3 Realistic New Year Resolutions for Your Gym

Just as you might encourage your members to make realistic, attainable health and fitness resolutions, you should do the same for your gym. The new year is the perfect time to reflect on the past year and create goals for your year ahead. It’s important for these goals to be specific, realistic, and possible to achieve. This is even truer in light of the impact the pandemic had on health clubs over the course of 2020. Here are three ideas for realistic resolutions your gym club may want to strive for now that we’ve reached 2021.

1. Create Specific Plans and Processes

The new year is the ideal time for you to see the gaps and challenges within your business. Do an audit of your processes and look for areas of improvement. Use this information to develop plans and processes, or improve the ones you have. Your gym should have specific processes for every aspect of the business, including membership onboarding, membership retention, marketing, billing, scheduling and so on.

You should also have plans for various scenarios such as the impact of the pandemic on gym businesses. If you need help improving your business, consider outsourcing the audit and strategy for your business and think about gym management software that could easily streamline your processes.

2. Build and Improve Human Connections

The last year showed us how important human connections are and how improving them is a key to moving forward in our new normal. So make it a mission to start and develop connections between your gym and people – come up with specific ways to achieve this. What does this mean in relation to your gym? Decide what’s right for you, but here are some ideas:

• Help people in your community through methods like volunteering, fundraising or doing acts of kindness one-to-one
• Use your gym to create a community for people by developing online and in-person support systems, such as groups to cheer each other on and programs that bring people together
• Find opportunities for diversity and inclusion, including within your hiring processes, your employee management and your membership onboarding and retention methods
• Encourage the hard work people put in at your gym by recognizing their efforts and their milestones, both for employees and members

3. Develop a Modest Growth Strategy

While you most likely want to bring more members into your gym, be realistic about it. Decide on a plan that will help you increase your membership rate in an attainable, sustainable way. Come up with a modest percentage to increase each month or other time period, develop specific goals to work toward that growth and determine ways to measure the growth.

For example, you could create a goal to increase your membership by five percent each month, and make sure you track your new member and member retention rates so you have a clear idea of your gym’s growth rather than just guessing. Nonetheless, you may want to incorporate fluctuations in the industry, such as higher growth rates in January and think of ways to boost rates during typically slow times of year. To do this, follow patterns you or other gyms have faced in previous years. 

Come up with clear ways to create the growth you want, such as:

• developing specific exercise programs to advertise
• running promotions to retain members
• holding events to bring in new interest

Feel free to use these ideas and turn them into specific, realistic resolutions for your own gym club. Do you have other ideas that you’re using for new year resolutions this year?