Gyms are widely considered as the leaders in the fitness industry with more than a million facilities in various countries worldwide. Gym management highlights the potential of human strengths.
In the management of most gyms, risks are intolerable to aggressively innovate new products and services. They expand even to other countries but offerings remained the same. This can be emphasized with the licensing feats that control the operations, advertising and products of franchisees. Because of this centrally-planned structure, it added impediments to search for value-adding products apart from weight lifting. In addition, the location of a gym’s franchises abroad near the urbanized areas or near the capital of the country could suggest that it is limited to cater in the high-end slice market. This lack of entrepreneurial commitment of the gym will prevent them to achieve profitable income at the log-run.
The process of gym management typically includes the continued offering of modern equipment, personal and group training, yoga and its core niche, weight lifting and other exercises. Gym management also involves the core business portfolios which include franchising, selling fitness machines and fitness apparels while maintaining good relations with business partners such as real state developers, equipment suppliers, textile companies, internet providers and franchisees.
To have a suitable gym management, most gyms rely to the efficiency of their marketing channel. Activities involved in the process of gym management are gathering of information from customers and competitors, stimulating purchase, reaching agreements in price from manufacturers, placing orders, acquisition of funds, storing and moving physical products, providing customers intermediaries for payment and overseeing actual transfer of product to the organization or person. These activities are divided into two kinds of activities: the forward flow (promotion) and backward flow (ordering and receiving payment). In evaluating major intermediary alternatives, the gym should be informed and aware on the pros-and-cons in selecting a business partner in the marketing channel. The Internet and telemarketing are relatively cheaper but have limited value-add of sale. On the other hand, creating own sales force and building alliances like distributors and retail stores cost more but provide higher value to customers and suppliers.
There is also the gym management option for the gym to internalize the marketing channel activities through vertical integration in view to keep its core competencies private and gain market power over rivals. It can save operating costs, improve quality of products and services, and prevent unfair imitation. Franchising became popular in fitness industries where competitions among small gyms are prevalent because it consolidates independent gyms in contractual relationships. In the franchising, the franchisor controls the sharing of resources and capabilities with the franchisees.
Gyms must understand that excellent gym management includes being risk-averse and knowing the entrepreneurial pros-and-cons. However, without innovation and risking some investments to improve product and service diversification, gym performance will not improve while rivals will capitalize on the former weaknesses. To be the number one in the fitness industry and being such requires strong differentiation and customer-value apart from competitors. To get out from this bottleneck, the gym management must create a committee to operate the risk identification and evaluation in the gym.