and wants to continue doing so at your club. Whether they do individual fitness, personal training or group exercise, they’re committed to exercise being a part of their life. These people joined health clubs long before the proliferation of health clubs began in the last century. Unfortunately, more people have joined your club who fall into a second group —the uncommitted exerciser — and for people in that group, exercise is not an abiding habit.
Your Success Creates A Problem For Most Members
By selling these people a membership, you have created a secondary problem that most health clubs fail to solve — enabling the new member to change his or her exercise behavior. You provide exercise opportunities, but you should be helping them change their exercise behavior.
Essentially, this is like an industry that sells airplanes, but has no pilot training program. And as result, there are many crash and burn situations. Eventually, fewer people choose to buy a plane because they recognize the likelihood of being unsuccessful.
I believe the same has happened in the health club industry. The wonderful resources you have for exercise and engagement indeed attract a large number of people. But as soon as they join, 10 percent, or even 20 percent may already have the exercise habit, but you’ve created a major problem for the rest. When asked, they’ll often cite a time or money problem. But time and money are never barriers for a person doing what they really want to do, because they value it, and it has become a cherished part of their lives. Time and money both impact sales, yet they are superficial. Every time you overcome such an objection, you are failing to deal with the real barrier a new member will have in establishing an exercise habit — namely, changing their behavior.
Engagement and attention to the new member do help in resolving the exercise behavior-change problem. This comes into play when a new member signs up for personal training or group exercise. Both of these provide extremely intense engagement and emotional support that are powerful tools in forming an exercise habit.
Simply having an appointment for every personal training session and knowing the trainer will call or e-mail me if I don’t show up, provides an extremely successful motivation for engaging new members. However, very few of your members buy personal training, so this leaves the rest with the problem of behavior change.
The next extraordinary success that health clubs have in engaging new members is group exercise and small group training, because both instill a motivation similar to that of personal training, such as regularly scheduled classes, which everyone feels obligated to attend.
Based on the data I have seen, I would summarize by saying that group participants in a strong group exercise program will remain members of your club twice as long as those which are in a fitness-only program. Group exercise and small group training provide a breakthrough in behavior change!
Shawn Stewart is the Operations Manager at Gainesville Health and Fitness Center. Contact him at shawns@ghfc.com.
