Se the great pandemic fitness network has turned into broadcast, even the village gym via zoom has become a production center at the “Peloton” by providing digital yoga courses to the ladies who could not do without them. And if it is true that any gym remains perched on the fundamental three elements – structure, technologies and men – it is equally true that the role of the Club Manager, controversial and perpetually poised between managerial and technical skills, suddenly had to rethink. From head to toe.
Fitness centres: the new Club manager
An opportunity emerged from the battles to contrast the pandemic and post-pandemic born to maintain a minimum level of receipts: the “double” gym. It was not an illusion but the new reality of the fitness center that the Club Manager had to master. Not everyone today seems well trained in impact because on the one hand the older generation of Club Managers have human-to-human skills above all and are capable of managing teams and customers. On the other hand, the next-generation digital native manager has intuition, genius, masters ChatGPT but not the complaint of a runaway customer who knocks on her office. But let’s go back to the “double” gym.
The gym and its double
Given the triple crises that have followed – covid, energy, wars – a gym could (indeed absolutely had to) become its double in the shortest possible time. Virtually. And so two could become four. And so on. The dream came true: double the fitness-business in the quantity of product (branded kit) that can be sold now also on the platform and not in the dusty shop.
Then it was finally possible double the service provided (wellness-pack) without building an extra gym, without an extra square meter to heat or cool and above all without an increase in team-per-square-metre. The new fitness service offer has not responded well to this wave of multi-channel demand, because the basis of the multi-channel fitness demand is the disconnect between the physical space in which to train and the reception channel of the fitness service or training protocol individual.
Fitness Centers: Workout space and service
Space of training and fitness service were once absolutely contextual, inseparable within the gym membership. They dictated its managerial strategies. This is no longer the case: the fitness club, today, grants activity spaces in terms of membership-base as places of implementation of sporting performance while the service flies on its own. The managerial approach will have to be hyper-mutant: from old to next-generation. The “communicating vessels” effect which on the one hand shifts the cost-service (trainer) onto the user as an option separable from enrollment, on the other creates business risk: the reduction of the average customer-turnover-turnover, a decisive issue which it must be managed by a Club-Leader connoisseur of the Old and New World gyms. Where age doesn’t count but his attention, his concentration. His “vision” on two fronts, communicating like vases.
READ ALSO: Fitness Industry: Everything changed, or not?
Photo by Sam Moghadam Khamseh / Trust “Tru” Katsande
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