2025 Geared Up, Issue 3 | Page 44

Operations Update

Reviewing Schedules

2025 Issue 3 | GearedUp
42

Running a profitable club has many factors. The journey toward profitability started in the planning stage. The right ADA, lease, layout and marketing all play a role in how quickly you can start the cash flow. However, once the doors are open, the club’ s ability to generate revenue rests in the hands of your management of the location. There are budgets and line items for every operational metric. Some costs may seem trivial while others, like payroll, can have a substantial impact on the bottom line. Finding the right balance to servicing your members and servicing your creditors can be a tricky task.

Over time, Planet Fitness ® has made recommendations for management and staff scheduling. Many operators look at this as a guide and have changed things up to fit their needs. To start the conversation about staffing, Planet Fitness offers two versions of the scheduling template on FRM. They offer the 24 / 7 and 24 / 5 Staff Schedule Recommendations. The recommendations include club manager, assistant manager and trainer hours along with staff coverage hours. This may or may not meet your club’ s specific needs or scheduling philosophies, but it does give you a starting point. The“ right” schedule, most likely, will never exist. Think of the schedule as a living document, always in need of thought and maintenance.
Linking a portion of the club’ s profitability to the schedule is important. That link will serve as a check for the manager to increase member counts while considering the cost of having employees scheduled. Having enough staff to greet members, keep the club clean and sell by Brian Cassagio the tour while not leaving the front desk unattended can be a daunting task. If your schedule has too many overlapping shifts, the team can be less motivated to stay busy, and you will feel like the budget is not well spent. If you provide too few, you run the risk of staff feeling overworked and undervalued, leading to increased staff turnover. Both of those scenarios have a cost associated.
It is difficult to assign a revenue generating monetary value needed to justify each shift, but there can be some non-monetary principles you can follow. One of the things that you should consider is the number of staff on shift at any moment. Do you