We were approached by a couple of ninjas last week.
“Is everything going ok with the business?”
“Yeah, it’s great. Why do you ask?” we replied.
“It’s just it wasn’t much busier in January and we were expecting it to be rammed”.
Understandable thought process as that’s what happens in gyms.
Their model is built on 80% of members going very rarely.
Imagine if all 3,500 members of the local large commercial gym wanted to go three times a week.
It would be carnage.
So they oversell on what they can actually support, signing them to long term contracts, and everyone has to put up with it in January.
For the regular members, those January users are subsiding their membership – it’d be five times as much if they limited numbers to the 20% who do use it regularly.
At the RISE , our whole model is built in regular use.
And a total number of users we can successfully support.
Each month we just replace anyone who’s not able to continue on the next programme and grow by a handful, so everyone can get the full service we want them to.
So, while January is a little busier than late December (people may have dropped to a couple of sessions a week, then back up to 3 or 4), we don’t want or need loads of extra members in the New Year.
Infact all our spare places for January were taken in December.
So people approaching us in January were only able to start last week.
We actually have more members than ever (and have introduced extra sessions accordingly).
And we’ve been receiving local and national recognition of what we do.
Top 6 at The National Fitness Awards anyone? 😉
You get the point – there’s a reason gyms are rammed in January and we’re busy all year round.
By the way, for those that haven’t checked us out yet, we have the find-out-more meeting for our March FREE ’20lbs in 8 weeks challenge’ (and normal membership) next week.
Check it out at myrise.co.uk/briefing-meeting.
Much love,
Jon ‘Busy doing nothing’ Hall and Matt ‘Working the whole day through’ Nicholson