Gyms work to educate about exercise benefits
| Sunday, Jan 04 2009 07:47 PM
Last Updated Tuesday, Apr 07 2009 03:42 PM
Tips to reduce membership attrition:
• Get the right people on your staff.
• Hone your staff’s hospitality skills and reward successes.
• Make sure owners and managers are visible.
• Take nothing for granted where new members are concerned.
• Incentivize club use early on.
• Facilitate member-to-member interaction.
• Show your gratitude.
• Practice responsive listening.
• Recognize and reward your most valuable members.
• Allow membership freezes.
Source: International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association
Images
Linda Piker even has a smile on her face while working out at Curves on Rosedale Highway.
Stephanie Hughes gets in a good workout at Curves on Rosedale Highway.
Several women work out at the stretching station at the Curves on Rosedale Highway and Calloway Drive.
It wasn’t Greg Hamilton’s imagination: Gyms were popping up all over town.
“Over the last three years it seemed something happened and everybody thought Bakersfield was a small Los Angeles,” said the co-owner of four Curves women’s fitness franchises in town.
For all the recent growth among local independents as well as chain-owned fitness clubs, Bakersfield’s gym industry is still working to find balance in a market that by all accounts could do with a bit more exercise. Local gym owners past and present say there remains opportunity, though they see lean times ahead if the economy worsens. They focus now on educating consumers about how workouts relieve stress — a potentially powerful marketing message as financial anxieties grow.
“I think (the new gym trend) is good for this area,” said Robert Chavez, general manager of the Laurel Glen Gym in Bakersfield. Entrepreneurs who open gyms here “see that there’s a need, because Bakersfield’s a very unhealthy market.”
For more than a decade, the local gym scene has seesawed between boutique and corporate, high-touch and anonymous.
Some mom-and-pops have succeeded against the large chains that entered and expanded in Bakersfield over the last decade, while other small gyms have thrown in the towel.
There were three dozen fitness clubs in Bakersfield in December 2007; some of those are gone. Scarborough Research found that the share of Kern adults belonging to a health club fell from 19 percent to 16 percent between 2007 and 2008.
There are good reasons why so many entrepreneurs opened gyms in Bakersfield over the last several years.
“More and more people know the health benefits of working out, so the quantities of people working out are growing. That’s evident,” said Diana Mestmaker, owner of Body Architect, a private personal training studio she runs out of her home in northeast Bakersfield. She owned a women’s gym in town in the 1970s and has worked in the local fitness market for 33 years.
SURVIVING, THRIVING
She and others see subtleties to surviving in the local market. They say much of the population is unaccustomed to spending money on fitness, and educating people about the health benefits of regular workouts remains a challenge.
And more so here than in bigger cities, Kern customers require personal attention, gym owners say. Locals are not used to the anonymity of big-city fitness clubs, and they expect their needs to be met directly.
“We’re a small town,” she said, “even if we’ve grown.”
This perception — that local customers place value on personal attention —helped fuel the recent boom in new gyms, many of which charged higher rates for their custom approach. People in the business say the trend was primarily a reaction to 24 Hour Fitness and other corporate-owned chains.
But another driver was the overall economy. New shopping centers were opening around Bakersfield and credit was relatively easy to come by. All of this made it easier to challenge the big guys, said Chavez at Laurel Glen, which is part of In-Shape Health Clubs, a Stockton-based chain with 32 locations, three of them in Bakersfield.
It was in this climate, in November 2006, that Roland Brown and his partners opened Concierge Fitness inside a 4,000-square-foot space on F Street. A personal trainer for 25 years, most of that time in Bakersfield, Brown helped raise about $500,000 — well short of the $1.5 million he now says it would have taken to start it up properly.
Concierge was smaller in size than a corporate gym and more high-end, more individualized. Although his club lasted only nine months, Brown maintains that it could have succeeded given more time and capital, mainly because it delivered what Bakersfield needs: Fitness education.
“If we are going to serve as a fitness industry, if we are to serve the marketplace instead of just open facilities for people to come in and use equipment,” he said, “then we have got to educate (consumers) on how and why they need to take care of themselves.”
WHAT'S NEXT FOR GYMS
What’s immediately ahead for the local market is anybody’s guess, as it is for the economy as a whole. But many expect the boutiques to have a harder time than the chains, if only because independents must usually charge higher rates.
Hamilton, who owns the Curves locations along with his wife, Sandy, plans to continue as his team has, focusing on personal service, time-efficient workouts on technologically advanced equipment and a knowledgeable staff educating customers in areas of nutrition, kinesiology and overall fitness.
Customer service will remain the primary thrust, he said: “We’re just going to maybe focus more intently on it.”
