Welcome to September, everyone. Let's start this week's Friday-4 with the material published on my own
website: - Sometimes the Customer is Wrong - Sometimes the loudest critic in your gym is the client who falls outside of your target demographic. How do you handle the feedback? In this
post, I ask you to take a step back and think of the circumstances of the feedback before making wholesale changes to the direction you are headed with your business.
My Friday FOUR:
Four pieces of content I've consumed this past week that will influence my future blog material and challenge me to think differently about how I manage
Cressey Sports Performance - as always, I'm looking to bring you some business-specific information from outside of the world of fitness. Enjoy: - Domino's Could Win the Pizza Wars
-- By Being Grosser Than Everyone Else - It's finally happening...consumers are beginning to realize that just about everything they see on social media is staged to represent unattainable perfection. Thankfully the social team at Domino's has opted to go a different route, embracing the greasy and imperfect finished product that is actually delivered to their customer's doors. Maybe more gym owners should follow suit and begin favoring
shots of chalk-covered rusty bars over immaculately organized empty gyms?
- 5 Benefits of Creating a Facebook Group for Your Business - My business ins't a great fit for creating and leveraging the usefulness of Facebook groups. I say this
because my target market is 12-22 years of age, which also happens to be a population that appears to be abandoning the platform. However, if I were a gym owner that catered to the needs of the general fitness population, I'd be all over these groups for each of the five reasons outlined in this piece.
- Should You Work On Your Strengths or Weaknesses? - I believe it is best to build a team of complimentary parts featuring employees who each possess unique skills. This allows us all to double-down individually on the things that we excel at. This being said, I also clearly remember a time when our business didn't have the resources to simply add a female strength coach to the team because
it would help us to appeal to more female athletes. We couldn't just conjure up payroll dollars, so the only option was for us to focus on soft skills and evolve as service providers who understand how to help athletes who aren't baseball players. This is why I wholeheartedly agree with the overall premise of this Business For Unicorns post: "Working on your strengths or working on your weaknesses is not an either/or proposition."
- Your Low Prices May Be Costing You Clients - The temptation to compete on low prices in fitness is nothing more than a race to the bottom.
Running a low-cost/high-volume facility is a game that Planet Fitness already plays at a hall of fame level, and I wouldn't advise any aspiring gym owners to go that route. Plus, I'd imagine that anyone who reads my material takes pride in the service they offer, so their pricing structure should be a reflection of this mentality. The author of this piece put it best: "What you charge tells a story about your work. What story are you telling?"
Make sure to
let me know if you come across any material that you think I'd enjoy. More importantly, have a great weekend!
- Pete
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