About Thomas Plummer
Thomas 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
Previous Articles
Showing 26 - 26 of 26 Articles
The Illogical Logic of the Fitness Business
June 2019 - There is little logic in the fitness industry. We endlessly repeat the past, building exact replicas of 1995 over and over again; we scream the market is jammed and there is no way another gym could squeeze into this town, yet here comes one more pretender; and we hire the same tired leaders to get us the same dated results, hoping we can find a hotel guy or Starbucks person who will finally understand fitness has little to do with room bookings or coffee. We talk about a national fitness revival in industry conferences, then drop our prices so we stay trapped in the equipment rental business where $10 will get you a gym with no service, but you do get to walk slowly on a treadmill seven days a week. Read Article...
The Issue That Confuses Most Owners of Box Clubs Or Training Facilities Is Price
January 2012 - The issue that confuses most owners of box clubs or training facilities is price. When clubs hurt for business, the owner figures all it could be is the price, and immediately, he lowers his price believing that, once the price comes down, the memberships go up. Read Article...
The Long Journey Back
August 2020 - Change is a part of life and a part of business. You accept the world as it is now, adapt to how you have to live and build a forward-looking life. There will be a short window of stabilization in the industry, followed by a second round of misery when the virus meets the flu season. As cases rise now, states are already reversing course and adding more operational restrictions, so we will have to operate on a week-by-week basis adjusting to what is happening at the time. The overall consensus is that, by the early summer next year, we will be working with vaccines, improved treatments and possibly the arrival of a saturation point where, as a group, we have moved past this thing. Until then, we will be regulated and restricted in our operations, and the clients will be dazed and confused by the ever-changing rules we will have to give them to get them into the gyms again. Read Article...
The Next Step Is the Hardest Step
Fighting Back to Protect Your Business
June 2020 - Publisher's Note: During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Thomas Plummer has written and presented a series of Letters to his readers. This month, we present the 7th Letter in that series because we feel it contains important information to consider as you move forward with re-opening. Whether or not you have re-opened, the points made by Thom are important ones to consider. This is a new world, and to survive it, new ways of thinking and the solutions that are a result of that thinking will be crucial. Read Article...
We Are Bad At Retention
March 2010 - We are bad at retention in this industry because we have never had to be good to survive. Ever since the advent of modern fitness in the 1950s, we have been totally focused on only one thing: the acquisition of new members. Read Article...
Why Everything in Life is About Fighting Change
August 2012 - The original title for this article was going to be something about a day in the life of a consultant and what we all can learn from a typical day's worth of calls that I do whenever I am in town. Even as I wrote the first sentence, I found myself bored. Read Article...
You Evolve or You Die...
The End of the Fitness Industry as a Single Business - Part I
November 2021 - Pressure, applied over time, can change, or destroy, anything. This pressure reveals the cracks, searches out and destroys the weakness, finally leaving something changed forever. Mountains disappear, coal becomes a diamond, rivers change course, and even Britney Spears was set free after years of pressure from attorneys. In the fitness industry, the pressure was applied in 2020 - 2021, and this pressure revealed the weaknesses that have existed for many years, yet they remained somewhat hidden, because it is easier to hide our reality rather than stand up and deal with obvious truths we need to address if we want to thrive into the future. For an industry that embraces semi-naked as an art form in our national marketing, we are not looking too good these days in the blinding, raw light of our post-virus meltdown. Here are a few observations of what several years of unrelenting pressure has left us. Read Article...
You Evolve or You Die...
The End of the Fitness Industry as a Single Business - Part II
December 2021 - In Part I of this article, I brought forth the premise that there is no such thing as a single fitness industry. I explained what this statement means and its origins. This month, in Part II, I will explain what it means for all of us in this industry. Read Article...
You Risk Everything You Have To Create A New Business!
January 2017 - You raise money, build your vision, take the risk of being in business, and yet, nowhere has anyone guaranteed you will make this dream a financial success this time. Yet, when the business struggles, we often get angry at the universe because there is always a sense of entitlement within us; since we took the risk, we should be entitled to succeed. Not so. Read Article...
Showing 26 - 26 of 26 Articles
