By: Zia Hasheem, Perkville

If you?re like most clubs, the thought of rolling out a new rewards program can be intimidating.  In 2013 Axiom Fitness was interested in implementing a rewards & referral solution for their chain of health clubs in Treasure Valley, Idaho. Their goals were simple ? automate the process of tracking and rewarding new member referrals and differentiate in a crowded local health club market.

Now nearly two years on, the data is in and the proof of Axiom Rewards? success is in the pudding.

[sm_hr]
Axiom Rewards Participation Rate        45%
[sm_hr]
% More Referrals Each Month               92%
Per Participant than Per
Non-Participant
[sm_hr]
% More Check-Ins Each Month             44%
Per Participant than Per
Non-Participant
[sm_hr]
Social Media by Participants                 548
[sm_hr]
Participants averaged                           29%
29% more new member
referrals per months than they
had during the three months prior
to joining Axiom Rewards.
[sm_hr]

?We?ve been very happy with the program,? JP Green, Axiom?s President said. ?We?ve been able to generate a lot of new sales without significant new acquisition spending.?

Axiom Fitness has achieved great success in growing their business through the word-of-mouth advertising that comes with providing members with a great experience and top notch facilities. But even a health club as successful at generating referrals as Axiom can always do more to drive new member referrals. By implementing a rewards program, Axiom not only eliminated an administrative burden by automating its referral program, it also increased the rate at which its most loyal members were generating referrals.

Axiom chose Perkville to power its rewards program. Perkville is partnered and integrated with ABC Financial. You can learn more about Perkville here.

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Do you research and know what is important to you. Do you need great trainers to help you get on track or is childcare your number one priority? Perhaps you are looking to get in shape for your beach vacation but also want to get a tan before you head to the sand? Many questions can be answered by researching online on the gym website or by simply stopping by and asking one of the employees at the gym. Depending on the membership levels the gym offers, there might be certain membership privileges (childcare, tanning, access to pools) you can take advantage of.

There are many different things to consider when choosing a gym; it must be a place where you are comfortable to work out, but gives you all of the opportunities to excel towards your goals. If the gym you are interested in joining offers a ?Free Day Pass? or ?One Week Trial?, then take advantage of this offer! There is a difference between walking in the gym and looking around and actually working out in the gym. If you already know what equipment is important to your workout, you can try out the machines while you are using your free pass.

Another thing to keep in mind when selecting a gym is its location and hours. You might find a gym that is PERFECT for you, but it closes at 9pm. If your schedule only allows you to work out after 9pm, this gym is not going to work for you. Convenience is a major factor when finding time to exercise.

Lastly, you should find a gym you are comfortable in. A friendly staff and clean equipment can help to make your experience the best that it can possibly be!

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With the New Year just around the corner, gym owners are gearing up for the post-holiday rush – after all, the first week of January is to health clubs and fitness facilities what Black Friday is to retail stores!

New members will be looking for a facility where they can fulfill their New Year’s resolution to lose weight, exercise more or take up a new sport, while existing members will be eager to work off all those holiday treats!

Here’s some quick tips on how you can prep your gym for the post-holiday, New Year’s resolution rush:

All Hands On Deck

January is definitely the busiest time of the year at fitness facilities, so be sure to have lots of staff on hand to sign up new members, conduct tours and ensure everything runs smoothly. Prevent conflicts between members over equipment usage by maintaining a strong staff presence on the gym floor, and make sure your facility rules are clearly posted, including any time limits on cardio machines.

Keep It Spotless

With the inevitable influx of members, your equipment will be getting quite the workout! Keep everything spotless (including the washrooms and showers) by doubling-up on your maintenance schedule for January and ordering extra disinfectant and paper supplies now. Remember that January isn’t just New Year’s resolution season, it’s cold and flu season too!

Differentiate Yourself From The Competition

The fitness industry is highly competitive – in some markets there are dozens of gyms battling to earn new membership dollars, so it’s important to offer both new and prospective members a reason to pick your facility. What sets your gym apart? Consider offering a unique product, service or ‘perk’ that appeals to members, such as cutting-edge classes, specialized equipment or ‘extras’ like a juice bar.

Go Paperless With Electronic Membership Agreements & Automatic Billing

Here at ABC Financial, we make new member recruitment easy with our paperless electronic membership agreements that save you time and money, while ABC’s comprehensive fitness club management software y payment processing services can help your gym collect more revenue from more members.

