Club Insider

About Thomas Plummer

Thomas PlummerThomas Plummer

Thomas Plummer has been working in the fitness business for over 40 years. He founded the Thomas Plummer Company in 1990, which eventually became the National Fitness Business Alliance (NFBA) in 2003. The NFBA is a group of industry vendors and suppliers banded together to bring advanced business education to all fitness business owners operating anywhere in the world. He has authored 10 books on the business of fitness, which have remained the bestselling books in the industry for over 20 years, and several of the books are currently used as textbooks in numerous college programs as their source for fitness business education. He also has one of the most popular Facebook sites in the industry with over 100,000 followers where he writes about business and life on an almost daily basis. His books have sold over 250,000 copies worldwide since first being introduced in 1999.

Phone: (800) 726 - 3506
Email: thomasplummer@icloud.com


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"Insider Speaks"
The State of the Health Club Industry Today

January 2015 - What terrifies us in this business, and then causes mass panic and overreaction, usually turns out to be the invisible monster under your child's bed that is all imagination and dust balls. It's never the horrible reality we imagine. We see something new. It's something we don't understand, and we are immediately scared that it will destroy us. Read Article...

"Insider Speaks"
The State of the Health and Fitness Club Industry According to Thomas Plummer

September 2015 - For sale cheap: Used DeLorean time machine. No longer needed. Just visited a chain gym and was transported back to 1995 without it. No longer interested in living in the past in the fitness industry. Read Article...

"Insider Speaks"
When Two Worlds Collide

January 2016 - Chaos brings opportunity, and the fitness industry is certainly operating in a chaotic mode as we go into 2016. Meaning, if there was ever a time to attack in this industry by anyone looking for growth opportunities, it would be this year. Chaos can be defined for us as an end of one belief system and the beginning of a new era where, no matter what you think you know about the business, the rules have changed and everything you think you know is now horribly wrong. Read Article...

"Insider Speaks"
The Health Club Industry is a Mess!

April 2016 - The health club industry is a mess! And, if you aren't making money, then it is customary to blame someone else for your current lack of success. In the late 1940s, we blamed the first commercial guys for ruining the physical culture gyms. The first commercial guys blamed the first chains for ruining their businesses in the '60s. Those guys blamed the first Nautilus guys for ruining everything good about the gym business. Those guys then blamed the rise of the full service commercial gyms for ruining the Nautilus purity. Read Article...

"Insider Speaks"
The Five Hardest Lessons You Will Ever Learn In The Fitness Business

March 2017 - Hard lessons in life, and business, are usually the end result of someone denying the truth until the truth kicks their ass. We call these lessons, "hard," because not grasping these ideas earlier in our careers, or life, cost us so much time and money doing everything, "the hard way." Small business owners are often forced to learn these lessons quickly when things go bad. You wake up someday with about $10 left in your account and a letter from the landlord that you are going to get booted. All of a sudden, you are now open to a few new ideas! Read Article...

Are You Ready for the Bubble to Burst?
July 2022 - The fitness industry is balancing precariously on top of the perfect bubble, and this bubble, as they all do, will burst, causing yet another reset in an already unstable fitness business environment. Our economy has been dancing bubble to bubble since the early 1900s, which presents itself as the typical cycle in any capitalistic society. We had the mind-numbing correction of 1929 we labeled The Great Depression, the cooldown of the 1950s, the gas crash of the '70s, the real estate busts of the mid '80s and late '90s, then The Great Recession in 2007, and of course, a number of bubble busts such as real estate and tech collapses. Bubbles are what we do in the U.S., and we do them well. As a country, we have used them as a correction device that allows us to reset, cool off a sector, then move on to the next level of play. Read Article...

Can the Industry Hit 100 Million?
No, Says Thom Plummer, Not Unless it Changes Its Ways!

September 2001 - Read Article...

