Raising Prices Doesn’t Guarantee Increased Profitability

If you’re trying to increase your business profits (and who isn’t?), you might think the sure-fire way to do that is simply to raise your prices. If your customers pay more, you’ll make more. Right? Not necessarily.

Well, if you’re using the Profit First method, raising prices will indeed equate to increased Profit. Because you take in revenue, you immediately pay yourself a profit. So if you take in more revenue (by raising your prices), you’ll pay yourself more profit. But increased revenue does not necessarily mean increased profitability.

Profitability vs. More Profits

And what is profitability exactly? It’s a measure of your profit relative to your expenses. It’s an assessment that helps you determine if your business can sustain itself and grow. Ultimately you want to be able to project the profitability of your business well into the future.

Here’s why raising your prices does not automatically equate to increased profitability. 

You do have to raise your prices from time to time no matter what because of inflation. The cost of doing business is always gradually increasing because the costs of goods and services in our economy are generally rising over time. 

So if you raise prices just enough to keep up with the cost of doing business, you might not increase your profitability at all. So how do you increase profitability? 

There are endless tactics and factors of influence. (Here are just a few ideas specifically for gym owners.) 

But at the most basic level when we’re talking about profitability, raising prices alone won’t cut it. You have to raise your prices and you also have to monitor your expenses.

How to Plan a Pricing Increase

Price increase strategy incorporates many factors. Ideally, you have a system in place for reviewing your client pricing structure on a regular basis. This involves running reports and examining numbers that are very specific to your business and its service offerings. Read about one fitness studio owner’s successful formula for profitable pricing here.

But let’s say you’re leaving your pricing structure in place for now because it’s working well. How much should you raise your prices, even if just to stay even with current expenses? 

I’m always a proponent for increasing your prices regularly by small amounts rather than implementing larger increases less often. It’s easier for clients to stomach.

At minimum, we suggest increasing your prices by 1 to 2% annually to account for an inevitable increase in the cost of something or other. But a 3 to 5% increase is very standard. 

Your landlord might raise the rent, or the cost of your CRM software monthly subscription might go up—or both. You might be able to predict how much your vendors will raise their prices this year by reviewing the history of previous years. 

And then consider whether you need to upgrade to a higher tier of an existing expense, or purchase something new altogether this year. You’ll need to factor that into your spending plan, and possibly your pricing increase, if you haven’t saved ahead to pay for it.

You should examine your full roster of expenses at least quarterly, and definitely whenever you’re thinking about implementing a pricing increase. We talked about analyzing your recurring business expenses and how to reduce them in this earlier post. Trim whatever you can. This is a step toward increased profitability.

Along with that, you should look at any other areas where you may have inefficiencies in your business. Are you running a tight ship with your team members for maximum productivity? Trim here too, if necessary. Labor inefficiency is an enemy of profitability.

Raise Prices to Achieve Broader Goals

Now you’re aware that you need to increase prices incrementally on a regular basis just to keep up with rising costs. Of course, it’d be great if you also could strategically raise prices to help you achieve your broader business goals. 

For example, do you have a goal to pay yourself more every month? You can use a pricing increase to take an incremental step toward that. Work backwards with the numbers. Do you know what your revenue needs to be in order to increase your Owner’s Pay by as much as you want to? Figure out how much you need to increase incoming revenue per client in order to make that incremental step.

Final Thoughts

Overall, determine an increase that you are comfortable selling to your clients. Are you confident that a $10 increase in their monthly membership fee is worth it for them? 

Part of raising rates and your journey toward increased profitability might also involve changing your business model to add more value to their membership. If your goal is to have a higher market share (more clients), then you’ll naturally need to scale your business over time to accommodate them.

Having a higher market share also makes you a more competitive business, and this alone can improve profitability. 

And stay tuned for next week’s post, where we’ll offer some best practices for how to tell your clients that prices are going up!

Your Black Friday Deal Probably Needs a Drip Account

Did your business promote a Black Friday deal this year? If so, now’s the time to set up a Drip account within your Profit First system—before you spend the revenue that you made.

What’s a Drip account?

It’s an account you create to help you manage the cash flow when you receive a lump sum payment instead of installments for a service or offering that you’ll be providing to your clients over a long period of time.

Maybe you’re selling a discounted annual gym membership to customers who pay upfront for the year in full. They’ll be using your facilities and your resources over the course of 12 months and your expenses to service them will be accruing over that same period of time. So it doesn’t make sense to treat their full payment as money in your pocket now.