To learn more about how ABC can deliver real-world membership and financial services for your facility, contact us today!

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Recent research points out that the common mental shortcuts (called heuristics) that we use in making decisions lead to faulty decisions.  Of even greater concern is the research that shows the faults can be amplified in a group, and spiral into an even worse decision than an individual would make.  The real challenge is that even the best and brightest CEOs cannot see these weaknesses. They self-report that they have excellent decision making skills. Here are the executive heuristics that have been researched and reported in a recent Harvard Business Review Article.

The planning fallacy leads us to always underestimate how much time something will take and how much money it will cost.  One executive in a company that made dozens of acquisitions each year said that they knew about the planning fallacy so after they did their due diligence on the acquisition they multiplied key factors by three, yet they still always found it took longer and cost more.

The overconfidence fallacy leads us to believe our forecasts are more accurate and precise than they are.

The availability fallacy leads us to seize on whatever springs most readily to your mind as a solution either because it?s memorable we recently experienced it.  Doctors tend to diagnose what they have been seeing recently so that the same signs and symptoms get widely different diagnoses.

The egocentric fallacy leads us to exaggerate the extent which our tastes and preferences and insights are typical.  This explains why so many new products/services and businesses fail.  The leader thinks he or she knows what the customer wants.

The sunk cost fallacy leads us to stick with hopeless projects because we have already invested so much and if we quit now we will lose that investment.

The framing fallacy where decisions are affected by how the options are presented. People are more likely to agree to an operation if they are told that 90% of the people are alive after five years than if they are told that 10% of the people are dead after five years.

All the above fallacies are in play when a leader makes a decision.  They operate in the back ground of the mind so the thinker is rarely aware of their influence.  When the leader is aware of them, he or she experiences them as ?my intuition? or ?my experience? coming into play to help me make a good decision.

Business thinking for the last few decades has encouraged leaders to make decisions with their teams to improve the quality of the decision and the engagement of the managers.  Engagement usually occurs, but improved decisions do not.

The above six individual fallacies are exacerbated in a management team setting.  We ?go a long to get along? because we want to be liked, so we agree regardless of whether it makes sense.

In the 1970s an experiment would have seven people sitting in a U-shaped table. Perceptual illusions were shown on a screen. They were all told to answer the opposite of what they thought was true. At this point the last participant entered, and was not briefed on answering the opposite.  Again and again the un-briefed member caved in close to 95% of the time and agreed with an answer that fit the group but did not make sense to them.  Most of us care so much what others think that it is very difficult for us to be truly honest in the face of disapproval.  This phenomenon was labeled Group Think.

The loyalty fallacy occurs naturally in ever hierarchy.  Good employees want to be loyal to the boss at best and are fearful of stepping out of line at worst.  Everyone is thoughtful about making waves and going against the grain.  The recent spate of millions of car recalls by GM was caused by the ?loyalty? fallacy and the ?go along to get along? fallacy.  A culture of niceness which has persisted for over three decades at GM.

There are five specific ways to largely avoid these fallacies and the poor decisions they produce.  REX trains all of its Roundtable chairs in these tools. We will cover them in future articles.

Will Philips is the founder of REX Roundtables serving 150 of the world?s best clubs with 5,000 sites and 30,000,000 members.  Improving performance of their clubs and the quality of the leader?s lives.

Click here to read part 2

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The holidays are here and ABC Financial has the tools to help you show your members that you care. Choose from our wide selection that?s perfect for the holidays.

Choose your design and the type of card you would like and ABC Club Marketing will personalize it for your club.

Click HERE to view and get started!

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By Erin Anthony

A new report is now available in CRS! We recently released the ?Daily Revenue and Deposit Reconciliation? report. This report maintains the functionality of the monthly Revenue and Deposit Reconciliation report with the added benefit of putting up-to-date daily data at your fingertips.

Use the report for cash basis accounting and to assist in cash reconciliations. You can view summary-level or transaction-level details on daily revenue, deductions, and deposits. Running month-to-date totals are also provided to give context to daily figures.

For additional details on the ?Daily Revenue and Deposit Reconciliation? and all it has to offer, click HERE!

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Recent United States demographic information has startled business owners across the country?not the least of which are health club operators.  A massive age-population shift is right around the corner.  Will your club be prepared for it?

