You have taken the first key step in the process to being a good gym manager if you have landed on this article as it demonstrates you want to better yourself and are willing to take time out of your day to do so.
In this article I will show you my top 17 tips for gym managers that you can implement in your gym overnight that took me years to understand or develop.
Probably the most important gym manager tip on this list is to ensure you hire and recruit the highest quality gym staff possible.
Your performance as a manager is largely dictated by the quality of your team, as their success becomes your success.
You want to have knowledge that when important tasks are delegated or you're not on shift that the work required is being completed and to of a high standard.
The best way to facilitate this is to get the best staff you can in the first place, that have the ability, passion and professionalism required for their roles.
In order to not be in a situation where you’re desperate to fill a vacant role, leaving you to rush the recruitment process, make sure you’re ahead of the curve and as soon as you find out a staff member is leaving you should be getting job ads up immediately.
Maintain quality across your departures by asking for qualifications and evidence of those qualifications across all your job adverts. This will filter out low quality applications and ensure you get a highly qualified team.
For example, some PT studios require all their PT’s to be qualified up to Level 4 as opposed to Level 3 or require their staff to have a sports related degree.
Getting to applicants before your competition matters!
You should be calling applicants (not emailing) within 24 hours of them applying, when your role is fresh in their mind and arrange interviews within a maximum of just a few days and then continue to cycle this process.
This increases the probability of applicants turning up, speeds up the recruitment process and shows that your company is serious about their application.
For roles you deem important ensure you sit in the interviews even if you’re not the one conducting it to make sure you're happy with the caliber coming through the door.
In the modern day of employment, companies need to sell themselves to applicants. At the end of all interviews tell the applicant about the great working environment, why they would love to work there and other benefits such as free gym memberships, pension or work events that are put on by the company.
You can hire great gym staff by using Active Career's free job posting service where you can hire Personal Trainers and front of house staff through to gym membership sales advisor and Fitness Managers.
Hire Gym Staff Here (FREE)
To truly inspire and foster respect from your team, a leader needs to embody the values and behaviour they wish to see in their team members themselves.
Respect is earnt through being perceived as a team player yourself. Your team must view you as someone who takes on responsibility, who will help and support when they need it and is ultimately a hard working individual that they hold in high esteem.
A good gym manager tip is to tell your team during monthly meetings what contributions you have made towards the clubs financial goals, clarify what projects you’re working on, so they can see what role you’re playing in the success of the gym.
One of the best pieces of gym manager advice I received was to create a community feel between gym members with one another and between gym members and staff.
It's essential to foster an environment where members feel they belong to something special and exclusive, this will enhance your gym membership retention rates, create a positive atmosphere on the gym floor and can be harnessed as a selling point to prospective new customers.
Perhaps the biggest way of creating community that is free to initiate is to create gym challenges that includes people new to training, different age groups, is divided by gender and different training goals.
For example, you might do one challenge to see who is the best pound for pound best deadlifter in the gym or who can do 2k the fastest on the rower or who can hold a plank the longest. Ensure to get your staff involved too.
Give small rewards to winners and cycle these challenges on a continuous basis. This will give your members a sense of pride, make them feel special and most paramountly, they will promote this to all their friends and social groups.
If you're looking for inspiration, check out these gym challenges by Xplor Gyms.
Recognise your members' efforts and success stories via monthly and annual awards. See below how Avenue Gym is celebrating the success of gym member Michelle Simpson:
To create even more engagement with more members you can create different categories for "winners".
This could include recognising who has attended the most gym sessions in a particular month, who attended the most classes or who achieved something great outside of the gym, such as completing their first half marathon or placing in their first bodybuilding contest.
Through creating good communication channels with your members whether that being via email, conducting monthly surveys or just chatting to your members regularly you can discover some great accomplishments.
Offering gym merchandise that is customised to the gym that can either be sold or better yet given as a prizes for the above mentioned
this creates exclusivity.
Get your team to share (with consent) progress pictures of your members fitness journeys and share their achievements both in and out of the gym.
