Two industry leaders share how to set goals as a leader of your organization and accomplish them with your team.
Goal setting is important for tracking progress, staying motivated and continuous growth. As a leader in the industry, it’s essential to be making goals and ensuring your team is onboard and helping you achieve these benchmarks.
Here, two industry leaders share how they do just that.
Each year in Q4 Assaf Gal, a Crunch Fitness franchisee, reviews and updates the budget his team has in place — which is an Excel model. It also includes their business projections for the next three years.
“The regional manager, Raymond Gonzalez, and I will go through all the assumptions to make sure they’re hopeful but still connected to reality,” explained Gal. “Once in place, that’s the plan we’re looking to create into reality for the year. Anything after one year is kind of make believe.”
This robust model allows the Crunch team to have assumptions in place for most of the operational moving parts of the business. Each month the regional manager will review the upcoming month’s model, and then put those KPI goals into a Google Sheet that’s shared with the general managers.
When it comes to measuring the success of the goal, Gal said it’s clean cut.
“For us, a goal is a goal,” said Gal. “We’re in discussions to change the language around it to be more like ‘expectations,’ but still, success is achieving the goals. We do measure the percentage of goal achieved and managers can bonus out the percentage of their payout in proportion to the percentage of the goal achieved. But, if the KPI falls below 85% they’re no longer eligible.”
Gal said targets are up from Day One of each month, and the regional manager is updating a scoreboard daily so they know if they’re trending on or off target. “If we’re on, we see how much we can beat it,” said Gal. “If we’re off, we’ll ask the manager to come up with a plan of attack to adjust. We monitor it not only daily but intraday.”
Sue Boreskie, the CEO of Reh-Fit Centre, said goal setting at her facility is two-fold.
In 2016, they developed a 10-year vision plan based on information from many sources, including Reh-Fit Centre Board and staff, members, users, their Building Advisory Committee, the general public, and key stakeholders.
Annually, they set goals based on the 10-year vision plan. This year given the COVID-19 pandemic, Reh-Fit called its planning process “Hitting Refresh.” They want to review where they were going to ensure it included lessons learned through COVID-19.
In addition to the 10-year vision plan, operationally Reh-Fit tracks how it’s doing against financial goals set through the budget process and tracks various metrics against industry standards.
A key part of achieving goals is ensuring all team members are onboard.
Gal said they try to cascade the goals down to the individual players at the front through two methods. First, they make sure the managers are having conversations daily at the start of each shift to let the team know the score and what they’re trying to accomplish that shift.
“Second, we use ABC Fitness Solutions and have customized FitnessBI dashboards loaded up to an iPad at the front desk,” explained Gal. “This displays our trending membership numbers and which team members have sold the most memberships across our three clubs. It’s amazing what a little friendly competition can do to motivate young and hungry team members. Your people want to win, they want to come and do a good job each day. We just have to turn the scoreboard on for them, define the rules of the game and coach as necessary.”
Lastly, Boreskie said to achieve one’s objectives you must continuously communicate and discuss goals and plans as things progress to all members of the team. And how you communicate is critical.
“Telling is quite different than having a discussion on how it came about, getting feedback and input, and keeping everyone up to date so they can feel informed,” explained Boreskie. “We have daily admin team huddles, departments meet monthly and provide updates, and twice a year we have all-staff meetings to share progress on our goals for the year and any new plans.”
