Alan Leach, the CEO and director of sales and marketing at West Wood Club, shares six tips for leading through a crisis.
Since March 2020, the industry has faced a whirlwind of issues. From shutdowns, losing revenue, mask mandates and more, we are all longing for the day the pandemic is behind us.
However, with the rise of the mu and delta-plus variants of COVID-19, it looks like the pandemic will still be top-of-mind for operators in the coming months. Alan Leach, the CEO and director of sales and marketing at West Wood Club with multiple locations in Ireland, said while the pandemic can be overwhelming, gym operators should take a breath and understand the real burning issue.
“We can blame the government, individual politicians, the vaccine providers, fitness industry bodies, the medical authorities, whatever,” said Leach. “But the real problem was the arrival of a global pandemic, the likes of which had not been seen for over 100 years.”
Here, Leach shares six tips for gym and health club operators who are continuing to lead through a crisis.
- Use your downtime wisely. Do the business and marketing activities you never get time to do. When we’re open, we never have the time to do all the new sales and marketing activities we want to do. We’re all just too busy. Lockdowns were the time to regroup and get this stuff done.
- Do an audit of all your website copy. Is it the right copy for your target market? Is it dated? Does it need new copy/content?
- Clean up all your Google Ads campaigns. This takes work and time we never seen to have when open. I spent four months tidying up our Google Ads account. This reduced our cost per lead by 61%.
- Do sales training. We did several weeks of sales training with our sales teams when we were shut. We probably did more sales training than we’ve done in the last 15 years.
- Do management training. When we are open, we never get the time to train our managers. During lockdown we did many, many days of management training with all managers in the company.
- Read all those business books you’ve never had time to read and make decisions to implement some of the best ideas.
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Alan Leach is the CEO and director of sales and marketing at West Wood Clubs, Ireland. He is also a sales trainer and international presenter on fitness business marketing.