See here how Blue Print Fitness Gym based in London demonstrate their expertise through sharing progress pictures across their social media and website:
You can run events where members represent the gym at. For example, some gyms have a park run gym team, whilst others do outdoor challenges that members can attend like hikes or bike rides. You could also run a spinathon for a fitness charity or even just having regular social events hosted by the gym is a powerful way of creating a great social element to your facility.
See a great example below of creating community by Liverpool City Centre based Gym Limitless Lifestyle who not just run engaging gym challenges, have a member whatsapp group but also run monthly social events for their members like the such as the hike below:
When you ask most applicants what makes a good gym manager, you normally hear answers like to be approachable, friendly or empathetic, which are all true, but what you rarely hear is “someone who makes me better at my job”.
Let’s put it this way, what makes a good football manager? You don’t normally hear “being approachable” mentioned, that’s because it's an attribute that makes someone's life easier, not better.
A good gym manager is someone who will coach and mentor staff by challenging them, empowering them with responsibilities and setting out ongoing plans for their development around their existing role.
A good gym manager tip is to share your personal success’ and failures and what you learnt from those and how they can benefit from them. Give staff honest and always constructive feedback with clear targets that makes them leave meetings feeling motivated and driven to succeed.
As a gym manager, you shoulder a significant responsibility, not just in managing the facility but in maintaining a positive relationship with your employees. This relationship is pivotal, as mutual respect between you and your team is essential for a harmonious and productive workplace.
When thinking of how to become a good gym manager, you need to put yourself in your staff’s shoes and think about what they want from a manager. See below some ways to gain respect from your team:
Organise team building activities that are fun and engaging
Offer training and development opportunities
Value their time off and scheduled annual leave
Be fair and transparent with your team
Don’t change the goalposts with your aims and expectations
Recognise and praise your staff
Show them trust and empower them to do the tasks that they have been assigned.
Be the first to offer help and assistance when they are struggling
Deliver on promises that you make to them individually and as a team
Referrals are the best type of lead for any business and this is even more prominent for gyms.
Referrals are more powerful than other forms of traditional marketing as your service is getting endorsed by someone they know, like and ultimately trust.
When thinking about how to be a good health club manager, one of the first things you need to do is set-up and optimise and effective gym referral programme. Here is how you can implement this step by step;
Firstly you need to brainstorm a referral incentive that is two ended. This means, making sure the referral offer benefits both the referrer and the individual being referred and the prix is something of value. Examples of this could be that both individuals get a free freeze on their membership for a month, two free personal training sessions each or both get free merchandise.
See this example here by Fusion leisure, where they are offering both parties a free months membership:
Advertise your promotion everywhere across the gym including but not limited to; the lockers, posters, the gym floor, newsletters and automated induction emails.
Create friendly competition within your team to see which departments or individuals can generate the most referrals and offer the winners a reward for doing so. This will encourage staff to be proactive and push the incentive.
Train your staff on how they can effectively approach members to ask for referrals at different stages of the customer journey such as when they sign up to the gym, during inductions, when they attend the gym and on the gym floor.
You should cycle referrals every month and create new incentives for both members and gym staff to prevent the incentive becoming stale.
When considering how to be a good health club manager, a useful tip is to spend some time incrementally reviewing areas of the gym’s systems that could be more efficient via automation software.
Doing this position by position and listening to feedback from your team members is a good starting point to seeing where pain points are within their job roles.
For example, your fitness team might be writing and administering fitness programmes using Microsoft Word or Excel. This would be extremely time consuming and ultimately costing valuable time that could be spent elsewhere.
A solution would be signing your fitness staff up to one of the numerous personal training software companies where they can create programmes that not just look more professional, but saves them huge amounts of time as they can save training templates and even distribute nutrition plans with just a few clicks of a button.
How your gym membership contracts are administered (Document software)
How you record staff performance (HR Software)
Social media posting (scheduling software)
Email automation for your marketing (email marketing software)
Where your customer data is stored (CRM system)
Accounting / Bookkeeping (ERP software)
Policies and procedures
How complaints are handled (Customer service software)
A good gym management tip is to take some time evaluating all your process within each staff members respective job roles to see which processes are executed manually and then performing a simple Google search to see if there is a piece of software that can resolve the issue.