Instead, stretch their payment out over 12 months even though you’ve received it all at once. The sensible thing to do is to place the revenue in a Drip account, then take a proportional amount of the money and “drip it out” each month. So you’re matching revenue with expenses on the same timeline.

If you don’t allocate this money correctly, then it’s just money without a plan, and you’re in danger of spending it. We see this a lot: businesses in year-round “Black Friday mode,” trying to sell annual memberships, or offering other long-term, one-time payment deals, because they’re always needing a large influx of funds—to pay for services they sold months ago but don’t have the resources to cover now.

As one of the biggest spending days of the year, Black Friday is a classic time to offer special membership or subscription deals. But your business should use a Drip account for any similar payment structure regardless of the time of year. Retainer fees, sales of packages and bundles, pre-payments—these all might warrant the use of a Drip account. 

Here’s an example of how to use your Drip account for annual membership fees paid in full up front.

• Put each lump sum payment into the Drip account.
• Automatically transfer 1/12 of the amount to your Income account every month as if you just received the revenue (in two payments on the 10th and 25th as per the suggested Profit First schedule would be great).
• Proceed as you normally would to allocate the funds by percentages—into OPEX, Owner’s Pay, Profit, Tax, Payroll, and any other advanced accounts you’ve created within your Profit First system (the Drip account is considered an advanced account as well!).

Of course, if the membership deal is six months instead of 12, or if it’s an unlimited package deal for three months, then you’d prorate the funds accordingly. You might need to create multiple Drip accounts if you have multiple levels of deals on offer. You can also book a call with a professional to help you determine how much to drip each month.

Trust the Drip account system. 

Don’t be tempted to move more than 1/12 of the Drip account funds into Income every month. Can you see how you will end up overinflating your Profit First accounts? OPEX will definitely be too high, and you will mistakenly think that you can spend more on expenses—which could topple your whole Profit First system.

With Owner’s Pay, this inflation can be especially dangerous. If you’re an owner who withdraws the full amount from your Owner’s Pay each pay period, you’ll be paying yourself prematurely for services not yet rendered. (And you know we advocate for building a buffer in Owner’s Pay. Determine a living wage for yourself and withdraw that every month, leaving the extra for when tough times hit. True, Owner’s Pay will grow as your revenue increases, but you should be making calculated decisions to increase your Owner’s Pay allocation percentage using accurate earned income figures from previous periods.)

Similarly, you might think the Drip account should only be for setting aside some OPEX monies, and you can do what you want with the rest. Which would be…? Putting it in Owner’s Pay? Or Profit? You can see how you run into the same problem.

Black Friday shouldn’t put you in the red.

When you do offer long-term, prepaid deals, you need to price them appropriately to cover your expenses that will accrue over time. You’ll probably need to pay yourself or a team member to work with the client, so factor in payroll expenses. Don’t forget rent, utilities, insurance, and anything else that falls under OPEX.

You may think of offering deep discounts for existing services to get people to sign up. But consider how you can add value to your product offering instead of discounting the price. Throw in a free month of a nutrition app with the purchase of a gym membership, or add a free massage for buying a bundle of ten at full price. We’ve encouraged you to get creative to incentivize your clients in an earlier post.

We caution you against relying too heavily on “paid in fulls” to sustain income. Monthly recurring revenue models are much easier to manage in terms of cash flow. As you head into the new year, what are some ways your business can create excitement around a monthly subscription rather than waiting for the next Black Friday to roll around?

Analyze Your Expenses and Increase Your Profits

Who doesn’t want a more profitable business? We’re in business to help people, sure, but we’re also here to make a living. And if we want to make a good living with a business, we need to be profitable.

Generally, there are two ways to increase your profit:

1. Increase revenue (while keeping expenses in check), or
2. Reducing expenses (while keeping revenue the same)

This article will focus on the latter—reducing expenses to increase your profitability. Because while increasing revenue is important, most businesses forget that increased revenue is not an excuse to lose sight of expenses. The beautiful thing about this strategy is that it simply involves cutting some expenses to increase what you keep. Expenses that you probably don’t need anyway.

To reduce your expenses, simply conduct an Expense Analysis. There are many ways to conduct one, but here’s a simple method that anyone can use:

Make a list of your common and recurring business expenses.

• Go through your bank and accounting records, and be on a special lookout for those small monthly subscription services that you no longer really use or don’t use fully.

Trash or Trim your list.

