Summary: A la carte offerings will give fitness studio owners a menu of upsells, increasing revenue. It’s simple. You’ll look at what you currently do, or can do, find ways to make it even better by creating more value, then add it to a list of additional services.
Providing outstanding service as a gym or personal training business owner means being a complete solution. This means ensuring you can provide everything possible to help clients get to their goals. While you don’t want to nickel and dime every client, there are specialty services you can offer. In fact, it’s likely that you currently provide some of these smaller solutions as part of your total fitness programs. You might offer them free of charge simply because you haven’t considered creating an A La Carte service menu.
Naamly has compiled a list of services you can offer clients to create more profit centers and increase ROI for gym owners. Then, we’ve generated the steps you can take to begin working them into your business model. Naamly is an ideal tool to not only scale your fitness business but also organize and charge for these additional fitness and nutrition services. If you haven’t seen the power of Naamly firsthand yet, check out our free software trial.
A La Carte Services
Each of the services we have listed here is likely not part of a recurring monthly fee. Instead, they’re items that clients typically need help with. If you don’t offer a premium service, consider making these part of one. Even better, you can determine the value of each and provide a menu so clients can opt into each service as it becomes relevant in their lives.
Restaurant Ordering & Planning
If you already do this free of charge, consider making the process more robust. You’ll help your client make better food choices, plan in advance, and even better, enjoy a social lunch or dinner out. Have your client pick five or more restaurants they like or go to frequently. Of course, it can be more or less than five, but it’s standard that most people visit the same five restaurants 80% of the time. Once the client makes their selection, begin the research and development process on your own time. Analyze the menu and give them three options per restaurant. Your options should include what they should order and how they should order it. This includes any modifications they’ll need to make at the restaurant. As part of this service, you’ll also include a planning narrative. This means, that if they need to alter their other meals on the day of the selected menu item, you will explain what needs to change. You can also include a “This is good for when…” description. For example, “This is a good happy hour location” or “This is a great choice when you are running short on time.” You can consider it their daily playbook of what to do when meal prep isn’t part of the plan. This service allows your clients to have social dinners and still stick to a meal plan you both agree on.
Vacation Programming
It’s common for a trainer to provide recommendations for what their client should do when they go on vacation. Include this on your menu of a la carte services but just like restaurant ordering, go the extended mile and give them even more. You’ll start by researching where they are staying, the equipment or outdoor space they’ll have available, and what the activity habits are for the other people they’re vacationing with. All of this, of course, is done separately outside of the traditional workout session. Then, create a complete program for every day they need to work out when they’re out on vacation. If necessary, and it likely is, you’ll review the plan with them in advance to make sure they know how to do the exercises correctly and the acute variable modifications. Together you’ll also determine if it’s doable and something the client can commit to. It adds another service you can provide while also ensuring the client stays committed while enjoying their retreat.
Family Programming
This works especially well for the client who has a tough time balancing family responsibilities with self-care. Develop workouts and programs the client can do with their kids, spouse, partner, and more to help integrate physical activity into their lives (even pets). Consider fun activities like bench pressing or squatting your children’s body weight, then resting while they do jumping jacks. Or, find ways to turn household chores into a fun workout routine like doing walking lunges as you all bring groceries into the car. As part of this offering, you can work collectively with the family to teach them what they need to know as part of their activity together.
Family Meal Planning
Similar to developing family workout programs, help your client out by learning more about their family’s food preferences and lifestyle. It’s more than just offering nutrition coaching to the member. Instead, you’re accounting for multiple people, and you have to consider timing, food availability, and the convenience of cooking. So, it entirely makes sense that you charge an additional fee for this service. Then help your client by creating menus of foods (and how to prepare them) that everyone can enjoy and how you can work it into hitting nutrition and fitness goals. You can take it even further by getting a feedback log from the client about how the family liked it, what worked and didn’t, etc. This makes it so that you can modify the meal plan until it’s a success for everyone.
Member And Client Appreciation
Everyone loves being part of a community, and it positively influences motivation to exercise and program compliance or accountability. It should be part of your ongoing practice to offer member appreciation days, but this type of service should be more than just free snacks and beverages. Some gym owners even plan full trips for members to opt into or team-building events. Consider an additional $10 per month for clients to opt into the fitness community. Or, for larger events, consider how long it will take you to plan the activity and how much the external costs are, then identify the member cost by adding 10 – 20% on the external cost and your hourly rate to plan the event. Easy activities can include paddleboarding, happy hour, healthy cooking classes, etc.
Implementing More A La Carte Offerings
Follow this quick guide to begin increasing your revenue by offering more services.
- Step 1: Find New Offering Opportunities. Take a look at what your current members ask for on a one-off basis. Again, you might already offer it for free. All you need to do is look for ways to go above and beyond with the service so you can implement it.
- Step 2: Collect 3 Offerings. You don’t need to wait until your a la carte list is long. Likewise, you shouldn’t have a menu list of just one or two items. Make it enough so that it’s worthwhile for clients to look at and then seek to grow the list every six months or modify the existing offerings.
- Step 3: Calculate The Price. This should be simple. Take a look at how long it would take you or one of your fitness team members to put the offering into motion. If it’s researching restaurants and order planning, practice it on yourself and time it to see what it takes. Then, it’s up to you if you want to charge your full hourly rate for the price or reduce it as part of the membership benefits.
- Step 4: Internally And Externally Communicate. Make sure you post fliers, have handouts, post on social media, and include these new services on your website. You want it visible to everyone. This raises awareness so that clients will ask for it. But, it also makes it clear that it’s part of your ongoing business model.
- Step 5: Review The Metrics And Revise. Create a plan to go back and revisit the success or demand for these offerings. Once a quarter or twice a year is a reasonable amount of time to gauge interest and worthwhile. Learn from your successes and mistakes, then modify the menu.