Alternately check out this great list of gym software and apps that you could utilise in your gym.
Search Hundreds of Gym Manager Job Roles From The UK's Largest Employers
When thinking about what makes a good health club manager, your ability to market your gym effectively is potentially going to make or break you.
Every business relies on a high volume flow of quality leads coming into their business as this is what determines revenue.
Google is the world's most visited website and how we use Google is very different to how we use social media platforms.
With Google we do a lot of what we call "transactional searches" where we are looking to spend money on a product or service, whereas on social media we rarely do this.
For example, I might use Google to buy a new squat rack for my gym and Google “squat rack” with the hope Google presents me with lots of different types of squat racks that I can peruse.
By contrast, I would very rarely harness a social media platform to search for a squat rack to buy.
This differentiation is important because when people search for things they want to buy, they use search engines (not social media) to find it.
This is why it is important for your gym to be showing at the top of the search engine for terms like “Gyms in XXXX Your Location” or “Cheap Gyms in XXXX Your Location”.
See the screenshot below if I search for a gym in Edinburgh:
You can see "Cavefit Gym" advertising at the top of the Google search for "gym In Edinburgh" as well as dozens of other related search terms.
Cavefit are benefiting from hundreds of people using Google to find their ideal gym:
(Table to show the number of Google searches each month that match the exact term "Gyms in Edinburgh")
Hundreds of people each and every month are using Google to find their gym and as they are using Google ad words (PPC marketing) they are gaining most of the traffic, giving them a steady flow of high quality leads coming into their gym everyday.
If you can master setting up Google ads for your gym, you can drive huge traffic of potential members to your website and massively boost your gym memberships sales.
Google ads alone was the sole reason I grew my gym memberships into the thousands and was responsible for over 85% of my gym's annual enquiries.
Watch this video tutorial here on how to set-up Google Ads for your gym.
A good gym manager knows when to stick to policies set and when to use discretion when dealing with staff.
Being flexible in your management style means being adaptive to your staff needs and welfare when it is possible to do so.
For example, you might have a staff member that requests a holiday within a shorter time period allowed within the gym’s annual leave policy due to a special circumstance such as their parents visiting for a limited period from overseas or that childcare on that date has been cancelled outside of their control.
This would be good examples of using managerial discretion to override a policy that would really help your employee out, make them feel appreciative, boost their morale and alleviate stress. This shows good management and
Another crucial way of being flexible is how you communicate with one staff member to another. We are all individuals and react to the same stimuli differently.
You need to be aware of the different personality types within your team and try and match the approach that you feel would get the best out of them. For example, you might have one person who needs constant external validation that they are doing a good job whilst another would thrive better from a more direct approach of how they can improve.
It is very costly to attract new members, but you should have a list of people to hand that at one point were an actively paying customer.
Most members stop becoming members due to reasons that you can control such as cleanliness, joining a competitor or lack of equipment.
If something improves in the gym, maybe you have had a refurb, had a new pieces of equipment, changed pricing or added a new service, the first people you should be informing is your list of ex-members.
It could be the information that they need to re-enquire or sign back up and it costs next to nothing to send an email out.
A good Fitness Club Manager tip is when bulk emailing previous members to ensure you offer the ex-members something exclusive to them to entice them back in.
“Claim your Free Trial at our Newly Refurbished Gym”
“Get your first Month on Us in our Exclusive Ex-Member Offer”
“New Squat Racks: We’ve squatted our prices down to Ex-Members only”
“Ex-Member Special Offer: Free PT for the First Month”
See a great example here by Applied Fitness Solutions, who are trying to entice former members back by giving them their first month membership for free:
It can be quite easy to get defensive regarding negative reviews, but when thinking about how to be a good studio manager or gym owner you should use this as an opportunity to improve your systems and service by extracting key parts of complaints.