• Latest government statistics say that ? on January 1, 2015 ? 45% of the 315 million Americans will be age 50 or over!
• By 2017 ? less than 3 years away ? 1 of every 2 U.S. citizens will be over age 50.
• Every Baby Boomer is now over age 50.
• Industry statistics indicate that ? within less than 2 ½ years ? 50% of national health club members will be over age 50.

So what?s the big deal?  Well, the big deal is that most club and gym advertising, marketing, and exercise programming is geared to age 35 and under!  In other words, fitness facilities are acting as though their own member demographics haven?t changed in 20 years.

Add two other facts to this mix.

• 75% of all U.S. wealth and discretionary spending is controlled by consumers over age 55.
• The average 50-plusser has 6 times the discretionary buying power of the average 30-year-old.

What these numbers mean to you.

Club Owner ? is that you will very soon have either a massive opportunity in your competitive marketplace or you will suffer a colossal bummer!  The choice will be yours.

For those who seriously want to engage with the best-potential-buyer market we have seen in over 35 years in our industry, you will have to quickly get on the ball with several segments of your business.

• ADVERTISING: You?ll have to go where they are (and it isn?t newspapers, direct mail, radio or TV).  You?ll need to learn ?interactive smart site? marketing, email strategizing, and app/social media campaigning.
• SALES: They don?t like high pressure, ?buy now deals,? and club tours.  You?ll have to get smart with ?interview selling? and ?personalization? approaches.  This group doesn?t like ?locked in contracts? ? they like no commitments until they?re customer-satisfied.
• EXERCISE TRAINING AND COACHING: Give them your run-of-the-mill orientation of two trainings on equipment and they?re gone.  You?re going to have to learn ?outcomes management? if you?re going to keep this group coming back and referring their friends.
• PROGRAMMING: Think ?group, group, group? ? from on-boarding these new 50+ members into GEX classes to Small Group Training sessions to ?clubs within the club? which may include social programs, nutrition counseling groups, investment clubs, and a lot of other ?lifestyle-type? events which will add value to membership.

The track record of small training studios ? whose principal clientele is Baby Boomers ? proves that this group will spend a lot of additional dollars for experiences that they value.

Now your job becomes creating the value.

Michael Scott Scudder is Founder/CEO of Fitness Business Council, the independent club business network.  Michael can be contacted at 575-751-1212 or mss@fitnessbusinesscouncil.com.

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We recently took on a client club whose sales were on a steady decline. Of course, we heard the normal push-backs such as too much competition, time of year, rates are too high, marketing is not working, etc. One of the first things we will normally do is listen in to call-tracking results on incoming calls ? most of this is tied to direct mail marketing. In this particular case, a prospect called in asking about membership rates. Not only did the club representative not follow the provided script, but when the caller volunteered that she may have called the wrong club, the club rep offered to find the phone number of the competitor. You may be thinking this was a new rep that was answering the phone prematurely?..unfortunately, it was the club manager.

Do you know what your salespeople and front desk staffers are saying over the phone?

92% of customer interactions happen via the phone. 85% of customers report dissatisfaction with their phone experience.

Do you have a written phone script? If not, you need to get one and it should be memorized to the point of being second-nature. Regular training and role-playing should be done to be sure everyone is on track. And be sure to listen to your call tracking notes?this will only be important to your staff, if it?s first important to you. You must inspect what you expect.

A customer is 4 times more likely to buy from a competitor when ignored.

Are you ignoring your customers?

Many clubs will put a significant effort into getting the phone to ring and people to walk through the door, but then don?t maximize the opportunity to increase membership sales when the salespeople fail to follow up.

48% of salespeople never follow up with a prospect.

25% of salespeople make a second contact and stop.

12% of salespeople only make three contacts and stop.

Only 10% of salespeople make more than three contacts.

80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact.

The biggest reasons we find salespeople do not follow up like they should ? they simply don?t know what to say. Web leads, for example, on average, require 8 attempts before contacting?.you may speak to some web leads right away which means someone else make take 16 attempts.

The key to successful follow up is to commit to it, get creative on different ways to do it and understand that speed is power.

Do you know what your salespeople are saying? Can your salespeople pass the test? If you would like for us to phone shop your club, just email jthomas@fmconsulting.net or call 800-929-2898.

Now, go learn that script!

Jim Thomas is the founder and president of Fitness Management USA Inc., a management consulting and turnaround firm specializing in the fitness and health club industry. With more than 25 years of experience owning, operating and managing clubs of all sizes, Thomas lectures and delivers seminars and workshops across the country on the practical skills required to successfully build teamwork and market fitness programs and products. Visit his Web site at: www.fmconsulting.net.

