With more than 35 years in the industry, Pablo Viñaspre has trained managers, advised chains, and led management and retention projects in different countries. Today he is the co-founder and CEO of FitnessKPI, and one of the people who best understands how members behave inside a club.
There is a sentence of his that summarises almost every retention issue:
“When you see a cancellation, you’re already too late.”
Cancellations are the end of the story.
The problem always starts months earlier… but most operators never notice it.
They focus on the usual numbers: how many members join, how many leave, and whether the month closes in green or in red.
You can compare with that, yes.
But you cannot understand what is really happening.
If you want to anticipate issues, there are three signs that immediately tell you retention is about to drop.
If there is one indicator Pablo considers “the real one”, it is this.
Adherence shows how many members remain active month after month from the moment they joined.
When you analyse adherence, you discover things like:
Adherence tells you when the leakage begins and helps you identify the exact point in the customer journey where you need to act.
If your curves fall at the beginning, the problem isn’t in month 12 — it’s in the first 90 days.
Pablo explains it with absolute clarity:
The club looks at billing and sees normality.
But in daily usage, the alarm is already triggered.
Attendance is the first crack in the habit.
And the habit is the variable that sustains everything else.
If you don’t capture those drops in the first 90 days, it doesn’t matter how many messages you send in month 11 — that member checked out mentally months ago.
This signal is gold, but almost no one measures it because you need technology capable of analysing very fine behavioural patterns.
When a member stops attending group classes, goes from coming three times a week to coming once, or from consuming services to consuming nothing… something has changed.
And that change is not accidental.
It often anticipates:
These micro-changes happen long before a cancellation.
Those who detect them in time can act: redirect, propose, hit the right lever.
Those who don’t, always arrive late.
Retention does not break the day a member signs a cancellation.
It breaks the day that member starts losing the habit… and no one detects it.
The cancellation is only the official notification.
If you really want to anticipate problems, don’t look at the end of the journey — look at the beginning.
And here is the key point: it’s not enough to see the data — you must activate it.
Detect signals on time, intervene when needed, and personalise actions based on what each member is experiencing. Not to create “more tasks,” but to improve retention, increase cross-sales, and attract new members.
Clubs that have taken this step work differently: they know what is happening, who needs attention, and which lever to move at each moment.
If you want to see how you could apply this approach in your own club, you can request information or a demo. Sometimes understanding how to activate your data becomes the turning point that changes the entire dynamic of your business.
