The Two-Brain Business Retention Assessment

Two-Brain Business has data from hundreds of fitness businesses, and this assessment is based on the best practices of the top gyms in the world. Find out how your business stacks up and where you have opportunities to strengthen retention and generate more profit!

How to Score Yourself

You will be assessed on nine different skill sets that are required for spectacular client retention. For each skill set, there are three levels:

1. Founder (1, 2, 3)
2. Growth (4, 5, 6)
3. Tinker (7, 8, 9)

Read the description for each level and score yourself. Be as honest as you can. If you score yourself accurately, you’ll have the best overall picture of your retention. Lower numbers can be viewed as an opportunity. For example, if you give yourself a 1 in a certain section, think what will happen to your business when you hit 5—or 9!

At the end, we’ll tell you where you’re at overall and what you can do to improve your score to make more money through retention.

Assess: Client Onboarding

The best gyms have systems in place to ensure new clients are set up for success right away. A solid onboarding process makes the client more likely to stay for years. A weak process gives the new client a host of reasons to break a habit before it’s taken hold.

Client Onboarding: Score 1-3

No personal contact is made after the sale. You move clients into class with no onboarding or after a general group onboarding class.

Client Onboarding: Score 4-6

Clients do a few private training sessions to get acclimated to the way you do business. They receive a few automated email messages and maybe a general welcome package. Someone might do a check-in at some point, but these services are not optimized, formalized or consistently delivered.

Client Onboarding: Score 7-9

Clients go through extensive onboarding in a business with a clearly defined client journey. They book introductory consultations and receive precise prescriptions that put them on the right path. They get personal contact from multiple staff members and are introduced to gym other members in classes and private Facebook groups. They receive personalized welcome packets and are told exactly how to contact a client success manager any time they need assistance. Automated email sequences provide motivation, encouragement and key details, while staff members personally check in on the client multiple times in the first 90 days. A goal review session for the 90-day mark is booked at intake.

Assess: Client Journey

When we refer to the client journey, we are talking about the entire pathway a person takes from potential customer to paying customer to former client. Gyms that lay out the steps in the journey can identify what clients need and then create roles and responsibilities to ensure staff members provide what’s needed—every time.

Client Journey: Score 1-3

You don’t know exactly where new clients come from and don’t have a clear process in place to build an audience or warm leads. Clients essentially “just show up.” Your target market is undefined, and you haven’t got documented procedures for each person’s first in-person interaction with your brand and staff. You might track number of members but not length of engagement, and clients do not have access to a staff member who can help them find success. You know most clients’ general goals but don’t meet with them quarterly to review them and plan to achieve them. You don’t know when most clients leave or why, and you do not stay in contact with departed members.

Client Journey: Score 4-6

You have a general idea of your target market but haven’t created avatars based on your ideal clients. You’ve formalized your intake process but haven’t optimized it, and your follow-up with new clients could be better. You or a staff member might check in with them, and you might have some automations in place, but you know there are holes in the bucket. You track length of engagement and even notice improvements, but it’s not consistently increasing or directly tied to new tactics and strategies. When clients leave, you stay in contact with them through a mailing list only.

Client Journey: Score 7-9

You’ve actually written down your client journey and created avatars based on your best clients. All the tasks associated with the client journey are documented and assigned to staff members. Each client receives the same great intake process, and regular goal review sessions are in place to ensure the client is on track. You’ve automated basic tasks—such as email sequences that provide new members with tips and resources—but you’ve got a client success manager (CSM) who is directly responsible for client satisfaction. Length of engagement is tracked, and your CSM regularly reviews procedures and runs tests to see if changes will improve retention. Your CSM reaches out to clients regularly to solve problems before they cause departures, and when clients do leave, the CSM engages them regularly, both with automations and personal messages. You regularly reacquire departed clients and have specific campaigns to do so at key intervals.

Assess: Retention Metrics

The key retention metric is length of engagement (LEG). This is how long an average client stays with your business. In great gyms, LEG is measured in years. A secondary retention metric is reacquisition of departed clients, but the goal is to prevent them from leaving in the first place, so LEG is the focus.

Retention Metrics: Score 1-3

You do not currently track LEG or have a plan to improve it. Once a client leaves, he or she is generally gone for good.

Retention Metrics: Score 4-6

You track LEG and have seen improvements of two to four months over baseline to bring LEG to about 10 months or a year. No one staff member is responsible for improving the number, but you do have basic retention strategies that are beginning to pay off. You reach out to old clients about once a year and reacquire a few, but you know you could do more.