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The credit card industry, led by Visa and MasterCard, developed the PCI Security Standards Council (2005) to set security standards that includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design, and other critical protective measures. This standard, Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS), was launched in 2005 and recently revised, November 2013, to meet the needs of securing the credit card industries changing environment. This standard provides a comprehensive set of requirements for enhancing payment-account data security.

Today, companies affected by the PCI standard are required to conduct a variety of validation activities, including quarterly vulnerability scans, a self-assessment questionnaire, or an onsite review by an independent third party qualified security assessor, depending on the number and types of transactions conducted by the companies. Addressing PCI compliance is not just a matter of avoiding noncompliance fines, it is about good business: reducing risk, enabling delivery of services over an increasing range of customer channels, and maintaining the trust of customers and business partners.

Benefits of PCI compliance
While some may complain at the requirements for PCI compliance, organizations that have implemented the guidelines have realized the benefits compliance can provide. In addition to creating a trustworthy reputation, customers will be more confident in doing business with these companies.

PCI standards help lower the risk of a group becoming a victim of a data breach. These instances can be embarrassing and costly for an establishment, as each incident can result in fines as high as $500,000 per month. The first step in becoming a PCI compliant organization is for administrators to investigate the requirements in place for their business. Standards can vary depending on what payment card content is dealt with, so it is in executive decision makers’ best interest to do their homework.

The Payment Card Industry Council requires implementing encryption of cardholder data in transmission. This can be achieve using an SSL certificate, which provides the optimum level of website security. In this way, transactions completed over online portals have the best-in-class protection against threats.

The PCI standard accounts for different transaction volumes, payment channels, and level of exposure across companies. The PCI standard lays out 12 specific security areas of responsibility with which companies must comply. These areas are:

• Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
• Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for passwords and other security parameters
• Protect stored cardholder data
• Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
• Protect all systems against malware and regularly update anti-virus software or programs.
• Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
• Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
• Identify and authenticate access to system components.
• Restrict physical access to cardholder data
• Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
• Regularly test security systems and processes
• Maintain a policy that addresses information security

To most IT/security professionals, many of these regulations seem like straightforward commonsense. However, many organizations have trouble complying. Most data breaches occur when a merchant or service provider stores sensitive information on a card?s magnetic stripe in violation of the PCI standard. This makes compliance critically important to your enterprise.

While PCI DSS certainly is comprehensive, the list of 12 areas of responsibilities leaves 12 possible points of failure. Fail one requirement and you fail them all. This “all-or-nothing” approach is both a curse and a blessing. The benefit: enforcing compliance with each of the 12 areas of responsibilities ensures the most secure possible transmission of data. The pitfall: especially for smaller companies, total compliance with the standard can take time and resources to achieve.

The way the standard works now, a merchant or service provider that satisfies 99 percent of the requirements would still receive a failing grade. With this in mind, many experts predict a significant number of organizations may in fact never comply.

In order to prove compliance, payment card organizations require the use of qualified data security companies (QDSCs) to perform an onsite audit review. MasterCard and Visa have established a certification program for vendors to become QDSCs, as well as a program authorizing companies to provide qualified scanning services. These two credit card giants also offer certification programs that train qualified data security practitioners (QDSPs) who perform testing and other security work.

These organizations often offer additional value-added services such as best-practice security assessments, compliance-readiness reviews, system deployment and training, systems integration, and other security and network-related services. In many cases, businesses also can help themselves by purchasing sophisticated security equipment, configuring it to minimize risk, and implementing a host of policies and procedures that comply with the latest data security standards.

ABC Financial

ABC Financial leads the health and fitness industry in software and payment processing solutions. We have one goal: to maximize our clients? revenue. Our industry knowledge and innovation reflect our 33 years of experience. Today we are the choice of over 4,800 North American health clubs.

Our DataTrak health club management software reflects our dedication to cutting-edge technology in its speed, comprehensiveness, innovation, and security. We?re constantly enhancing our software as a part of our commitment to unparalleled service and to our clients? bottom line.

If you want your business to thrive with the most advanced club management software, comprehensive payment processing, customer service second-to-none, and customized marketing solutions, choose ABC Financial.

https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/

http://www.ftc.gov

http://www.thawte.com

https://www.checkpoint.com

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