» Management
by performing this simple surgery.
BY ROD MACDONALD
ike a tumour growing within a body, membership attrition, if unchecked, can lead to the certain and untimely death of your facility. Managing at-
Is Your Facility Sick?
L
Take control of your membership numbers
trition and retention is critical to the success of any fitness facility. It is also the issue that operators struggle with the most.
The problem
If you have 2,000 members and one
month you lose 500 members and gain 500 new members, you might mistak- enly think that you are retaining 2,000 members. This is correct from a num- bers perspective, but from a reputation perspective you now have up to 500 dissatisfied former members who may sabotage the future of your business. What you have is “churn,” or a con- stant revolving door of members, that will erode your growth potential. This is especially true in small- to medium- size markets where you can afford to have few critics.
Two-part diagnosis
Diagnosing the problem happens in
two stages: First, determine how bad the problem is by identifying your lev- el of attrition. Attrition is the percent- age of members who have left based on your average membership over the past 12 months. (Take the total lost members for 12 months and divide by the average membership numbers over the same period.) While not a perfect calculation, it approximates the size of your loss. The second stage of diagnosis is de-
termining the cause. There will always be attrition that you cannot control (people move, die and have financial troubles, for example), but these people are typically a small percentage. It is more likely that departing members have not had their expectations met. All members have expectations of your facility. Do you know what these
44 Fitness Business Canada May/June 2009
are, and are you meeting them? Many clubs make the mistake of trying to do too many things – and then doing none of them very well. This can include having equipment line-ups when you promise none, or of- fering single-ply bathroom tis- sue when promising a spa-like locker room experience.
Cutting out the tumour
To discover why your mem-
bers leave (as well as why they stay), you need to ask them. This can be done via surveys (pen and paper, telephone, web or email) or during conversations with your members. Once you know the top five reasons your members leave and the top five reasons they stay, you will be able to skillfully remove the tumour.
Rehabilitation
Next, you and your team
need to rehab your reputation by shouting out why your members love your facility. You also need to use the sur- vey information to give the majority of your members what they want in their club. Managing membership
attrition and retention isn’t brain surgery. With a little objective diagnosis of your fa- cility’s current state of health, you can chart a course of ac- tion that creates an abundance of success for you and your mem- bers. FBC
Rod Macdonald is the
vice president of Can-
Fit-Pro, Canada’s largest member-based com- munity of fitness professionals and consum- ers. He builds successful work environments founded on growth of the organization through a supportive and challenging corporate culture.
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