Growing your club’s ancillary revenue areas may seem unimportant to your day-to-day operations. However, it does have the potential to be critical to your overall revenue base.
At the Newtown Athletic Club, ancillary revenue makes up 49 percent of its total $17 million in revenue per year. This isn’t something that is taken lightly. This past summer, its summer camp program hit a goal of $1 million dollars.
Here are some strategies to help your ancillary departmental revenue increase:
1. Track your leads. You would never let a membership lead remain untracked, or unentered into your CRM. Why let a lead slip by for your summer camps or birthday parties? Front line staff should be trained on this, for it is just as important as any other department lead. Accountability is important!
2. Follow up. This may seem like common sense for membership, but how is this being done throughout the club? If someone makes an inquiry about summer camp and two weeks later still hasn’t signed up, is someone assigned to call that person back? Is it tracked?
3. Treat your ancillary revenue departments just like you would membership. Apply the same best practices throughout the club. Your membership team follows up with new members 30 days after they join, 60 days after they join, etc. So, apply these great customer service skills to your ancillary revenue areas.
At camp, every Monday, the Newtown Athletic Club calls anyone who is in their first week of camp, to see how each child’s camp day went. If a child had a negative experience, they follow up with the child during the camp day and then the parent again on Tuesday afternoon, just as the retention team would.
5. Use feedback to provide better services. At the end of each week, our camp team surveys all their parents to see how their child’s experience was. They do this for birthday parties and throughout other areas of the club. Feedback is extremely important to all departments. You wouldn’t let Medallia feedback about the facility go unnoticed, so why not survey all areas of the club about their specific experience? Not only survey each client in ancillary revenue areas, but also have each director personally respond to the survey results.
5. Create a clear plan and stick to it. Membership campaigns are well planned. Each ancillary department should have its own calendar of a marketing plan that includes internal and external campaigns.
6. Incentivize all employees. At the Newtown Athletic Club, front-line employees in ancillary departments make more money when the department is doing well. Just like your sales team commission, everyone is a part of the club goal where everyone should take ownership for growth throughout the departments.
Amanda Brown is the camp director for Newtown Athletic Club. She can be reached at amandabrown@newtownathletic.com.
