"All Aboard!" Series by EGYM - Sheldon McBee of Universal Athletic Club

[00:00:00] Hey friends, this is your host, Eric Malzone, and I'd like to welcome you to a short series

[00:00:06] entitled All Aboard, How to Conduct the Perfect Onboarding at Your Health Club or Gym.

[00:00:12] Brought to you by our good friends at eGym.

[00:00:14] In this series, health club operators share their insights into the importance of the

[00:00:18] onboarding process for their members and their bottom lines.

[00:00:23] Short-form interviews with long-term impact.

[00:00:25] If you'll be at URSA this year, please swing Universal Athletic Club. We are located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It's a beautiful part of central Pennsylvania. So any listeners out there who want to come through and check us out, we'd love to have you. It's a single site, family owned itself, how big is it? What kind of services do you guys provide as a group training, personal training? Yeah, give us more insights on that. Yeah, sure. So it's about 110,000 square foot facility. We have about 9,000 members. Interestingly, just before the pandemic, 14,000 members, it did drop down to nine after the

[00:03:03] pandemic.

[00:03:04] But revenue-wise, recovered quite quickly because as inflation started hitting its peak which are about 1,500 to 2,500 square feet of space dedicated to that alone, including youth athletics, spa and salon. We do some digital nutrition programming, martial arts, huge training area, obviously, and other amenities that keep the club driving with the ones I mentioned are our biggest

[00:04:24] drivers of member engagement.

[00:04:25] Awesome.

[00:04:26] That paints a great picture. we have to realize is that we are not essentially, we are not like the end all be all. It's about the prospect. It's about the member. We have to meet them where they are and be a guide. More than a solution, we are a guide. And if we can't guide them in the beginning, they won't adhere to what we're serving them. So exercise is all about adherence, really. You know, when it comes to,

[00:05:44] well, any kind of health related initiative you do being a business coach. Cause you know, I've only been in business for nine years. And the guy said, he said something that changed my, my mind like really quick. And it was like, you don't have to be the guy who sits atop the mountain who knows everything and he was done all right. You're more like the Sherpa you're kind of walking along with them on the path,

[00:07:02] helping them with things as they go.

[00:07:04] And that like, similar to what you're still have some work to do to close the gap and understand the psychology of adhering to new changes and recognition and hitting milestones of usage is something that I think that we failed to do enough of earlier.

[00:09:44] We did rely a lot on gamification me to like, this is this is what I want to do. So that's a little bit, but there's there's a lot of difficulty, obviously, a lot of great books on habits and

[00:11:01] behavior change. So that's, that's a really critical point.

[00:11:03] I really like that. So let lot of that comes with what you market and can we like, can we pre frame the journey before they sign the agreement? Once someone does actually come to the facility, they do a tour, they check things out, they find a path that really works for them. They sign the agreement. It's the our agreements are 12 months upfront. It's a 12 month agreement at

[00:12:21] first, okay. When we actually part of your member integration. You don't pay beyond your initial enrollment fee to have access to this. So they have a tremendous amount of guidance and accountability for that first month if

[00:13:43] they do that path.

[00:13:44] If they want to continue with it, then they could go ahead and agree to the biweekly billing that's guided for them. One of these four or five passes, essentially what they do. And when we look at them, we look at their usage primarily over a 12 week period. And we look at a very large map of this and we know we're doing well as far as a lead indicator of success. If at least 70% of all the members who joined

[00:15:03] over the last 12 weeks are coming into club

[00:15:05] at least one time.

[00:16:04] Our in-member app is able to create scheduling and programming inside the app for someone to use as a mobile device to track their actual check-ins.

[00:16:08] So there is that.

[00:16:10] We do have MyZone.

[00:16:13] We're a MyZone facility.

[00:16:16] And so you have the option to opt in to get the MyZone.

[00:16:18] If you get the MyZone, we'll have staff who's able to engage you through that platform and

[00:16:22] do different challenges and things of that nature, you know, with the artificial intelligence, through some other personalized engagement tools that exist out there to help enhance our ability to engage the member. Eejem, I will mention Eejem, I mean, that right now has been a brilliant, brilliant onboarding strategy for us because that just took the thought process of what I do to exercise

[00:17:45] just out of it. Is that right? Correct. Yeah. And it works with automation. So it aligns with our member management system. So checking the club, get your points. If you hit certain landmarks of usage, you earn your points. If you use your MyZone and get X amount of maps on your MyZone, you're earning points. So they get constant extrinsic rewards for club usage, which helps with exercise adherence.

[00:19:02] Awesome. Awesome. Well, Sheldon, man, you know your stuff. It's very much. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Feminist. If you did, I'm going to ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it.

[00:20:22] iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be.

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