When it comes time to decide your gym’s hours of operation, there are two things you should consider:
The Type of Model You are Offering
Your Target Audience
The first thing you need to consider is the type of clients your business attracts and what these clients need in terms of hours. If you’re in a big Globo Gym, L.A. Fitness, Gold’s Gym type of a model, you need to be open a lot because you’re going to have perhaps 10,000 people on a monthly basis coming through your facility. If you’re a very small personal training gym and you’ve got three or four clients who come in at an hour at a time, it would not be advantageous to stay open all the time.
You also need to consider your target market’s needs. If you’ve got 10,000 as is typical of most ‘globo-gyms’ you will have a massive range of people with varying schedules which you will need to accommodate. The opposite is true of smaller ‘micro-gyms’. These gyms typically only have 50 -100 clients which means they don’t need to remain open all day because their clients likely have similar 9-5 schedules.
When starting any gym, what you want to do is start with fewer operating hours and expand as your clientele and services grow. You also want to make sure you’re thinking about who your target market is so that you can also incorporate that into your hours.
“if you have an executive bunch of people who are your clients, you probably want to be open before and after work. Think about that for a second. You might not need to be open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. or even 5 p.m. If you have different types of people, you’re going to have to have some different hours. My advice to you is to think through who you want to work with, what their hours probably look like, and set your hours up to support the people who you’re working with.” – Jim Crowell, OPEX CEO
Learn more about how to set up gym hours by applying for the OPEX Gym’s Program today.