Retention Metrics: Score 7-9

You consider LEG one of the most important metrics and are constantly working to drive it up. You have a CSM who is responsible for improving LEG, and you review numbers, tactics and strategies regularly. You also have a retention plan in place for staff members. Your LEG is over 15 months and climbing. You reach out to departed clients regularly—both with automations and personalized messages—and you expect departed clients to return at some point.

Assess: Seed and Weed Clients

Seed clients are your very best clients: They bring you the most joy and they spend the most money. They are the soul of your business, and in perfect world, your business would be full of seed client clones. Weed clients are the high-maintenance, unpleasant clients you wish you didn’t have to deal with. They eat up your time and sap the joy from your business—and they’re seldom happy, no matter what you do.

Seed and Weed Clients: Score 1-3

You’ve never considered seed and weed clients. You just have a group of clients, and you like some of them a lot. Others, not so much. You’re eager to please, so you regularly bend over backward for clients even when you feel like they’re taking advantage of you.

Seed and Weed Clients: Score 4-6

You’ve actually done a “seeds and weeds” exercise to identify your best and worst clients. After that, you met with your best clients and made at least one change based on their feedback. You’ve fired at least one weed client who clearly wasn’t a good fit for your business.

Seed and Weed Clients: Score 7-9

You know exactly who your seed clients are, and you’re working to replicate them by using “affinity marketing” techniques to reach their family members, friends and close contacts. You regularly showcase them on your website and in social media. You’ve acquired at least three new clients from this process, and you’re working hard for more. You fire weed clients whenever they appear, and you’ve learned how to identify them in introductory consultations so you can direct them to businesses where they’ll be a better fit.

Assess: Feedback Loop

Client feedback is incredibly valuable. Some gym owners ignore it or don’t seek it out, but the best hunger for it and use it to strengthen their businesses. That doesn’t mean they’re responding to the whims of the public. Instead, they’re finding our exactly how they can offer more help—and sell more—to their best clients.

Feedback Loop: Score 1-3

You don’t actively seek out feedback from clients, and when they offer suggestions, you generally just nod and smile. It’s not that you don’t care; you just don’t have a system in place to ensure that important feedback is acted upon in the right way.

Feedback Loop: Score 4-6

You schedule goal review sessions with clients quarterly. In these sessions, you review progress and successes, then set goals with measurable milestones. You offer prescriptions for success and book the next reviews. Through this process, you’ve upgraded at least five clients to new prescriptions that will help them find success. You’ve also created one specialty group and sold it out based on needs you identified in these sessions. You regularly upgrade and adjust group programming based on client results.

Feedback Loop: Score 7-9

You have a well-established, documented goal review system, and clients welcome the sessions as an essential part of your service. You’ve trained staff members to perform these reviews, and they’ve upgraded 30 clients to new prescriptions. As CEO, you regularly have lunch with your top clients and treat their feedback as critical to improving your business. Once you know how you can serve your best clients better, you delegate, and improvements are made by staff members.

Assess: Client Success

Succeed precedes motivation—not the other way around. For clients to want to keep coming back, they need to win. And many of them don’t see their many small victories because they’refocused on the ultimate goal. You need to show them they’re winning every day and help them keep the streak alive. This is best done through a dedicated staff member called a client success manager (CSM).

Client Success: Score 1-3

You’re invested in your clients, but most of your focus is on coaching them through workouts and handing out high fives for PRs. You’ll certainly offer congratulations at the whiteboard, and you genuinely care about your clients, but you haven’t got systems in place to help clients beyond the workout of the day.

Client Success: Score 4-6

You have an experienced CSM who has managed the journeys of 25 or more clients according to a carefully created plan. This person celebrates clients with simple but very effective tactics such as texting when they hit a PR. The CSM is in regular contact with clients and is constantly reminding them of success or providing remedies for perceived failures. Your CSM runs a vibrant, interactive members-only Facebook group in which everyone posts Bright Spots each week.

Client Success: Score 7-9

Your CSM has mastered your systems and is constantly improving them. Some parts are automated, but not at the expense of regular personalized contact. The CSM knows each client’s goals and progress toward them. When progress stalls, staff members are made aware of it so they can prescribe a new plan before the client becomes disheartened. In your gym, clients become superstars: Your CSM has published at least 20 success stories to your website and social media. This practice makes the “stars” feel amazing, but it also motivates other current members and piques the interest of departed clients. You know that because you’ve reacquired at least 10 lost members. As a bonus, these success stories are used in your marketing.