Convert Your Weaknesses to Strengths!
October 2017 - We all have our strengths, and in the old days of the health and fitness club industry, those strengths could carry you against any market condition or competition. Today, the health and fitness world is different, and what we don't know and understand are the very things that can bring us down. Back in the day, if you could sell or build a sales team, you could literally sell your way out of trouble. If you learned to do hardcore marketing, such as lead boxes or cold calling, you could fill your gym and just think of how many thousands of young sales people were fired through the years because they couldn't keep up the 100-cold-calls-a-day nonsense trying to set appointments for people who never showed anyway. Read Article...

Customer Service Is As Simple As...
February 2013 - The most important asset in your business, and the hardest thing for any competitor to copy, is a well-trained staff. Fitness trends come and go, but a quality, professional staff is something so rare that it gives any owner who has the drive and patience to build one an almost insurmountable competitive edge in the market. The definer for this staff is the commitment to delivering legendary customer service to the members who have trusted that business with their money, faith and time. Read Article...

Dinosaurs...
March 2018 - Your cell phone is less than two years old. Your new flat screen is, at best, a few years old. Your fitness wearable represents technology that didn't even exist just a few years back. My old box computer is in the back of the closet, dead and gone, replaced by laptops and pads. My news comes from scrolling on my phone to see the latest from all sources. And, who is left on the planet who schedules his life around a television when there are a dozen apps that let you choose what you want to watch and when? Yet, the fitness facility you just built, and expect the public to buy, hasn't changed its basic concept since 1985. Read Article...

Don't Even Think of Calling Them "Boutique Gyms!"
January 2020 - They are not boutique studios or fitness studios, and if you call these new businesses by those inaccurate names, it means you don't know anything about what they are and who owns them, which is why they will take over the market. The modern training gym is a recent phenomenon dating back to the late 1990s, but the rise of this alternative and challenger to the mainstream big box hold on the fitness industry has gone quietly unnoticed. Each year, hundreds of these financially successful business concepts open while the traditional fitness market struggles to open a limited number of new entries. Read Article...

Is Your Marketing Killing Your Business?
January 2022 - Marketing in the fitness industry is much like politics; everyone is an expert, but so few really have any idea as to what the hell they are talking about when it comes to how it really works. The strange thing is that the industry changed, but how we market our businesses really hasn't. The business of fitness segmented into two distinct categories back around 200... Read Article...

It Really Is About The Frog and The Boiling Water...
June 2015 - It really is about the frog and the boiling water. You know the story; the one where the frog happily swims in the science lab pot as the water gets turned up hotter and hotter, not aware that doom is just a few more degrees away. In the fitness industry, we are the frog sitting in the pan of ever hotter water slowly starting to bubble. Yet, we still sit and stare over the edge of the pot wondering why it's getting a little warm in here and denying that change is happening no matter how we work to ignore it. Read Article...

Knowing When to Quit
August 2023 - The legendary football coach, Mike Ditka, once owned a night club in Chicago, a favorite stop for fitness people making the annual pilgrimage to the Windy City for trade shows we didn't need to attend so we could go hang in bars we couldn't live without. One of Ditka's quirks was to hire retired boxers, dress them in tuxes and let them wander the floor schmoozing. After too many shots with an assortment of IHRSA people, I wandered into the restroom and found one of these boxers, a guy who fought Muhammad in his prime, sitting on the floor by the urinals, back against the wall, singing softly to himself. Read Article...

Our Future Is Our Past
February 2024 - My granddaughter opened her Christmas present and giggled. It was just what she wanted: Chuck Taylor Converse high-top black sneakers. When I was 12, which let us say was maybe 55 years before my granddaughter was born, my mother handed me my Christmas present, wrapped in red paper with snowmen sledding down steep hills, one I had left hints for every day since early summer... a beautiful new pair of Chuck Taylor Converse high-top black sneakers. Like those old school, black flat-soled basketball shoes, the best never goes out of style. It might be hidden for a time, but if it is something people still feel a need for, a void they can't get filled anywhere else. The trend or product always rises again. This is why the old school, serious lifting gym of the early 1970s, the Arnold days, is going to be the next big thing in fitness... again. Read Article...

