Running a fitness business is not as easy as it may sounds. You have to juggle multiple tasks, contend with numerous competitors in the industry and overcome several challenges along the way.
As a result, you may end up feeling overwhelmed, tired and drained. The good news is, there are a couple of ways that you can streamline your fitness business, make things easier for you, become more efficient and grow your revenue fast through a marketing campaign.
In this article, we will walk you through six proven tips that you can use to streamline your fitness business. So, if running your fitness business has been feeling like too much work for you, here are some tips that can help to make things easier.
1. Prioritize
In all businesses, there are certain things that deliver the most results. And your fitness business is no exception. So, to make your business run more efficiently and save time for yourself, you should prioritize things that are delivering the most results. Anything else that isn’t essential should then come second. Or, you can even consider eliminating the non-essential things completely.
For instance, you may be using different social media platforms to market your business. And with time, you may have noticed that a particular platform, be it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest, is bringing you the most clients.
So, instead of trying to maintain a strong presence across all the different platforms, you should instead focus more of your resources on this particular one that is delivering the most results. By doing so, you will get more output from this platform, while saving yourself valuable time.
2. Automate Repetitive Tasks
Another effective method of streamlining your fitness business is to shift from doing tasks manually and automating what you can.
The main benefit of automating your fitness business is that you will save a considerable amount of time and energy. You can then use this time that you’ve saved to focus on your core business operations like creating and delivering top-notch training programs, attending to your fitness clients, or marketing your fitness business.
Also, automating your fitness business can help to reduce or even eliminate errors. For instance, if you are generating hundreds of invoices for your clients and you are doing it manually, you may end up making some costly errors. But by automating the entire process, such errors will be non-existent.
So, which areas of your fitness business can you automate? Well, here are a few areas that you can automate, make your fitness business more efficient, serve your clients better, and save yourself a considerable amount of time and effort.
2.1 Member Check-In
Doing member check-ins manually can lead to long lines at the front desk. And, such a situation can lead to a poor gym member experience, leading to loss of clients. If your members have to wait for several minutes before they can check-in and begin their workouts, the chances are some will decide to quit your gym and go elsewhere.
Fortunately, automating the member check-in process can help to prevent such a situation. By setting up something like an in-app member check-in, you will save your clients a great deal of time. You will also save some money, which you may have to spend employing several people to man the front desk.
2.2 Payment Processing
Collecting payments from your gym members or reminding them of late payments are laborious tasks. However, you can’t afford to ignore or avoid them. At the end of the day, your gym will need money to keep running, meaning you have to keep collecting payments and sending late reminders.
But, there’s an easier way of doing it, using a payment processing system. An automated processing system will be handling all issues related to payments, leaving you with ample time to improve your gym member experience and grow your business.
2.3 Sending Notifications and Emails
It’s highly likely that you spend several hours every week, sending notifications or emails to your clients. But, with an automated SMS messaging and emails system, you can reduce the amount of time that you spend while maintaining that vital one-on-one communication that your members expect.
2.4 Content Marketing
Keeping track of all your content marketing campaigns is not easy. But, you don’t have to do it by yourself. There are several automated tools out there, which you can use to schedule blog and social media posts, collect leads, and monitor campaigns progress, among other tasks.
2.5 Files Management
New gym members have a tendency of switching back and forth between the different membership levels offered until they find one they are comfortable with. The problem is, tracking all these movements and changes is a monumental task, if you are doing it manually. But by automating it, the software will track all these changes for you, thus saving you valuable time and effort.
3. Outsource What You Can
Besides automating some of your business processes, you should also consider outsourcing some tasks. Outsourcing some of your tasks will enable you to get more work done, within a lesser time.
Besides helping to streamline your fitness business, outsourcing some work may also save you money. For example, the costs of having a full-time accountant working for you are higher compared to hiring a freelance accountant.
Some of the tasks that you can outsource in your fitness business include content marketing, competitive research, marketing, bookkeeping, social media management, lead generation, website maintenance, data entry, and sales, just to name a few.
Basically, you should outsource everything that you shouldn’t be handling yourself or tasks that an automation tool can’t handle.
There are several online platforms out there, which you can use to hire independent contractors for various tasks. However, make sure you conduct proper due diligence and vet potential independent contractors thoroughly, to ensure they are dependable, up to the tasks and legitimate.
4. Plan Ahead of Time
If you want your fitness business to run smoothly, you should get into the habit of planning things ahead of time. And by doing so, you will always be proactive, instead of being reactive – which is usually the case with most entrepreneurs.
For example, if you have a blog, you should craft the blog posts in advance, and then schedule them using an automated tool. And when it’s time for the blog posts to go live, that tool will post them on the scheduled date.
On the other hand, if you fail to plan ahead of time for these blog posts, you may end up failing to post anything or put together a low-quality blog post in a rush, when the time comes to post it. And if this continues to be the trend, your blog’s traffic will start reducing.
5. Set Clear Boundaries
Some fitness instructors tend to accept every client that comes their way. They may accept every client, regardless of whether that person is not fun to train, isn’t paying enough, or has unrealistic demands. And doing so will eventually lead to feeling overwhelmed, overworked, tired and unhappy. Simply put, this approach is unsustainable.
Instead, you should have clear boundaries on whom you can and can’t train. By using this strategy, you will only end up with quality clients, who respect what you do. As a result, your earnings will be decent and you won’t be constantly feeling drained, tired or overwhelmed.
6. Avoid Unnecessary Meetings
Meetings are a necessary part of running a fitness business. But, you should try as much as possible to avoid holding unnecessary meetings. Meetings can be highly time-consuming. And if you are holding them too often, it means your team is losing valuable time, which could have been well-spent elsewhere.
So, instead of holding in-person meetings every other week, you should get into the habit of communicating through emails or other channels. Besides eliminating unnecessary meetings, you should also consider reducing the time spent during meetings.
For example, if your meetings run for two to three hours every time, you should reduce that time down to 10 to 20 minutes at most. And by using this approach, your team will be more productive and your fitness business will be running more efficiently.
7. Leverage Templates
If you want to maintain a powerful presence on social media, then you will need to be constantly posting. But, creating social media posts from scratch every time is both tedious and time-consuming. And this is where social media templates come in.
Fitness templates come pre-filled with text, images, graphics and various other elements. So, whenever you want to create a social media post, you simply need to make a few edits, and you will have a ready post within a few minutes.
You can use these templates for different types of content. Whether you want to post a quote, a recipe, tips and hacks, or just any other type of social media post, these templates are highly versatile.
8. Wrapping It Up
Running a fitness business comes with various challenges. But, by adopting the above streamlining tips, things will be easier for you, you will be more productive and your fitness business will be running more smoothly.