Retain and maintain

Making sure your health club members keep coming back is essential to become a market leader, says Paul Brown, founder of Face2Face, the official member retention programme of IHRSA

It all started with a broken ankle and a newly discovered passion. At the age of 16, Australian Paul Brown sustained an injury while playing football that led to his leg being put in a cast for some months. In an effort to regain the strength in his leg, he joined a gym.

“I went there to get strong for football but very quickly found that I liked it. I was 16 years old and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life but I really liked being in the gym,” he says.

From this beginning sprung a lifelong obsession with gyms. Brown progressed through the ranks of gym management until at the age of 24 he was in charge of his own club. “I started to get a better understanding of the problems of members, because my gym, like every other gym, was having trouble keeping members. We thought we were very good at fitness and wrote great programmes, but we still didn’t seem to be a success. That’s when I started this search to find why people didn’t like fitness the way I like fitness,” he says.

Brown came up against a problem that’s blighted the fitness industry for the last thirty years; people were prepared to join a club, but would ‘drop out’ soon afterwards. He describes this as a ‘crisis of attrition’.
“42% of people who join a health club quit during the first month,” says Brown. “As an industry, we have to sell seven memberships just to retain at least one member.”

In much of the world, gym membership is charged monthly, rather than annually, so retaining members is vitally important for maintaining cash flow in those premises. One of the obvious questions though is that most health clubs in this region, charge an annual, rather than a monthly fee. While maintaining the fee income over the year therefore won’t be a problem for most local gyms, Brown warns that any business that views its members only in terms of membership fees is missing out on a massive amount of revenue.

“The money you can earn per customer isn’t limited to the year’s membership,” he says. “When you sell someone a year’s membership, you’ve got them locked in only on a membership relationship. But if you can get them coming back to the club, they’ll spend more money on drinks, on personal training, on massage, on tanning, on all the other services. So you could quadruple how much they spend that year just by having them come back regularly.”

He also points out that the annual approach is short-sighted. “Some clubs have members who’ve been with them for 10 years. How much does that member spend in 10 years? It’s a lot of money. If you get more members like that, your club will be really successful.”

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Brown says there are two kinds of attrition; controllable and uncontrollable. Controllable attrition is members leaving because they are bored or won’t make time to use the club, while uncontrollable is when members move away from the region. Given the transitory nature of the region, uncontrollable attrition is higher in the GCC than elsewhere, but Brown feels that it is still important to create a good impression.

“That challenge is also an advantage. The people who are coming and going typically work for a company, so when you show up to replace the guy who’s leaving, he’s going to brief you on everything about that company,” he says.

“Maybe then they’ll say something like ‘Oh, and make sure you join this health club. They look after you well, it’s a great place to make contacts. Everyone who’s anyone goes to that club. Tomorrow you need to go and join.’ That handover process, that referral process, it happens almost every day in business. It will not happen if the person who they’re replacing had a bad experience.”

Lack of action over member retention isn’t limited to the Middle East. “It’s a sad reflection on the industry that here we are, 30 years later, and we’re only just starting to get our product right,” he says. “We’ve focused on the building, the equipment, the décor, the smell, the music, but this thing about delivering on the promise has only just become important, as everything else we’ve tried has failed.”

He points to the large American influence on the fitness industry, with its focus on sales and marketing. “You can control physical things. You can design it, build it, spend the money and that’s great. People are a little bit harder to control.”

Key to the retention programme is demanding a certain level of commitment from its members, such as attending three times a week, in order to develop a ‘fitness habit’. He also points to considerable follow-up and making members feel valued. A computer software system can be used to log when member attend the club and be used to provide reminders of classes or any other information staff may require in order to help members ‘connect’ with their club, such as ‘results day’ ceremonies and graduation ceremonies for those who complete the Face2Face course.

In any case, the relatively nascent nature of the Middle East health club market means Brown sees huge potential for clubs to improve their retention rates and boost their profits.

“I want to go where I can make the most difference, and that’s a market that needs the most amount of education, and has the most potential gain,” he says.

“The people in the region are well paid, so there’s a lot at stake. Every customer we save in this country is worth a lot more than a customer in say, the US, where membership can be $10 a month. I feel I can come to a country like [the UAE] and without any arrogance, just a bit of confidence, and say I know I’ve got some technology that this society hasn’t been exposed to before, and when I introduce them to what I know, I can leave a mark that’s going to make a difference to potentially tens of thousands of people.”