There is no doubt many fitness businesses focus on sales as the most important Key Performance Indicator (KPI). After all, revenue is the oxygen that makes our business breath, right? While this is true, I’m also reminded of one of my all-time favourite sayings, “before I have, I must become.”
In thinking about my business, Listen To Your Body, before I have a super-profitable business, I must become a fantastic leader, who drives a motivated personal training team to create an excellent member experience that turns them into raving fans. Before worrying about sales, you need to know your most important KPI is actually attendance.
Why is attendance is so important?
Overall, if our members are training high volumes, they are retained, which means we have a service that people want. Once we have high attendance numbers, sales naturally follow that.
In our system, the average member spends $14.20 per workout, therefore if we execute 500 workouts per week, the value of those sessions is $7,100 per week. Based on that, we have a super healthy business as there is also upfront payment opportunities on top of this, plus extra revenue streams.
How do we drive great attendance?
Check out my five best tips to encourage high participation.
- Ensure you have a super studio that attracts people to work out. It needs to be hygienic, have great equipment, is easy to access and comfortable to train in. Remember our fitness facilities are a 3rd home for our members as they will frequent us out of any other place on earth other than their home and work in many cases. They need to love the environment.
- Are your trainers motivated? If they are motivated for health, fitness and their own training, then they are a chance to encourage people through high levels of goal engagement, great workouts and accountability because they care. If your trainers are not inspiring and motivated, you will grow at a snail’s pace, if at all.
- Do we really know WHY members are training? Understanding key drivers for our members to train is a must. Never assume the old “lose weight, get fit” will get them out of bed at 5.00am for a session. Find out what benefits they get and what that means to the member.
Understand their intensity level goals and adjust your customised program appropriately and not just what you want to do. This is called customisation and if you are doing blanket programming such as one size fits all, you may not keep your members more than a year.
Are you communicating to members about preparation? Preparation is a huge key for attendance success. Fitness training is all about momentum. When we prepare well, we plan out our week, and we will get 4-7 workouts in per week.
As trainers, we need to work out planning habits of our members, if it is ad hoc and they just roll in and train when suits, they are guessing their way to results. Alternatively, if they plan the next 7 to 14 days thoroughly and book out say 9 workouts, chances are they will attend 9 which means they will be motivated which over again adds to our 90%+ retention rate?
Always work to retain your core membership base. Too many fitness businesses get a thrill with marketing to new members, getting leads and converting leads towards their New Member KPIs. Sure, new members are gold, and we can never stop recruiting.
However, I often see many fitness businesses neglect the existing members while they roll out the red carpet for the new members. The issue with this mindset is that when the new members who walk on the red carpet for 3 months, get this taken away and given to the next wave of new members, then the value decreases. Never neglect your core membership base as they are the reason why you are in business.
At Listen To Your Body, we pride ourselves on this KPI as being an accurate reflection of the business health long term. If a studio has high attendance, they are just great at what they do. If they have low turnout and higher sales, this means their service is not good enough, and the funnel has a massive hole at the bottom that eventually will run dry.
Want to find out more?
Ben Fletcher is always happy to share what’s worked for him at Listen To Your Body.
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