Fitness Business School – Improve Your Retention

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and I’m going to teach you how to improve your retention in this episode. Well, let’s get started.

Welcome to The Fitness Business School podcast – the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen til the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

So I posed a question in my coaching group. I said, Hey, what’s the one issue that you’d like to resolve, or one thing that you want to improve the most. And, you know, I got a few different things come back. And one of them was how do I improve my retention? And so I wanted to take you through the five component retention improvement plan that, that I think is going to give you the highest possible retention that you can have in your business. The first, first step is you actually need to track your retention very simple, but you need to track your numbers. You need to know, you know, what, your month over month retention rate is it, it would be wise to know what your average client you average client membership duration is. You know, and average client lifetime value would be wonderful too, but for the purposes of retention, just basically how long people stay, but tracking that is going to help you focus on, on it. Obviously, if you’re not tracking it, if you’re not measuring it, you’re not gonna be able to focus and improve it because you’re not gonna know if what you’re doing is working. As far as a, a, a good number for the average business that I would work with, right?

So the average training business independently owned training business, a and so obviously this, this is kind of a broad spectrum of private semi-private businesses up to you know, large group type businesses. If you are doing 95% month over month retention. So basically 95% of the people who are with you on the first day of the month are with you on the first day of the following month. Then you’re doing great. You’re, you’re doing fine. Because you’re not gonna have a hundred percent retention every month. Just, you know, people, people are gonna have changes in their life. They’re gonna move, they’re going to have other things take priority. So 95% means this is not a problem in your business. You’ve got other things that you can focus on. You know, if it gets much below that, then we probably need to make it more of a priority. You know, if you’ve got a large group business and you’re supporting 300 plus clients, then you know, if it dips down to 94, 93, that’s not that that’s not bad by any means, but if I, if your numbers are falling in that eighties range and even high eighties range, you need to, to probably pump the brakes a little bit on chasing new clients and do a better job of keeping the clients you have, if you wanna see growth. So, you know, that’s the first thing we need to track better. Second, you know, we need to deliver on the promise that that, that we made to the client. When they joined, we need to get them a result.

People come to us and they want to, to be better, right? They, they wanna feel better. They wanna move better. They wanna look better. If we’ve made them a specific weight loss, like a, a measurable weight loss result, we probably have to deliver on that. I, I, if we didn’t make a specific numeric kind of on the scale, weight, loss result, promise, then, you know, we may not need to be specific there, but if they’re not getting a result, if they’re not getting some sort of gratification for being here, it’s gonna be easy to rationalize, not coming. So we have to actually deliver a result. And that may seem incredibly obvious, right? But you would be amazed at how many businesses have a sales people. I mean, have sales people that sell one thing and then coaches that deliver another and never even know why that person walked through the door in the first place, never know what their desired outcome was. So there’s a disconnect. So we need to deliver the result.

We promise to people unless you’re doing one of those, you know, a specific weight loss challenge or something, you know, I don’t know that that means that clients are gonna micromanage that, Hey, I need to lose exactly 20 pounds or I didn’t succeed or whatever else, but they’ve gotta feel better. They’ve got to see progress. Or they, they start to question, why am I investing so much time? Why am I investing so much money? So delivering a result would be the second piece of this kind of five part puzzle. The third is accountability, right? I mean, let’s face it. We now operate in a world where people have access to about any information they could want at their fingertips. They can scroll through their phone and find all sorts of exercises and workout programs. They can download apps for pennies and get a workout to follow. And that doesn’t mean that those things are as good as what you would be delivering. In fact, I would speculate that they’re probably not, and there’s certainly not a, is clear and direct in, in specific is what you would deliver to somebody, them kind of just cobbling things together on their own. But the, the real challenge here is most people need accountability to change behavior. They need somebody who’s paying attention.

They need a buddy to, to kind of answer to, right. I mean, I’m guessing that most of us probably wouldn’t been, have been as diligent, turning in our homework in school. When we were young, if it wasn’t gonna be graded, and if it didn’t have a due date, like accountability is something that we are kind of groomed to, to, to stick to. And people need that kind of structure. People need to know somebody’s paying attention if they’re going to do well now, ultimately it’s great. If people can provide their own accountability, but most of those people wouldn’t have joined your gym if they were so great at that on their own. So you need to find a way to provide accountability. They need to know that you’re paying attention. They need to know that you actually care whether or not they show up whether or not they improve and that’s gonna help them on those days that it’d be easy to drift. It would be easy to just skip something else. Would’ve been more convenient, it’s cold and dark in the morning, and they don’t wanna get outta bed. Having that accountability really, really matters.

