At the FitNation event which we attended in October, last year, Rene Moos, CEO of Basic Fit, talked about the importance of Health Clubs focusing on their goals. Today I want to take a deeper dive into just what that means and how you can ensure you too concentrate on what matters.
First and foremost, setting short term, medium-term and long-term goals is something every business should do, not just those which belong to the fitness industry. Furthermore, alongside company goals and department goals, each individual should be assigning themselves personal goals so they too can contribute to the greater good of the company. To exemplify this, as a Chief Executive Officer, you may set a personal goal to help increase company culture and motivation by talking to at least 20 staff members from outside of your Head Office each week. As a Marketing Director, you may set a company goal for your brand to become more recognised. As a Sales Director, you will no doubt set a department goal for your team to attract more prospects and new members across each region.
Generally speaking, everyone within your organisation probably sets goals to some degree. More often than not in big companies, each individual has their own Personal Development Plan, which allows them to set their own goals which matter most to them. The issue is they are not always followed up with the decisive action and therefore may not get reached. I addressed how to keep goals alive in the early staged in a recent post titled – ‘Act, Don’t Wait’. Today I want to shed even more light on how to set goals to encourage the right behaviours, after all, it’s important we all have the right knowledge of how to goal set so we don’t set goals with targets that are impossible to achieve, or vague goals that can’t be measured.
Here are the key steps for successful goal-setting.
Decide what you want
The initial step in setting business goals is understanding precisely what it is you want to achieve. Make sure your goal is worthy of the time and energy you are investing in accomplishing it. I always suggest following the SMART goal principle.
Set SMART Goals
S – Specific – Is your goal direct and meaningful?
M – Measurable – Is your goal quantifiable and can you track the progress?
A – Attainable – Is your goal realistic and do you have the resources available to achieve it?
R – Relevant – Does your goal actually align with your companies mission statement?
T – Time-bound – Does it have a deadline.
Now let’s look at all these areas through an example of a goal we can all relate to – improving the Health Clubs Group Exercise timetable.
Specific
When you make your goals specific, you define exactly what the end goal is and establish a clear road map for exactly how you are going to get there. Therefore it may be a bit too general to say, we want to ‘improve our Group Exercise timetable’, you ought to say exactly what you want to do, i.e, ‘we want to improve the occupancy percentage of our class timetable across three areas – Zumba, Yoga and Body Combat’, or, ‘we want to add 4 more HIIT classes to our Group Exercise timetable per week to see an uplift in overall Group Exercise attendees.’
Measurable
If we go along with the first statement ‘we want to improve the occupancy percentage and attendance rates of our class timetable across three areas – Zumba, Yoga and Body Combat’, we can see that is is quite specific, but as of yet, it is not measurable. In order to make it quantifiable, you need to add some numerical value so you can see if you are on track, so in this case, you may change it to ‘we want to improve the occupancy percentage of our class timetable across three areas – Zumba, Yoga and Body Combat by 30%. This way you know that if you have 20 members on average attending these classes and your maximum capacity is 40, you need to get that figure to 32 members and you can clearly track the numbers each week to measure your current performance. It’s wise to create check-points within each goal you set so you can see if you are on track as it’s likely that your occupancy won’t grow by 30% overnight but will increase steadily over time.
Attainable
So far we have a goal to increase our occupancy levels of three classes – Zumba, Yoga and Body Pump by 30% – which equates to approximately 12 more class attendees per class. Before running with it, you need to decide if this is realistic? If a target is not achievable then it has drastic consequences on the mindset of your team and creates a culture of failure! I’ve already expressed how it’s essential that teams operate with a ‘Need to Achieve Success’ (NaCH) mindset as opposed to a Need to Avoid Failure (NaF) mindset. I also emphasised in another article about how creating a strong culture full of leaders is vital for your business if you want to succeed. Therefore, one can imagine what detriments creating a culture of failure can have on a team.
So you understand just how setting unrealistic goals creates a culture of failure, let me explain below…
Failure becomes excusable – Over-shooting leads to under-focus. At the end of the goal period, if the Health Club has under-achieved its occupancy goals, the fitness staff may make up a number of excuses “We had too many classes to think about, we didn’t have the money and time to market all three classes effectively.”
Failure becomes acceptable – By accepting such excuses, gradually failure starts to become accepted. The National Fitness Manager who is responsible for this goal may say ‘although we didn’t hit our occupancy levels for Zumba and Yoga, we did with Body Combat.’ The message which is actually being subtly delivered here is; It’s OK to set goals if we don’t achieve them, as long as we have partial success that’s fine. Well in business, some may consider partial success as mediocrity, and whenever it’s OK to accept mediocrity, it’s a further step towards creating a culture of failure.
Failure becomes expected – Once you’ve given staff members the opportunity to create excuses and you’ve accepted those justifications, you’re making things even worse for yourselves in the long run. Next time you want to improve your Group Exercise timetable across key areas, all the team will know that they may miss these goals like last time but as mediocrity was acceptable last time, then it’s no big deal.
