360 SPECIALIZED TRAINING

HOW LOCKDOWN IMPROVED OUR PRODUCT – PART 2

The Return

So now government had given us the green light to start trading. Fear was at a premium, despite a lot of our members eager to return to the gym, quite a few flat out refused & some more terminations followed.

Could we have continued with Zoom, maybe, but we had never viewed it as a serious option while we had the physical space. Also all our focus had to be on rebuilding as we had been hit pretty hard – not a time to be fighting on two fronts.

The answer to our price reduction was just about to be answered too. Spacing out of people, made it near impossible to implement. However, we had committed behind closed doors and wanted to bring this to fruition, knowing that it would also contribute to much needed further sales.

45min classes (3 instead of 2 every eve) and the extra space we had accumulated would be the answer. This way we could drive our rate down – very aware that the public were also experiencing job losses and pay cuts.

The bond between the business and members was strong and no way were we going to rip this apart by increasing rates on our existing members – a stance a lot of gyms took. Once again we were looking after a relatively small group of people, but they were our members and they were who counted.

We had launched a marketing campaign, with our planned expansion, just before the president’s speech to lockdown. This had pretty much gone dormant over 3-4 months after an initial explosion. So we decided to revisit this and fulfil our obligation to offer 10 class passes.

It was a competition but with such a divide between those who felt comfortable to train and those who didn’t, we gave everyone the win. Although we ran the risk of completely eclipsing the gyms capacity, the reality was that it topped up our classes and provided a similar vibe to pre lockdown but across more classes.

The members, amped to be back & bewildered by the new offering (Quite a few felt embarrassed to pay the new rate), created an amazing atmosphere to which the newbies were instantly attracted.

Another sign we were on the right as our pre-existing amended debits went off with a healthy amount of new ones.