Health clubs, studios and gyms, especially the smaller, independently owned ones, have just gone through the biggest challenge to small businesses since the 1930s. With the coming of COVID-19 and the mandatory lockdowns of clubs all over the country, the fitness industry took a financial hit that many pundits predicted it would never recover from. And there were some fatalities—24 hour fitness announced yesterday that they were filing for bankruptcy restructure.

But now that we seem to have come through the worst of it and clubs are opening back up, albeit slower than most owners would want, a lot of you recognize that the world you are emerging into after a long cold spring differs from the one you knew when you locked your business down. But just because it’s different doesn’t mean it is bad. This may be a great opportunity for smaller clubs to take up the slack being left by the demise of some of the larger chains since there are some additional aspects to the business that have ramped up while the industry was sleeping—developments that could be a great fit for your small independent club.

One of these innovations is the innovation of live stream personal training and classes through companies like ZOOM. Club members can sign up for a class and take part while watching their phone, desktop or TV. Yes, some companies had been putting their toe in the water of online training before COVID, but it was only the lockdown that pushed personal trainers into taking their classes digital. And here at Money Movers, Inc., we saw which way the wind was blowing and built live stream ZOOM class functionality right into our ONLINE BUSINESS MANAGER Gym/Member Management software.

OBM lets your club members see all your ZOOM classes displayed on our proprietary Public Calendar which you can install on your club’s website or Facebook page. Members can also use our AccessPass App to see which trainings and classes are available through the OBM member portal. You set up your class inside the software and make it available to the calendar and the member portal. The calendar and portal have a sign-up wizard that allows your members to purchase the class and book themselves into it online. When they do, the software sends them an email or a text with a link to the ZOOM meeting and at class time, they log in and take part.

When we were developing our ZOOM function, we discovered one factor that was keeping trainers from getting into Online Training as a profitable option for club members. To present the class, the trainer had to be there every time to lead it, live and on camera. To make Online Training feasible, they had to present several classes each day which can be exhausting.