Since March 2020, you have lost a lot. Welcome to July 2020; the fitness industry’s “new normal.” There will be nothing easy about operating a business at 50% capacity with the same expenses month after month. Can your business survive? Can your family, your home and you survive this?
People don’t understand what it really means to be an entrepreneur. You’ve risked everything to operate your own business and this forced closure has probably been by far the biggest challenge you’ve ever encountered. There is nothing easy about things being out of your control.
There are really only two real plays you have right now: The first is to raise your rates and pray your loyal members appreciate the situation you’re in. The second is to reward your loyal members with additional services that will improve their experience and outcome.
Business 101: Sell more to the people who know, like, and trust you.
It’s highly likely the most profitable service you provide comes from your personal training (PT) department. For the sake of discussion, let’s say your PT department contributes 50% to your overall monthly revenues and 50% to monthly membership dues. If you’re now operating at half capacity, you just lost significant monthly revenue — that’s pretty daunting.
Raising your rates isn’t the worst plan, and perhaps people are willing to pay for more exclusivity and cleanliness right now — that’s never an easy play though. Another route is to add a new service and the most obvious addition, one that goes hand-in-hand with personal training, is nutrition. You know your members need it and even they know they need it. Today, if you were looking out on the gym floor, what percentage of your members would welcome a nutrition solution? 50%, 75% or maybe even higher?
Understand if you’re not providing a nutrition solution for your members, there’s a really good chance they’re spending their money elsewhere and honestly, right now, they’d probably rather spend it with you.
Think about how much easier it would be to provide your members a service you know they need and want. Imagine an entirely new profit center solely dedicated to nutrition. Adding a secondary department that is systematic, delivers results, is scalable and will increase monthly revenues just makes sense. You may have been thinking about it previously, but now you absolutely need to act. There’s never been a better time to position nutrition for improving immunity, staying healthy and getting back on track from the “Quarantine-19 weight gain.”
It’s common knowledge that the weight loss market is a $60 billion dollar a year industry, meaning there’s no shortage of customer’s needing this service. And with 50% less members, even your employees are looking for additional ways to earn more money to survive.
Having two profit centers feeding one another just makes sense. Don’t raise your rates — increase the value.
Carolyn Fetters is the founder and CEO of Balanced Habits™, based in Southern California. She can be reached at carolyn@balancedhabits.com or 657.231.6779.
