2025 is almost here, and as a gym owner trying to level up your gym’s nutrition coaching program there is no better time than now to do a year end review, and plan for the year to come.
Taking a good look at what’s working, what is not, and assessing your current processes, procedures, and offerings is an excellent plan moving into 2025. It’s time to identify areas for improvement, make strategic changes and plan the new years exciting events so you can enhance member satisfaction and drive revenue growth for your gym’s nutrition coaching program.
In this article we will provide a few tips for you to get started.
Step #1 - Start With Reflection
At Healthy Steps Nutrition and HSN Mentoring we think reflection on your overall program is important in order to move forward. Look at client success, coaching success, and income success.
Ask yourself these questions for each category:
What went well in 2024
Where do you feel there is room for improvement
What does success look like to you at the end of 2025
Keep in mind each category above (client success, coaching success, income success) and make a plan moving forward to improve in the areas you write down for each category.
Step #2 - Review Your Year To Date KPI's
Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) during your year end review is essential for the financial health and growth of your nutrition coaching program. By monitoring these metrics, you can make data-driven decisions, improve efficiency, and maximize your reach and return.
Here are some KPI’s we suggest you track that are directly related to the categories of success noted above:
Leads – how many potential clients are coming into your funnel on a monthly basis, where do they come from, and are you following up with them?
Conversion To Free Intro – Out of the leads that come into your funnel, how many of them are booking a free intro to sit down and talk to you?
Conversion To Client – Of the leads that booked a free intro, how many of them become nutrition clients? We love to see 75% conversion.
Retention – How long are clients staying with you that converted from the free intro to client? Our goal for you is that you retain clients for at least 9-12 months.
Revenue – Does your nutrition coaching program make money? If you get leads, you convert them and they stay a long time, but you aren’t making much money, then it’s time to raise rates. But if you are missing the mark on moving clients through the above pipeline, understanding where you are getting stuck and improving those processes is key in 2025.
Our point is knowing is half the battle. If you don’t know your KPI’s, you won’t know where to improve.
Step #3 - Review Your Current Pricing And Offers
If your income success was low in 2024 – this section will be important for you.
A pricing year end review is especially important if you are converting and keeping clients, but not making much money. Your nutrition coaching business should serve you as much as it serves your clients. Pricing too low is a common thing we see with many gyms. They price so much lower than their current gym membership prices because they don’t think that nutrition coaching is as valuable to clients as fitness. In our mind they are equal and they should be treated as such.
As a gym owner, put yourself in your nutrition coaches shoes. Are you charging enough for your nutrition coach to get paid enough to want to stay with you? Charging $99/month for nutrition coaching is not going to provide enough income for a nutrition coach to make even a part time living.
Our recommendations are to have a standard and high accountability option with a 3 month commitment to start. Pricing your standard between $179 – $229 per month, and your higher accountability option between $279 – $329/month is a great place to start.
Step #4 - Review Your Coaches
There are a couple different areas your coaches need to be reviewed.
They need to be happy to provide coaching to your clients in their current role as a nutrition coach in your gym
They need to be performing well as a nutrition coach and improving clients overall health
Nutrition Coach Satisfaction
Having regular meetings with your nutrition coaching team is imperative for their success and yours. You want them to be happy and feel valued or their performance will suffer which in turn will bleed over to their level of client care. As gym owners we get busy and sometimes forget about nurturing the relationships we have with our coaches and providing support if needed.
I love to ask coaches:
Are you happy with your current role and if not what would make that different
Are there opportunities you see that I’m missing
Is there anything you need from me in that will give you the ability to do your job better
Nutrition Coach Job Performance
The other aspect to reviewing your nutrition coach is verifying they are professional and doing a good job. In most situations clients will let you know otherwise, however we have seen clients quit because of poor nutrition coach performance that the gym owner was not aware of.
Trust but verify is a motto I like to go by.
At a minimum, doing monthly checkins on your coaches performance is imperative, and at HSN Mentoring we us an app for client communication which makes it easy to verify how our coaches are communicating with their clients.
Our check ins with our coaches look something like this:
Spot-check 1-2 clients in the app (1 new and 1 ongoing if possible) for the following:
Is the client getting a monthly meeting with their coach
What do the meeting reminders look like, and are they being sent 24 hours prior
Is the coach reminding them of best practices with meetings according to the device used
Check the coaches notes for up to three months on random clients:
Look for Bright spots
What were some client challenges
What type of action items did the coach provide
Are their clients making noted progress
What kind of habit mapping is taking place
Are their clients leveraging meal photos and feedback
Coach development attendance:
Coaches should do 1 continuing education endeavor each month. Typical options for HSN coaches are:
Attend a live webinar or coaches corner, or watch a recording of one
Re visit a module in the online platform per month
Coaches attendance to monthly mentoring call with nutrition business mentor at HSN
Coaches should be attending this monthly call every month and completing the action steps assigned by their HSN business mentor
Social Media Check In
Check marketing efforts to make sure recipe posts, reels and success stories are all being prepared and posted as required
Ensure the coach doesn’t need anything from the owner in this area
Client Success
Are clients with a goal to lose weight finding success
Are clients who want to improve their training or exercise habit doing so
And are their clients set out to gain healthy habits to improve their lives finding success and learning those new skills
Keeping up with your nutrition coaches happiness and job performance is the key to success of any nutrition coaching program. One of the most common reasons why nutrition programs in gyms fail is because the nutrition coach quits and the gym owner can’t keep up with the client load and admin responsibilities themselves.
Getting ahead of any potential issues and keeping a clear path of communication is imperative for program success.
Step #5 - Have A Staff Year End Review Meeting And Plan For 2025
After all the other steps are complete, get your staff involved. I love to see gyms do one big year review meeting where everybody gets to participate in planning events for the next year. In our gym this involves ordering coffee, getting updated staff photos and having a great chat.
We not only plan for our nutrition program, but we also plan gym events and find ways nutrition tips from the nutrition program can fit into them.
For the nutrition coaching program we suggest planning during the year end review:
Nutrition challenges
Nutrition talks
Nutrition Community Partnership Events
Nutrition Monthly Themes if there are any
Nutrition Board Updates and topics
Ways the nutrition program can fit into fitness events
Wrap Up
Heading into the new year after having this year end review done is refreshing. It feels great to have a plan and move forward with new goals and fresh ideas. Getting your staff involved and collaborating together on the future helps with buy in and feeling valued as a team member.
Cheers to 2025!