• Write TRASH (or strike through) any expense that you can eliminate without negatively affecting your business (think about services that you no longer really use, but are still paying for)

• Write TRIM next to expenses that can be negotiated down to a lower rate, replaced with a competitor at similar quality but lower price, or downgraded without issue to the business. 

Contact the vendors to cut/trim expenses.

• Do your research ahead of time if you plan to ask for a reduced rate.

• If you’re switching software, set up a free trial of the new service first before cutting out the old one. If needed, hire a professional to help with the transition.

Any business can do this in a couple of hours. The more your cut, the more profitable your business becomes–as long as you’re not cutting out vital services in an effort to save a few dollars. It’s worth weighing whether cutting out a service will mean less fluidity of workflows or more time investment for you. 

We recommend going through this process on a quarterly basis at a minimum. This practice will keep you financial efficient and profitable.

Not sure if you can eliminate a particular expense? Try this test…

Eliminate the expense for a month, but be prepared to regain if needed. How do your customers react? Does your team notice its absence? Are you having to spend any additional time connecting dots that are no longer connected? If no one is negatively affected, then you could probably eliminate the expense.

Remember the old saying, “It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep.” Doing a quarterly expense analysis will help you keep more of your money, and help you earn higher profits. If you need help implementing Profit First in your business, let’s connect. Schedule a call with us today.

Revenue Streams or Trickles?

There is a lot of thought/opinion/advice when it comes to diversification and creating different revenue streams within a particular business model. The “don’t put your eggs all in one basket” theory. And it sounds good. If one “stream” starts to dry up, another one will help mitigate total disaster.

Here’s the rub. Too often in a business, I see “multiple streams of income” become “throw a bunch of stuff on the wall and hope some of it sticks”.

When it comes right down to it, how many Revenue Streams does it take to have a great business?

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Why Would You Track Financials in Excel – A Rhetorical Question

A lot of business owners start out doing their books in Excel. It’s something they know, and they’re not ready to pay for a service like QuickBooks Online or to pay a bookkeeper.

In Excel, you can sort columns and rows, set up formulas to add up transactions, color code rows and fields based on type of transaction, even make notes right in the fields.

And sure, there’s probably a lot more you can do in Excel, but it has its limitations. Steep limitations.

That’s why we encourage business owners to get out of Excel and into QuickBooks Online as soon as possible. And then, once it’s out of the virtual box, it’s important to customize its setup to meet your business’s unique needs–something Excel couldn’t do if it wanted.

When done right, QBO gives you everything you need every month, with just a few clicks of the keyboard.

What else can QBO do that will make you want to kick Excel to the curb?

Create Recurring Payments

One of the best ways to improve your revenue is to create a system where clients pay for a service month after month. This makes sense in a traditional gym, with monthly membership fees. But so many other businesses in the health and wellness field can go this route too–and make the payments automatic for the consumer. (We have plenty of thoughts on how to do this. Let’s chat!)

Monitor Your Expenses

You may not need more revenue in your business; you may need to get a better handle on your expenses instead. It’s really easy to do this in QBO, and to do it on a monthly basis, because you’re categorizing transactions and reviewing your balance sheet and profit and loss statement regularly. If you wait until the end of the year to clean up your books and review where all the money went, chances are you won’t catch that subscription you should have canceled or those ads that aren’t really paying off. In the end, you’ll spend a lot more than you needed to!

Identify Tax Write-Offs

You know a lot of the standard write-offs but with QBO’s ability to categorize, it’s so much easier to write off certain expenses–and minimize your tax burden. It’s really easy to identify often-forgotten tax write-offs like bank charges, health insurance premiums, equipment costs, internet and phone expenses, and more because they’re right there in your books.

Everything in One Place–Electronically

Have you ever tried to build a P&L in Excel? Manually? (Whatever did we do before computers!?) Without something like QBO, you’re hunting for receipts and financials, you’re looking in one place for recurring transactions and another place for one-off sales. It’s a lot, and trust us when we say we’ve seen it all. With QBO, you have a one-stop shop for all things business financials. And it will change your life.

So when we ask, “Why would you track your financials in Excel?” we’re asking in jest. We don’t think you should if you want to have a thriving and profitable business.

Are you ready to get off Excel and onto QBO? Let’s chat!

Sustainable Business Growth:
More Marketing Isn’t the Answer

There’s a lot of marketing noise and advice out there in every industry, but in the gym and fitness industry there seems to be even more. After all, we’ve had to close up shop this year, bring on more health and cleaning expenses and even pivot to the online space–changing up our offers and searching out new prospective clients.

