Important Question: Industry Data
Important Question: If you could compare your gym's performance to industry benchmarks.... would you be willing have anonymous data automatically submitted by RGP for analysis?
There would be NO additional charge for this service, the only requirement is that you agree to provide anonymous data for one year in exchange for seeing the results for one year.
The idea: you "give", and then you can "get" :)
Some specifics: membership, sales, and check-in trends vs the industry averages. There would be ZERO work required on your end.. RGP would automatically transmit the data.
One example: we are working on a membership retention analysis tool, and it would be nice to compare your retention vs. the industry average.
Realistically the first analytics wouldn't come until later this year after enough data has been collected, but the data could start to be collected soon.
Comments
I would agree to this.
Yeah, let me know.
Would love to be a part.
Sounds like a great idea.
Ok... this thread is back from the dead.
The next update will include an option to "submit your data anonymously" to be used to track industry trends. It's a small checkbox for a HUGE feature. It'll be a work in progress how to analyze and use the data... but hopefully by the CWA event this May, we can have some preliminary analysis done.
And don't worry... this will be an opt-in feature.
For the financial data, be very careful about converting currencies between countries. In other words, don't just take all the Canadian data and convert it by the exchange rate on some random day (by the way, this is exactly what the CWA did for their salary survey). Exchange rates can change dramatically from month to month, and the real story may be very different from what the exchange rate suggests, even when it is stable.
It may be better to group financial data by country. That could also be a terrible idea, unless there are enough gyms participating in that country to swamp any one business's data and prevent any specific insight from being divined!
In general I like the idea of having industry data to compare with, but it can be very tricky. If your data sources are primarily big gyms in large cities, that will produce a very different picture than if you get mostly data from smaller gyms. Maybe you should consider normalizing your data to make it more representative of the industry as a whole, as opposed to your respondents (I think some polling firms do this).
I really want to compare my gym's performance against "gyms like mine", whatever the heck that means.
Good feedback John, thanks.
I suspect this whole project will be a "throw things against the wall and see what sticks" adventure. Meaning, we'll start collecting the data and just continue to tweak and improve the reporting as time moves forward.
We'll definitely break out the metrics (where it makes sense) by country.
And where appropriate, using normalized metrics will make the most sense. For example.... percent CHANGE in revenue or membership year-over-year is good metric that can be used to compare gyms in any country, urban, rural, etc. So rather than comparing actual hard values... comparing percents for example.
The reporting will be online, so it'll be easy to improve and tweak as we get feedback.
The other thing we will need to do eventually is having people supply a little more information. For example, our product categories in RGP don't break out "day passes" or "youth". So we will need to have people group their RGP revenue categories into categories.
The technology making this system work can be "refreshed" daily by the gyms, thus it'll be very easy to roll out improved categorization in an incremental fashion.
Thanks for the feedback!
Andy
ps. The technology that is going to make this work is *real-time* replication of your local MySQL database to the cloud. Yup, a real time copy of your database available to web based applications. The replication is already working at two test gyms. Industry data is just a small benefit of this technology... the true power will be in the web/mobile enabled functionality that I can start to put into RGP. I'm very excited! :)
Also, can you give us a clear overview of the security precautions that will ensure that having a live version of my SQL database in the cloud cannot possibly result in any outcome that would make me uncomfortable?
First... having a cloud version of your database is an "opt-in" choice. Meaning, if it makes you uncomfortable then by no means do you have to do it.
As for security... we take the industry standard precautions of protecting all online data stores. Naturally we don't want to spell-out exactly what precautions we take.
Of course, no system is impenetrable as evidence by all the various breaches we hear about in the news. All we can do is protect the data using the best practices and technology available. One advantage we have is that our development team is a single person - me. Thus there is only one "weak link" in the chain - me :) Typically, all these breaches you read about begin with a human somewhere screwing up.... often because they had access to the data when they didn't need to.
Your local data has always been one-router away from the internet as well. Meaning, a simple misconfiguration on your router at your gym would expose your local MySQL database to the internet evil-doers as well. Or having a piece of malware software get installed on your front-desk computer could do it as well. Risk of data theft can happen to local or web based database.
That being said, a reminder that all waiver information has been in the cloud since the beginning anyways (since it is a web based system). And that includes all the typical customer details. So the possible exposure of customer information has always been a risk. Online database replication adds more data to the mix, but none that hackers particularly care about. They want the customer info - which has already been in the cloud. Additionally, your offsite backups have existed in the cloud as well - albeit in an obscure file format encrypted with your master key. But there in the cloud as well.
Bottom line - we take data security seriously.... and will do our absolute best to protect it. And having cloud copies of the database will only increase our vigilance.
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