In the past few days, I've been in contact with Ben, Chris, and Karin at Planet Fitness / World Gym. Karin coordinates a lot of the franchise activities and she overnighted me my UFOC (a requirement for companies to be able to sell franchises), along with my franchise agreement, and a couple of questionnaires designed to gather personal and financial information about me and my company. I have already begun reading the agreement, making notes about things questions that I need answered either by World Gym or my attorney. My goal is to get the entire things read and understood by this coming Monday and then to get it into my attorney's hands for his review. I hope to be ready to send it back to World by one week from Monday.
Today, Chris and I got into some very in depth discussions about our current membership statistics (number of members, current prices, etc.). I have never been great at paying regular attention to the numbers, especially as long as our bills are being paid and we have money in our checking account - but I've taken an Entrepreneur's Boot camp at Syracuse University for the past month, and I am committed to really understanding my financials. Chris asked me for several things:
- number of paid in full members (180)
- number of EFT members (12)
- number of expired members (190)
- EFT pricing ($39)
- Annual paid in full price ($419)
- 3 month membership price ($149)
- Age of club (1 year)
He suggested some pricing and promotion strategies, and we came up with a plan to have our first direct mail piece hit the Monday after Thanksgiving. He's going to have World Gym's mail house get started creating the mail piece so we can have it approved and ready to go. We're also planning to send a letter to our existing members at the same time. Chris really helped educate me on the value of the EFT memberships. I've always thought that having a solid EFT base is a good business strategy, I've just never followed through on implementing a strategy to build the base. It sounds like all that is going to change once we convert fully to the World Gym format.
On another note, Chris faxed me back my site plan, marked up with his suggestions about changes to wall colors, what WG graphics need to be installed on what walls, and a list of the specific colors - which are available at Sherwin Williams. I was really excited to start to get a vision of how things were going to look, so while I was at lunch, I stopped by the local SW and picked up a few color chips of each of the spec'd colors. The colors are really nice - they're bold, but soothing colors. I really think WG's new brand identity is going to be around for a long time, and it is such a marketable brand as compared to the older image of an ape and a bent barbell. I was also glad to hear that my mother liked the logo - after all there is so much more to this industry than body builders.
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