Gym management encompasses a broad spectrum of business issues as well as membership management. With the growing popularity of personal training among fitness enthusiasts, being able to manage all of the complexities of a full feature personal training program is key. Skye Kaise, owner of two Gold’s Gym locations in Regina, Saskatchewan and an EZFacility client, spoke with representatives of EZFacility about the success he has had using the EZFacility management tool to streamline his personal training program while generating savings.
Skye Kaiss, owner of two Gold’s Gym locations in Regina, Saskatchewan and an EZFacility customer, spoke with EZFacility about the success he has had using EZFacility management software to streamline his personal training program, increase client & staff retention while generating savings of over $8OK/year.
Over the last few years, Gold’s Gym in Regina has been actively selling $200,000 of personal training between its two locations on a monthly basis. Members could choose to pay for the personal training in full, or take advantage of a multi-level financing plan offered by the club. With plan lengths of three, six and twelve months, members were provided with purchase flexibility while taking steps towards achieving better health.
Of the $2.4 million in annual personal training sales, 75% were purchased using one of the available financing packages. Of these financed annual sales, 15% were never used and the payments were subsequently defaulted on by the member. Since Gold’s Gym paid out commissions on these sales in the payroll period immediately following the sale, they were experiencing an overall loss of revenue due to the fact that commissions were paid in-full on these sales once completed. Initially, Gold’s attempted to institute a policy of taking back commissions on defaulted sales, but this was not a popular policy with the sales staff in the least.
Solution
Although not using the full power of EZFacility, the Regina Gold’s Gym locations did implement EZFacility to manage the Personal Training program in both locations from a scheduling and session-management stand-point. Utilizing the feature-rich EZFacility architecture, Skye was able to institute a policy where salesperson and trainer commissions would be paid out as each session was conducted and completed. As each session was logged as completed in the software, both the salesperson and the personal trainer would receive a commission for that session. If the personal trainer was also the salesperson then they would receive two commissions.
Benefits
Initially, the most noticeable benefit is a savings of 10% in payroll expenditures on a monthly basis due to linking the payment of commissions directly to session’s completion. And while this did not immediately eliminate the fact that 10-15% of sessions get paid for but never used (which usually results in those members not renewing their membership or referring family, friends or colleagues to the gym), it did offer a significant customer service benefit. As a result of the salesperson and personal trainer only receiving commissions based on sessions completed, both began to maintain contact with the members to provide support and encouragement to keep the member committed to the training plan. Additionally, as the salespeople were accumulating a bank of as yet unused sessions, the attrition rate of sales staff was also reduced as the unused sessions represented unrealized commissions that kept them tied to the club for a longer period.
Combining all three benefits, Skye Kaiss and his Gold’s Gym facilities realized an estimated savings of $70-80K annually between both clubs, based on an estimated $1 million annual operational revenue from personal training services.
Listen to the full interview: