Episode 525: Freeze Policies: The Unsexy Rule That Matters with Mark Fisher

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Click the link below in the show notes and download it right now. You'll be glad you did. Hello, fitness business nerds. What's up? Welcome to another episode of the Business Futuricorns podcast. Back with Mr. Mark Fisher today. How are you? How's your week going, sir? It is going. That's gone well. I had a fun morning. I was some careful listeners. Well, now I'm a producer on a podcast called Into the Machine and spent the morning with two very interesting people, a woman named Dr. Rebecca Goldstein, who has a book came out called The Mattering Instinct, which was really interesting. And then I came out of some work she'd been doing with Martin Seligman and Roy Balmister and a very simple distinction, but just like thinking through and there's a customer service stuff. I'm working on a piece already for this about customer service. We really want to matter. It's very important. As soon as we have an sense of self, we really want to understand, do we deserve the level of attention we give ourselves because we think about ourselves a lot. So that was really fascinating. And then we had a gentleman named Dr. Stephen Pinker, who is a linguist and a sort of like famous thought, the Dury Guy, talking a little bit about his most recent book and the difference between things that people know individually verse things that people know that everybody knows. And it's a dense rabbit all the time to give its proper due here, but it was very intellectually interesting morning. I'll leave it at that. That's really fun. I love that I should take a look at the book about mattering is we cover a lot of study a lot of research on mattering in school. And I didn't realize what a well of what a well of research there is on the topic. Yeah, it's really under this giant bigger umbrella of overall human well being and mattering is a giant pillar in that research, which is really fascinating to me. I didn't really realize how deep the well went until the last few years. But I'm glad it's coming out in like book form people to really think more about that as a concept because you don't have that phrase very often. That's right. And this is she has chops right because this reminds me a little bit of the Tony Robbins significance in Tony Robbins I think has his merit, but this could seem like very frothy and self-helpy and sort of unmoored. And this this woman that she is a some real some academic muscularity. So this is like a very serious person. Now I want this contest to be about mattering now we need to record. Yeah, I have a lot more to say. The editorial list for the next time. I'm actually writing an article about it. Because it's good. Yeah, it's the whole game. It's a anyway. One of my whole paper school was on mattering. So we should. Okay, great. That's our list table talk about. We're going to do this quick because this is as unsexy for you. It's for us. But it's an important one. So today we're going to eat our vegetables together. I'll be like boss is the opposite of matter, which is I don't really want to talk about it at all. I know it's important and glad we are. I'm glad we are. This is the topic matters. The topic really does matter. And I think that it does have significant impact on your gym businesses listeners. And so today we're talking about freeze policies. Freeze policies. And so generally speaking on me just teed us up by saying that anyone who has a kind of a membership based model, meaning you're charging people week after week or month after month. Most of you at some point run into the need for having a freeze policy some way for people to pause their membership for all kinds of reasons, work travel, sickness, seven babies, moving, whatever the thing is. And how you shape that policy, the expectations you set around that policy both internally for the workflow is and how it functions. And with your clients, in terms of how generous you are or not, with how much they can freeze. Really has big impact on your business. And I mean, we know this firsthand. And Mark for sure, if it is we had a very generous freeze policy for many years. And they were at times when people really leveraged it because we had a very transient audience of actors and performers who traveled a lot throughout the year. We would have what up to 15, 20% of our revenue in the extreme cases frozen for a given month. And so that's a huge number of revenue just paused because people are not there. And so I say I'll have to say that this policy really does matter to have big impacts both on keeping people and retaining them long term can really be helpful there. And also on your cash flow, right. So there's a lot of big impact here. But maybe Fisher, I'm going to talk about the kind of different approaches that we see to freeze policies. Yeah, I mean, I think like there's a spectrum, right? Like you could say there's like the most generous to like the least generous the most generous. Arguably as customer forward arguably allows you to maybe retain a little bit better because again, these premium price products as contrasted with like maybe an open access gem. It does feel a little brutal to be like two miserly with freezes of people paying you sometimes $500 per month. At the same time on the other end you have like stricter policies, which in some ways make your life simpler. And they certainly arguably in theory allow you to have a lower percentage of frozen revenue any given moment, which in theory could mean you're capturing more of that revenue and discouraging people to be less committed. But at the same time, it's the