If fitness is your business, then changing lives is your passion, but revenue needs to keep your mission flourishing. This is why knowing what goes into ROI for gym owners upfront is critical for your long-term success running a personal training company. Most individuals that get into the fitness industry do so because they want to help people. They have a passion for healthy living and want to help others improve their fitness level and change their lives.
However, when you choose a career path, how you will make money changing lives is an essential factor you must consider.
To do that as a gym owner, you should be asking yourself these small but VERY important questions:
- What are you really good at? What makes your business different?
- How can you do what you’re really good at to help people and make money doing it?
- What supportive tasks need to be done to help you make money doing what you’re really good at?
- How can you do MORE of what you’re really good at to help MORE people and make MORE money?
It’s essential to answer these questions for yourself, your gym, and your employees. Without this clarity, it’s easy to get caught up in the busy work that keeps the fitness business running but doesn’t necessarily contribute to your gym’s financial growth.
Follow along as we explore how you find that delicate balance between doing what you love, making money, and executing the daily tasks that make your fitness business run.
Your Return On Investment (ROI)
As a gym owner, you’ve likely heard the term “return on investment” or “ROI” before. Simply put, this is a measure of the profitability of investments you make.
To calculate ROI, you subtract the money you’ve invested from the amount you made from the investment and divide that number by the amount you invested. That total is then multiplied by 100. So, it will look like this:
ROI = [(Gains – Investment) / Investment] x 100%
For example, let’s say you spend $500 on a local ad in an attempt to attract potential personal training clients to your gym. Suppose the ad brings in 4 new clients that sign up for a $500 trainer package. You’re ROI for that ad would look like this:
[($2,000-$500) / $500] x 100% = 300%
In most cases, this is an excellent return on your investment.
Understanding this calculation and applying it is one of the most essential components of your financial success.
Marketing And Advertising
Marketing has changed significantly in the fitness industry over the years. From mailers to billboards to digital marketing, there are many ways to connect with new potential gym members.
The goal of marketing and advertising is to increase gym membership sales, personal training sales, brand awareness, etc. Because of this, marketing is typically one of the most vital elements of your growth and where you will spend the bulk of your attention regarding ROI.
There isn’t necessarily a perfect marketing formula for all gym owners. So, be willing to try different things, calculate ROI, and shift when needed. And, keep in mind if marketing operations isn’t your forte, you can invest in marketing tools to help you track your ROI and reach your goals. For example, Naamly’s fitness business software allows you to track leads that require attention and automate some of the outreach. This makes it less laborious to run the sales and marketing arm of your personal training business.
Your Investments
Once you can calculate your ROI, you can determine which tasks are really worth your time (drive revenue and growth) and which tasks are not. This, in turn, helps you understand where you should be spending your time and money to grow your fitness business.
As a part of your ROI calculation, you’ll want to include how you spend money on your marketing (social media ads, flyers, google analytics, brand awareness, etc.). But you also want to build your awareness of other potential tasks that are taking you away from the opportunities that help you grow. For example, how much time are you spending following up on existing clients, sending out communications, and tracking your personal training staff? These activities aren’t a marketing spend. However, your time is worth money. So, it’s important for you to know your ideal hourly rate and add this to the operational cost of running your business. It helps you drill down to the real profits of your company.
The Secrets: Do More Of What You Love And Increase Revenue
Not every task you complete regarding your gym business will have a direct ROI. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that those tasks are not important. For example, detailed tasks like follow-up emails and paperwork can be important for client retention (which are indirectly associated with your revenue).
However, gym owners and other fitness professionals can easily fill their day with paperwork, client emails, scheduling, organizing, following up with potential prospects, new client prospecting, etc. If you start to fill your day with too many of the “busy” tasks, it takes away from the higher priority activities.
Automation
One of the keys to your success as a fitness professional or business owner is to prioritize your time so that you spend your time wisely.
One of the best ways to do this is by investing in products, people, resources, and services that help you automate the tasks you need to run your business smoothly. Automation could be as simple as creating template emails that you can easily send out in response to different clients’ inquiries, follow-ups, and personal training check-ins. Or, it could mean investing in a software application that helps you track, manage, and communicate with all your current and potential clients.
Ideally, the more tasks you can automate, the more you can free up your time to focus on the highest priorities for your gym.
Delegate
Another important component of your success is knowing that you can’t (and shouldn’t) do it all yourself. Once you identify what tasks are most important, you can focus on putting the right people, processes, and tools in the right places to support you. This can be hard for a business owner, especially if you’re a new fitness studio owner. Great trainers become successful because of the results they’ve gotten clients in achieving fitness goals. When you move into gym ownership, you have to delegate client success to other trainers. Of course, this requires you trust your personal training staff enough to delegate client interactions to them. But, it also means having the right systems and processes in place that make delegation an easy answer. You’ll want to consider how you manage your personal training team and follow up with them. With Naamly’s coaching app, you have tools that allow you to develop and retain trainers working in your fitness studio. It’s yet another way to more easily delegate responsibilities in gym ownership.
Organization
The time you spend today in organizing your business will yield a return for your business. Having good organization of paperwork, clients, and personal training staff should be an integral part of your business model. The more you can keep everything in one place, and in an organized fashion, the more you’ll cut down on time trying prioritize or determine the next steps for your business.
Use The Right Tools
The key in both automation and delegation isn’t just finding a person to delegate to or an automation tool. It’s about finding the right person that has the skills you need and the right automation tool that can do what you need it to do. It’s important to do your research, ask questions, and find the best tools that work for you and your fitness business.
As a business owner automation, delegation, and organization together are known as systemization. In fact, the fitness industry itself has coined this term to reflect the most important thing a personal training busines owner can do to improve their ROI and see success for years to come. Naamly has conducted hundreds of market touchpoints to learn the problems personal trainers and gym business owners have faced. The outcome of this market research all points to the same problem–a need to systemize the business.
This need is why Naamly created the best in class personal training software. It’s a CRM, client nutrition and program keeper, communication platform, and fitness staff management tool all in one. Naamly provides the must needed systemization you need to improve your ROI through more revenue and less operational time.
Want to know how it works? Try Naamly’s free software trial TODAY to learn how you can transform your business overnight.