It’s time that health/fitness clubs in Canada had some reliable data on business measures that will help daily and long term decision makers for staff and management. While clubs know their own business measures, there is little insight into how they compare to others in the industry.

Measurements For Management - The Need To Know

Operating a health/fitness facility is a complex and risky business. Managers compile useful measures of their own but lack reliable statistics on what the rest of the fitness industry is doing in comparison. Such knowledge is valuable when it relates to staff compensation, membership fees, retention rates, program design and results, marketing strategies and materials, membership sales, industry wide data on number of clubs, member demographics, equipment use, and the list goes on.

A primary service of Fitness Business Canada is to provide this type of information. Indeed, we receive regular requests from established club operators and new owners/managers, the media, various researchers, government agencies, and others interested in the fitness business. They seek operating statistics on the health club industry. Unfortunately, statistically reliable data requires expensive surveys and these have not been done in Canada.

Industry data on U.S. commercial clubs is available thanks to IHRSA, the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association. One can extrapolate (usually using the 10% factor) from U.S. club stats to Canadian stats with some success. This is not a substitute, however, for basic surveys being done in Canada, for regional data collected on business parameters of primary interest to Canadian operators and for analysis of these measures by experienced consultants familiar with the Canadian industry.

Measuring the Fitness Business in Canada
Obtaining business measures of value to Canadian operators requires surveys that enough clubs will participate in to make the data statistically useful. Owners, directors and managers value this information. Taking the time to answer long and complicated surveys is difficult however. Hiring professional services to manage the job is expensive. Fitness Business Canada would like to take advantage of our relationship with IHRSA and our new website capabilities to begin to solve this problem and acquire useful data for our readers.

IHRSA International has agreed to share their club survey content with us. It will be possible to use modified content from their club surveys to use with Canadian clubs. Their experience is extensive in this field and this will permit us to take advantage of their survey design and implementation process. Using established questions from their surveys, we can begin to obtain our own data so that club owners and managers can begin to compare their operating parameters with other clubs in Canada and with clubs in the U.S. We propose a series of short surveys on key measures which will hopefully encourage more clubs to participate. The technology that has been developed for FitNet makes it possible for us to deliver brief industry surveys targeted to measure parameters of interest and value to all club operators. Information can be collected electronically, analyzed by industry specialists and reports provided to those who participate.

The technology that has been developed for FitNet makes it possible for us to deliver brief industry surveys targeted to measure parameters of interest and value to all club operators. Information can be collected electronically, analyzed by industry specialists and reports provided to those who participate.

Participation
Fitness Business Canada will take the initiative in implementing these surveys and providing results to those that participate. By starting with a number of short surveys on selected topics we hope to both attract more clubs to participate and sponsors to support the collation and analysis of results.

Suggestions
Your suggestions for key business measures that you are interested in and for an information collection process that you would be comfortable with are invited. (Send to fbc@fitnet.ca )
We will take all suggestions into consideration and hope to respond with a working club business information reporting system later this year.

(This article also appears as the Canadian Forum in the March issue of Fitness Business Canada.)

Popularity: 9% [?]

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.