Daron Allen

With all good secrets, there's a story. This story starts with how did we get here; how did the average price of a membership get so low? The introduction of the high-volume, low-price (HV/LP) business model created an immediate short-term surge for the industry. The attractiveness of the low-price offering was designed to bring in the untapped masses of the unfit population. If we could just get to the 90% of people who don't exercise with this low-price offering, there would be plenty of revenue to offset the decrease in average price per member, right?

For most operators, this business model worked for a few years. But, with the volume decreasing and the low average price per member, margins have become extremely tight or nonexistent for a lot of operators.

The dilemma of deciding how to increase the average price per member looked to have one solution: sell them personal training. So, your member base that came in for low-price offerings is now your target market for selling EFT personal training. But, what we failed to see was that all the high-ticket members had slipped out the back door for boutique studio training while we were packing our gyms with low-price members. The reality was that finding a low-price member willing to pay for EFT personal training was like trying to find a needle in a haystack; there were just not enough needles.

A new offering had to be created, something appealing to the masses that was low-priced, offered core competency (fitness results) and had a cost-effective delivery method.

The solution, the secret, the answer is TEAM TRAINING. What a revolutionary concept! Get an instructor and a group of people together to exercise. Oh, wait, we've already been doing that for 30 years; we've been running group classes in our gym forever, and we're good at it. But, the concept of using a personal trainer to run a class that combines cardio fitness, resistance training and stretching... now that's out-of-the-box thinking.
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