Take this 1 star review written on Trustpilot where a gym member has booked onto a class, but has not been notified that the class had been cancelled and has not had any contact from the complaints department when they have raised their concern:
Clearly communication is the main issue for this gym member. As the club manager, you can potentially rectify this moving forward by evaluating the process of how your staff deal with and notify class members of classes being cancelled.
Are your team members just emailing members as opposed to ringing them and trying to reach them via other channels. Are they prioritising this as a highly important task on their daily agenda.
A good tip for a general manager is to once a month review and tally your gym’s complaints into categories to better understand your members' nuisances.
You can then create actionable tasks that can positively influence their member experience reducing complaints occurring in the future and minimising negative feedback such as this review above.
Next on what makes a good fitness club manager is a critical point, you need to ensure you create appropriate boundaries between yourself, your staff and members alike.
A professional manager is someone that does not compromise their position to sustain a supportive working environment and gains respect from staff members.
Here are a few club manager tips to consider when trying to maintain a professional environment:
Respect your staff’s privacy and don’t delve into personal information when it’s not necessary.
Apply company policies, discipline and consistency across all team members fairly.
Respect staff’s annual leave and days off as their time away from the gym.
Set clear values, communication expectations an
Be cautious when sharing your own personal details and issues with staff members.
Limit your staff socialising outside of work to work based events
When providing constructive feedback, ensure it’s focused around their performance and working behaviour, rather than their personality traits as this can be perceived as an attack on their character.
Every company has a profit and loss (P & L) spreadsheet and you can actually use it to find excellent ways to generate more revenue for your gym.
A great bit of advice for a gym manager is to manually go through the income streams on your P & L and isolate ways you can grow additional revenue streams to boost revenue.
For example, you might notice that supplement sales are very low on your monthly P & L.
To combat this, you might rearrange where and how the supplements are displayed, run a special promotion such as buy one tub of protein, get the second tub half price.
Most importantly though, get your staff incentivised to push your promotion, including receptionists letting members know when they come into the gym or by using the tannoy as well as getting your fitness team utilising inductions and classes to push sales. You can also include it as part of a company newsletter or even get your sales staff to upsell it when new members sign up to the gym.
Your P & L will help give you a load of opportunities to see gaps in potential revenue that you can exploit, see below some common additional revenue streams that you could potentially exploit:
If you don't make any revenue from locker hire, you might be missing out. Members are willing to pay extra to leave their stuff overnight or have their own designated locker.
Gym members love merchandise! Consider getting customised merchandise in the form of hoodies, tracksuits and T-shirts.
You can also add in additional paid classes to your timetable where members pay extra for certain types of classes. Normally, this is executed with classes that are not typically offered at most commercial gyms or are classes that are not easy to replicate, such as martial art or dance focused classes.
If your gym deploys a PT rent model, having a flow of qualified trainers that pay rent each month is an easy way to bolster revenue.
A great bit of gym manager advice is to increase your recruitment pool by partnering with fitness specific training providers through offering their graduates an interview post course, which is not just free for you but also gives you constant applicants.
If your gym has a spare room or dead space, a good fitness club manager tip is that you could rent it out to a whole host of professionals including hairdressers, physiotherapists, sports massage therapists, osteopaths and beauticians to name a few.
You are responsible for knowing exactly who your competitor's are, how they operate and how you can beat them.
The best way to go about this is to initially perform a Gym SWOT Analysis of all your competitors nearby.
This is where you're going to analyse their strengths and weaknesses and then evaluate the threats they provide and the opportunities it presents you with.
The points you want to consider are:
Gym visibility & size
Gym Accessibility
Car Parking
Gym Membership Cost
Secondary revenue streams
Amount, quality and type of gym equipment
There fitness or personal training model
Gym clenliness
Amenities, such as showers, changing rooms, water stations
Service(s) e.g. classes /
Support structure and customer service
Marketing and promotion quality such as their website, banners, socials
Reward, loyalty or affiliate schemes.
To perform a competitor analysis, you can use a plethora of different resources including reviews, mystery shopping them, reviewing their website, looking at jobs boards and even singing up to the gym itself.
