3 ways to manage your boxing club more efficiently

Successful business owners always look for ways to improve efficiency. Working more efficiently cuts costs, and frees up your time to do fun stuff. Like, becoming more successful. Why treat the management of your boxing club any differently?

Opening your first boxing club

Before we get to managing your boxing club, let’s go over the basic checklist for opening a boxing club. Feel free to skip ahead if you’re already established.

1. Know your area. Don’t open a boxing club in an area that’s already full of other clubs.
2. Find your niche. Are you going after top contenders or do you want to open up boxing to the masses? Adjust your class offering accordingly.
3. Work out a business model. Demographic, pricing, business goals, what makes your business unique, write it all down. Hang it over your bed. Don’t just wing it if you want to become successful.
4. Protect yourself legally. In the end, it’s boxing. Things can go wrong. I sincerely hope it won’t, but cover your butt just in case. Make sure contracts and waivers are in order, and consider having legal assistance on call.

Managing your boxing club

Boxing is fun. Managing a business, not so much (in my humble opinion). I’m talking about the tedium of bookkeeping, managing your administration, financial hassle, and so on.

Luckily, managing your boxing club doesn’t have to be a drag. As a tech enthusiast, my motto is: if you can automate it… automate it.

After all, you don’t go down to the river to do your laundry if you can get a washing machine, right?

I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

The ladies who run the Bijlmerbajes boxing club, put it like this: “Do we really have to do all this administration? Do we really want to?” The answer is simple. No-one really wants to, but everyone kinda has to.

“We want to spend as much time with people as possible,” Maartje, the owner of the club, explained. “That’s why we started this boxing school in the first place. And to help them free up the time to do it, they automated their front office with boxing club software.

Selling boxing memberships with less effort

Roughly speaking, you’ve got two types of membership sales.

1. You sell to walk-ins
2. You sell to online visitors

Let’s start online. It begins with Google. I live in Amsterdam, so:

Your website – you do have a website, right? – should pop up on the first page. If it doesn’t, it’s time to dive into the wonderful world that’s SEO, or search engine optimization. And if you have the budget, run ads for these types of searches, so your website always shows up in the top results.

Moving on. The interested party (me, in this case) ends up on your website and your content manages to convince me to sign up.

A relatively low-tech way to gather signups is via a simple contact form.

BUT, that involves a bunch of manual work after the form submission. You have to process the contact details, send them an offer, get them to sign, bill them, process the payment… you get the idea.

Why not take a hint from e-commerce and add your own webshop to your website? That way, a visitor can purchase memberships (or trial sessions) directly, without manual work on your side.

In an ideal world, it works like this:

1. A visitor visits your website
2. They buy a membership via your webshop
3. A payment link is sent to the new member for immediate processing.

Meanwhile, you didn’t have to lift a finger. Success! Spoiler alert: it works like this in Virtuagym .

Scheduling boxing classes more efficiently

Beyond membership sales, another task to streamline is your scheduling. Not everyone handles being on the phone all day as well as our consultants.

Even if you love it, it does eat into your available time that might be better spent giving lessons, developing your marketing campaigns, or all the other business-y thing entrepreneurs do.

I’ve seen gyms and studios that went at it old-school. Desk staff taking booking confirmations over the phone, manually inserting everything in a schedule, using spreadsheets in lieu of a calendar… Shudder.

The solution to manual scheduling? Throw more technology at the issue! The world of digital scheduling is vast.

On a budget? Free tools like Google Calendar can be a lifesaver. You can make a Google Calendar public and share it with your members. That way, they always have access to your most up-to-date class times and can get insight in cancellations.

Unfortunately, “free” comes with limitations. You’re restricted in notification options, for one. And do you want attendance limits? Then you’re out of luck.

Moving on to paid tools.

Now, when it comes to scheduling tools for boxing clubs, I might be a bit biased. Without, ahem, recommending any specific tools, here’s some criteria any scheduling tool should meet.

1. Flexibility. You need complete control over your schedule, the types of activities, number of attendees, refund rules, and so on. It’s essential that the tool fits your business model.
2. Attendance monitoring. When it comes to attendance, you need at least two things. First, you need to be able to limit the amount of participants, or you’ll end up with a class of a hundred people. Secondly, attendance tracking is super useful. Tracking attendance makes it easier for you to optimize your class schedules. It also allows you to detect less engaged members who are more likely to churn.
3. Waiting lists. Hopefully, your most popular classes will always be fully booked. To ensure maximum capacity, waiting lists can help you fill up slots that open up due to late cancellations.
4. Notifications. When you cancel or move a class, automated notifications can save you from a bunch of phone calls or 1-on-1 messages.

Engage your boxing club members better

Your members won’t spend their lives in your boxing club. If you don’t convince them otherwise, they’ll come in for a couple of hours and leave again. Limited contact like that kills member retention for clubs.

An answer to this challenge is to build up the number of touchpoints with your members and add value at every turn.

Set up feeds with motivational posts. Teach your members the value of respect in combat sports via your own mobile app. Give them home workouts to improve their conditioning.

All those little moments combined contribute to a feeling of being valued. Of getting value out of your services. In the end, delivering value is the most sure-fire way of getting paid.

Turn your business into a lean mean boxing machine

Ready to move up in the world? Check out the all-in-one boxing software powered by Virtuagym. It checks all the boxes, from member management and billing to scheduling and member communication. Top-rated customer service and a passion for helping businesses flourish? We’ve got that covered too.

Curious? See how we can help!