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You Track Your Personal Bests But Are You Tracking Your Fitness Business?

Posted by Rana on May 16, 2012 in Fitness Business Strategies, Fitness Sales and Systems | 0 comments

Many fitness professionals will instantly know the answer if questioned about their personal bests or their clients’ progress with their weight loss goals, because they track these daily or weekly; but ask them about how they are tracking their fitness business and you may be met with a blank stare.

Just like the area of administration, the monitoring and tracking of a business is one of the less “glamorous” areas that tend to make some personal trainers’ eyes glaze over as soon as it is mentioned. But paying attention to the health of your business is as important as giving yourself regular fitness and health check-ups.

Below we look at some ways that you can start monitoring, tracking and measuring your business – all of which is vital to ensure you are maximising results.

Tracking a Fitness Business

Just as you will break down a client’s weight loss goals into the components that affect it – mainly diet and exercise levels – you need to break down your business to see whether its components are all aligned to your goals.

Do you know what your goals are even? Where do you want your business to be in one year… five years…ten years?

If you have defined your goals then how is your business doing in terms of reaching these goals or at least travelling along the right path towards them?

Focusing on the components of your business that affect its bottom line and overall success is key: this involves focusing on attracting new clients, retaining existing clients, ensuring that clients are paying, monitoring income levels and monitoring overheads, measuring the success of marketing campaigns and so on.

Can you honestly say you know what is happening in those departments?

How to Keep Track

Tracking needn’t involve anything too special in the way of software – simple Excel spreadsheets can help with much of it.

Here are some of the key areas to concentrate on, though you can add any other areas that you feel are especially important to your main business objectives:

• New leads generated
• Number of leads converted to paying clients
• Number of leads converted into complimentary sessions (if appropriate)
• Number of clients lost
• Overall client retention rates
• Number of paid clients
• Number of cancellations
• Number of complimentary sessions
• Total Income billed
• Total income received
• Total available sessions in the week
• Sessions filled
• Sessions remaining (unfilled)
• Overheads – break down

For individual marketing campaigns you can assess the success by measuring the number of new leads generated, the conversion of these leads into clients and how much revenue they generate; compare this with the total cost of the campaign.

Further Breakdown Per Personal Trainer

If you are running a business with several personal trainers involved then each of the PTs will need to complete spreadsheets for their own performance – in terms of leads generated and converted and many of the other factors listed above.

This can be done for both personal training and group training sessions and should be tracked on a weekly basis via the spreadsheet.

Each PT should be aware of their total session numbers, cancellations and no-shows, revenue generated,  rates for client retention, new clients, referrals etc so that areas of strength and weakness are identified.

Some PTs will have to work on retention – which may mean forming closer bonds with their clients – while others will need to be doing more to attract new clients through promotions, encouraging word of mouth referrals, developing a social media strategy to help or some other strategy.

Without measuring and assessing the personal statistics of each trainer it will be impossible to identify this important information and improve their contribution to your business.

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