Now you’re with me? So when setting goals, think about what excuses may come up and ensure your goals are specific and attainable enough to not allow for any excuses. If I was looking at our example, I would personally shift the focus towards just one of the classes (just Body Combat), rather than all three (not Yoga, Zumba and Body Combat), moreover, I would ensure that you can clearly outline to your team members just how you can acquire another 12 participants. Instil confidence in your team by using statistics from machine learning big data to demonstrate how it’s possible. For example, you can show your team the typical demographics and member profiles of your current YOGA attendees and then reveal how many other members you have who are not attending YOGA who also fit this particular profile.
Relevant
So now you’ve made your goal ultra-specific, clearly measurable and attainable to a point it’s impossible to make excuses, you just need to ask yourself – ‘does this really sit well with our current mission and long term plans?’ To make myself clear, here is an example using our existing goal case. If your Health Club data shows that your HiiT classes have the lowest occupancy levels AND that your HiiT class goers tend to invest in Small Group Traning 3 months after doing regular HiiT Classes which leads to further increases in secondary revenue, then it makes little sense to make Body Combat your prime focus. You would be better off changing your goal to concentrate on boosting the occupancy of your HIIT CIRCUITS classes. Similarly, if your Health Club knows there is going to be a shake-up in the timetable in the next 6 months meaning in the future, rather than paying external instructors to deliver licensed Les Mills Body Combat classes, you are going to get your own Personal Trainers to deliver something similar but not quite the same, then it makes little sense to drum up some excitement about a class which is not going to be on your timetable later down the line – this will only frustrate members.
It sounds ridiculous to suggest this happens, but it’s only as naive as a Health Club saying ‘we need to boost numbers in this class or we’ll scrap it, let’s apply some more marketing to see if we can make it work’. If the marketing sees some uplift but not enough to keep its place on the timetable, then it will only disappoint the people who did book on to the class and attend during the period in which it was promoted. Generally, it’s much better to keep the promotional spend allocated to each class the same and make decisions around Group Exercise based on the organic occupancy of each class.
Time-Bound
Setting a deadline is crucial – if you don’t have a deadline, your goal is just a pipe dream that cannot be properly managed. An absence of deadlines raises question marks about your commitment to a goal, whereas a definitive end date puts that goal into context, and when made public, allows your staff members to get excited. Using our current case, we do not have a deadline for our goal as of yet – so we need to change it to ‘we want to improve the occupancy percentage of our CIRCUITS class by 30% within the next 8 weeks.’ Of course, this comes back to the ‘realistic’ component of the SMART model framework. Pick a date that is feasible and one which your team members will accept as fair, in this case, consider the actual scope of the work required. If you want an extra 12 members consistency in 8 weeks then that is between 1 – 2 new members per week which is far more realistic than saying you want to achieve that goal within the next 2 weeks as that would mean getting 6 brand new participants each week.
Make your goals public
By making your goals public you become more accountable. In the same way that you as a Health Club will no doubt encourage many of your gym members to share their fitness goals with friends and family, you should do the same with your business goals. Set an event in the calendar every year where you invite all your staff to join you and share your SMART goals with them and explain your reasons for wanting to achieve them. By the end of the event, every person within your business should know their role and involvement with those goals and what they can do to steer your Health Club in the right direction.
Commit to your goals.
Once you’ve set SMART goals and told everyone about them, the ‘Measurable’ element and the ‘Time Bound’ aspect should mean that you do stick to your guns and keep everyone up to date with how you are getting on. When your plan is in place and the wheels are in motion it’s important to keep a positive mindset and to stay motivated right through to the end. It’s very easy to give up on a goal if it’s not going right at the very beginning or to start pointing fingers through negative communications. To avoid this from happening, as you set the goals, identify the obstacles that you might come across in the first place and set a plan for how you will not let them become permanent barriers to your success.
Reward yourself
Be sure to reward yourself where possible. When you have achieved a goal or reached a milestone, celebrate your success. If you do achieve your 30% occupancy increase in your circuits classes within the 8-week time frame across all your clubs and your reaction is very much ‘Right, we’ve done what we needed, now on to the next’ – this only creates an atmosphere where success is not recognised, which is not how great cultures are made. You need to take a moment to celebrate and to give everyone a feeling of satisfaction, this means the next time you tell your company about your next big idea, people will be more likely to buy into it as they picture the euphoria that goes with achieving it.
Closing comments on Goal Setting
It is hoped by reading this that your Health Club has started to think about the way in which you create your goals and how you follow them up. When Goal-Setting is carried out correctly, it goes hand in hand with creating a culture of success, not failure. SMART goals should command thoughts of key leaders within your organisation, they liberate some life and energy into every person involved in your Health Club and they should inspire everyone to achieve more in the future.