Establishing Growth Goals For Your Gym

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Whether you are considering starting your own gym or already have a fitness facility up and running, setting goals for your business should be part of your process as it is monumental for long-term success. This is because your goals are the driving force behind a lot of the daily operations of your gym, such as marketing campaign development, equipment purchases, site enhancements, additional trainer onboarding, and even merchandise.

Here is what we will cover for setting growth goals in your gym:

SMART Goals For Your Gym

SMART is an acronym in goal setting that is short for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This concept may be familiar to many fitness facility owners as it is typically a base model for personal trainers to use when setting client goals. Just as a client would set these goals at the beginning of a program, gym owners should take a similar approach when laying out their business plan early on.

Setting multiple goals for your gym can also be a healthy start, but focusing on different aspects of the business may be a good choice so you do not overwhelm yourself. Looking at areas of the business like membership growth, facility expansion, revenue enhancement, or even brand recognition can be areas of focus when starting to consider goals for your fitness business.

Here are some examples of good and bad goals:
BAD: I want to grow membership numbers.
GOOD: I want to grow membership numbers from 250 to 325 total members by the end of the Year.

BAD: I want to open my gym on the most popular street downtown.
GOOD: I want to find a good location that fits my budgetary needs based on square footage, foot traffic, parking, and accessibility for my target audience.

BAD: I want to hire trainers so I don’t have to work as much.
GOOD: I want to get my gym operations to the point where I can take on 2 additional trainers focused on our target client demographic in the next 6 months to help offset my time so I can work on growing the business further through new initiatives.

Product VS Process Goals

Many times when we set goals, they end up being very specific, quantifiable, or well-thought-out points, and, as we outlined in the SMART goals section, this is a good thing. But these types of goals can also be known as ‘product goals,’ which are the destination for where you want to be. A measurable point in your mind that you can say, “This was a success.” These are the goals that you, as the owner, are using as your primary navigator for how you shape and run your fitness facility day in and day out.

But product goals are not the whole picture. Once you know where you want to be, those daily decisions and tasks that you do to help move the dial in the right direction to completion of your well-set SMART product goal are what’s known as ‘process goals.’ These can be small tasks like having personal conversations with members to help drive retention or actively participating in local social media groups driving awareness of your gym, or larger activities like hosting an open house or holding a competition.

While the breakdown of process goals is typically unique to the product goal set; sitting down and proactively working on ways to help align your product goals to most effectively get you to your desired destination is critical. Without these process goals strategically outlined and implemented, you risk the potential to flounder – wasting time, energy, and resources.

Number-Driven Goals

Depending on how into the nitty-gritty you want to get with your business, another way to set goals is by focusing on a healthy distribution of income. For many fitness studio and gym-based businesses, this could mean income diversification via memberships, classes, personal training packages, merchandise, supplements, or even events/competitions held on-site. Setting goals in this line of thinking could look like having 65% of your revenue come from memberships, 25% from classes and personal training, and the remaining 10% from various events and merchandise sales.

Number-driven goals could also mean a breakdown of audience members based on their demographics, especially in regards to your target audience. For a small fitness studio, this could look like a customer percentage breakdown based on age category. For a powerlifting gym, this could look like a percentage breakdown of lifters by primary category – such as powerlifting, bodybuilding, or general population. Focusing on keeping a healthy percentage breakdown in different categories allows you not to lose sight of your primary target audience, but also builds in the room to grow outside of your defined niche.

Budgeting With Goals

Budgets are a great humbling point for business owners regarding wants vs needs. Many times, we find ourselves wanting to get more equipment or t-shirts, but really, we need to allocate those funds for less ‘fun’ things like fixing the plumbing. However, budgets can also be a good place to look when you are setting up goals for your business – our Building a Budget For Your Gym page covers this topic more thoroughly.

Similarly to the wants and needs comment above, your budget can help you identify where you want to be (let’s say with memberships) with realistic goals vs where you need to be in order to not be in the red each month. Building on this, if you are thinking about opening a gym and found a great location and have some rough pricing in place, that gives you an opportunity to set a baseline SMART goal of how many active memberships you will need to have monthly not to be losing money in your business.

Goals with Your Gym’s Target Audience

Once you’ve identified and established your fitness facility’s target audience, you can start to set goals around them. While the first thought for goal setting might be around getting more people signed up, it doesn’t necessarily only need to be quantitative goals in this category.

Quantitative goal examples for your gym’s target audience*

Increasing gym membership numbers that align with niche type

  • Example: Increasing student athlete memberships by 15 memberships

Goal setting for a specific percentage breakdown of niche-based memberships vs more general type memberships

  • Example: 80/20 split of direct niche vs general fitness member types

Increasing premium membership numbers or add-ons

  • Example: Increase (or convert to) premium memberships by 15%
  • Example: Drive personal training membership add-ons by 25%

Qualitative goal examples for your gym’s target audience*

Increasing customer satisfaction

  • Example: Getting more 5-star reviews from personal training clients on your Google Business Profile

Building and strengthening your gym brand’s identity locally

  • Example: Putting out 10 pieces of content on your website’s blog and social media that covers specific member profiles and their story/progress with your fitness facility

*While the goals in the examples may not be SMART type goals, they are meant to give you an idea of the core goal at hand.

When you practice goal setting around your target audience, you are forced to look at these goals with a problem-solving mindset after the goals are established. This viewpoint shift may make you realize that your current structure, systems, or even prices might not support your goal outcomes. These realizations are pivotal when making necessary changes within your business, which may have gone unnoticed otherwise, to help get your gym moving more smoothly in its process goals on the journey to your product goal(s) completion.

Common Fitness Facility Goals

Sometimes, it takes just looking over some examples to get your goal planning and setting juices flowing, so here are 10 top-level gym goals that you can review to help get the ball rolling:

  1. Increase referrals from current members
  2. Reduce facility expenses or overhead
  3. Improve facility, equipment, or training quality
  4. Increase average membership life or decrease membership turnover
  5. Improve staff retention or team member work efficiency
  6. Strengthen local SEO ranking or build up brand equity
  7. Enhance website and online content efforts
  8. Drive new memberships in a healthy, consistent, and reliable systematic manner
  9. Strategically increase marketing, advertising, and partnership programs
  10. Promote automation implementations to help drive efficiencies

Making a Splash

Regarding goal setting, there is more than meets the eye with surface-level aspirations of making more money or working. By taking time to plan out your SMART goals strategically, break them down into manageable process goals, and ultimately set a base of measurement to keep yourself accountable and decide if the goal was met, you are setting yourself up for a better chance of success. Often, the details get overlooked, the financial health of a business is misinterpreted, or resources are spread too thin to achieve stability, let alone growth. Setting a clear road map and sticking to the plan will help you work efficiently and make more effective business decisions with your goals in mind.