Our ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG)’ in 2013 is going to be DRIVING SESSIONS. More specifically — our BHAG is to conduct 16,500 personal training sessions in 2013.
I arrived at this goal by looking at each year of Fitness Together’s history to see what we’ve accomplished, and we have decided to move the chains out further than ever before for 2013. Last year, we were just shy of completing 14,000 sessions. So, 16,500 will represent a 20 percent or more improvement over last year … pretty audacious!
Why is the BHAG Important?
This BHAG is important because when we train this many sessions, it will mean that we have enough clients, revenue and profit for the business and each individual staff member to be successful. This will mean more profit to share with all of our team and the sustained success of our operations. A studio that is training at this level will be able to afford annual pay raises for its trainers, bonuses for its trainers and management, and special events (like the annual holiday bowling party). Plus, we will get the satisfaction of operating at the top of our industry and getting our clients into great shape!
What’s in it for our trainers?
To start, when we reach this goal, we will take the whole team by limo (stretch Hummer!) to Beachwood Place Mall. Each team member will be given an envelope of cash ($500) that they must spend during the trip. Afterwards, we’ll have a meal and/or drinks together to celebrate before the limo brings us back home! The exact details of the event will be planned by a committee of our staff!
In addition, we will be determining additional bonus events to hold throughout the year as we make progress towards our goal. And, we’ll be giving out spot bonuses and recognition to staff members who are going above and beyond to drive sessions by living our values (Hardcore, Optimistic, Loyal, Dynamic, Aggressive, Profitable, Ambitious, Nimble).
What is the plan?
We are going to KEEP IT SIMPLE! The beauty of a BHAG is that we are going to only focus on this one goal until we accomplish it. In fact, one of the toughest parts of having a BHAG is that we are going to have to pass on other opportunities that we may have in 2013, that don’t fit in with helping us achieve our BHAG. Throughout the year, we hope our employees will be nimble and dynamic and help us to reach this goal, by making sure everything they do somehow helps us reach our BHAG.
More importantly, if they’re doing something that isn’t helping us achieve our BHAG, we’ll need to stop and discuss this with the employee, the manager and the owners. We will need to put every ounce of energy into this BHAG to accomplish it.
Let’s get going
To remind us of our BHAG goals, we’ll be installing a chart in each studio to track our session counts by month. Each month, we’ll update this chart so that we can see how many sessions each studio trained and how far ahead/behind we are on our goal — “The Diff!,” or the difference between our goal and our actual number of sessions trained.
In addition, we’ll be holding one-on-one meetings with each staff member to discuss what each of them can do to help our team accomplish our BHAG. At these meetings, we’ll discuss the following questions:
- What is our goal for the year?
- Why are we doing this?
- What’s in it for me?
- What can you do, personally, individually, to help?
- What one or two things can you do every day, starting tomorrow, to drive sessions?
- What one or two things can you stop doing (because they don’t drive sessions) to give you more time and freedom to work on the BHAG?
If you can’t think of anything that you’d like to work on to drive sessions, here are a few ideas (these will need a plan for how you specifically will make them happen):
- Work on Puffy Mailers (To get lost sheep clients back)
- Ask current clients to refer their friends/family
- Make sure all clients are scheduled before they walk out the door
- Encourage current clients to increase their number of workouts
- Retain current clients by discussing their goals and results in detail and giving them outstanding customer service
- Conduct training experiences at staff meetings to help us drive sessions:
-role play how to encourage a client to book an extra session each week
-role play interactions that create sales opportunities
-role play interactions that create referral opportunities
-role play goal setting with clients
Jonathan Slain is a fitness business consultant and owns and operates franchises of Fitness Together in Cleveland, Ohio. He can be reached at JonathanSlain@FitnessTogether.com, 877-FIT-OHIO, or www.FitnessTogether.com/ohio.
