Steve Grant the founder of the Gym Hub, explains four key benefits of mentoring for club owners!
Research shows that 80 per cent of Australian gyms will close in their first five years of business and 80 per cent of those who survive will, unfortunately, fail during the five years that follow.
Gym owners need to juggle a number of important factors to succeed in the early days, such as keeping expenses low while gaining maximum exposure to new members – just to ensure they can pay their bills. Then, later in the business lifecycle, gym owners look to leverage away from the 80-hour work weeks, using strong systems and staff development to ensure the momentum continues, and for survival in the long term.
Here are four good reasons that EVERY gym owner needs a mentor.
1. To get faster results – One of the best tips I received, as a young boy was ‘if you want something, find someone else who has it, ask them what they did and then copy them’. It’s not rocket science, but it amazes me how many people choose to ignore help and grind away in solitude, rather than implementing some good advice and seeing faster results.
With so many different things for business owners to be thinking about, a mentor who can provide both clarity and accountability is the golden ticket. It can be the difference between knowing what to do versus actually doing it. And it can also be the difference between having a good idea that never makes it to market versus introducing an innovative new product or service that potentially adds $100,000 to your profit margin.
2. You don’t have the time to do everything – In the first four months of selling my fitness studio I visited 30 gyms across Australia and the US, I read 12 books and I completed a digital marketing course. It suddenly became very clear that I hadn’t had that amount of fresh ideas, content and professional development for three years while I’d been a busy business owner. You simply don’t have the time to do everything!
The harsh reality though is that seven of the 12 books were a waste of time and many of the gyms were struggling to compete using outdated methods.
I did however find four great gym models who were crushing it, plus a marketing system and five books that were so good they would have both saved me and made me tens of thousands of dollars if I had used them earlier in the lifecycle of my fitness business.
A proactive business mentor can help you sift through all the inferior information and identify the ‘so called experts’, saving you precious time, enabling you to focus on implementation, making more money and working smarter rather than harder.
Doing what you have done got you here, but it won’t get you there.
3.To gain perspective – Often we get too caught up in the emotion surrounding the wins and losses in our business, which can effect us on both a personal and business level. If we avoid wasting emotional energy and getting distracted during these times and, instead, keep things in perspective then we can remain much more focused and continue to operate more happily and far more successfully.
4. To get outside your bubble – Regardless of who you are and how big your business is, a business that fails to innovate will soon get left behind. Look at the bookstores that had a monopoly on the book sales market a decade ago – they’ve almost all had to close their doors in recent years.
A mentor that looks at different industries and different fitness business models is a great resource when it comes keeping your brand fresh and finding new ways to add value to your customers base.
Article written by Steve Grant for the What’s New in Fitness Magazine – Summer 2015 Edition.
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