What makes a Category Leader?
As elements for women continues to expand its fitness club network into key US markets, we
are frequently taking time to evaluate prospective development groups.
Our team has had many collective years in business development, and elements? represents
the "best of" with respect to many of the business systems marketing and training programs
which we have developed, making us the category leader in fitness clubs for women. Our solid indstry reputation, combined with the buzz around the fresh elements branding, has been attracting the attention many very seasoned business owners. We enjoy working with these developers, as experienced operators clearly understand the value of the brand, and the services which we provide to our clubs. This tends to make our job as brand directors easier.
Take, for example, a small project which is in development - enhanced employee handbooks.
Our previous employee handbooks were fine, and very comprehensive, but on the quest to
always be the leader in the industry, we sought to develop a truly unique and powerful
employee handbook, one which each employee, at each elements club, would not only enjoy
reading, but would refer back to as a training guide. We enlisted 5 members of our operations
and creative team, to spearhead the 3 week project. The task was to add 25 pages of
inspiration, brand knowledge, upgraded service standards and measures, as well as streamlined
"sales focused" psychology to the book, which would be re-designed to resemble a
personal journal, handheld with a coil binding. The result is one of the finest employee
handbooks I have ever come across, with the input of an entire spectrum of retail, operations,
and design minds - it is hard to place a dollar value on this, because again, the original
handbook was already quite good, and I believe many direcotrs would have certainly not seen a
need to enhance. Our job is to always be looking for ways to improve performance of the brand,
and the clubs.
This new manual will be given to each staff member at each elements location, along with the
proper re-training. I am sure this will directly increase the already high service levels and daily
production at the local clubs.
