Best Practices

March 31, 2009

Processes and activities that have been shown in practice to be the most effective.

There is one thing that every gym seems to have in common…not a single one buys all their equipment from just one manufacturer. I’ll see Star Trac treadmills, Iron Grip dumbbells, and CYBEX ellipticals. A mix of the best gym equipment.

But ask a gym owner about software and you always hear: I only want to deal with one vendor! One vendor that does billing, collections, check-in, member management, and provides an online presence.

But is this practical? Can a gym owner use just one vendor for all of their software needs? Is that best practice? After all…if they don’t use one vendor for all of their equipment, why would they use just one vendor for all of their software needs? Doesn’t it make more sense to get the best software for each particular need?

So why do gym owners settle with only one vendor? These decisions are usually made as a result of the owner’s willingness and the vendor’s assertiveness. A few thoughts:

Aggressive Salesmanship
This is something most every gym owner is familiar with. Simply put, the salesman is trying to push as much software and services as possible onto the gym owner…regardless of whether the software is a good fit or not. A part of this aggressive sales approach is to push an all-in-one product onto their customers. This is not a good consultative sales approach. Understanding what the club wants, what they need, and what would be the best fit for each particular software need is a better way of creating a relationship with the customer as opposed to just making a sale.

Education
Gym owners need to take time to educate themselves on their options. Just like the equipment they spend hours testing and trying at the trade shows, they need to spend as much time getting to understand technology, software, and how these things effect your bottom line. Words like ROI, member lifecycle, website integration are just the tip of the iceberg. Until owners take on some of the responsibility of learning and educating themselves on what they are purchasing, they will be trying to cling to one vendor in whom they trust all of their software needs. It’s an understandable relationship considering that they’d rather go out onto the floor than sit behind a computer, but it also makes them very dependent on their vendor. That being said, there has been a shift in recent years of owners beginning to understand how important researching software and billing software is.

The Seventies
You laugh But a lot of great things came out of the Seventies: bell bottoms, 8-track, the pet rock…and, most software companies in our industry can find their roots in the seventies. Because it was so difficult to do recurring billing (the Internet wasn’t even in a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye) most clubs would sell their lists to a single company to do the software and the billing. This left owners with only one thing to do…run the club. From these humble beginnings, the single software source was created. Thirty years later it is still — for good and bad — going strong.

Price
Club owners are price sensitive, especially in our current economic climate. It’s understandable to save money by buying the cheapest software on the market. But owners must understand that in many cases the amount that it costs needs to be equivalent to its expected level of performance. It’s amazing to think that the software sold to a 50,000 sq. ft facility with 8,000 members is the same software used at a single Curves! The money spent may be a nice fit, but the software isn’t.

What is the right way to buy software?
First, put together a list of your requirements:

• How do I do check-in?
• Do I want online scheduling?
• Are my employees 1099 or W-2s?
• Do I need to manage PT?
• Do I want to do my own billing?
• Do I want web-based or server-based software? (This question will be tackled in an upcoming blog.)
• Collections?
• Do I use gift cards?
• What part of my business do I want to grow?
• How important is CRM? (This will be covered in a future topic too.)
• What other current vendors do I use?

This isn’t meant to be a complete list, just a starting point to help you understand some of the pieces you need to be aware of…

Next, use this list as you talk to vendors. Don’t be afraid to talk to all the vendors instead of limiting yourself.

Put together an RFP or at least a list of requirements. The answers to the above questions will reflect the requirements. Hire a consultant if you need one.

It may turn out that different vendors fit different needs. Prioritize these needs and the list of vendors will come into better focus.

I’ll end with this piece of advice…the last time I checked, the only piece of equipment in a facility that helps owner’s get paid EVERY month is the software…put some time into this decision.