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The Install: The Creep Sheet in a Gym
This week’s teardown found about nine thousand dollars a month hiding in an auto repair shop’s pricing file. This Install walks The Creep Sheet into a gym, where the price is a promise the member joined on and the cost to serve moves every time a bill renews.
A full class is a count, and a count is where the problem hides. Here is the sheet at work in a gym.
An unlimited membership at one hundred and fifty dollars a month cost ninety dollars to serve a year ago: the coach’s time for the classes the member comes to, their share of the rent, the software and card fees, the cleaning and the kit. After a coach raise, a higher lease, a bigger power bill and a software price rise, it costs one hundred and five. Same member, same classes, same price, and the margin has slid from forty percent to thirty. A worked example, not a client.
Twenty Plans, Three Columns
Write down every plan and service you sell, up to twenty, most members first: the unlimited plan, the two a week plan, class packs, personal training, small group, the drop in rate. If some members are on an old founding rate, give that rate its own row, because it is its own price. Column one is what one member on the plan cost you to serve each month twelve months ago. Column two is what it costs today. Column three is the rate those members actually pay, not the one on the website. One page, with a date on it.
The Eight Percent Rule
Circle every row where the cost is up more than eight percent and the price has not moved. Below eight percent is normal noise, a quiet January or a busy September. It is never all twenty. It is three or four rows, and they are usually the unlimited plan and the founding rates.
Four Moves for a Circled Row
Raise the price, and on a one hundred and fifty dollar plan the move back is fifteen dollars, ten percent, with thirty days notice and the same letter to everyone. Honor a founding rate until a date you choose, and tell those members the date now. Price the add ons, because the intro sessions, the body scans and the nutrition check ins grew the service and nobody priced them. Change the schedule: a class of four costs the same coach hour as a class of twenty, so merge it, move it, or make it small group training at its own price. Or let it go, because a plan that cannot carry its own cost is a subsidy. One decision at a time, then let it run a month.
The Creep Sheet is inside the free Small Business MBA.
Twenty rows, three columns and the eight percent rule, as a fillable page in the app, not a download you have to print. It is free, it is not a trial, and every tool this season lands there.
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