Ben Ludwig, the COO of Traction Group LLC, an F45 Training company, shares how to better understand your people and stats within your business.
When you think about your current production within your fitness business, are you satisfied with how many leads, trials and new memberships you currently have? Consulting business owners across the globe, the most common answer I hear when I ask, “how many do you need?” The answer I mostly get is, “More.” So what’s the right number of leads? What is the right number of sales?
Years ago while running full service gyms, I remember myself and the CEO constantly looking at draft trends within our businesses. The funny thing was, the more I looked at these number, the more I began to see trends. I noticed where numbers and staff attitudes or processes didn’t add up. I began to understand what was actually happening in the business, and best of all, I was able to begin effecting change in the areas we needed to grow by understanding how people and stats coexisted.
Let’s take a look at four ways you can be sure to not only understand your people and stats within your business but also be able to improve them.
1. Manage numbers driven by behavior.
The biggest mistake the fitness industry makes is managing people on numbers that can be easily faked, or even worse, not managing people by numbers at all. Most sales teams are driven by leads gathered and outbound calls made, which is not inherently a bad thing, but if not closely managed, this can easily be skewed by the wrong sales people. Finding the right person that’s hungry and driven to effect change and then managing them based on quality of outreach and lead gathering activity is a must have better approach. More leads and calls isn’t always the answer.
2. Always over-explain why you manage a certain key performance indicator.
If you manage a leader based on attrition of their member base, excuses can easily creep in such as transient populations, inflation and competition. Ensure you have established a reasonable target and explain why this is the expectation. This is your best way to combat low performance while simultaneously creating more buy in from the team that goals are not only achievable but expected.
3. Be honest with yourself if you have the wrong person in the wrong seat, and over-train if it’s the right person.
Let’s be honest with each other. All of us have held onto the wrong people for far too long because of fear of the unknown, change or even being put in a place of having to do everything ourselves. The thing about this conundrum is when we’ve finally made the decision to change, it has always worked out for the better in the long run. We’ve also likely had a great person in a seat that we haven’t spent the time and energy they deserve. The goal of finding the right person for your roles within your business is that they always naturally begin to pick up on good habits when trained properly. Do you know why? Because they naturally lean toward doing the right thing when someone shows them the path to get there. So if deep down in your gut, you know the person you have isn’t the right person, make the move. Even better, just have the conversation with them about how you see their performance and their role. You may be surprised they have some good self awareness which could save the employment relationship.
4. Make it fun to chase growth.
More sales, more leads, more challenge participants and more front desk sales. In today’s world, sales can feel like a dirty word and worse it’s what’s unspoken. Many employees may not understand the desire to grow and think ownership or management is simply money hungry. It doesn’t have to be this way, growth can be fun and competitions don’t have to be cutthroat to see who is best and who should be fired. Devising team goals can be great ways to get more collaboration, communication and creativity within your team. When pointing to a goal, it’s important to update often and give pointed feedback to team members involved to keep the focus. It’s also important to work closely with anyone getting behind pulling their weight. No one wants to be the outlier, and most importantly, the longer you wait to dig in and drive toward a goal, the more unrealistic goals start to become. Then staff begin to question whether or not the role is even the right fit for them.
The funny thing about the fitness business is it involves people and statistics. It’s not just one or the other. To be great, you have to develop systems, metrics and processes that make sense on paper. You also need to understand that motivation plays a huge part in your success. Build people just like you build systems and you’re sure to eventually win.
