Putting the Member First: Devising New Strategies for Health Clubs to Thrive

Key Points:

• ABC Fitness Solutions serves over 8,000 health clubs in North America
• ABC Fitness Solutions had to monitor each of their client’s state, city and county gym and fitness center regulations in order to properly serve them during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Both ABC Fitness Solutions and the clubs they serve learned that putting members first both in out of the club was the key to success.

Commentary:

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented many challenges to gyms and health clubs. Across the country, places of fitness have been faced with various restrictions and even shutdowns to limit the spread of the virus. One group in the fitness community is trying to help these clubs weather these tough times, especially when it comes to retaining memberships and operating successfully under pressing restrictions. MarketScale spoke with ABC Fitness Solutions’ Chief Marketing Officer, Cristine Kao, at the 2021 IHRSA trade show about their Rebound Bundle that started during the pandemic. Kao discussed how the resources in the bundle have been essential to helping clubs reach success despite not having a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to restrictions across the country.

Abridged Thoughts:

We have over 8,000 clubs here in North America, as you can imagine with them in different states and different cities. Counties even have different regulations and compliance in place. The key was, to be honest, the story from March of 2020 to even now. The key here is flexibility. In all honesty, just listening to our clients. And so we actually set up a SWAT team, a SWAT team of team of operations and our development and engineers. And every single week we met keeping an eye on local regulations to what’s going on with our clients.

And we were constantly on the go with understanding how the membership is trending. So that’s freezes, cancellations, new joints. How are things operating because we were handling all of our clients back in offices. So that’s also member support, phone calls. If they have questions, they have inquiries about their club. We were there with them, answering all those calls, answering all the emails, answering all the texts.