All right. So fourth, they need to have a connection with you and with the team or, you know, whoever the coaching provider’s gonna be, they need to have that connection. And obviously if you are the business owner and you have other coaches, you want them to have a connection with you and the business as a whole, not just in the individual coach as well, but you know, if they feel like they’re just a face in the crowd, if they feel like this is just a transactional interaction and there’s no actual relationship, it’s easier for them ’em to leave, right? They’re, they’re going to feel like, Hey, I’m not gonna be missed. They don’t, you know, I mean, if they feel like I’m not gonna be, you know, nobody cares about me. If I leave, it’s easier for them to leave. But if they have a connection with you, they are gonna be more accountable. They are gonna stay around longer. I, I mean people by people, we we’ve said this many times over, but you know, people also really gravitate to environments where they feel cared about where they feel like people are rooting for them. I did a little, I, I guess you would call it a survey. I basically just posted a question about, you know, you know, what do you like about our coaching program? And, you know, all the, the, the comments were, were almost all of them were tied to, you know, Hey, people care about me.

The coaches actually care about me. The people around me want to see me succeed. This is, you know, people are actually rooting for me. There was so much of this kind of family, or at least what we wish family always was like atmosphere and, you know, yeah, it’s, Hey, they make it simple or whatever else. But I, I mean, there were more were comments that led with this strong connection to the team or the fifth one community than anything else. And that was just a minor of how important it is. It wasn’t, Hey, they have the best sales templates on the planet or anything like that. And we give people every template and tool they could ever need to operate a business. And we give people more than most franchises and having consulted with a bunch of them and owned a couple of them. I can tell you that without question, we give people more than more than most franchises do yet. The first thing most clients mentioned was this connection in this sense of, of care from, from the coaches, from the team, from their peers. And that’s just a really powerful reminder how important that sort of stuff is. So making sure there’s a connection with you, a connection with the team, a connection with the business, and then last a sense of community.

So basically a sense of connectedness with their peers, with other clients, with other people that, that may have similar goals may be along that same journey. People that you know, that again are rooting for them, people that are lifting them up. So you need to fill, like, facilitate a sense of connectedness between the people that you serve. And, and sometimes that’s as simple as having partner workouts periodically. Sometimes that’s having more community style events. Sometimes that’s creating an environment where people can share a little bit about themselves, but this kind of five part plan is how you maximize retention. And if your retention isn’t where you want, it’s, it’s probably not a mystery. It’s probably one of these things or a combination of these things. And you can really get under a hood and figure it out pretty quickly. You can see where you’re falling short. And if you turn the aisles on these and improve them, you’re gonna see better retention almost instantly.

You’re gonna see a stronger community. And as of an added bonus, you’re gonna see people that are getting better results. You’re gonna see people that are referring more frequently. You’re gonna see more reviews coming in all sorts of fun stuff that, that comes on the heels of this because let’s face it having high turnover really kind of breeds having more turnover because people don’t feel that sense of community. They don’t get connected to anybody else. So it’s easier for them to leave. So make sure that you are trying to check all five of these boxes, make sure you’re putting your business under this lens and, and seeing what you need to do to to, to maximize that retention. And like I said, 95% is great. Don’t, don’t get lured into thinking, Hey, I need a hundred percent. I mean, that’s, that’s a hypothetical, that’s not a human thing. So there’s your five step process to improve your retention.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School. Before you go, I have a quick announcement. When I first connect with a fitness business owners, they almost always asked me, how can I get more clients or make more money? Well, I have an exclusive offer for you, and it’s gonna help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive our business growth accelerator coaching program for FREE.

BGA is a one of a kind program where you get done-for-you marketing tools and a level of coaching that is unmatched in our industry to help you attract more qualified prospects and convert them into paying clients, ultimately making you more revenue and personal income.

Imagine having every tool template ads, script you need all proven to convert in, ready to use. Plus you have access to over 10 weekly live video coaching sessions to help you with everything from dialing in your ads, to mastering your mindset. You get all of this and more when you joined BGA and to help you succeed, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to let you test drive BGA at zero cost.

If it delivers for you in the way that I expect – it more than it pays for itself, and you’ll probably want to stay. If not, you’re out nothing and have a library of proven tools and resources to keep.

To take advantage of this special offer. Just email me [email protected] and put test drive in the subject line, and I’ll get you all the details.