I’ve been fortunate enough to own two fitness businesses, each for around eight years.
With both businesses, we managed to reach roughly an $80,000-a-month run rate within the first 18 months.
Getting to that point changes things.
It takes some of the financial pressure off. You can build a good team around you. You don’t need to do everything yourself. And, importantly, you can create a business that gives you a good lifestyle rather than one that consumes it.
There’s definitely been some trial and error along the way, but there are also a number of principles that have consistently served me well.
So if you own a gym, PT studio, group training facility or another fitness business, here are my 16 rules for running a successful fitness business.
1. Charge What You’re Worth
One of the quickest ways to improve both revenue and profit is to look at your pricing.
Your costs increase every year.
Rent goes up. Wages go up. Equipment costs more. Marketing costs more.
Your prices need to move as well.
That doesn’t mean randomly increasing prices. It means understanding your market and making sure you’re not unnecessarily sitting at the bottom end of it.
Charging properly gives you the money to employ good people, advertise, update your equipment, improve the member experience and even take a holiday.
A healthy business starts with charging appropriately for the value you provide.
2. Build an Audience Before You Ask for the Sale
Most people don’t particularly like being sold to.
So instead of introducing your business with “Come and buy our membership”, start by helping.
Create useful videos. Share educational posts. Answer common questions. Give people something they can use.
It could be three stretches for lower back pain, five simple fat-loss tips, or a video showing someone how to improve their squat.
When someone’s first interaction with your business is valuable, you begin building trust.
Then, when you eventually make an offer, you’re no longer asking a completely cold audience to buy from you.
You’ve already established some credibility.
3. Invest in Your Fitness Business
A mistake I see fitness business owners make is trying to build everything on a shoestring budget.
They spend everything getting the doors open and then discover they don’t have enough left to actually fill the business.
Before opening—or when planning your next stage of growth—make sure you’ve got enough capital behind you.
You need money for marketing, rent, wages, signage, uniforms, equipment and all the other things required to operate professionally.
Opening the doors isn’t the goal.
Building a successful business is.
Give yourself enough resources to do that properly.
4. Invest in Yourself
I believe you generally pay for business education in one of two ways: Time or money.
You can spend years figuring everything out through trial and error.
Or you can learn from someone who’s already solved the problem you’re facing.
That might mean getting help with digital marketing, sales, recruitment, staff onboarding, leadership or financial management.
I’ve always preferred to invest money where it can significantly shorten the learning curve.
If someone can help me achieve in 10 months what might otherwise take me 10 years to figure out, that’s a worthwhile investment.
5. Build a Great Team—and Develop Them Every Week
There’s only so much you can do yourself.
If you want more members, better customer service and eventually more freedom from the day-to-day operation of your gym, you need a good team.
You don’t necessarily need to hire someone who already knows everything.
Look for people with some experience, a great attitude and values that align with your business.
Then develop them.
If you spend just one hour every week training your team, that’s more than 50 hours of development over a year.
Work on sales.
Customer service.
Marketing.
Training.
Nutrition.
Communication.
Your competitors can copy your equipment, your challenge or your timetable.
It’s much harder to copy a great team.
6. Streamline Your Sales Process
Early in my fitness career, I did traditional sales training.
Some of it was useful, particularly the role-playing and practising conversations.
But I didn’t like the pushiness or the complicated 12-step processes.
So I simplified it.
The result was a sales process that felt much more authentic to our business—and suddenly more of my team were comfortable getting involved.
They could be themselves.
They could talk about what they loved about the facility, explain how we could help someone and share their expertise rather than feeling like they had to become a stereotypical salesperson.
Make your sales process simple, authentic and repeatable.
If it’s easy to learn, more of your team can confidently participate in it.
7. Ask Your Members What They Think
Every three months, I like to ask members for feedback.
Keep it simple.
Send an SMS with a short link to a survey with no more than about 10 questions.
You can even incentivise participation with something like a $100 voucher.
Most importantly, don’t become defensive when someone gives you negative feedback.
Your fitness business can feel like your baby, so criticism can hurt.
But look for patterns.
One person complaining about something may not mean much.
Five people independently mentioning the same problem deserves your attention.
Your members are telling you how you can make the business better.
Listen to them.
8. Create a 12-Month Retention Calendar
There’s an enormous amount of fitness industry content about lead generation.
There isn’t nearly enough conversation about looking after the members you’ve already got.
Create a simple one-page retention calendar covering the next 12 months.
Include activities that educate, engage and entertain your members.
That could include:
- Fitness challenges
- Social events
- Christmas parties
- BBQs
- Trivia nights
- Guest speakers
- Workshops
- Local partnerships
- Pop-up events
Look at your historical cancellation data as well.
If July and August are traditionally bad retention months, don’t wait until July to start worrying about it.
Plan something in advance that gives members another reason to stay engaged.
9. Delegate the $10-an-Hour Activities
If you want time for the $1,000-an-hour activities, you need to stop spending your day doing $10-an-hour jobs.
Things like cleaning, data entry, scheduling posts, updating timetables and making tiny website changes can usually be delegated.