inverse promise now we're potentially losing people that depending on your market, a lot of affluent people do travel a lot, a lot of affluent people are older older people have surgeries and they have like health things and sometimes some markets like New Jersey Florida kind of reverses my gym New Jersey. We have a lot of snowbirds and there's people in Florida that are there in the winter and then they come back to New Jersey or Long Island in the summer. So there's a number of ways one could look at this. I'm happy to share a little bit more about how we're currently doing it in our facility. I would know we're a little bit more towards the more generous side, but I'm wondering if you have anything else you would add. No, I think it's a good thing to put good places start. I think I'll maybe start with something that's just worth saying out loud was if you do have a membership that lasts any longer than three months, I do think you need to have some freezes policy. I think that's a good thing to have a membership that are six months or a year. I do think you need to have some version of one of the policies we're about to talk about. If you have a membership that are canceling time up to months or maybe up to three months, I think you may be get by where you're still in pack land, which we don't recommend staying in forever, but some of you are in pack land happily. You probably don't this doesn't matter much to you, but anything beyond that, I think beyond three months requires some options for pausing. I think the first principle we should sell out loud is you want to avoid freezes. However you do it, you want to try to incentivize them to not freeze. Let's talk about maybe a few different terms one could consider. The first term you'll probably want to consider is this free or not free. In case they made for either, you also want to consider what is the minimum amount of time and the maximum amount of time. Most gyms are going to have some minimum if you have everybody freezing for three days because they go away for the weekend, like that's going to be annoying. So we probably can allow that. On the other hand, if you require a month on freeze, not it's not possible. I think there are probably brick and mortar gym like training led gyms that can do that. I think that's harder to pop off. On the other end is if you're trying to have people not freeze in the first place, arguably I like a two week minimum freeze, right? So to play my hand what we do in my gym in Jersey, it's a two week minimum. And again, within reason, we're usually trying to have them not freeze and just move around their sessions. We also an intersection is your upgrade downgrade policy art because we're a cancel anytime facility. They can just downgrade the next month, not a big deal. We need to downgrade to catch up sessions. We can do that. Again, I'd rather keep them active. I'd rather keep them coming in here for me. That's the most important goal. Now in canceling a time world to play this out here and then maybe we can talk a little bit about how we consider this when people are on some sort of commitment. Can't say time world, you could go both ways. You could say, look, just, just, just terminate just cancel. If you're going to be gone for two weeks, just cancel your membership and then come back when you're back or whatever. I'll do that for me if I'm thinking, okay, I have a list of active clients, frozen clients, former clients and never been clients. I'm basically pushing people out of the frozen client into the former client bucket. And that means now the default is there gone and I have to follow up with them to get them back in. If I keep them in the frozen bucket, this is my argument for it, which is not going to be right for everybody. I would make the case, okay, now that the fault is they're coming back and I'm going to be following up with them treating them like a regular client, which is to say that when we're looking through our roles to touch base of people, we're going to keep our arms around them. We wouldn't do it the same way if they were a former client. Now, I will say one of the tricks of this is if you have a canceling time membership, you have freezes to say this out loud, if you've done this, you know it. This sometimes people try to quiet quit. And again, this is where it gets a little borderline. I could see a case for either some gyms will try to convince people that are trying to quit to just freeze. So that way they don't have them terminate in the hopes that they're more likely to stick around and maybe this works sometimes maybe sometimes you're delaying the inevitable. But regardless, you need to have a conversation before they freeze. So in no uncertain terms, they know if you require 30 days notice, you're still going to need 30 days notice because sometimes people will try to quiet quit. where they'll freeze a couple days before a billing cycle. with no notice and then they'll freeze for three months and then say, "I'm not coming back. You can just turn my membership." That's okay. You're not coming back, but we need 30 days notice. We do have another billing cycle. Would you like to come in here some of these sessions? That may or may not go down while depending on how you have framed it up. That's the way we do it now. To flesh out our policy, and then we can punch it up and talk about what we might do different situations. Again, we are optimizing for simplicity, for ease. We tend to be generous. It's a 14-day minimum, but like wink-wink. We'll do 10 days in certain situations. The freezes are, they're never open-ended. That's another thing that MFF learned the hard way. Never open and freeze. Few things