Maximize ROI from your Club Management Software System

Club Solutions - September, 2006

In my June editorial, I discussed the rapid growth that personal training is experiencing in clubs across the country, and how this is positively affecting your bottom-line and member retention capabilities. I also discussed the benefits that a powerful club management software can bring to your business, especially when attempting to effectively monitor and measure the performance of personal training in your facilities.

This month, I would like to focus on ways to expand the use of your club and online membership management software beyond that of just your personal training department. The purpose of this discussion is to help your health or fitness club to maximize the Return On Investment (ROI) received from the purchase of this valuable business tool.

The key to accomplishing ROI, with any club management software or membership management software, is ensuring that the product can provide two core things for your fitness business:

1. Breadth: Quite simply, the more people affected by the product, the higher the potential ROI. You can increase the impact of any club management software tool by ensuring it can touch a variety of different departments and members of your staff. This will help to: streamline your club’s operational efficiency; centralize the management of all your schedulable resources, and reduce the total cost of ownership for this system.

2. Repeatability: The more a software tool can enhance your employees’ day-to-day activities, the greater value it will bring to your club. By ensuring that a club software system is used on a daily basis for multiple purposes (and not just sporadically throughout the month for a single purpose), you will improve the productivity of staff and increase your ROI from the system.

In terms of expanding the use of your new club and membership management system beyond the personal training department, I felt it would be helpful to review some ways our customers are accomplishing this in their clubs today…

1. Group Exercise and Class Instructor Scheduling: One of the more obvious uses is to include your Spinning, Pilates, Yoga, kick boxing and other class instructors within the management system. This is especially beneficial to those clubs who have a variety of multiple purpose staff who may be personal trainers in the morning and class instructors in the evenings. Centralizing schedules into one system simplifies this staff’s daily activities and ensures that you are taking advantage of both the breadth and repeatability of the system. In addition, a good fitness center software tool will enable you to setup the schedule of these classes for weeks or months in advance; allow you to set class size restrictions for each type of class, and even register members into the class for attendance tracking (for both free and paid classes).

2. Massage and Therapeutic Services: Many clubs provide various types of massage therapy services to their members on a regular basis, including selling a variety of pre-paid packages that can be used at their convenience (similar to personal training). This becomes a natural fit for the club and member management system, and will allow you to better track the performance of your therapists and the revenues you generate from these services.

3. Exercise and Therapy Rooms: Most of the group exercise, class instruction and therapeutic services staff that is managed in your new system will also have physical resources (rooms) that need to be scheduled in conjunction with the services they are performing. Whether it is various exercise rooms, class rooms or therapy rooms throughout the club, you will need to effectively manage the scheduling of these resources in order to know at all times which instructor is running which class, and in which room. A good club management software solution will not only allow you to schedule these types of non-people resources, but it will allow you to simultaneously schedule this resource with an instructor or therapist and their client (or class).

Finally, by centralizing all of these additional resources in the same software system used for your personal trainers, you will gain the ability to record, track and report on payroll for these staff members – based upon their hours worked, classes taught, or sessions performed. A good club software solution will assign different per-trainer pay rates for the various types and duration of services performed. You may pay staff a particular rate for a one-hour personal training session; another rate for massage sessions, and yet another rate for a spinning class. A system should also allow you to set bonus thresholds for your staff, based upon hours worked. And with a few clicks, the software should provide this payroll information in one neat report that shows all the different services the staff member performed, and how much they earned from each.

By taking advantage of a powerful club management software tool for your personal trainers, class instructors, therapists, and physical resources, you can improve your club’s operational efficiency – maximizing the breadth and repeatability of this new system, and significantly increasing the ROI for your business.

For a free evaluation of your existing club-wide scheduling and management process, please contact me directly at anytime.

Adam Zeitsiff is the CEO of EZFacility.com, Inc. He can be contacted at 866.498.EASY (3279), or visit www.ezfacility.com