Should You Worry About Local Competition?

Why should you worry about local competition if it distracts you from your principal mission? In this episode, Rick and Matt will discuss If you have a powerful business model and strategic focus, don’t chase every new fitness trend your competitors are chasing.

Competitive Business Focus: What You Should And Shouldn’t Do

1. Product and Service Differentiators

Don’t provide the same products and services that your competitor is offering at the expense of your own fitness brand mission and strategy. We offer personal training to every client in a small group personalized setting. If our competitor offers large group boot camp classes, we don’t want to provide the same product because it would not fit into our business model.

Losing some of your customers to local competition can be painful. And when they’re directly stealing customers from you, it can really set the alarm bells ringing. Sometimes you should pay attention to what competition is doing if they are offering the same service, but you don’t want to take on every fitness trend that is popping up in our industry. You can get yourself overwhelmed really fast when you are chasing every new fitness fad. You should always keep your strategic focus on your business concept. Sometimes you can lose sight of what you’re trying to do when you focus on competitors too much. Squirrel brain can drain your business, so keep Keep Your Focus on the Main Thing.

2. Marketing on Discounted Price

Don’t Use Discounts To Compete. For example, if you use short-term “Hook” marketing offers that sabatoge your long-term pricing strategy. When you decide to offer a discounted price, you are cheapening your product or services. You are telling customers that your You don;t want to be caught in a race to the lowest price. If you don’t short term promise with short-term gain, but it will create more churn on the back-end.

3. Target Demographic Segments

Don’t attract customers that aren’t your customer demographic. In the fitness industry, many fitness gyms focus on the younger market in the 20 – 30 age group. They also market to the masses and need large numbers of customers to support their business model profitable. They also need a constant amount of new customers on the front-end because they are churning and losing customers each month.

The Alloy business model has a different demographic market. It would not make sense for us to market to the masses. We cater to the over 50 population, which is an underserved segment with greater discretionary income. With our studio business model, we only need 130 members to be profitable. In addition, Alloy has one of the highest client retention rates of 97% and the longest client longevity rates of 36 months. The fitness industry average retention rate is around 70%. Having a smaller membership means happier customers and provides a more personalized small group personal training atmosphere, cleaner facilities, and less competition for equipment.

In this episode, Rick and Matt are going to explain how much attention you should pay to your competition, why the scarcity mindset is killing you, and where you should really focus your attention.