I'll say, absolutely, friends. Never open-ended. They have to choose the date that they're coming back. You can have a conversation if they get there and they're not ready, but you never want an open-ended freeze. So some of our clients, again, they go to Florida until July. Now, to be clear, if I'm looking at my active client count, I'm not kidding myself and pretending that that frozen client is a real client. In fact, I don't count them as an active client. It's a different bucket for me. Again, I like that bucket better than former client, but they're not a real client. The way an active client is. But at least they're in my world. At least I know we'll be texting them like we are the rest of our clientele base. At least the theory, the default thing is they're going to come back. So now, I would say that other people in the system, and other people that have canceling time gyms, again, do it very differently. Some of them are like, it's canceling time. There are no freezes. You just can't. So you just, at a get, I get it. Defensible makes sense. Just not how I think about it because of all the reasons I elucidated. I'll pull up there. I'm curious for any additional thoughts you might have about that. Or maybe how you might think about it in different situations. No, I think you're really on the right track. I think a week or two minimum, I think is great. Anything less than that, you should be able to smooth their sessions around and make up for. I think month or so tends to be a pretty common maximum that the most we want you to be gone for is maximum. Unless there are some extent in these circumstances, like you're just gone for the season. And then to your point, it's better to know they're just gone for three months, keep them in your arms in your orbit and follow up with them knowing that they're planning to come back. I think that makes sense. That's great. I think the only thing we haven't touched on that I'll just shed a little light on is I do think that it's good to have some amount of freezes that are free. Just come with your membership. Yeah, and I do think if people want the added flexibility of freezing more, it's only just charge them for it. And I've seen people charge anything from 10 to 25 dollars a week to freeze their membership as a range I've seen. So it's not a ton of money. But if you want to maintain your membership, which means maintain your current rate and easily come back in without any other rig or morale and we'll just save a spot for you more or less, then we'll do that. But you're going to pay above and beyond the free freezes. So generally speaking, I think when I see it for a lot of unicorns, I think if you have if they have like year long memberships, maybe they have two or three free freezes over the course of a year. Anything more than that, they'll often have to pay for. I think I'm a lot more generous than that. I think ours was like four or more for the year. Maybe it was five or six years. I think every three months there was a free freezes or something like that. Yeah, but I think that if I was sick to wave magic wand for most listeners, if you do a membership based thing, I think that's probably a good ballpark, a free freeze for about every six months or so. And then anything above and beyond that, people pay just kind of a weekly fee to extend further. Yeah, the one thing I'm not a big fan of, and some people do this and stick by it is some people do ask for like doctor's notes when it's a medical freeze. I'm with you. Or they want, I don't know, a permission to put it in your box when it's, and I hate it so much. Like we're just, no, not high school teachers. Got it, but yeah, it's also just the administrative work of it. It's like, it's so much work for you. I don't want to be like that with my clients. If you're, yeah, I'm yeah, if you're an adult, I'm just going to take you out your word for it. If you're not judging through this, I'm not judging you, but I don't want to do it. Yeah, I don't want to do it. Also, just I don't want you to do it. I will judge you. I don't want you to do it. Stop wasting your time on it. It's just take them out their word and are people going to lie to you? Yes. Yes, of course. Welcome to any customer service job. It's not their job to be honest with you. I mean, I see if they were, and long-term clients you're close with, probably won't lie as much. And then most people aren't going to lie too. So I don't think the juice worked the squeeze. You're punishing everyone in making more work for yourself to screen out like the occasional bad actor, which is going to find other ways to be annoying anyway. So 100%. So I just think it's we have a simple freeze request form. We asked people to fill out. We asked people to give them a few days notice if you can. Some people like to give us 14 days notice for a freeze. People don't plan to do that. I think asking for three to five days is the most you could probably get away with to process their freeze. And then to Mark's point, you assume they're coming back on the fall, updating let them know it's in their hands. If they need longer, they need to reach out to you, but their membership will restart at the end of the freeze period. Yeah, I think those are the most of the best practices that I see. Anything you would add? Yeah, I agree. Like having a form is a thing that's definitely going to make sense. Can we we don't right now? It's just because it's such a smaller leaner jam. We're going to bother with the form. If you have any scale to certain point, you're probably going to need that. The streamline makes you have the information where it's going. You have the same written track record all