During its first year of business, I had the opportunity to work at Ascend Performance and Recovery. Unlike my public relations coursework experience where I worked on a specific project, working for a small, new business was challenging because I had to figure out where to start: what do we want to know, what information we have, and what do we need to find out.

At this point, Ascend was undergoing a brand transition from being strictly personal training to being an overall wellness and recovery facility. Consequently, we were faced with two questions: how do we get current clients to spend more at the gym, and how do we acquire new clients? The gym also did not have a consolidated consumer database, so I decided that the first thing we needed to know was who our consumers were, what services they use, and why. To figure this out, I designed and conducted a consumer satisfaction survey.

After a 2 week dissemination period, over half of the gym’s members responded to the survey. An important insight from the survey was that over 90 percent of clients learned about the gym via word-of-mouth referrals. Furthermore, we learned that 70 percent of Ascend’s current clients had been members for an average of 4 years. Overall, the survey helped us determine how to incorporate all customer segments into the gym’s ecosystem and what new amenities would best fulfill our clients needs.

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