As a service designed to help gym owners manage their businesses, WODconnect is involved with different kind of gyms in different stages. In the most cases, we work with gyms from the very beginning of their life cycles. Therefore, we have the opportunity to witness the twists and turns of the process from close. Antti Akonniemi, the founder of WODconnect, is an experienced gym owner himself. He has founded and run three CrossFit gyms in Finland, so we might say that he knows what opening a CrossFit gym is about. The growing CrossFit community and gym network in Finland often turns to us when they need advice.
In addition to helping gym owners personally, we thought it would be a good idea to collect our thoughts in a series of blog posts. Hence, we started to write about all the basic subjects related to opening a new gym. The aim is to outline all the necessary steps every new gym owner will most likely face in the process without going too deep into the details. Here’s our first contribution – it's about you and your initial plan as a gym founder.
Take time to define your reasons
Every project should start with a plan. But let’s not go to the actual business plan yet. Before that, a lot of thinking takes place. The most important thing is to define your reasons. Why do you want to be a gym owner? This is important, as your motives, your mission and vision, will guide you throughout the processes of founding and running a gym. Wrong motives will direct you to make poor decisions, deliver poor service and eventually your business, your quality of life and the sport will suffer. Managing a gym is not for everyone, so take your time before making your final decision.
All this sounds quite obvious. But it has happened before, and it will occur in the future; the hype around CrossFit is up, which is great, but a sad side effect is that people will start gyms only thinking it’s a good way to make money right now. It’s true, it can be economically beneficial. However, the value you create around you should always be in the midst of your actions. Don't only ask yourself why you want to do it, but also why you should do it. What can you bring to the market?
When we asked some successful gym owners what’s the best thing about running a CrossFit affiliate, we got answers like this:
"The best thing is changing people's lives and watching a community build." - Chris Spealler, CrossFit Park City
"I talked to a member this morning who, a year ago, was recovering from a terrible accident - a building scaffolding had fallen on him, leaving him hospitalized for months. He gained a lot of weight, was in constant pain, could barely walk. He came into the Box out of desperation, as his doctor had told him he was going to die if he didn't get his act together. Over the course of the year, he lost more than 80 pounds, started moving like an athlete, and saw huge improvements to his strength, metcons, etc. Anyway, he told me this morning that he had just gotten his L1, and he wanted to know if he could assistant coach in some of our classes, just to give back some of what CrossFit had given him. Stories like that are the best thing." - Joshua Newman, CrossFit NYC
So having a genuine mission is not only important for your business but also motivating for you, as completing that will be the most rewarding thing that running a business could offer. But it takes more than a good heart to run any business, and a gym is no exception. After all, a relevant part of your mission is to make a living for you and your family.
Make a high-quality plan
It is said that well planned is half done, and you should indeed make a precise plan. However, the truth is that your initial plan won't cover even the half that’s ahead of you. So again, be realistic and prepared for surprises.
When Mikko Aaltonen and his crew were in the process of opening their gym Reebok CrossFit 33100, it wasn’t long until they faced their first possible threat. A week after they had received their loan, they heard that a big functional training gym with significantly lower prices was going to open in the same, relatively small city. That didn’t discourage the future gym owners, though, as they already had experience from another gym and a clear vision of what they were doing.
“Our previous experience and learnings kept us confident throughout the process. When you plan all actions around a successful customer experience, it’s difficult to fail. In turn, if your goal is maximum monetary profit, failing is quite certain.” - Mikko Aaltonen, Reebok CrossFit 33100
As the world map is filling up with functional training and CrossFit gyms, the competition gets more intense for sure. That brings us back to the quality of your gym. One thing to take in consideration is specialization. Ask yourself, what do you have to offer? How will your gym stand out from other gyms in the neighborhood?
You don’t have to specialize in any field of training, but make something your specialty. Something that you can use to promote your gym and that will come up when people talk about it. Don’t just randomly come up with a specialty, but choose something that you know you can master. Simple things can do the trick and create that unique customer experience.
When you have determined what you would like to be on a general level and why, it’s time to ask, how? This means planning things on a more practical level. Based on a careful market research, think about what kind of services, prices, and customer base do you want to have. Think about what do you want from your staff and space, and what equipment you will need. When you have come up with the answers, it's time to make a more detailed plan. Details are what make your plan convincing and help you to get funding.
In our future blog posts, we will share our thoughts about different areas you need to include in your plan and process towards opening a gym. The subjects we will cover include choosing the right services, space, equipment, handling insurance, staff, programming, customer management, marketing and different tasks related to opening.
Financial estimates to get you started
Before going further, go ahead and play a little with some financial estimates based on your initial business plan. We created an excel sheet to help you, feel free to download it.
Gym Owners Excel by WODconnect
Fill in your monthly estimates and insert a sum for equipment investments (and affiliate fee) in the beginning. Estimate the amounts of on-ramp clients and coaching hours you could manage each month, then see what it does to the numbers. This Excel file gives you a quite realistic image of your costs and revenue of the first year and shows how long it would take to start making profit with the estimated amounts. Try different scenarios, these are your first estimates.
After going through different phases of the process with the help of our upcoming posts, you’ll most probably want to return to the Excel file, make your final estimates and determine your realistic budget. Note that you can easily modify the excel to suit your needs. Doing this helps you picture your future business and takes you already one big step closer to your goal.
