I'm seeing the question being asked more: "How can I accept cryptocurrency as payment at my gym?"
Before I answer the question, I want to preface this whole post with: I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR AND THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.
🔥 Crypto Is HOT 🔥
I get it, crypto is hot right now, and that's got a lot of gym owners looking to take Bitcoin or Ethereum as payments for their fitness and personal training services. With the amount the entire crypto space has been exploding - why wouldn't you?
The logical thought process would be to want to accept crypto of payment, but as of today, this is the wrong answer, and will lead you to waste a lot of time and energy on something that will not yield you anything.
Why Crypto As Payments Is A Fallacy Today
As much of a crypto believer I am, there's some really distinct reasons why it will not work as a form of payment today.
These reasons will be why any attempt to take crypto as a payment will likely result in you wasting a ton of time, energy and thought to it. Spend the 5 mintues reading this post, then put the idea to bed - focus your energy on helping your clients and growing your gym.
Remember: your time is the only asset you really have.
Government and Tax Issues
For the sake of this post, I'm going to gloss over the most glaring fallacy of accepting crypto as gym payment today:
The ongoing and emerging governmental restrictions and laws that are popping up (and will continue to pop up as crypto emerges).
There's untold accounting, tax, and reporting issues with accepting crypto as a form of payment for your gym. These will vary state to state and country to country and they'll likely put a ton of liability on you and add work for your bookkeeping and accounting teams.
It's Not Easy
Study the world's most successful businesses - they grease the rails for you to spend money.
Amazon has one click buy it now. Netflix just keeps taking their monthly fees while you binge watch your favorite shows.
PushPress has gone to great lengths to make our sign up and onboarding flows super simple to get your clients to join your gym and pay you with ease.
Payments HAVE to be easy. The more friction you put in front of someone, the less likely you are to get paid.
I understand some of your clients might be crypto savvy, but many will not be. But even for the most savvy crypto users, there will be many more steps to make payment - and it will be much more difficult.
Also (and this is a big one), due to the inherent technologies of blockchain today - there's no way to setup a recurring payment from one wallet to another without verification from the sender.
Which means every time you want to take payment for your gym services, you would be relying on your client to initiate the payment and the best you can do is remind them to pay.
That effectively takes Payments back to 1960 - and negates all automations and business process we can put around the payments flow.
Accumulation Mode
And that brings us to the biggest reason why any crypto payments strategy will fail in your gym. The concept of an "Accumulation Mode" for crypto.
Let's be real - the main reason you want to accept crypto at your fitness studio is because it's a long term appreciating asset.
You are seeking to accumulate as much as you can, and taking it as a payment will help you accelerate that growth.
You have this vision of ending up with 10 Bitcoins or 100 Ethereum tokens (valued at $58,000 and $4000 at the time of this writing) over the course of the year... and since you think Bitcoin will be going to $500,000 - that's enough to retire on!
The problem with this train of thought, IS SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE.
Why would they pay you in Bitcoin (or any crypto) when they see it going 10/100/1000x in value over time?
FOMO
Fear of Missing Out is a real thing - and no one wants to feel like they're not maximizing their upside with crypto... that's why they're all invested in it.
The people you think will pay you in crypto are more than likely in accumulation mode too. The last thing anyone wants to be is that guy who paid 10,000 Bitcoin for 2 pizzas.
Bitcoin, and all crypto today, are seen as a potentially life changing investment opportunity. The last thing anyone would trade a potentially life changing investment in for is a good or service that has no future value.
This is the inherent flaw with spending Bitcoin for a Tesla, a movie ticket, or your fitness services. There's no inherent future value swapping one investment for another.
(And yes, sadly no one will view their health as an investment on pay with Bitcoin).
How Your Gym Can Generate Crypto
Occam's razor: The simplest answer often is the right answer.
Finally we land here. The goal is you want to add to your crypto stores as an exchange for your gym memberships and services. It's so much easier than you think and avoids ALL of these entanglements above.
- Setup a personal or business account on the exchange of your choice (Coinbase and Gemini are dead simple easy systems that support business accounts)
- Decide the % of your monthly recurring revenue you'd like to allocate into Crypto.
- Once a month, transfer that % of revenue from your bank account to your crypto account.
- Buy the crypto at market price.
All you need to do - just buy the crypto. You can do this at an interval quicker than monthly, if you want to capture the coin at a more "current" price, that's a decision of how much time you want to spend managing the process.
My personal opinion, crypto is a worthwhile investment to continually put a small percentage of your disposable income into. Consider it a retirement plan - put money into the account and don't look back.
