Welcome back for the third and final part of our series on starting a fitness lifting competition at your gym or Crossfit box. Congratulations on getting this far. It’s been a lot of work, but the end is near. You’re almost ready to start your fitness competition.

You’re almost ready to launch your fitness event and reap the rewards. You’ll have hundreds of people visiting your gym to watch the competition, and, if you put up your FitnessTexter posters, you’ll most likely get some new gym members as a result. As we’ve said in part 1 and part 2, competitions are a great way to increase the visibilty of your business, gain valuable marketing experience, and ideally, increase your gym’s membership. Without further ado, here are the final 4 steps to starting your functional fitness competition.

7. Meet with City Officials to Discuss Necessary Permitting

Time for a little trip to the city hall. You might be able to do this via email, but in-person visits are always more fun and get more accomplished. You’re holding an event outside of the scope of your business. You know what that means? You’ll most likely need a permit. Cities have permitting requirements for nearly everything. Some cities even have water slide permits! Some permits are free and some cost a little money. Pay the piper and get your permits. You’ll most likely need a one-time event permit and maybe a portable-bathroom permit(unless you are going to have everyone using your business’s bathroom).

Be smart and get this done WAY before the event. You never know what kind of bureaucracy you’ll run into. Instead of holding your fitness lifting competition without city permission(and take the risk of the fire marshall showing up and shutting it down in the middle of the event), it’s best to have all necessary permits on hand. Be prepared for the worst and you’ll be ready for anything.

8. Create Informational Advertising Posters & Marketing Materials

The best part of holding a fitness competition at your gym is promoting it. Who doesn’t like to get people excited about something? Have your graphic designer design a marketing flyer for your business and create a separate signup page on your website for participants. Print off 100 high-quality copies and distribute them to your local gyms, yoga studios, CrossFit boxes, dog parks, grocery stores, etc. Get the word out! Make a Facebook page for the event so that people can start sharing it. Create “Like” contests. Pay for some AdWords advertising and get the word out. You need LOTS of people talking about your event so that it goes viral in your community. Have your current social media agency focus their efforts on promoting your fitness event. Your gym will get the residual benefit of being the host of the event. Don’t make the event be about your gym, make it about the participants. Get them excited and talking about the event, and your gym will start showing up in Facebook feeds and Twitter posts with you even asking people to promote it. FACEBOOK POST HERE

9. Don’t Do It All Yourself: Delegate Tasks & Responsibility

You can’t do everything yourself; and don’t try. You’ve got a gym to manage, employee salaries to pay, insurance premiums to pay, clients to train, and more, on top of trying to plan your fitness lifting competition. Assign takes and deadlines to your managers. Make good use of your time. That last thing you want is to burn out from trying to plan your competition and run your business at the same time. Give people tasks and trust them to accomplish these tasks. Find a parking coordinator, a sponsorship coordinator, a marketing person, etc. Command your troops!

10. Execute Steps 1 – 9 & Enjoy the Results

You know when you need to do, now get it done! Schedule your expectations meeting with your managers now, call the city to see what permits you’ll need, email some large fitness companies to see if they want to get up a sponsorship, call your insurance agent and get a one-time policy, figure out the parking situation for your business, contact a talented graphic designer to make you some promotional posters(put your FitnessTexter codeword on these posters so that people who might be interested in trying your gym out will see your free week pass deal).

Finally….have fun! If you’ve got everything set up, go enjoy it! You’ll have hundreds of people in your gym, you’ll be showing off your facility, local athletes will be having a blast and creating friendships, and you’ll be the business owner at the center of it all. You’ll be known as the guy/girl who created new friendships in your cities fitness community, you’ll be responsible for people having a fun weekend competition, and you’ll learn a TON of valuable business skills as a result.

If you’ve held a successful event and want to let people know that you’re willing to offer tips, please leave a comment below. Thanks!

Image Credits:
Source: http://gillettenewsrecord.com
Source: http://multimedianewsroom.us