Once you know your competition well, and I mean really well, you can then formulate a strategy of how you're going to beat them.
For example, if one of your close competitors offers a complimentary personal training sessions to all new gym members when they sign up to the gym.
You could mitigate this by offering all new members get a programme written by a qualified Trainer as well as free two free PT sessions and an accompanying nutrition plan to follow. This now would give your gym a massive service advantage, which would attract a lot of new members to your gym over your competitors.
Ensure to make sure you communicate your findings with your relevant departments so your team are aware of how your competitors operate and make sure to perform a competitor analysis systematically every quarter as competitors change how they operate all the time.
A business is like an organism, one organ helps facilitate another and you should treat being a gym manager with that metaphor in mind, that each department should flow and support another.
A good fitness club manager tip is to target your staff during monthly set-ups on aspects that influence other departments' success.
For example, you might want to try and increase the uptake of personal training sessions within the gym to drive more PT revenue.
What you could do is put a target into your sales team or reception staff to sign up new members to PT packages at point of sale.
Many members ask sales advisors whilst onboarding as a new gym goer about personal training as well as reception staff, therefore incentivising them to push personal training packages will help both your trainers obtaining new clients and your club's revenue.
Here are some health club manager tips and ways you can use to get your departments to help support one another:
Target your sales staff to book inductions for your fitness staff by giving them a percentage based target of new gym members to sign up for an induction. A good number in this day and age would be 20%.
If you want to get your gym classes filled, give your reception staff targets on getting the gym’s classes as full as possible.
Give them lists of members who have booked classes previously to message and ask them to phone / email those on waiting lists when people cancel classes.
Your front of house staff might have secondary revenue targets such as to sell supplements, gym products or merchandise.
Targeting your fitness team to push these on the gym floor after inductions and PT sessions is extremely effective as these are your staff members that should be very knowledgable on these products and have a trusting relationships with members.
Gym staff normally have the most rapport with gym members, task them with getting online reviews that benefits the companies social proofing and online reputation.
You can use things such as Google review cards where gym members can just tap or scan and leave a 5 star review. This will massively help both your marketing and sales team as it gives the gym lots of positive social proofing that they can harness during sales pitches or as advertisement on your website.
Some members might have contracts outstanding (to be signed), direct debit mandates not set-up, photos missing, PAR Qs not filled put properly or other details needed on their gym profiles that the sales team could not obtain at point of sale.
Tasking receptionists with obtaining missing information when members come in helps with the smooth operations of the running of the facility and it not just helps your sales team out, but also sustains good gym compliance.
You can target to call get in touch with members that have notified you of their cancellation to try and see if there is a reason within your control that you can resolve and prevent them from terminating their membership with you.
Even if you reversed just 10% of members minds, that will make a drastic improvement to your net member movement and is 10% increase than if you did absolutely nothing.
Having collective club wide meetings at the start of each month where all departments get together to see how they have helped each other and the positive impact that it has is a great way to build relationships between your staff within different departments and provide recognition for their selfless work.
A good piece of gym manager advice to drive performance across the gym’s various departments is to create friendly competitions amongst staff members.
Friendly competition is a good way of making work fun, keeping staff motivated and getting them to excel within their roles.
Offer extrinsic rewards such as vouchers or an extra day annual leave for your winners and consolation prizes for individuals that came close so they still feel their effort is valued.
See some suggestions that I have implemented in the past in my gym that you could consider:
Front of House - Having a competition to see who could get the most 5 star Google reviews for the gym across the month through delivering excellent customer service or you could create competition around selling the most merchandise, supplements or locker hire.
Fitness Instructors / Personal Trainers - You could do prize for whoever sells the most supplements on the gym floor or whoever onboards the most clients in a particular month.
Gym Sales Staff - Prize for whoever closes the most gym memberships or if you wish to reward productivity, prize for whoever calls the most leads or generates the most point of sale referrals.
You should do this across your departments and rotate the prizes and competitions to keep things interesting.
Competitions should not be created for or be inclusive of your management team or department leads, this is the chance for your staff to shine and demonstrate their skills and enthusiasm for the role.