Here’s something that happens way too often:
A gym is running well. Clients are happy and stay for a long time. As the client count grows, all the systems that kept people training start to crack under the strain.
Suddenly a gym that had pushed up to 200 members is back to 150.
You can’t just stop working on retention because your gym is growing. If you do, you’ll kill the growth, and your business might even shrink.
As the owner, you might not have time to tick every box on the retention checklist. You’re the CEO after all, and you have a ton of stuff on your plate.
But someone has to work on retention—and do a great job.
Key Staff Members
It’s worth noting that your coaches are part of your retention plan.
Yes, they must tell clients to push their knees out in a squat.
But they must also motivate clients, show them they’re making progress and celebrate their results.
With that said, a client success manager (CSM) is your real retention safety net. A CSM’s No. 1 job is to improve retention.
A CSM will manage all your retention systems and apply them to clients at various points on the client journey.
For example: On Day 2, the CSM might call each new client to check in with “how are you feeling?” or “do you have any questions?”
That’s just one of hundreds of tactics you can use to improve retention. The exact timing of the check-in isn’t important. What’s important is that someone is executing on a detailed plan to keep clients longer.
See, gym owners scale all kinds of things as their businesses grow. They scale marketing and sales and improve their coaching, but most gym owners fail to scale retention until it’s too late.
“Too late” means an owner looked at a P&L statement and said, “WTF?”
Real-world example: One of our clients started very small and eventually built his gym to more than 200 members. And then he lost a bunch very quickly. So he put a staff member in charge of retention and thought the problem was solved. About six months later, he looked at his revenue and realized he was bleeding clients again.
What had happened?
His CSM had stopped following the plan, and no one noticed until it was too late.
Retention must be scaled—and scaled properly. To do that, a CSM must be hired, trained, mentored and held accountable.
You can’t miss any of those steps. You can’t just hire and go to the beach. That’s abdicating and assuming.
But you can hire, train, mentor, hold someone accountable and then go to the beach. That’s delegating, and great CEOs are master delegators.
I won’t give you a laundry list of exact tasks for your CSM (you can find a complete gym hiring plan here), but I will highlight a few key jobs:
1. The CSM must notice when people are absent, contact them and get them back in the gym. This is a simple task that has a dramatic effect on retention.
2. The CSM must be proactive. That means solving small problems before they become huge, checking in with clients regularly to ensure they always feel noticed, and surprising and delighting clients with congrats, gifts, cards and notes.
3. The CSM must book your clients into goal review sessions every 90 days and ensure they show up.
If someone took care of these essential tasks at your gym, would you hold onto clients longer?
Yes.
Invest in Retention
Our top gym owners—the ones who post the best metrics—all have CSMs. Some have two or more. The role is that important.
Nevertheless, it’s a role with high leverage. All you need is caring, detail-oriented person who can follow a plan, and you can start a CSM with five or 10 hours a week at about $20 or $25 an hour. You might invest $400-$600 a month to start.
But do the math on that: If the CSM prevents one client a week from canceling, you’re winning if your average revenue per member is more than $150 (which it should be; coaching is valuable).
When we ask the gym owners on our monthly leaderboards about CSM costs, they brush them off because they get huge ROI from the position. They consider the money they pay a CSM an investment, not a cost.
I’ll give you an example: Rune Laursen at BoxLife/CrossFit 5512 tasked his CSM with addressing an at-risk client list with 80 names. After the CSM reached out to the clients on the edge, the list had fewer than 10 names on it. That’s 70 clients saved.
Rune’s retention systems are now so good that the at-risk list seldom climbs above seven names.
He has 512 members, by the way. Rune learned how to scale retention—big time.
And he said this of the CSM position: “It is the fastest paying-itself-back role I could ever imagine in the gym.”
I can’t emphasize this enough: Retention is the foundation of a strong gym business.
So who’s responsible for retaining clients in your gym, and exactly what is that person doing?
If you can’t answer those questions immediately, you’re losing more clients than you need to.
We help clients beat industry-average length of engagement by a year. To find out how a mentor can teach you to keep more clients, book a call here.
