“No one scales retention.”
When Chris Cooper said this on a recent episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” I suddenly realized why my gym once reached about 230 members and then quickly slide back under 200.
As we grew, we scaled lots of stuff: staff, sales and marketing, programming and so on.
But we didn’t successfully scale our retention systems, and it cost us.
When rapid growth is happening, it’s easy to drop the ball with current clients.
Instead of treating them like the golden geese they are, you start assuming they’re happy, locked-in clients who will just keep renewing memberships. You take them for granted. Your eyes turn to the flood of new people at the door, and you forget that you must build value and “resell” to current members if you want to keep them.
It’s not that you don’t care about them or recognize their contribution to your business. You just start making assumptions and fail to care for the relationships.
Here’s the mentality: “Tim’s been here for years and is always happy. I don’t need to check in on him. I can work on getting more leads to book free consultations.”
Except Tim does need something.
Maybe he dinged his shoulder at work and now feels like a burden in class. Or maybe his kid has started evening sports and he can’t make the class where he’s been a fixture for three years. Or maybe he’s traveling more often for work and won’t be at the gym for 10-day stretches every three weeks.
Or maybe Tim wants to maintain the personal connection that brought him to the gym in the first place, and he’d love nothing more than a “how ya doin’?” text.
I had a bunch of Tims. But I didn’t know it because I was setting up systems to manage the leads from our six-week challenge and trying to figure out how to get new coaches up to speed fast.
A bunch of Tims started to notice they weren’t getting a lot of attention, and soon these pillars of the business started leaving.
System Rot
I wasn’t completely ignorant of the need to retain members.
In fact, I did set up basic retention systems that included check-ins with members who hadn’t showed up for a week or so.
Here’s where I failed: As the gym became busier, the retention systems I had set up became overwhelmed, and they broke down. All my systems rotted out because I didn’t check on them, shore them up and upgrade them.
I assumed the system that held onto 150 members would allow me to hold onto 230, and I was dead wrong.
I had failed to scale retention, and my gym sank right back to the level of my systems.
Here’s what I should have done:
I should have used the revenue boost from new members to hire a client success manager (CSM) whose sole job was improving retention. No GM duties, no coaching, no sales commitments. I needed a detail-oriented, caring person who had one point of focus.
This would have cost me about $400 a month, but it would have saved me thousands of dollars. Remember, I started bleeding out dozens of clients. Had the CSM saved about three per month, the costs of the position would have been covered.
Here’s what I did instead:
I got mad at my staff as my revenue plummeted. When we started losing a lot of money every month, I got scared and started taking drastic measures. Not all of them were good.
But one—hiring a mentor—helped me right the ship.
Maintain Airtight Retention Systems
I assure you that your systems will crack if you don’t repair and upgrade them as your gym grows.
It’s not because you’re a bad business owner. It’s because scaling a business is very difficult and requires a new skill set.
Easy example: One owner-operator can serve about 150 people with just a little extra help. Beyond 150, that owner needs a team—and building a functional team is not the same as teaching people to squat at 6 a.m.
If I could go back in time, this is what I would do:
- Hire a mentor before problems appear.
- Use that mentor to create an airtight business that serves 150 people at an A+ level.
- Work with the mentor to figure out how to scale up without sliding back or imploding.
Who knows? I might have decided 150 members were just fine if I added high-value services to increase average revenue per member (ARM). Maybe I would have targeted acquisition of 180 members while improving length of engagement.
Or maybe I would switched to a different model to serve about 50 high-value members in a facility with much lower overhead.
With direction, I would have had options. Without direction, I had stress and panic.
If you’re reading this right now during a period of growth, I have two recommendations for you:
1. Lock yourself in your office and review all your retention systems. Fix the broken stuff and upgrade your systems to handle the new volume. Do this right now.
2. Book a call to talk about mentorship so you know exactly how to maximize your current model without breaking it.
The worst plan: Focusing on adding new clients while assuming your current members are happy. If you do that, you can expect major problems in less than a year.
