Losing about nine members a month at a 140 member studio and I cannot find the leak

Jen Okafor· Pilates studio owner, eight months open, about 140 members· Open, Health & Wellness·5d

Eight months open, roughly 140 members, and on paper that number has barely moved since June. What it hides is that I am signing eight to ten new members a month and losing about nine. I am running very hard to stand still.

What I can see in the booking system: the people who leave are mostly on the unlimited plan at $149 and were coming twice a week. The eight class pack people at $128 stay much longer, probably because a pack does not feel like a bill. The leavers also skew heavily to one time slot, the 5:30pm, which is my most crowded class and the one where a newer client can feel like the worst person in the room.

The exit reasons in my little offboarding email are useless. Everyone says schedule or money. Nobody says your 5:30 is intimidating and my hamstrings hurt.

Things I am considering:

a real beginner series that is separate, not just a note in the class description
capping the 5:30 and adding a 6:45
calling anyone who has not booked in fourteen days, personally

I would rather fix retention than spend another dollar on ads. For those of you running memberships or recurring clients, what actually moved the number for you?

3 replies

Hannah Lee· Idea stage·4d

Not a studio, but the group practice I am at has the same shape of problem and calls it something politer. People do not cancel because of the fee, they cancel because the fourth session is the one where the work gets uncomfortable and nobody warned them it would.

Your offboarding email is asking people to criticize you in writing, which almost nobody will do. When our practice started calling instead of emailing, the reasons got a lot more honest and a chunk of them came back. Your fourteen day call idea is the strongest thing on that list, and I would make it a call and not a text.

Dana Kowalski· Open·4d

Outside your industry, so take this as pattern matching rather than advice. In the client companies I work with, attrition that clusters in one time slot is almost never about the product, it is about who is standing at the front of the room and how consistent that is.

Who teaches your 5:30, and is it the same person every week? If members are attaching to an instructor and the instructor rotates, they churn quietly. If it is you teaching it and you are also running everything else, then the real answer might be that 5:30 gets a tired version of you. Worth looking at the schedule before you rebuild the pricing.

Jen Okafor· Open·3d

It is me teaching the 5:30, four days a week, after I have done the books, the laundry and a 6am. So that stung, correctly.

I think you are both right and it is one problem: the class is full, the room is intense, and the person teaching it has nothing left to notice a new person struggling in the back row. I am going to cap it, add a 6:45, and hand two of those slots to my contract instructor even though it costs me money I would rather keep. Then I will do the fourteen day calls myself and report back in a month.

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