I love this question, why a gym’s going broke because there’s too much focus when it comes to the fit out and is it a great facility and do I have the right equipment and there’s not enough focus on the actual quality of the service and the connection with the people inside the gym? Today we use the example of the cafe and there’s lots of cafes. If you’re just gonna open it and you don’t know people’s names and there’s no sort of, you’re not making people feel good to come back and sort of make it their regular, like gyms, it’s actually, it probably will have to sort of shut the doors until someone gets in there that’s willing to roll up their sleeves and do what it takes.
The second reason I see gyms go broke is trying to do everything themselves. So because we love the fitness industry, because most of us actually worked as a trainer or delivering classes or something like that, the first thing we instinctively do when we open our own gym is we dive into that role and we’re actually pretty good at it.
The first reason I see gyms go broke is because there’s too much focus on the quality of the bathrooms and the facilities, not enough on the actual service and how well we sort of connect with the members and make them feel good.
Number two is gym owners that try and do everything themselves. And again, that’s fine at the start because you keep your overheads low, it’s what you know and you’re actually getting pretty good results for clients, but it’s the exact same reason why you will sort of experience fatigue and a bit of burnout after a year or two of doing absolutely everything yourself, you realize, you know what?
The third reason I see gyms fail or have required to sort of close their doors is marketing. And there’s a couple of different elements of marketing that I see are common mistakes that gym owners get wrong. The first one is trying to discount the membership instead of discounting the trial. So you see it on Black Friday, a gym say, hey, we’ll give you, you know, six, sign up for six months and we’ll give you six months free. This is guaranteed to kill your business. Discounting is just a race to the bottom. There are of course some brands like Crunch that can do $5 a week.
