By Dan Visentin, Certified Two-Brain Fitness Business Mentor
Do find your staff meetings to be dull and unproductive?
Do you feel like your staff members zone out and don’t contribute much in your meetings?
Working as a Certified Fitness Business Mentor with Two-Brain, I know many gym owners struggle to have effective staff meetings. Common issues include infrequent meetings, lack of staff engagement and a lack of action.
Here, you’ll learn how to use your staff meetings to increase a key business metric: average revenue per member (ARM). In the next article in this series, you’ll learn how to get your coaches to create social media content in staff meetings.
Increase Average Revenue Per Member
Profitability in your gym will come much faster and be more sustainable if you focus on ARM instead of total members.
As gyms grow, most gym owners move out of frontline roles to work on growing the business. This natural progression separates you from your members, and it limits your understanding of what each individual client needs, wants and likes.
As the owner levels up, staff members become responsible for relationship building and creating connections to clients. Your coaches are in the trenches, supporting, pushing, correcting, communicating and high-fiving every single day. They understand members’ tendencies, weaknesses, strengths, frustrations and even moods better the the CEO or owner can.
This intimate knowledge becomes extremely valuable when you’re looking to increase your ARM. The strategy is simple: Offer services that will help members achieve their goals and eliminate weaknesses outside your regular group class environment.
But how can you create a process to identify opportunities to help these members if you aren’t in daily contact with them?
Enter the “actionable” staff meeting.
Steps to Grow ARM
In your next staff meeting try this:
Step 1
Before the meeting, identify areas in which you’d like to improve revenue. Personal training? Nutrition? Online coaching? Weightlifting specialty program? Handstand workshop?
Let’s use a four-week weightlifting specialty program for this exercise.
Step 2
Have coaches identify members they think will benefit most from four weeks spent honing their skills in a weightlifting program. To prompt your coaches, ask about newer members who could use more time developing these skills. You can also refer to some recent workouts that included weightlifting movements and identify members who struggled. Or ask for members who clearly have an interest in the snatch and clean and jerk.
Step 3
Use a whiteboard and list all the members your coaches identify. From my experience, a list of 15-20 members is ideal. Color-code them based on greatest need or likelihood to join the program.
Step 4
Have your CSM, salesperson or a coach reach out to each individual on the list. You can also take this role if you like. This outreach can even be done during the staff meeting so you act immediately. Start with the top 20 percent of the list and work your way down.
Here’s a script:
“Hey, Jane, I was chatting with Coach Robyn yesterday about our upcoming weightlifting specialty program. She mentioned that she was working with you in class on some clean-and-jerk mechanics and that you would really benefit from participating in this program. Picture this: Spend two days per week for the next four weeks dialing in your Olympic-lifting technique so you can come back to class feeling confident and stronger than ever in those lifts.”
Action!
This process should not in any way replace regular Goal Review Sessions with members every 90 days or so. But it does provide a quick identification process so you can fill programs and help interested members benefit from your additional services.
This approach also ensures quick action. Instead of dreading unfocused, boring staff meetings, you’ll be leading your team to quickly identify members who need help and then make sales that help your staff and your business.
In the next post, we’ll solve a huge problem: I’ll tell you how to use staff meetings to get your staff to create content for your blog and social-media channels before the meeting ends!
Other Media in This Series
“Actionable Staff Meetings: Publishing Content”
“Actionable Staff Meetings: Engaging Former Members”
“Literally Make Money in Staff Meetings”