Out of Chaos Comes Opportunity
August 2011 - The classic definition of chaos is complete disorder and confusion. Much of what most of you are feeling in the industry today is a reflection of the chaotic state of the industry at the moment. Even the financial gurus of our industry, such as Rick Caro, declared 2009 as the worst year in modern fitness history when it comes to financial aspects. Read Article...

Ownership
December 2012 - Owning your own business is the dream that wrecks so many sleepless nights, causes family fights and pushes friendships to the limits. Once you catch the ownership fever, it often becomes an obsession that fills your head every waking moment, and the emotional attachment is what sends a usually normal person down the path of "I have to do this no matter what it costs me or my family." Read Article...

Sometimes the Answer is NO!
July 2012 - The Pareto Principle states that roughly 80% of the effect comes from about 20% of the causes. Stated in our business terms, this means that we make about 80% of our money in business from about 20% of our clients. Or, yet another way, most of what we get comes from a small segment of the people we deal with each day. Read Article...

Sometimes The Only Way To Save A Business Is To Destroy It
October 2016 - A single, flimsy thread can't do much harm to you. Threads are usually just little cotton strands that a child can snap with her little fingers. Thousands of threads, especially those that keep us tied to a failed past, can however, combine into a force that chokes the life out of any business trying to stay alive or evolve. Every business with any age to it has threads that bind that business to its history. Read Article...

The "Insider Speaks"
The Foundational Truth Will Set You Free

December 2009 - Publisher's Note: This month's Insider Speaks column is written by Thomas Plummer, who is the single most prolific and proficient educator in the health, racquet and sports club industry. His reputation as a straight-shooter is embraced in the article that follows, and he truly "Tells-it-like-it-is" here (This commentary was in a blog Thomas recently wrote for his website www.thomasplummer.com). Read Article...

The Basic Rules of Reinvention
How to Move the Health and Fitness Industry From Infancy to Adulthood

July 2017 - Look! Look! It's bright and shiny! I want it! I want it! I want it! Oh, now look over there! Brighter and shinier, and I have to have that now, too. In the health and fitness world, chasing bright and shiny is our industry's way of instant gratification. Curves introduced the 30-minute circuit about a hundred years ago, and we all had to rush out and buy one for our own gyms, because obviously, the 30-minute circuit was the missing secret to financial success in the health and fitness universe. Read Article...

The Client We Need the Most Hates Us
We Have Driven the High-End Client Out of Our Gyms

January 2023 - If there is one, real life business comparison to the modern fitness industry, it would be the cheap grocery store chains. Huge physical plants, filled full of cheap food, sold cheaply to cheap people looking for bargains. Marginal service, performed by bored people, paid low end wages to stock shelves and who mumble when asked simple questions, such as where is the cranberry sauce? What once was a small neighborhood convenience are now megastores trying to offer everything to every shopper. Read Article...

The Death of the Big Box Business Model
December 2013 - It's as if 1995 never left us in the fitness industry. Walk into almost any big box mainstream player, especially the chains, and it is as if time is standing still. The machines might be newer, the colors a little different and the hairstyles have changed, but the basic business model dating back to the 1950s is still alive and well. Read Article...

The Fitness Industry Has Hit Rock Bottom
A Blog Post By Thomas - May 5, 2009

May 2009 - Every person who has ever suffered from a drinking problem knows the old adage that there is never change until you hit bottom. Then, and only then, can you admit you have an issue and rebuild your life. In this industry, we have hit bottom, and we're floundering on the floor like a bunch of wet monkeys in a hot tub. Read Article...

The Harsh Lessons of Failure... and Why They Matter to You
May 2021 - The year 2020 is littered with the failure of too many gyms now gone... And, the sad thing is many of those closures could have been avoided and many of those businesses saved if the owners had clung to a few basic concepts. Gyms are emotional businesses. We get close to our clients, live the lifestyle ourselves and quietly believe what we do matters to those we help. But, this emotion also deceives us into thinking we are different than other businesses and that we are entitled to play by a different set of rules. We are wrong. Read Article...

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