Your time is better spent hiring a great manager, creating a new offer, developing a partnership, improving your marketing or building a system that could generate revenue for years.
Delegating doesn’t just give you more hours.
It creates more mental space to work on the parts of the business that actually move it forward.
10. Spend One Hour Every Week Planning
This has been one of my most useful habits.
Once a week, I get outside the four walls of the gym.
I’ll go to a café or somewhere else where I’m unlikely to be interrupted and spend an hour working through three areas: Numbers. Meetings. Marketing.
For numbers, I want to know at least:
How many leads did we get?
How many sales did we make?
How many members cancelled?
Those three numbers give you a quick health check of the business.
Next, plan your important meetings for the coming week.
A 20-minute meeting with a clear agenda can achieve far more than an unstructured 45-minute meeting.
Finally, review your marketing.
What’s the current campaign?
What’s working?
What isn’t?
What can you do this week to get the offer in front of more of the right people?
An hour of good planning can save you many hours of wasted activity during the week.
11. Build Your Fitness Business to Sell
You don’t actually have to want to sell your gym.
But I believe you should build it as though you might. Why?
Because a sellable fitness business usually needs to be profitable, systemised and capable of operating without the owner being there 60 hours a week.
That’s also a much nicer business to own.
Build your revenue.
Control unnecessary expenses.
Develop your manager and senior staff.
Document how you answer the phone, conduct tours, sell memberships and onboard new members.
Keep your website, Google presence and brand looking professional.
Gradually move the important knowledge out of your head and into systems other people can follow.
Whether you eventually sell or keep it for another 20 years, you’ll own a better business because of it.
12. Build Your Google Reviews
Google reviews are one of the most valuable marketing assets a local fitness business can build.
Make leaving a review easy.
Create a simple link and SMS it to happy members.
Then keep asking consistently.
When a prospect searches for a gym or personal trainer in their area and discovers a business with hundreds of positive reviews, a significant amount of trust has already been established before they ever contact you.
Reviews don’t just help your online visibility.
They help move prospects further through the buying process.
13. Use the Power of Video
Video isn’t really optional for fitness businesses anymore.
Start with one quality video on your website that introduces you and the business.
Don’t just show equipment and people exercising.
Talk to the camera.
Explain who you are.
Who do you help?
Why did you get into the fitness industry?
What makes your business different?
Then create regular short videos on your phone.
Talk about training.
Nutrition.
Technique.
Common mistakes.
Frequently asked questions.
Anything genuinely useful to the person you’d like to become a member.
I’d rather see a gym create one useful video every week than seven generic posts that nobody pays attention to.
Do less content if you need to.
Just make it better.
14. Invest in Software That Buys Back Your Time
Good software can be one of the cheapest ways to improve your productivity.
The question I ask is simple: Does this save me time or make the business easier to run?
Tools for design, accounting, video, CRM, bookings, payments and member management can remove hours of unnecessary admin.
You don’t need every new app that appears.
But paying $10, $20 or $40 a month for software that consistently buys back your time can be an excellent investment.
Technology should simplify your business—not add another layer of complexity.
15. Follow People Whose Values Match Your Goals
Be careful who you take business advice from.
There’s no shortage of successful people online telling you how you should work, sell, manage your time and run your business.
But their definition of success may be completely different from yours.
If having time for your partner, kids, friends, travel or surfing matters to you, find mentors who’ve built successful businesses while maintaining those things.
If you want to eventually sell your gym, learn from someone who’s successfully sold one.
If you want to reduce your hours, learn from someone who’s already built a business that doesn’t require them there every day.
Don’t just look at someone’s revenue.
Look at the life they’ve built around it.
Then decide whether that’s actually what you want.
16. Get Around Successful Gym Owners
Your environment matters.
If you want to raise your standards, spend more time around people who already operate at the standard you’re trying to reach.
And when it comes to your fitness business, seek advice from people who understand fitness businesses.
Your mate who owns a café might mean well.
So might your builder friend at the pub.
But neither necessarily understands member retention, fitness sales, staffing, lead generation or the economics of running a gym.
I’ve always found enormous value in getting around other successful gym owners.
You share ideas.
You discover what’s working.
You see what’s possible.
And inevitably, your own standards rise.
Build a Business You Actually Enjoy Owning
Today, I still own a fitness business in Sydney.
I’ve been able to structure it so that I only need to be physically in the business a couple of mornings each week.
It makes good money, we have a great team and, most importantly, after all these years I still enjoy being involved.
That’s what I believe a successful fitness business should eventually give you.
Not just revenue.
Freedom, a great team, an enjoyable business and an asset that has genuine value.
You don’t need to implement all 16 rules tomorrow.
Pick one or two areas where you know your business could improve and start there.
Then keep building.
If you want to know more, watch the full video of 16 Rules to Running a Successful Fitness Business HERE
Need help growing your fitness business?
At GymHub, we work with gym owners across Australia and New Zealand on the practical parts of building a better fitness business—from marketing and sales through to retention, staffing, systems and creating a business that doesn’t rely entirely on you.
If you’d like some help working out what your next move should be, book a call with Steve and the GymHub team.
