The global industry of fitness has been on a steady rise in recent years. If you're already a gym owner, you know that it's definitely a workout in itself.

Managing a successful fitness business requires more than just pumping iron, it takes hard work, dedication, and smart decision-making to make it a lucrative venture. But don't worry, with the right mindset and approach, your path to a fit and profitable future is almost guaranteed.

For those of you in the fitness business, now is the time to build a strategy around how you’re going to manage your gym in the coming year.  To help you out, we’ve put together a complete guide on how to manage a gym in 2023.

4 key aspects of gym management

Before we get into planning your gym management strategy for 2023, let’s talk about the 4 key aspects of gym management that you will need to touch upon as part of that strategy.

Experience

When we say experience, we’re not talking about the number of years you’ve been running a fitness studio. We’re talking about customer experience and the impact it has on managing your gym.

Ideally, for your brand to flourish, you will need to ensure your customers have a positive and consistent experience irrespective of the touch point.

This means your customer’s entire experience when they visit your website, come for a workout session or connect with a member of your team on Facebook Messenger, should be unique to what your gym identity is and what it represents. It should also help create and nurture a positive relationship with your gym.

Team culture

The team culture you build within your gym will reflect on the fitness culture your customers' experience. Simply put, the way your staff feels directly impacts their interactions with your customers.

It’s important for you to ensure your staff knows their efforts are appreciated and that you treat them with the respect and understanding they deserve.

When you create a positive work environment and have a happy team, their positivity and joy will reflect in the way they treat your gym’s customers.

Financial management

Financial management is, needless to say, the key to ensuring your business stays afloat and continues to generate not just income, but profits.

This means staying on top of everything money related, including new memberships, renewals of existing gym memberships, member payments, staff salaries, rent, utility bills, and marketing costs, among other things.

Let’s face it, you cannot do everything by yourself. And money management, in particular, is not something all of us are great at. We’d advise you to hire a team of professionals to help you with financial management.

Engagement and retention

While new memberships are great news, your bread and butter are still going to come from retaining existing members. To retain gym members, you need to have effective communication channels and keep them engaged, be it in person or online.

Pay attention to ensure you create multiple member engagement touchpoints based on their preferences, and address issues that may be affecting their customer experience to ensure they don’t lose sight of their fitness goals, or worse, leave you for a competitor.

How to manage a gym successfully in 2023

To successfully manage your gym in 2023, you’re going to need to address multiple factors, and have a reliable game plan in place. Here are some pro tips on how to manage a gym successfully in 2023.

Streamline pricing

To begin with, you should be smart about how you price memberships to your gym without compromising price integrity.

If you charge too much, you’re likely to lose out on a lot of paying customers. If you charge too little, you’ll not only struggle to keep your head above water, but you’ll also be unfairly undercutting your competitors.

The way you price your gym memberships should be based on a number of factors, such as the facilities and courses you offer, your physical location, the recurring costs you need to cover, and competitor pricing.

A lot of fitness studios also lose on clients because they make their pricing structures complicated. They have multiple additional fees and hidden charges for extra facilities that confuse and deter prospective customers from using their services.

Instead, it will serve you well to have clearly defined tiers and pricing options for your gym membership and the services that come with it. The flatter your fee structure is, the more likely customers are to be happy paying for your services.

Manage your finances

Experts predict that there is more than a 25% chance of a global economic recession in 2023, which is, quite honestly, alarming. This implies that you will need to handle your finances with the utmost care this coming year.

The bottom line is that your gym will need to generate enough revenue for you to retain your staff, handle expenses and service your customers satisfactorily. For you to generate this revenue, you will need your customers to pay you a certain amount.

And for it to be worth their while to pay you that amount, you will need to maintain a certain service level consistently.

A word to the wise: if you haven’t thought about insuring your gym, do so right now. Invest in business insurance to cover physical assets like gym equipment and the building. And considering the physical nature of your business, it would be prudent to also invest in public liability insurance to cover accidents and injuries to members and staff in the gym.

We at Kenko will be working closely with gyms and other fitness business owners, like yourself, on financial strategies to not only ride through the bleak financial forecast for 2023 but to turn over profits during the recession.

Now’s the time for you to jump on board the Kenko juggernaut!

