Silver Sneakers Benefit or Burden?

If you have 70 seniors who have come in and signed up for SS and can convince only 80% of them to scan their card 8 times a month. That's over $1500 right there. For me it's simply positioning our club as the underdog against an oppressive regime (snap) and their collusion with a large insurance company to try and take advantage of us. I've also been told that peter's sister (or some other relative) sits on the board of Healthways, and you better believe I let the seniors know about that as well.

Heck, I'm debating on getting bumper stickers made up that read "Fight corporate greed - Stand up for the little guy - Scan your card 8 times a month"

Howdo...Firecracker is right..you must be in Florida. Have you run reports on how often those seniors are coming in? It must be the water they're drinking in your area if you can maintain 70 on average attending the gym. No way I can do that with two different areas (and class of people) I have. Are you offering unlimited free snacks like they do at Costco? That will bring in the senior men. Turn all the bikes facing each other so they can bike in senior gangs and non-stop chat. That might work for retention. I just cannot imagine hanging on to most of my seniors especially near 70. If nobody is there to chat with them they get bored. I talk them to near death at the signup table about how frequently they should come in. Maybe I should tell them it's the law dammit!

No, I got your point. I was just making light of my numbers of seniors in comparison. I don't expect to have access to as many as you have been through. Most everyone signs up, of course, because it's free. Seniors like free. Maybe I'll study your script a bit and modify my approach at the sales desk. It'll take a conversation with them to get them on my side, for sure. One thing I do know, tell them too much and they are overwhelmed and forget half of it, so have to keep it to the point. I'll give it a try. Maybe that will help with getting them to swipe more.

You have 2 fees. The first is an administration fee. Don't ask me what sort of administration they do because tracking who's using their membership and who's not falls solely on the franchisee. That fee I believe is $45/month.

Next there's the fee they charge per member. This varies per club, but you pay the same to the snap mafia for a regular member as you do for a SS member even though even at their capped amount you're still not collecting as much for that SS member. Now, if that SS member didn't come in at all that month then you pay the snap mafia a fee for the privilege of having that SS person as a member of your club. Therefore you need to terminate those inactive SS members as quickly as possible otherwise you could be paying a sizable fee for having them as members. (You'd think that would be part of the $45/month administration fee, but nope. Why? Because if they're terminated snap doesn't collect that fee for them. The solution would be to have the fee paid to snap as a percentage of what you've collected. Since you don't collect a full membership fee even at the cap then the maximum fee should never be as much as a full membership fee. Easy to implement, but why do that when you can stick it to your franchisees.

Next there's the new member fee. Not a big deal if they're coming in and using the club. However, if they sign up simply because they figure it's free so what the heck might as well pick my freebie, and never come in again then you're in the hole on that as well. Now here's the kicker. They go for months without coming in and then one day decide they want to come in. Well if you've been monitoring the attendance logs and terminate them for non-use, but they want to re-establish their membership well then you have to pay that new membership fee all over again. To make matters worse the system takes so long to register a new user in the door system that they're probably gone before you can even get a check-in registered. Now if they go months again without coming in you've just paid more for that non-active member. Oh, but the snap mafia gets paid.

Then there's the access card which you're supposed to provide for free. You'd think that since snap complains about disengaged members being the reason they have to ship out access cards for online signups and their fitpass program that they'd provide free access cards to SS members. Nope. Funny that they're nonsensical logic doesn't apply to this area. Could it be that then they'd actually have to be the ones giving something away for free? Haha. It only makes sense to them to give something away for free if it's the franchisee giving it away for free.

Here's what you could do. Have them sign up for a fitpass. Once they receive their card have them dispute the charge with the credit card company. The logic being that they're supposed to get the card for free, so they shouldn't have to pay $8.95 for S & H of the card. Swap that card with one of yours and now they got their card for free and it didn't come out of your pocket. My experience is that the credit card companies never side with a snap franchisee, so they shouldn't side with snap hq either.

(Long answer to a short question)

I was wondering the same thing- now the 25th and still no $ from Healthways.  What's the deal?

26th.... No payment from S.S.. Maybe it's my fault, maybe it's just like my (once again)NEW BPS/FAM keeps telling me. "You have to really want it." Or "If you're not getting the results you want, you are not putting in the effort to get them"

I love the sentiment and respect the motivation of these statements coming from an EMPLOYEE of Snap, who didn't invest 300k of thier own money in a rudderless ship. But Hey, even then the boat will steer where you want it to go if you "Want it bad enough" right?