Assess: Member Check-Ins

In some facilities, members don’t receive check-ins—unless a credit card has expired. This is akin to a bank asking you “how are you doing” the day after you threaten to leave. In top gyms, staff members are in constant contact with members—and not just through automation. Regular personal contact creates a personal bond that’s very hard to break.

Member Check-Ins: Score 1-3

In your gym, members are generally on their own after intake. You give them great service in classes and ask about their goals, but you don’t have a formal system to stay in contact with them.

Member Check-Ins: Score 4-6

You’ve got some email sequences set up, and you might even have a staff member who checks in on clients regularly. These check-ins are personalized and effective, but they’re more casual. You haven’t yet established and optimized an official procedure for check-ins.

Member Check-Ins: Score 7-9

Your check-ins are all scheduled along a well-defined client journey, and you know exactly how many points of contact your clients are receiving. Check-ins are scheduled at least every three months, and you have a formal procedure for these sessions. You—and your staff—first review the client’s successes, and you document them for use in approved testimonials later. Then you ask about new goals. After that, you set up a measurement system and a plan, working back from the goal to the client’s current state. You and the client agree on the new plan—which might include a service upgrade—and you book the next session for three months down the line. Between those sessions, you check in regularly to make sure the client is making progress.

Assess: Community

The relationship between coach and client is key. But retention is strengthened when clients have strong relationships with your brand and each other. Those Relationships don’t just spring up: You have to foster them.

Community: Score 1-3

You know your community exists, and you can tell people enjoy it. They wear your shirts, and everyone smiles during group workouts on holidays. People even talk about the community and express love for it. But no one is actively working on building a sense of community, and you don’t have a documented plan to strengthen the bonds in your gym.

Community: Score 4-6

You’re working to bolster your community, and your retention numbers reflect your effort. People have a clear sense of your values and goals because you have a mission statement and regularly tell members what membership in your “tribe” is all about. Your holiday workouts are packed. You have a schedule of outside-the-gym events as well as a members-only group on Facebook. But it’s hard to get people to post in the group, and sometimes a day passes without any activity. “Monthly get-togethers” sometimes don’t happen for a few months. No single person is responsible for growing the sense of community.

Community: Score 7-9

The sense of community in your gym is palpable—but it’s also documented by data. You’ve seen LEG increases when you added community-building features, and you now have a CSM or other staff member who is responsible for forging close bonds in the community. Everything is documented in your policies and job descriptions. One person is tasked with creating buzz in your Facebook groups, and all staff members know it’s their responsibility to participate and “lead from the front.” Social events are planned and promoted months in advance, and members look forward to them. The events are also created to involve members’ family, friends and co-workers, giving you a chance to show your brand to the people closest to your currentclients. Your staff members actively ask how they can help clients’ family members—not just to make sales but to provide a support network for the client.

Assess: Reactivation

Members who leave your business are actually the most likely people to sign up in the future—if you encourage them to do so. Departing members know, like and trust you, but they have to leave for other reasons. Great gyms stay in contact so that former members are very likely to return when outside-the-gym circumstances change.

Reactivation: Score 1-3

You do a good job training your clients, and they know it. Departing clients sometimes come back simply because you’re good at what you do, but you have no reacquisition systems in place and generally bid farewell when someone cancels.

Reactivation: Score 4-6

You have some basic reactivation systems, but you know they could be better. You’re not sure what percentage of old clients will return, but you do contact them from time to time, either personally or with automation. You’ve even run a few focused campaigns for departed clients. But most of your contact is through the monthly newsletter, and no one is tasked with reactivation.

Reactivation: Score 7-9

Reactivation is a priority for you, and you have the systems to make it happen. One person is in charge of reactivation, and there’s a playbook to be followed. That includes long, tailored automated email campaigns as well as planned personal interaction that ensures the relationship never goes cold. Departed members might not sweat in your gym, but they never feel out of touch with your brand. You’ve researched which periods are better for reactivation, and you have precise plans for those periods. You have a good idea how many people will come back during each campaign. People who cancel memberships fill out forms that allow you to try to save the client, and even if you lose them, you collect feedback so you can improve. You analyze this feedback and act on it. When the time is right, you launch new programs and promote them as solutions for the problems that caused members to leave. When a client walks out the door, you don’t say “goodbye.” You say, “Talk to you soon!”