If your gym is constantly hovering around the same number of clients and not growing, you’ve hit a “client ceiling.”
Marketing can raise the client ceiling, but only temporarily. Most gyms fall back to the same number over and over—even when marketing is successful—because the businesses are limited by one of these things:
1. Lack of systems—If any part of your operations is inconsistent, you’ll lose clients. One sign you have a systems problem: Clients preferentially choose classes based on one coach over another. Another sign: People are paying different rates for the same service.
2. Lack of proper onboarding—When a client is thrown into a group class—even for a “free trial”—the person is less likely to sign up and more likely to quit early. If you don’t have a consultative process, you’re churning clients out before you can change their lives.
3. Poor retention—When clients leave, they sometimes take other clients with them.
4. Inconvenience—If your clients have to juggle their schedules to match yours, they’ll leave.
5. Staff turnover—Your best coaches leave and take clients with them.
6. The wrong model—You might be playing the game by the wrong rules. For example, at the 150-member mark, your model changes. You need different staff, different systems and maybe even a different name.
You can absolutely run a gym with more than 150 members. But we recommend gym owners start with that target, earn $100,000 per year and build a solid base before they scale up. More on that in the next post in this series.
We address all these limiting factors in our RampUp program. We build systems for operations, retention, staff development, marketing, sales and profitability with you, and then we shift you into our Growth Program to add clients.
Over 150? You need a different plan. That’s our Tinker program, where you’ll level up as a leader, learn to build a management layer, optimize for profit and duplicate your gym without killing yourself.
