How many people are coming in? How many are still there at the end of the year? What’s your client retention rate? (churn rate) Lifetime client value: How much money are your clients paying you during their entire stay at your gym? The better your client retention, the higher this number will be, of course.Ģ.Annual client value: How much money are clients paying you each month/year?.In light of the above, four more important metrics than ‘How many members do you have?’ include: 1. (Perhaps we can also measure success by the lifestyle you have: Are you burnt out or are you working a manageable number of hours? Are you able to take time off and go on vacation? But again, these things come down to profit, because if your gym is churning a profit, chances are it’s because your clients are sticking around, your coaches are sticking around, you’re probably less stressed out, less overworked and have a pretty good lifestyle). Thus, business success is that simple: Are you making a profit? Though you likely didn’t get into the gym business for the money, logically you’re not going to stay open long if you’re losing money. (Have you ever had a coach earn $100,000 and then quit?) Business Thus, coach success can essentially be measured by annual coach pay. And for this to happen, they need to be making enough money. Same goes for the coach: If the coach is sticking around coaching at your gym for years, they are probably happy with their job. If they weren’t, they’d leave the gym, right? Coach If the client is paying you a lot of money for a high value service and is sticking around for years, they are probably having success.

So what does a successful client look like? Coach? Business? Client It’s safe to assume if you’re a gym owner, you want all parties to be successful: the client, the coach and the business. Let’s reverse engineer this for a second and consider what we mean by success. Though how many members a gym has seems like an obvious way to measure success, after a decade in the industry, where I have spoken with hundreds of gym owners-and in my experience working with the MadLab Group, a business group for gym owners-I have learned the answer to the question ‘ How many members do you have?’ tells me literally nothing about business success. 100 members means you’re kind of, sort of doing things well. In fact, it’s the number one question I have overhead heard gym owners ask each other in the last 10 years.Īnd although we don’t talk about it, we know the answer we give comes with assumptions about how successful we are:ĥ0 members means you must be doing it all wrong. I lost track of how many times affiliate gym owners or coaches asked me this question when I was at the 10-year CrossFit Affiliate Gathering in Whistler, B.C.

Lifetime value of a crossfit member