We make a point of being available to our members and staff. After all, you can't get the pulse of your facility if you are locked in your office. On the other hand, it's not safe out there. Take last Friday, for example:
9:00 a.m.We touched base with staff regarding a woman who had twice verbally attacked employees over our decision to open late during last week's big spring snowstorm. She wanted us to contact a "real gym" that was open 24 hours to learn how to run ours, and wanted proof of our bond with the state.
9:45We actually got to spend 30 minutes discussing business issues until…
10:15A trainer came into the office regarding an incident that had just occurred in the weight room. One of the guys had all but launched a couple of dumbbells across the floor after completing an exercise. Our staff person, reacting emotionally when the dumbbells flew past her and her client, raised her voice and said "Hey! Don't do that." The member then stomped around the weight room expressing his outrage at having been disrespected, and said he "wanted to talk" to our trainer after his workout. We told her not to talk to him - and to direct him to Rob, instead.
10:30A local detective was waiting for us regarding two thefts we had reported, the first we've ever had at our clubs. Two female members had credit cards stolen from their purses, and the police had a lead.
10:45A member pulled Rob away from the detective in order to say thank you for the repairs we had done on the pool building's dehumidification system. This member felt that he had been the sole person to realize that a belt was loose on the system, so its repair was a point of great pride for him.
11:00As Barry's conversation with the detective was coming to a close and Rob was chatting with our dehumidification expert, another member felt the need to interrupt to ask about the status of the aquatic dumbbells he was eagerly awaiting. Yes, they will be in next week.
That's also when Dumbbell Guy (as we will forever call him) came up from the weight room to speak with Rob, allowing Rob to step away from Dehumidification Guy. Dumbbell Guy was incredulous at having been spoken to like that. Um…but he had launched the dumbbells across the room, correct? Well, yeah, but...
Rob assured Dumbbell Guy that we would speak with our trainer to review the incident and how it might have been handled more elegantly. But, Dumbbell Guy needed to be more concerned with his behavior and not repeating it rather than being so concerned about how our trainer had reacted.
11:15Review of Dumbbell Guy incident with our trainer.
11:30As we flowed into what we hoped would be a productive conversation about how to encourage more memberships from one of our biggest corporate accounts, we had to break it up because we suddenly heard some rather loud, angry words coming from the front desk: "I haven't used the club in two years but you've been withdrawing money every month." Rob dealt with that one, which went fine ("Here's how to cancel…") while Barry picked up the phone to address this question from our other facility: Did we have any extra cash we couldn't account for? There was a fellow there claiming he had already paid for his enrollment fee and first month's dues and now he just wanted to arrange his EFT payments. (No, two days earlier we gave him the cash back and ripped up his contract when he was unsure about how to pay for his monthly EFT charges.)
11:45We wanted to sneak out for lunch, but the client who was being trained during the dumbbell incident wanted us to know that our trainer hadn't done anything wrong and hadn't raised her voice at all. It was all Dumbbell Guy's fault.
Thank you. Can we go now? We're stopping at the hardware store for a new office lock.
(P.S. The next day, Dumbbell Guy's friend wanted Rob to know that Dumbbell Guy hadn't done anything wrong and our trainer had overreacted and disrespected Dumbbell Guy. By this point, what we were really most interested in was when and how "disrespect" became such a popular verb.)