It’s not been an easy year. But yet, some small gyms have thrived. And others? They continue to struggle.

For many business coaches who serve the gym and fitness industry, the answer seems to be marketing. If you can just get in front of more people…if you can just sell more services…if you can just…if you can just…

Sure, more customers and more revenue is great, but it’s not the answer. Not by a long shot.

Before we get to the solution…

We know you love what you do. Your happy place is working with your training clients, developing training programs and teaching classes. You want your clients to meet their health and fitness goals, and you know how to get them there.

You opened your business–your gym, practice, studio–because you wanted a space where your clients could gather and you could help more people. Working for someone else wasn’t working for you because you couldn’t create and launch the programs you wanted to. Working out of your garage could only get you so far–and the weather got in the way a lot of the time.

But you knew what would help clients so you opened your own place. And while it’s been a lot of hard work, you’re proud of what you’ve built.

Now, with COVID causing all kinds of chaos, you hear from business coaches, friends and family, heck, even your competition, that more (or better) marketing is the answer to making ends meet this year.

Throwing out more marketing isn’t going to get you over this hump. In fact, chances are that more marketing and more sales (aka more revenue) isn’t what you actually need.

What you need is to keep the revenue you already have.

It feels really good to look at your revenue and see that you have a $250k business. Or a $500k business. Especially if you started off training clients in your garage or at the park down the street.

But those great revenue numbers are just that–numbers. They don’t tell the whole story of your business or your lifestyle.

We’ve had the honor to look behind the scenes of some amazing fitness businesses and we see a lot of the same challenges again and again. When revenue increases, expenses also increase. That’s nothing out of the ordinary. But we see expenses increase at a rate that’s not aligned with the revenue.

If you’re striving for sustainable business growth, you need to have systems and processes in place that help to make your life easier. Having 20 personal training clients should feel very similar to having 10 personal training clients because you have automations that take care of scheduling, billing, follow-ups and more. Going from 10 clients to 20 clients should double your revenue, but it shouldn’t double your work (or your expenses).

We believe that before you throw marketing at your business to try to make up for the COVID gap, you should take a close look at your numbers and determine where you can make cuts and where you can tighten the belt–as well as where you’re wasting time and money because the operations side of your business isn’t efficient.

Yes, this is one of the less sexy sides of business ownership. But it’s a lot sexier to have money in the bank and some free time on your hands than it is to feel the stress and frustration you’re feeling right now.

Book a call with us today and let’s talk about how we can help!

Dancing With Debt

Are You The Only Choice?

Your Clients Care If You Are Profitable. Do You?

Top 10 Tips to Increase Profits for Fitness Business Owners

As we approach Q4 now is the time to push to end the year strong.  It’s the perfect time to revisit old business strategies from last year so that you can increase your profits for 2020. If your financial numbers were fantastic last year, that’s great! Keep the strategies that worked for you and cut the ones that didn’t.

If your financial numbers weren’t amazing last year, or maybe you’re just interested to see how you can increase your profits even more, we have you covered.  Every business has a gold mine in its current customer base. But not all business owners remember to mine this gold, because they are too busy trying to attract new customers or developing new products or services. This is the perfect time of year to step back and remember the easiest ways to increase your profits is using your existing customer base.

Top 10 Tips to Increase Profits for Fitness Business Owners

As an entrepreneur, you are responsible for shaping your business success, so here are 10 tips you can use to increase your profits this year:

1. Revisit Your Current Prices and Make Adjustments as Necessary

Many people will tell you that increasing your prices will increase your profits, but that’s not necessarily true.  Increasing your prices by a small amount might increase your profits without turning away existing customers, but make sure you research your competitor’s prices and adjust based on what makes sense in your market.  

Keep in mind that if it has been awhile since you have raised your prices, it is definitely time to do a little research and make the adjustments that are best for your business.  Review the price list for your services and products to determine what you need to do to bring all of your numbers back in balance.  

It is important to note that customers do expect periodic price adjustments, so don’t let procrastination or fear hold you back from making a good solid business decision here.  

2. Bundle Your Services or Products Together

Make your products or services more attractive by bundling them together and pricing them at a better deal than purchasing the services or products separately. Customers that only want one particular product or service should still be able to purchase the product or service à la carte, but offering different packages of increasing value makes it much easier to upsell to clients and increase your profits.

