When looking for either your club’s first CMS or what you hope is its last, the task can be daunting. But choosing the right CMS for your club is everything.
John Miller, the owner of Courthouse Fitness in Oregon, uses Jonas Fitness. However, he didn’t choose Jonas Fitness just by chance. Miller said there is a lot of thought that goes into choosing the right CMS for his club, and there are multiple layers to the decision. “The first layer is we looked at what was out there, in terms of systems that would give us the functionality that we were looking for, at least on sort of a surface level,” he said.
Miller also said the responsiveness of the company to issues was important. On top of that, using the CMS to further customer relations was huge as well. “With us being the kind of club we are, we wanted part of the solution to be a customer relationship component to the software that allowed us to do a better job of tracking our members and tracking the guidance our staff was providing our members,” he said.
Narrowing it down, Miller said the next layer is the most important for him. “The biggest driver for me was, which company was on the right path of progress that we wanted to get married to?” he said. “I’ve been doing this long enough to understand you’re buying in part what the software does today, and you’re also buying where they see the industry going and where their development is going. So that was a big piece of the decision to go with Jonas [Fitness] in the end for us.”
It was this factor that led Miller to change his CMS. “Honestly, a big piece of that was I had lost confidence in [our old CMS’ ability in following through],” he said. “You need to have confidence that when they talk about what’s coming, they’re not just feeding you a line, and they can really deliver on the improvements.”
Jonas Fitness has so far met his expectations. “I’m very pleased with their follow-through, doing what they say they’re going to do when they say they’re going to do it,” he said.
Ultimately, it comes down to the future. “I think you can make reasonable estimates where you want to be, what you’re going to need to serve your customers, to know your customer and compete in the market with the strategy you want to have as a business,” said Miller.