the time. It's getting fed into a sheet somewhere. So there's not confusion if they change their mind later. The length of notice is another kind of little sticky dead actually, because in 2026, everyone's used to just like terminating their netflix and their Amazon, whatever. It's very hard in 2026 to say, yeah, we need even two days notice, which as a typical gym owner, you're going to need two days notice. Like you need the time. You're not like on call if somebody tells you on Thursday night, hey, my payment's going through tomorrow. And they send you an email at 930, expecting it's going to take care of by the next day. And again, it's not a perfect world. You're going to have people to have maybe unreal expectations. Don't understand that I'm not netflix. I'm an independent gym owner. So I think streamline that stuff over the time is going to be important, because the other advantage having a form, which you can also lay out what the exact policies and procedures are. And then not too long, ideally, they can just have that chat directly with the AI that they manage their platform to the booking building platform. And the AI knows your policies and the AI is better at customer service and emotional intelligence than most 24 year olds who you're going to hire to do the front task. So they do a good job of, oh, I know, I wish I could do that, but turns out that technically the policy is such and such. But here's what I can do for you. And they'll know all the if-thens for when they can break the rules and they can't. But in the meantime, you're not going to be able to do that. The only other thing I want to say before we pop off here that I forgot is more and more small group gyms. I don't see this typical in class-based gyms are going to recurring session times. And there's a lot of like about that. I don't know what works for everybody. I don't know what works for your market. But that's another case where I would probably would buy us towards charging some rate if they're not going to be in there to keep that spot. If it's an open access and they just like it's hunger games every time the schedule goes live, maybe it's not quite as important. But particularly if you're saving a spot for them in a prime time spot, at a certain point you were handed his force. I think you have to charge something to keep it. Because in some situations, yeah, what are you going to do freeze three months for a prime time spot that people want to get into? Yeah. And again, as we close this up here, I also want to highlight this is a different set of rules for these more premium price products. So I belong to a gym along on city. It's called vibe fitness. Love it. Hashtag shout vibe. And it's $150 per month on the cancel anytime. And the minimum freeze is one month. And you get one freeze for $20 per month on your month to month. If you get I think unlimited freezes with no record keeping required. If you do the year long membership, which is $16.50, which is whatever that works out through, it's basically you get a free month. And again, depends on your economic bracket. For some people, $150 is like really pushing for an open access gym. That's a lot even by certainly by most markets. New York City doesn't feel that onerous. But it's funny. I look at that and I'm like, that makes a lot of sense. It's really, it's a simple policy. I think it would be harder for most of you to be like, no, you have to give me $500. I don't care if you're gone for a month. No, you have to freeze for a whole month. You're gone for two weeks, but I'm making you freeze for the month. It's it just can get a little bit at that price point, feel a little bit punitive and make it. You can, that's in two, you can have a very harsh intense freeze policy. But if you do just be prepared, the people might be super pissed off and you might lose those clients to create some ill will. Yeah, I think generally speaking, my final thoughts on this are, I think generally speaking, we had much better long-term retention of clients and markets are fitness. And I see this with our gym owners. When they were as generous as they could operationally be with their freezes. Yes. And I think this is an area where I think it's easy for us to add value and flexibility for members and many of them really appreciate it. Also, depending on your market, that might matter more or less. But if you can be generous there and simplify the operations of it for you and your team, I think that's worth the squeeze most of the time. I think it's have a clear policy, have it written down, make sure staff and clients know it, have some sort of system for how it's done, make sure you're not violating the rules too often or if you do our favorite there. As always, make a note in the booking billing platform you've evaluated for that person. In case the person's always asking for things. And then as far as what the policy is, you decide we probably error both error a little bit more towards the size of generosity and make it easy for people to be a client. That's our two cents. That's it. We did it. We talked about freeze policies. For me, that's true to the other end. Super second topic. But listen, I think we get sent to really tactical stuff from time to time. It's been a while since you and I at least recorded one. Usually it's Ben and I who get into the weeds with the tactical policies. But this is a good one. And hopefully listeners, you've all found that valuable and maybe make it tweaks to your freeze policy. Make your life easier for you and your clients. Thanks as always for sure for a great conversation. And I'll see you all in the next one. Have a kick out of the week. Bye. ♪ Wanna hear it come ♪