3. Make Your Online Presence Known and Manage Your Online Reputation

Everyone uses search engines and social media to find the right business to serve their needs, so make sure you can be found online. Create a website for your business and make sure you have business pages on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You’ll have to develop some marketing strategies and optimize your site to rank high, but, when done right, these channels can dramatically impact your profits for the better.

When you have many good reviews, your credibility goes up and your business is more appealing to potential clients and customers. If your clients leave you an amazing testimonial, it’s a good idea to ask them to post it online as well—especially on Yelp, your Facebook Business Page, and Google Reviews. On the other hand, negative reviews will look bad to potential clients and can negatively impact your profits, so make sure you respond appropriately to the review and show potential clients that you care about getting things right.

4. Encourage Customer Referrals by Building and Nurturing Customer Relationships

Connect with clients and build strong relationships through effective communication, providing exceptional service, getting feedback, addressing concerns, and showing appreciation. Doing so can increase repeat customers, customer referrals and your profits.

5. Cross-Sell Current Customers

Restaurants practice this the most, asking us if we want appetizers, dessert, or fries with our entrée, and you can apply this to your business too. If you offer two services and a client is only participating in one service, make sure they know about the other service you offer, and find out if they have a need for it.

This is called cross-selling, where you offer a current customer a service or product that they don’t already purchase from you. For example, a salon will want to offer waxing services along with haircuts. A gym who also offers nutrition coaching will want to follow up with the newer members to encourage nutrition after the gym habit has been established. An online business who sells a DIY course and also has a group accountability program will want to offer customers that program as well.

6. Upsell Current Clients

Offer steady customers a product or service with more features than they usually purchase. Examples include moving a client from coach to first class, from a budget vacation to a luxury one, from a standard model car to a luxury version, from group classes to private training, from an off-the-rack suit to a designer suit, from the standard service to an all-you-can-eat version, and from a regular meal to a super-sized one.

Some customers simply need to be given permission to splurge on themselves, so why not by you? Others have outgrown the standard package but find it hard to break routine. With a gentle nudge from you, a percentage of your clients will purchase the upgrade, therefore boosting your sales with little effort on your part.

7. Start a New Product or Service Line

If you’re limited to just a few products or services, it might be time to expand. Be sure you’ve analyzed the profitability of these moves first and have the first service line operating profitably on its own. Then it might be time to add nutrition coaching if you don’t already offer it, or child care for some classes, or a smoothie bar to your reception area. Expanding the scope of what you’re selling will provide you with additional revenue and if priced appropriately will lead to added profit as well.

This is a great way to then start upselling or bundling products and services to your customers!  

8. Expand Your Geographic Reach

If you’re still only offering services and products locally, consider expanding your reach, especially because the internet is so readily available nowadays. Think about which services you can offer virtually; some may require you to invest in cloud-based delivery systems. If you only sell products at a physical location, e-commerce is a huge industry and you could definitely increase profits by having a storefront online.

9. Curb Irrational Spending

Invest in things that will last, such as your own education, great systems, team training, and assets that you really need. Avoid spending on items that are used up quickly, such as elaborate entertainment expenses that don’t generate significant revenue, excessive utilities, and stopgap equipment.

This area can be a tough one to evaluate objectively because there can be emotion and attachment involved in the spending. Let us know if you need help in this area; we can help you look at your spending with fresh eyes and provide a new perspective using the Profit First system.  

10. Maintain Your Focus

Great entrepreneurs have clear focus. If you have too many projects going on at once, you end up delaying all of your project completion dates, and nothing gets finished. Ask yourself, what’s the most important thing I can do today? And work on that until it’s done. Then ask yourself the same question again, and wash, rinse, repeat your way to success.

All ten of these tips will help to raise your average profits per customer and boost your overall profits without a lot of additional work on your part. Try these tips today, so you can enjoy a more prosperous 2020!

Connect with Shannon:

If you are interested in learning more or joining a community of like-minded fitness business owners, check out my free Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/PFforfitness

Shannon Simmons, a 10-year business owner, and 5-year Profit First Coach is the owner of Netbooks Accounting Services, LLC.  She is one of the original Profit First Professionals when the concept was created by Mike Michalowicz.  

NetBooks is your gym and fitness center’s business partner in achieving levels of profitability, accounting integrity, and financial reporting that will allow your business to do more than just thrive but to achieve the highest levels of profitability.

Our professionals are intimate with the fitness market and will guide you through creating the right plans, managing your operations and accomplishing your goals.  Think we might be a good fit?  Click Here to find out!