Health and Fitness Articles

Customer testimonials can be fantastic tools for driving new business to your door. But boring, photo-free client comments buried deep inside your website are unlikely to do the trick. To quickly capture the imagination (and training dollars) of the masses, it is critical to breathe life into client success stories. So what makes some testimonials tedious and others terrific? Follow these four steps to avoid the mistakes of time-wasting customer snooze stories. Bring your facility’s testimonials back from the brink—and attract new-member dollars to your door.

While social media continues to grow as a marketing tool, people often struggle to find the most effective ways to use it to generate business. One question facing companies large and small is this: How do you measure social media success? Which data provide the most accurate and effective overview of your online presence? What tools can show whether you are getting the best return on your social media investment? Identifying Your Metrics

Running a successful business is much like being an athlete. You’ve got to attack the task with dedication, commitment, passion, integrity and respect for the road ahead and the people who are part of it. Just as you keep clients by training them to run faster and jump higher, you’ll build a long-lasting boot camp by starting out great and just getting better.

Have you ever heard the saying, “Greatness is by design not by chance”? Think about the organizations and people you admire. Are their successes derived from chance, or did they spend time intricately creating what they believed greatness to be? Most likely, the latter is true.

There’s a common misconception that fast food costs less than food prepared at home. That’s partly because of massive corporate marketing budgets and campaigns from food companies that influence our thinking. Actually, cooking food at home costs less per person than the typical $5.00–$7.00 fast-food “value” meal.

After serving in the United States Army as a medical specialist, Stephen Landrum transitioned to the civilian world of personal training. As owner, manager and personal trainer of Hard Corps in East Ridge, Tennessee, he uses his experience working with a wide variety of people in the army to serve his clients better. “The most important thing that I learned then, and have continued to prove since, is that no one is beyond help,” he says.

In March 2011, we gathered the IDEA staff to participate in an off-site team retreat that helped us dramatically reshape the cultural blueprint for our company. We went into the daylong meeting as a competent and confident team of co-workers and colleagues; 15 months later, we proudly call ourselves a Tribe. There is a subtle yet powerful difference between the two. Where the former was a collection of people who happened to work together, the latter is a family whose ties are intertwined and whose individual successes become shared achievements.