“I need more members!”
That’s the most common statement gym owners make when they’re bleeding clients.
But it’s the wrong statement.
Here’s the right one:
“I need to figure out why my clients are leaving.”
Marketing is important, but it’s less important than retention. If you’re great at marketing but bad at retention, your gym will still be empty. Make sure the boat is free of leaks before you fill it.
I did it the wrong way: We filled our gym before we had solid retention systems in place, and when people started leaving in waves I looked to six-week challenges and other marketing gimmicks to replace them.
If I had a time machine and could go back to 2013-2014, I’d take clear steps to prevent members from leaving.
In my case, we focused too much on competition, and we invested our best hours in a very small group of people. “Regular people” didn’t feel as important, and competitive athletes below the top tier felt like they didn’t get the attention they needed to reach the next level.
To prevent the problem, I could have stopped spending large amounts of time at competitions and investing my best hours in special training sessions and programming.
Those freed hours could have been spent partially on onboarding, but, in truth, our on-ramp was pretty good. Most of the people who did it bought ongoing memberships, and in almost all cases they re-upped those memberships in three or six months.
My retention problems were greatest between 12 and 24 months of membership. I could get a conversion out of on-ramp, and I could get about two six-month membership renewals, but after that it was hit or miss.
The time frame is important because Chris Cooper has stated that no single retention tactic fixes all problems. Gym owners need different tactics at different times.
Had I knew that in 2013, I would have realized novelty was fading for some clients. They were on to “the next thing.” Others had reached a certain level and didn’t know where to go next—so they went home and stayed there.
The greatest problem: I didn’t know what my clients wanted to accomplish.
So when some people left at the 12-month mark to try bootcamps or Orangetheory, I figured “their time was up.” But if I knew why they came in the first place—lose 10 lb., get a first pull-up, etc.—I could have helped them make the progress that would have sustained them when novelty failed. Or I could have told them how to speed up progress toward their goals.
With others who were further along in their journeys, I could have celebrated their past goals and helped them set new ones that would have kept them in the gym for more than 24 months. Instead, they got a first pull-up but felt like muscle-ups were too far away, so they quit. Or they lost 10 lb. and needed someone to help them figure out what to focus on next.
Instead of asking “why?” and solving retention problems, I made bad assumptions and turned to marketing tactics to replace the departed.
It was a bad plan in 2013, and it’s a bad plan now.
If you want to build a very profitable business, figure out when your clients are leaving and why. Plug the holes, then work to add more high-value clients who stay for three years or more.
A mentor can help you do this, but I’ll give you a starting point: Check out Chris Cooper’s article “When You’re Bleeding Clients, Do This!” It’s got a Length of Engagement Cheat Sheet you can save to your desktop.
Analyze your length of engagement to find out when clients are leaving, then use Coop’s recommended tactics to solve the problem.
