Bottling Your Fitness Facility's Secret Sauce: Building a Franchise

By Tim Mauk, Special FBA Contributor

The word franchise typically invokes thoughts of global brand names like McDonald's or 7-Eleven. While these well-known establishments are prominent giants in their categories, many owners should implement this franchise business structure into their small businesses—including fitness facilities! If you are wondering what a business promoting healthy lifestyles can learn from a value-based burger operation, gear up because you are about to learn how to bottle your business’s secret sauce.

What Exactly is a Franchise

According to the Internation Franchise Association, “A franchise (or franchising) is a method of distributing products or services involving a franchisor, who establishes the brand’s trademark or trade name and a business system, and a franchisee, who pays a royalty and often an initial fee for the right to do business under the franchisor's name and system.” Sounds pretty corporate, right? Let’s boil this down a little bit. A franchise is essentially a structure that allows others to buy into it, giving them immediate brand recognition (i.e., reputation or authority), operating instructions, and resources to source from or utilize.

Cooked down even further, it’s the entry cost to adopting a known system that may help reduce some growing pains of operating a business independently.

Why are Franchise Structures Something to Strive for?

If you’re a trainer reading this, this isn’t to sell you buying into a franchise agreement (but there is nothing wrong with that if you want to go that route). And if you own an already established fitness facility, you might wonder what this has to do with you. The idea of a franchised business structure is a great template to strive for when operating your own business or building out your brand as a trainer.

The franchise structure requires systems and processes that allow others to pick up your template and successfully run with it. Why wouldn’t you want to adopt this concept into your business?

Developing this template enables you to have your branding established, your values set, your voice captured, and your market segment well-researched. It demands documenting the successful inner workings of your business, the critical elements of success, and the unique differences you bring to the industry. Franchise structure requires processes for hiring, training, staff reviews, and even roles within organizational structure.

In a sense, striving for a franchise model within your business requires you to meticulously document, test, and optimize your way of doing things. While this may seem like a lot of unnecessary work to some, shifting your focus to this type of structure can help future-proof your business for growth, unforeseen changes, or even for sale. This business fortification comes from building a smooth-running operation that, when documented precisely, removes you from the equation. This removal of self does not mean that you are not necessary to the business anymore, but rather that you’ve bottled your secret sauce and can now distribute it if/when you wish.

Ways a Fitness Studio Can Implement a Franchise Design

If your business aims for growth and sustainability, implementing elements of a franchise design will be pivotal to achieving those goals. Below, we will break down some of the ways you can start and what goes into them.

Documentation

As you might have figured at this point, a lot of franchising is the idea of a business template or playbook to go off of. With this concept in mind, when working toward “franchising” your business, you need to start documenting “how” and “why” you are doing things. This documentation needs to be specific, too. Consider the process of explaining how hiring trainers for your business goes. For instance, “post a job listing” doesn’t exactly cover what goes into your hiring process. How many trainers do you recommend per facility size or total client base? What qualifications or specializations must they have to succeed at your facility? What are deal breakers? What pay range does your business structure support? The more granular and comprehensive you get when documenting processes and procedures, the more valuable they become.

Owners can complete the documentation process in stages. Focusing on quality and thoroughly examining a procedure before jumping into the next one might be a good start for some. But consistency is key. Over time, you will build what will be known as your operating manual—the collection of all your systems, style guides, processes, and procedures.

Testing and Optimization

Once you have documented your procedure(s), it’s best to test them out to ensure the clarity and effectiveness of the instructions. A great way to assess is to have a third party run through them and attempt to execute the steps with minimal outside influence to see how well the final results stack up against expected results. If your final results are not quite what you prefer, you can walk through the steps with the tester and find the weak points in the documentation that require tweaking. Naturally, it doesn’t hurt to retest your procedures after making adjustments like this to ensure they are clear and accurate post-editing.

Another scenario you may find yourself in is learning new efficiencies or evolving processes over time to meet new business demands or market trends. An entire documentation overhaul may or may not be necessary in these cases, but updating and optimizing the written processes to capture these improvements is critical. Again, testing the updated instructions is always a good thought to ensure clarity and ease of use.

Final Thoughts

Running your fitness business like a franchise might sound counterintuitive to some. But when you break down the structure a franchised business is built on, it has some genuinely sound practices that can help develop more organization into your fitness facility and help you in the future if you ever plan to grow, scale, or even sell your business. By bottling your secret sauce, you help remove yourself as the product and learn to build a company that can successfully run independently from you.