Why Having An Exit Policy In Your Business Is A Must!

Why an exit policy is a must

Hey gang, having an exit policy for your fitness business is absolutely critical.

I want to speak to you today about the reasons why it is so important. So first of all, now let’s think about this scenario. You’re training a bunch of clients, people are coming along, they might be on direct debit paying you week to week and so forth. Everything’s humming along well and suddenly you’ve got the four time a week client. I spoke to someone about this just literally this morning. They had a client, a four time a week client paying them 80 bucks a session and that person is moving away.

This personal trainer is in Brisbane, this person’s moving to Melbourne. Okay? That’s a condition, it’s something you can do nothing about. It’s going to be pretty challenging to salvage that relationship. That person’s going no doubt about it. Now that’s four lots of 80 dollars. Four eights are 32. That could be a significant amount of money in your week to week cashflow.

So what can happen is if you don’t have that exit policy in place, and what we mean by this is giving yourself enough time to be able to replace that person’s spot on your program or with you, with your personal one on one sessions. So our recommendation is somewhere in the vicinity of maybe a 21-day cancellation policy, a 30-day cancellation policy. We’ve got some clients who, on our program, are using up to a 6-week cancellation policy. We’ve had others who have put in the minimum terms i.e. when someone gets started with them, you know 12-week minimum terms, 6-month minimum terms. We’ve even had a client at Create PT Wealth who’ve done 12-month minimum terms because they’re looking for that level of commitment, the person who absolutely wants to go for it. But let’s go back to the exit policy.

So, if you give yourself three weeks what that means is you can potentially avoid that stressful situation of okay clients leaving, I’ve got the SMS the night before. Hey, I’ve got to finish up with you. I’m not going to be able to make tomorrow’s session and I’m going to have put it on hold altogether. Suddenly there’s that potentially stressful situation where it’s like alright well what the hell am I going to do? And there’s that loss of revenue and income and so forth. So giving yourself 21 days, that’s three weeks’ notification.

All your clients need to be made aware of this in the beginning. You’ve got to tell them the reasons why and the reason is that they’re securing their spot with you on your program. You are effectively turning up and you’re exchanging time for money and if you don’t turn up and exchange that time for money then you’re not going to get paid and that person’s not going to get their results. So you want to let these people know straight up in the piece that if they were to finish up with you, you just require a 21-day notification. During that 21 days, they’ll still get full access to your program, full service to your boot camps, they can still attend their personal training sessions and so forth. What it just means for you is that it just gives you that breathing space.

Now, if someone was to, you know, want to finish up today and If they had to jump on a plane today and take off somewhere, what would be the scenario? Well, I guess the 21 days gives you the ability to you know either

a) Negotiate with that person if you thought it was important. Now, if someone signed off on your policy, 21 days is 21 days. In that instance, if they were to take off and not do any more sessions with you, they’re contractually, from the agreement that you got in place and they would pay that three weeks of training because again you want to guarantee the security in your business. If you are worried that it might impact your relationship or level of customer service or whatever, 21 days just gives you a little bit of breathing space and what that means is that it gives you the ability to be able to knock that back to two weeks, or to one week in the first instance.

But, you know from our perspective probably not recommend you go out there and start changing the policy just for anybody. The policy is the policy, you’ve got an agreement in place. It’s the same reason why you enforce a cancellation policy and I’m sure that other things that you’re a member of or subscribed to that have cancellation policies, you abide by those cancellation policies as well. Why can’t that be the same for you and your business?

Like in our business coaching program at Create PT Wealth, our business coaching programs are 13-month programs. They’re run for 13 months. Why 13 months? Well, we know that building a business takes time, effort, energy and so forth. Over the course of 12 months, we also know that there’s going to be some public holidays, some time off, Christmas, all that sort of stuff. So we’ve taken the 12-month program and made that 13 months.

Now, anyone who’s in our program they can exit our program so they’re not bound for 13 months. If they decide that they want to finish up with us, it’s just a three month’s notification. Why three months? Again, because we figured out at Create PT Wealth it takes us roughly about that time to replace someone’s spot on the program. Not only that is that when we assign someone to their business coach, that means that that business coach only has a certain number of clients and so we’ve got to be very mindful of time allocation, we pre-book seminar rooms, workshop rooms, all sort of stuff for people in our program. It gives you an idea as to why we’ve put that policy in place and what we’ve found is that policy is incredibly fair, it’s a win-win. Sure we potentially are losing a client, but at the same time what that means is we have the ability to get compensated for that on the way through and go and find the next person.

The other part to it is that if someone was in a situation, personal situation, whatever in their business, they needed a little bit of help and assistance and right now though, just in a very stressful time. Three months gives us the ability to work together and try and assist that person through that to see if we can get them the results that they want or the breakthrough that they require.

Same thing over at your PT business, you might have the personal training client who’s just not getting the results and that might be the reason why they’re deciding to quit. I guess what that does, it gives you those three weeks to be able to get in there and say, “Look we’ve got three weeks left together, let’s go for it. Let’s really see if we can make some change and let’s just keep this thing open.” You may well find that at the end of that three weeks is that you might have turned that person around mentally, psychologically and so forth.

So, it’s a critical part of your business. Again, it’s a part that we see gets missed, gets overlooked, doesn’t get enforced quite often. So my suggestion to each and every one of you is to make sure that you put this policy in place and if you’ve currently got clients and there’s no exit policy in place, you can, of course, start it.

You can draw a line in the sand and make a decision to say that, “Okay as of the 1st of November or whatever date I’m going to decide to put this in, we’ve now got our exit policy in place. Now you wouldn’t have been made aware of this because it’s a new policy, but I want to run you through it.”

You have it documented, you sit down and you run each of your clients through it, get feedback from them, get agreement and all the rest of it. Again, what we find is that your clients they know you, they like you, they trust you, they’re the people who are going to be most open and receptive to adhering to the rules of your business that you’ve set up.

So there you go. Over to you, opportunity for you to go and set this stuff up now and I look forward to speaking to you shortly.