How to Grow Your Fitness Business In 3 Steps
There are ONLY three ways to grow your fitness business. You must either get more members to join your gym, get them to spend more, or get them to spend more often. Or if you really want to skyrocket the profit of your business– figure out a way to implement all three.
Sounds simple right? Let’s break down what each of these steps means for your business, and how you can accomplish them to grow your gym.
1. ACQUIRE MORE MEMBERS
This one is typically the most obvious, and what most Gym Owners are already focusing their attention on. If you’re servicing twenty customers and you increase that to forty, then you have more revenue. Your business grows. Pretty obvious.
So how do you get brand new members in the door? Advertising. If you’re not actively marketing your gym, chances are your growth is pretty stagnant, and you’re waiting on referrals to walk through the door. In order to have a steady flow of predictable leads, you’ll need to come up with a marketing strategy to grow your gym.
We have plenty of resources on how to do this on our site, but the tried and true best practice is to advertise an irresistible, high ticket, front end offer. You have to know how to get your audience’s attention and sell them on the results, not the program itself.
Your sales skills will also be critical to how many new members you will be able to acquire. The more leads you have coming in, the more sales you will close, even if you suck at sales. If you sharpen your sales skills, and maximize your lead flow you can easily 4x your profits and increase your fitness membership sales.
2. INCREASE THE AVERAGE TICKET PRICE OF EACH CUSTOMER
If you have twenty customers on a recurring membership at $100/month, and then you can get 5 of them to take an upsell to $500/month, then you grew your business. You didn’t actually increase your number of customers, but you increased the average ticket price.
Most Gym Owners are resistant to increasing their prices due to fear of upsetting their current members, or losing out on sales. However, increasing your prices is actually better for your business and your members.
A high financial investment yields a higher emotional investment, and in-turn will lead to better client adherence. In other words, people who pay, pay attention.
Products and services with a higher price are perceived as more valuable to a customer, compared to a similar product with a lower price. The “low cost leaders” in your area will not be known for their value, but rather for simply being the low cost option– and you don’t want that for your business.
3. INCREASE THE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASES
One way to approach increasing the frequency of purchases is to offer other products that a gym goer needs. For example, if they buy their supplements, apparel, energy drinks, etc from you, they will be paying you more often than if they were only paying a once a month membership fee.
The other way to increase purchase frequency is to build a recurring revenue model, and work on retaining members for as long as possible. If someone is in a 3 month membership, your goal should be to get them the best results possible, make them feel welcomed in your community, and continue to sign them up for more recurring months.
A super simple way to add an extra billing cycle to your memberships is to bill clients every 28 days or bi-weekly. Either way at the end of the year there will be a 13th billing cycle added to your bottom line. That adds up quickly if you factor in all of your members. The best part is people don’t really care what cadence you bill at, as long as they know when it’s coming.
BEFORE YOU GO…
This valuable concept will change your business and your life. Once you realize there aren’t a million ways to grow your fitness business, only 3, life as a gym owner becomes so much easier. Just focus on which of these 3 levers you want to pull to increase how much money you’re making.
Check out GymDash to keep track of your fitness business data so that you know exactly which lever your business needs to pull in order to grow. GymDash is a Gym Management Software built specifically for Gym Owners so you can see the health of your gym in real time. Click the button below to check it out.
