Jarrod Saracco, the president and CEO of the Health Club Doctor, shares the importance of member retention.
Imagine that it is a super hot, mid summers day. The humidity is high, there’s no breeze and no shade. Not to worry though. You have ice cold air conditioning to keep you cool. As you sit in the front of your house, you can feel the cool air blowing through the vents, but as you walk towards the back of your house you realize it keeps getting warmer and warmer and something is just not right. In the very last room, your back doors are wide open and the ice cold air you were enjoying in the front of the house is blowing straight out the back. How mad would you be? That’s money being wasted and just flying away. You would immediately recognize the issue and resolve it by closing the doors. You would most likely try to figure out why those doors were open and how you can prevent that from happening again.
Ironically, this scenario is playing out in many fitness businesses, but not with you’re A/C. Nope, it’s with your members. You may be so focused on sales and how good it makes you feel when people are buying your services, that you don’t realize that you have a major issue in the back of your house — members leaving. That’s attrition, which is not the same as retention. You can think of attrition as money being blown right out of the back door, and it truly is.
A strong focus on retention will help combat attrition. Do you have a retention plan in place? Who is responsible for checking up on members, seeing if they’re enjoying the club, or, more importantly, are getting results? Do you have someone in charge of fun? What about quality control? What are you doing to create remarkable experiences for your members so that they aren’t walking out the back door?
Sadly, many operators ignore putting together a real retention plan and instead focus on sales, hoping and praying that their “awesome facility and amazing staff” are what keep people staying. That’s a poor strategy.
Make retention a priority for your business. Otherwise, you’re just literally throwing money out the window.
