Retain and maintain

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Paul Brown’s Face2Face retention programme is the official member retention programme of IHRSA.

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.”

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