Create a winning culture in your gym

Your drive and attitude are of the utmost importance to the way your gym will function. What we’re implying is that you cannot be a remote leader who sits aloof while his team does all the hard work and still expect your fitness business to be a success. Your staff’s commitment and behavior will be perfunctory, at best.

Instead, you will need to lead from the front and set the right example for your staff. When they see you being hands-on and passionate about every aspect of managing your gym, right from maintenance and team briefings to customer enrolments and training sessions, that commitment and energy will rub off on them, driving them to perform better at their jobs.

Market consistently

The key to reaching out to new customers, whether you want them to sign up for online fitness classes or join your gym for regular training sessions, is being consistent with your marketing efforts.

The basis for a strong and consistent marketing strategy is knowing who your target audience is. Once that demographic is defined, you can then build your plan around marketing a mix of paid and organic content on social media platforms, which is where all the action is nowadays.

Keep in mind that while the core of the content itself will need to be consistent across all platforms and in line with your brand theme as well as values, the format will need to be modified to suit each social media platform’s unique regulations.

Take care of your staff

We cannot stress enough the importance of hiring the right staff and taking care of them.

To begin with, keep your long-term goals in mind while hiring staff. You’d ideally want to hire people who can be the brand ambassadors your gym needs, people who are willing to live your brand values.

Then, spend sufficient time and effort training them to be the people you want them to be before throwing them into the deep end. This will make them more capable of executing their roles with aplomb.

Always be available to your staff in case they have questions, have feedback for you, or even just need someone to let off some steam with. Remember, they’re doing most of the grunt work, and deserve that empathy.

If you see someone doing something well, recognize their efforts and reward them. This will motivate the entire team to push themselves.

This doesn’t mean your staff gets to do whatever they want either. Keep constant tabs on their performance, and be ready to step in with feedback and if needed, additional training to help them perform better.

And finally, don’t skimp on paying your staff a fair salary. In fact, paying them more than what your competitors do, and rewarding their efforts when they are deserved will ensure that you have a loyal and hard-working team.

Create an exceptional member experience

Eventually, it all comes down to how happy your paying customers are with your gym. This puts the focus on creating an exceptional member experience. Let’s break this down into three sections that you should focus on.

The first section is about creating an engaging onboarding experience when a new member joins, including

• Assessing their fitness levels,
• Helping them set realistic fitness goals,
• Ensuring your staff and you know their preferences,
• Ensuring they have the assistance they need,
• Integrating them into the existing community at your gym, and
• Ensuring effective communication at all times.

The second section is about creating ways to engage with your customers, both old and new. This could be through multiple touchpoints, such as blog posts, motivational or instructional videos, reminders through push notifications, email newsletters, and more.

The best way to do this is to first find out the preferred means of communication for each of your customers, create groups based on these preferences, and then design your engagement content accordingly.

The third section is about retaining your customers. A lot of fitness studios and gyms forget about a basic responsibility once they enroll members: going back and asking them for feedback.

Find out what’s working for them, and what they feel could be improved, and work on those aspects to keep your customers satisfied.

In fact, another great time to ask these questions is when you get to know customers who want to discontinue their membership. Finding out why they want to leave gives you the opportunity to change their minds, and make changes within your organization to address any shortcomings you may not have noticed.

Deploy a gym management software

If you want to run a tight ship and have control over every aspect of managing your gym, you will need to invest in great gym management software.

An efficient gym management tool will give you control over everything from managing member profiles, onboarding new members, billing, updating your website, mobile app management, managing your social media accounts, referral reward programs, e-store management, and much more.

Manage, promote and run your gym with Kenko

Kenko has one of the most comprehensive gym management solutions on the market right now Our software can help you manage practically every aspect of your fitness business.

Here are some of the reasons you need to start using Kenko’s gym management software today.

• Manage new customer onboarding easily.
• Manage existing customer profiles and schedules from a single dashboard.
• Allow you to keep track of your team’s performance and attendance as well.
• All your billing and expense management can be easily organized and managed.
• Want to offer seasonal discounts or referral rewards to your gym members? Our system can enable that for you.
• Track the inventory for your merchandise store with Kenko’s gym management system.
• Scared about how you’re going to see your business through the prophesied recession? Kenko has a plan in place to help gyms stay profitable through lean times.

Learn more about the amazing features we offer and our pricing plans by visiting our website today!

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