Welcome to the second video in our series on “Improving productivity in the health club”.

This video is going to focus on two strategies where we can automate parts of our day to day health club operations.

As we talked about on the first video a lot of health club managers are overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that’s going on in their club and this doesn’t allow them to then focus on the most important activities, the high leverage or impact activities that will create and grow health club faster.

If you can focus on automation, through technology and other means you can, as a manager or owner, free up time to give you availability to focus on more productive activities.

Let’s discuss our first two automation strategies where you can save time in your health club.

Strategy One: Appointment Confirmations

The first strategy that I’m going to talk about in terms of automation is what we call: appointment confirmations.

Confirming appointments is really vital in terms of your member induction purposes and getting members on boarded into your health club. Doing this sets them up for the best chances of success and your best chance on retaining them as a customer.

We’ve seen that implementing appointment confirmations can increase show rates by as much as 30%. This is very much an important thing to do, but if you are manually making phone calls, or have your team making phone calls manually, this is a lot of wasted time, because what we’ve found is that, it takes 4 or 5 even 6 attempts to get one contact in terms of a phone call. So, that’s a poor use of time because we must do a lot of calls to just confirm a single appointment.

What we found is that using SMS appointment confirmations is the best strategy when it comes to confirming your appointments and find little difference between the outcomes of calling to confirm and SMS in terms of these show rates. If your SMS appointment confirmations can be automated to go out automatically, without you thinking about it each day at the appropriate time, this is going to ensure that your appointments are being attended but without the labor intensive aspect of making phone calls. This process can save 2-3 hours per week depending on the size of your health club.

I’m a big advocate of personalized communications so, phone calls are great, there’s a time and place for them but in terms of appointment confirmations, it’s a poor use of time and something that should be automated through SMS. So, there are a number of technologies that can do this like the FitDesk software for health clubs but anything that can automate the SMS is a good option.

You also want to avoid platforms that you can SMS from but you have manually done it, so a staff member that has to log in each day remember to actually send off these confirmations, that’s something you want to avoid if you can, you want to be able to automate.

So, that’s the first thing that we can automate to start to free up sometime or free up the time of your team.

Strategy 2- Workout Templates

The next strategy to free up our time is what we call “Workout templates”.

So, when a member joins a health club, they often go through an induction process, maybe 40% or even 50% of your members will be given a training schedule and a workout program to follow and your trainers are obviously responsible for creating such programs for members.

The thing is that most trainers will write training programs that are very similar most of the time.

In fact, if we go back to the 80-20 rule we talked about in the previous article, I’d say that most trainers would write almost identical programs 80% of the time.

So, this then suggests that we can leverage that concept by using what we call “Workout template”. by having templated workout programs that suit certain demographics, say it’s a beginner that just wants to lose weight and tighten up a little bit, you might just introduce them to a machine circuit with a bit of abs work. So, rather than rewriting that program again, you can use templates and have templates in place to give to your members. This can be done electronically through software that has a template library or it may even just be doing it old school, where you have a templated program that you can give up.

Now, there’s a few caveats here, you want obviously to be mindful of ensuring that you or your trainers are focused on making sure that your members that do have injuries and medical conditions do get the appropriate level of customization. It’s not a matter of just giving blanket programs out willy-nilly, it’s a matter of still having the due diligence in place to assign a workout program that fits the specific needs of an individual but leveraging templates to use time more efficiently.

So if we take these two strategies and implement them in your health club instantly you’re going to find some additional time. You can then re-invest that time into more high leverage activities which we’ll talk about in future videos.
So that sums up our video here, in our next video we’re going to go through strategy 3 and 4 of our 6 strategies.

So stay tuned for that…………..