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New Book Introduction! Where Did That Member Go?

Published on 02/23/10 04:42PM

The fitness industry is an industry of mistakes, failures, and over 60 years of history of doing the wrong thing for our clients. We have mastered the art of the adversarial membership sale, we have advocated equipment and training that is both harmful and ineffective, and the member has never been anything more than a sales number recorded on a daily tracking sheet easily replaceable by the next new sale tomorrow.

Even today, there are still thousands of club owners, including most of the largest chains in the country, that still believe they are in the membership business, not the retention-through-client-success business, and that we will always have an endless stream of new clients to replace the ones we continue to fail.

The fitness business should be a business of trust. We take money in exchange for the client’s belief—and trust—that we can help him change his life through our leadership and guidance. In reality, in most mainstream clubs, unless this person can ante up the necessary money to declare himself elite, and therefore, buy leadership through personal training, the member is left to seek fitness on his own through magazines or help from other lost members.

The members believe we will help them, but we set them up with antiquated circuit training, including the giant workout card, that will fail the client after a few weeks, and then ignore them until we need them again at the end of their membership. If a member wants to get in shape in these clubs, he has to damn well work hard on his own because the club simply can’t, or won’t, provide the leadership and help he needs to be successful over time.

We have in essence created a culture of failure in our clubs. We run insulting advertising, pressure hard on the first visit, and only give a couple of workouts with a disinterested trainer, unless the person has a wad of cash sticking out his pocket, and then we love this member. For everyone else, we default to 1970s training philosophy that every major fitness guru in the industry has declared to be not effective in getting someone into shape and keeping them there once they do arrive. Everything we do is for the simple sake of selling memberships, which is the way it has been since the dawning of the modern fitness era in 1945.

This coming decade will be remembered forever as the decade of change in the fitness business. The industry has changed more in the last several years than it has in the previous 60. Maturing markets—defined as more clubs in your competitive area, new breakthroughs in training theory, the advent of functional training that allows an owner to generate big money in less space, the shift in the economy that will end the ability to build endless big-box clubs and a more sophisticated owner—all combined at this point in history to force a new, harsh reality on the way things have to be done if you want to continue to make money in this industry.

What has become apparent from this collision of factors is that the member is now becoming more important. Competition prevents endlessly replacing the ones you do get. The consumer is brighter and better read about fitness, bringing new demands on how he wants to be trained. Most traditional marketing sources are no longer valid to create leads for the clubs. Most importantly, everyone is now realizing that it just costs too much to acquire new members as opposed to simply keeping the ones you have already purchased.

The foundation for keeping your members is customer service. We have never, ever in this industry practiced anything but the most primitive basics of customer service. We don’t know how to teach it, we don’t know what it looks like, we don’t have the right people to deliver it, and we don’t have any systems in place to track the ultimate goal of good service, which is member retention.

Customer service is the mastery of many small things, such as the ability to handle complaints or create systems that individualize the member’s experience no matter how large your club is. When it comes to developing a customer-service image for your business, most owners are starting at the bottom of the ladder with nowhere to go but up. And no matter how good you think your service might be, if you haven’t trained your counter team for at least four hours last week, and every week, in creating and delivering customer service, then you too are at the bottom.

 

Service can be taught. Systems can be created that any owner can apply to his business. This book is about rediscovering the lost art of member service and then implementing it in your business. It is also about where we have failed the member, and how we should respect his commitment to our businesses.

Your goal with this book is to move away from the culture of failure where we have let down the people who have trusted us with their time and money and move toward building a business that retains its clients through the creation of legendary customer service in your business.

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