How to Create an Effective Debt Collection Policy for Your Gym

The gym is where people blow off steam after a long day of work or perhaps break a sweat in the morning to get the day off properly. It is integral in boosting people’s health and making them feel good.

Gyms might make people feel better about their bodies, but that doesn’t mean they’re always forthcoming with payments. Collecting payments promptly is one of the greatest challenges of running a gym, and the failure to do so can be extremely detrimental to the operation.

For example, if a member owes $50 and refuses to pay, the gym could expend significant money, time, and energy on getting this back. Collection efforts can impact how other members experience the gym and represent an obstacle to making improvements, and thus, the downward spiral continues.

Summit A*R is proud to offer debt collection for businesses in various industries, including gyms. Here are a few tips you can use to ensure your gym has an effective debt collection policy.

Incentivize Upfront Payments

Businesses may view the timing of payments differently. For some business owners, selling customers on the idea of paying later is appealing because they think more people will sign up, as the upfront cost can be a major barrier. However, people who pay upfront don’t have an opportunity to miss payments down the road.

You can get the best of both worlds by giving customers who do pay upfront a bit of a deal. This way, they get the satisfaction of saving money while you avoid headaches related to late payments.

You can sidestep the entire problem by having members pay at the outset. You don’t want to hear the laundry list of common unpaid debt excuses, and you won’t have to when people pay upfront.

Communicate Properly

There’s a major difference between writing something in the fine print and ensuring your customers understand the policy they agree to. Ideally, they grasp the entire policy right from the start and don’t agree to something they can’t fulfill.

They could still have a problem making a payment, which isn’t the gym’s fault. In this case, once again, ensure proper communication surrounds what they owe and any deadlines they’re subject to.

Listening to their needs and ensuring a way forward could prevent the problem from snowballing further. However, you don’t want to get taken advantage of by customers who manipulate your well-intended staff. It’s not on your business to hear out every case and make individual adjustments, or you’d be wasting time and money on processes that you shouldn’t even be involved with.

The trouble is, with gyms, it’s said that it’s roughly eight times as expensive to acquire a new member as it is to retain a current one. Knowing which customers to listen to and how to serve their needs is part of maintaining relationships with clients, and it may be done on a case-by-case basis by long-serving personnel who really know the members.

Ideally, you don’t want things to devolve to this point or have to take legal action against your own customers. Offloading the task to professional debt collectors can relieve you of this needless yet draining burden.

Hire the Pros

Most people work for a gym because they’re interested in health and enjoy connecting with people in their community over such topics. Few people get into it to chase down delinquent payments, even if it feels like that’s part of the job.

But it’s not part of the job, and it shouldn’t feel like that! Hiring debt collection professionals who specialize in recouping this money benefits your gym in multiple ways.

Now that gyms aren’t closed anymore, your top people should be free to focus on what they do best rather than deal with distractions they aren’t equipped to handle. Whether they specialize in admin, motivating members, creating new workouts, or whatever else, let them do that by hiring us to get the money you’re owed back into your accounts.

Summit A*R knows how to motivate delinquent debtors without using harsh or aggressive tactics like robocalls, threats, or other things which undermine the positive relationships you’ve worked hard to cultivate with your gym members. Indeed, we have a PHD philosophy, which stands for Preserve Human Dignity.

We can just about double the national average in debts recovered while treating everybody with kindness and professionalism. Whether by reporting to a credit bureau or explaining to members what they have to gain from making payments, you’ll find the money you need back in your bottom-line revenue, where it belongs.

Full-Service Debt Collection Agency

As a full-service debt collection agency, Summit A*R does more than just get you the money you’re owed. We also provide complementary services, like comprehensive skip tracing. We’ll find your debtors and their assets and convert them to bottom-line revenue since we’re one of the only debt collection agencies in the US with a licensed private investigator in-house.

We also offer accounts receivable consulting, so our seasoned experts can give you the benefit of their insights about increasing cash flow and reducing bad debt write-offs. Broad advice about best practices for gyms collecting debts may not apply to your gym, as no two are the same.

We’ll give you custom, tailored advice that helps your accounts and cash flow as healthy as your gym regulars! Nobody knows their business like the people who run it. We can give macro advice about what gyms can and should do to prevent debt collection problems from arising or how to create an effective policy governing it. But we never give better advice than when maintaining a close working relationship and dialogue with our partners.

Hopefully, people use your gym to get healthy and enjoy that endorphin rush that makes people feel better about themselves. To keep your books healthy, implement these tips and call Summit A*R today.