About Will Phillips
Will Phillips
Will Phillips has over twenty-six years of practical experience as a management consultant in thirty-four industries and nine countries. For the last nineteen years, he has chaired executive roundtables for owners of leading health clubs. Over ninety industry leaders participate in eight Club Roundtables. His input and out-of-the-box thinking about the club business has added immeasurably to the growth, profit and strategic positioning of these clubs.
Phone: N/A
Email: Will@RexRoundtables.com
Previous Articles
Showing 26 - 50 of 66 Articles
Fifteen Steps to Paradise
Step 4 - Managing By The Numbers: The Necessity of an Annual Budget
December 2009 - Most clubs underperform. They either fail to use the numbers to manage or they misuse them. Of course, all the numbers are historical, and you cannot manage history. Read Article...
Fifteen Steps to Paradise
Step 15 - Hiring: The Foundation
December 2010 - Your business success depends on your organization being smart and healthy. Patrick Lencioni, a keynote speaker at IHRSA 2011 says being smart means you are knowledgeable about marketing, sales, numbers, personnel operations and make good decisions in these areas. This is the traditional business school curriculum; hardnosed, practical and focused on results. Read Article...
Financial Literacy
May 2013 - April was Financial Literacy Month. Good timing! More than ever, government, businesses and families are suffering from financial illiteracy. Too often, we abdicate financial decisions to others. Too often, we do not understand financial decisions because we are financially illiterate. Read Article...
For High Performance: STOP Performance Reviews
A Summary of Recent Research
October 2014 - Stop grading performance if you want high performance! Managers love to manage, which means setting goals, measuring progress, taking corrective action and delivering results. Managing is like steering a car or handling a horse to get to where you want to be. In Spanish, the word for manage is manejar and refers specifically to knowing how to handle a horse or car, not people. Humans generally realize that 'managing' people is different than managing animals. The subtle insights of enabling people to produce superior results get lost when all you want from the worker is physical labor. This is seen in slave labor and in the assembly line where the work is simple. Read Article...
Generating A Waterfall of Leads
125 Membership Lead Sources - Part I
August 2008 - IHRSA reports there are more clubs than ever in the United States, yet overall membership declined in the last year. This means there are fewer members per club, and many clubs will have to work smarter to match the sales numbers they generated in the past. For the first time in eighteen years, the 100 or so members of REX Club Roundtables are reporting irregular sales. Some of the clubs with the most disciplined sales systems have even seen dramatic falloffs of 40% in lead traffic over the last six years. Read Article...
Generating A Waterfall of Leads
125 Membership Lead Sources - Part II
September 2008 - The most persistent sales problem for clubs has always been the lack of leads. Review your club's records for the number of prospects walking into your club each month over the last five years. Unless it was great and remains consistent over the years, you may need a new strategy. Clubs that have invested heavily in their sales process and training are finding that the same level of effort is producing fewer leads and sales. Read Article...
Guidelines for a Great Business
Mostly False...
September 2013 - A new genre of business writing began in 1984 when Tom Peters published In Search of Excellence and described eight factors in excellent businesses. More recently, Jim Collins published Good to Great in 2001 with five factors of great businesses. In total, there have been over 19 reports or books about business success factors in the last 30 years. Read Article...
How Blind Are You?
August 2012 - Over the years, we have noticed many of the 180 club executives in REX meetings speak at times with frustration about certain issues in their business. The frustration usually arises when a problem appears again and again and there does not seem to be an obvious solution. Often, these issues have to do with the followers who do not behave and make decisions in the way that the leader wishes. Read Article...
Immunity to Change
A Breakthrough Insight Enabling Behavior Change
June 2009 - I must own up to the fact that I have never owned a health club, nor worked in one, although I have been extremely physical in my avocations as a mountain climber, kayaker and hiker as well as being an outward bound chief (ph) instructor. When I entered the health club business some 20 years ago as the Chair of an owner's roundtable, I was struck by two items which represented significant barriers. The first obstacle is the penetration of only 14% of the market. Read Article...
Improving Your Disaster Personality
October 2011 - More than one in four of every small business will experience a significant crisis in the next twelve months. This ratio holds true on an annual basis. Thus, the odds are your club will have an emergency in the next four years. Read Article...
Is This A Sea-Change In The Health and Fitness Industry?
November 2013 - When planning for the future success of your business, it is valuable to distinguish between trends and fads. Fads are exciting and short-lived. They can consume valuable resources without significantly improving your business. Trends have a long lifespan. In 1982, John Naisbitt published Megatrends, and now, 40 years later, these trends are still present. You may remember the first megatrend: High-tech Requires High-touch. The ability of Apple to build on this trend contributes largely to its success. Read Article...
Knowing When to Fold
April 2009 - We have all heard the phrase that rising tides lift all boats, thus a rising economy lifts all clubs. This lift enabled clubs that were poorly managed and had poor business models to succeed. The broad scale successes across the fitness industry invited competitors, large and small, along with many new franchisees with different concepts appealing to different segments of your market. Read Article...
Learn How To "Get Out Of The Box, Set It On Fire and Roast Potatoes On It"
Double Digit Club Growth - Part I
November 2011 - We all know that when you keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different answer, you are insane. If your health club has had slack growth over the last two or three years, you have explored different ways of solving this and you have not moved into double digit growth, you may be insane! Read Article...
Learn How To "Get Out Of The Box, Set It On Fire and Roast Potatoes On It"
Double Digit Club Growth - Part II
December 2011 - Part I of Learn How To Get Out Of The Box, Set It On Fire and Roast Potatoes On It: Double Digit Club Growth appeared in the November, 2011 edition of Club Insider. This is Part II of a process to guide club owners and their teams in finding effective, new ways to grow sales, penetrate markets and retain members. They are ways that you and the club industry have not considered before. Read Article...
Master Mind Group
Part I
September 2006 - Read Article...
Master Mind Group
Part II
October 2006 - Read Article...
Obesity Crisis Accelerates
July 2014 - There is no need to document the growth in the obesity crisis and its impact on childhood obesity, diabetes, liver failure and so forth. This is reported weekly in newspapers and news magazines around the world. More than 12.5 million children in the United States are classified as obese. Obesity contributes to 1 in 10 deaths, making it the second leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. Currently, the direct and indirect costs of obesity are more than $190 billion annually. Childhood obesity has resulted in 47% higher medical costs compared to medical expenses for children with a healthy weight. Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years. In 2012, more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese. Read Article...
Powering Up Your Business
Part I
February 2006 - Read Article...
Powering Up Your Business
Part II
March 2006 - Read Article...
Powering Up Your Business
Part III
June 2006 - Read Article...
Powering Up Your Business
Part IV
July 2006 - Read Article...
Preparing for the Downturn
June 2008 - Read Article...
Professional Development for Club Owners and Managers
April 2008 - Read Article...
Reframing Problems for Better Solutions
July 2013 - Whenever problem solving fails, it is likely that you were working on the wrong problem. Reframing is a problem solving tool to help you look at a problem from different frames of reference which can uncover underlying assumptions. The reframing process shifts inappropriate and potentially misleading problem definitions into more effective problem definitions and better solutions. Read Article...
Sharing: Trend or Fad?
It May Change Our Industry
July 2011 - When several trends overlap and reinforce, like waves, they create an even stronger trend or wave. The first trend is the long-lasting impact of the recent recession, which has had enough impact on consumer's buying habits to merit articles about the "new consumer" in a number of major business magazines and journals. Read Article...
Showing 26 - 50 of 66 Articles
