The Club Solutions Leadership Summit is a yearly retreat that brings leaders from the fitness and wellness industry together to connect and collaborate. This year’s topics included lessons in hospitality, overcoming hiring challenges, a wellness and recovery panel discussion and member experience.

Active's COO Michele Wong and Regional Director Carol Day were at the Club Solutions Leadership Retreat in Carlsbad, CA. Below are key takeaways from the summit.

The segment on overcoming hiring challenges focused specifically on issues the industry has challenges with in regard to hiring. A key focus was on expectations from employees who are part of Gen Z and how to successfully hire and retain those employees so they perform at their best. Here are the tips we gathered to keep in mind:

• Use a predictive index or professional learning indicator to identify the natural behavior drives of the candidate.
• Pay more and be flexible, especially for entry positions.
• Provide mentorship and role-playing for difficult conversations for staff who are customer-facing like front desk staff.
• Break the day into different tasks.
• Consider texting and promoting job opportunities on social media when hiring.
• Find out how the individual learns and work with them to meet their needs.
• Remember, we were all in our first job once and that good leadership is still non-negotiable.

The member experience segment of the retreat focused particularly on the experience a member has when cancelling their membership. There was a roundtable discussion around cancellation policies, and these varied across the country. While some were complicated, many were easy and demonstrated an effort to make the experience a positive one for the member.

Ideas for improving the member cancellation experience include:

• Consider not charging for pausing memberships. It can make members want to cancel their membership altogether.
• Offer special events and rates to members who have cancelled in the past, also known as alumni members.
• If someone cancels and is losing a part of their monthly fee, allow them to gift that to someone else in the community.
• Lean on systems, not rules, and empower your front-line staff to handle difficult conversations if the manager is not available.

The event was well organized and a huge success. Thank you to Club Solutions for hosting this opportunity to learn.

Written By: Regional Director of Operations Carol Day

Carol is a visionary leader with over 30 years of industry experience. Her transformative approach to wellness inspires program innovation and results and has a track record of creating momentum for our clients and partners.