Retention: Start Now

What is the quickest first step to take to get a handle on your retention? Calculate it.

Let's take a count of all your member accounts right now. A complete listing would be accurate if you counted all the total accounts and not your number of members. I think that a discussion involving visits would be best served by actual number of members, but here we need number of accounts. If you haven't ever calculated your retention prior to this then we can you this number as your starting baseline. Every month we are going to add the number of new accounts (including reinstated accounts) and subtract the number of canceled accounts from the base number. The use of an easy excel spreadsheet would be beneficial and I would be more than happy to forward one to you, if you want to email me a request. Every month we can now see if we are growing or sliding backwards. At the end of any 12 month period we can then divide the total number of cancellation by the average accounts throughout the year to get our yearly attrition rate.

This information is key to deciding if you are doing the correct things in your club to be a growth oriented business.


Tom