In this episode, we talk to Alan Leach, CEO, sales trainer, and director of sales and marketing at the West Wood Club, based in Dublin. All thoughts shared by Alan in this podcast are based on business practice, running big multi-facility type fitness clubs with swimming pools, group fitness studios, and different workout zones. In total, there are 6 fitness clubs in Ireland.

We asked Alan a quite challenging question: Starting from scratch, what would be the first steps that you would actually do to grow the member base? The answer to this question required Alan to carefully consider the key success factors of a newly established club:

“You obviously want members, you want revenue, you want profits, you want clients, which you also have to think long term about the strategic part of marketing. And those would be things like: how do you want to be positioned in the marketing going forward?

And many times, when you have an empty club, and you are just starting off, you forget about those things. And what could happen is you end up being positioned in the market by just chance as opposed to any long term taught or strategic way of doing that.

So I would say to anybody, think about how you want to be positioned in the market in a year or two. Do you want to be a premium, budget, boutique, niche type club? How do you want to be positioned in the mind of potential members and potential consumers?”

Alan also pointed out that at the beginning and starting from scratch, it is important to distinguish yourself from the competition and have a clearly defined business profile:

“Be different, think about the customer, you know what you want to be to the consumer”.

Furthermore, we talked about how to fill the member base of the fitness club. Digital marketing is number one here. A fitness club website is a must – sounds obvious, but sometimes good SEO optimization can be challenging. But once you get there, collecting leads will be a lot easier. And yes, an excellent sales copy is needed. Collecting leads and trying marketing automation in your fitness club seem to be the most certain options.

Alan shared with us his recipe for the perfect free pass. Why does free 4-day trial membership have the best conversion rate? Our guest also discussed the importance of regular sales training for the fitness club team and a strong sales system for the fitness club.

We invite you to listen to the full episode of the podcast!

Alan Leach

CEO at West Wood Club in Ireland

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