Operational Excellence Part 5: Best Practices to Save Time

Operational excellence is about effectively running your business so that your athletes and staff are thriving and happy, while you maximize your income potential. This is part five in a seven part series.

In this series, we explored topics like opening and closing your gym and welcoming and exiting your athletes. Today we’re looking at ways you can work smarter to save time. Since you’re busy, and the real value-add actions usually occur when you’re with your athletes, you need to find ways to spend less time doing tedious and recurring tasks. To help you figure out which tasks are wasting your time and how you can get away from them, we’ve created this list.

Automate Your Billing and Payment Processing

Don’t waste your valuable time manually billing and collecting payments. Automate your billing process instead. Once recurring billing is set up, your billing and payment processing happens automatically, without any work on your part. Your software will generate automatic payment reminder emails for your athletes, and once a payment is processed, it will also send out payment receipts. Payments are posted directly into your athletes’ accounts, and the payments show up in your reports and metrics dashboard.

Get your time back today. Download your copy of our guide, Gym Management Time Traps to Avoid.

Besides being a great time saver, if you automate your payment processing, you’ll collect more money. We hear this all the time from our clients- collecting payments manually leads to missed payments. But automated payments are never missed, so you’ll collect all the money that’s owed to you.

Automate Lead Nurturing and Member Communication

You can also save time by automating your lead and athlete communication. With automations, you can create an email that’s sent automatically once a prospect fills out a form on your website. Through emails, your leads will be nurtured. Once a lead becomes a member, the automated emails automatically turn off. You’ll save tons of time not doing all this manually, and no one will fall through the cracks because you’re stretched thin.

Automating athlete emails will also save you a lot of time. Automations let you pre-set emails to go out as a follow-up after a certain event occurs. Maybe it’s when an athlete misses a certain number of classes or has a birthday. Or maybe it’s when an injured athlete puts their membership on hold. No matter which events you choose to set as your trigger, automated emails mean you don’t have to find time to make a call, text or write an email. It’s all done automatically and without any effort on your part, which is so nice because athletes love personal communications.

Pre-Schedule Programming

Sure, you can wake up early each day and program the day’s WOD into your workout tracking software, but why would you want to go about doing it the most time-consuming way? Instead, sit down once a week to schedule your programming and set it to go live each day on the Member App. It takes less time to log in and do it once. And when you do sit down to schedule your programming, be sure you’re using the pre-made skills library to make the process even easier.

Let Your Athletes Track Their WODS

Have your athletes track their own WOD results instead of doing it for them or writing their scores up on the whiteboard. By training your athletes to do it, you’ll save a significant amount of time each week. Plus, they become even more vested in knowing and improving their results.

Doing what it takes to save time is a smart step towards operational excellence. It allows you to spend time doing the things that matter most, like building relationships with your athletes and growing your business.

Looking for additional ways to get more time back each week? Get your copy of our free guide, Gym Management Time Traps to Avoid.