Club Management Solution: Helping Operators Adapt and Change

Karl Koutroupas, the vice president of strategy and customer insights at Exerp, shares six ways a best-in-class club management solution can help your business. 

We all know the fitness industry is continuously changing and evolving.  These changes present constant opportunities and risks to your business, requiring you to have a high degree of agility and flexibility to quickly and effectively address them.

Unfortunately, a common roadblock to fast and effective change is technology. For example, during the pandemic most club management solutions did not support club capacity management, digital streaming of classes, waivers or changes to member agreements — meaning most operators needed to look to manual solutions or external, poorly integrated systems.

Limited IT development capacity is another common roadblock to change. For example, how often are you told your change requests can’t be delivered because IT capacity is being swallowed up by other projects?

So, how does technology enable fast and effective change? Unsurprisingly, most of it starts with your club management software (CMS), as it forms the technology core of your business. Here are a few ways a best-in-class CMS can help you:

1. Empower your business to make changes itself via configuration. Any time your business needs to rely on your internal IT team or CMS vendor to execute a change, it costs you time and money in addition to taking resources away from other high-value projects. 
   
   
2. Easily accommodate changes that impact only a subset of clubs. It’s very common for changes to not impact every club, member and employee. Your CMS should have the flexibility to allow for easy adjustments to billing, products and services, process automation, member policies, etc. and then apply those adjustments to any subset of clubs, members or staff.
   
   
3. A robust feature set so more of your new and changing needs can be met out-of-box. Make sure your CMS offers a comprehensive, flexible and configurable feature set. If you migrate to a new CMS, you may also find you can retire several other systems in addition to your current CMS — simplifying your IT stack and affording you even more flexibility and agility.
   
   
4. Support of lean methodology. Configuration tool sets allow you to easily and iteratively build, test and learn from new ideas. You can then quickly roll out whatever works across your enterprise. Not many CMS products have this, but when they do it’s a game changer for your business.
   
   
5. Integration capabilities to easily plug-and-play third-party solutions as needed. Your CMS will never meet 100% of your needs. So when it doesn’t, you need the flexibility to bring in other solutions as needed. 
   
   
6. Foster a strategic partnership with your CMS vendor. Your CMS vendor should have the industry expertise, support and consulting availability, and network to help you identify opportunities and risks earlier and consult with you on how to best address them.