Omg! There are, like, soo many buttons! This is soo hard.

I’m thinking about starting up a gym. It’s a can’t-lose business! I got the idea after talking to an employee at the gym I currently go to, who told me they never have even 2% of total members there at one time.

“Holy shit!” I said, looking around, and proceeded to do some slow, clunky arithmetic in my brain, “That means this gym is making a squajillion pounds every month!”

“Something like that,” said the gym bunny, nodding his pretty little head.

It’s a brilliant scheme and I don’t know why I didn’t come up with it sooner. Because here’s the thing, the beautiful thing — the one, undeniable truth: people hate looking fat but they also hate going to the gym.

All you need to do is suck them in when they’re feeling like crap, then gently encourage them to stay away after that. You probably want to draw the suckers back in every now and then — a gratis training session, perhaps, or a couple of free spin classes — just so they feel like, maybe one day, they might start coming back regularly and so keep renewing their memberships. In the meantime, you pillage their bank account every month for a princely sum — the exact price of their body image shame.

Remember that episode of Friends, when Chandler complains about how he is paying for the gym every month when he doesn’t even go? And Ross mocks him for being a wimp, and offers to accompany him to the gym to help him to quit? And they get back afterwards with Ross signed up for the gym too, and their plan turns into a scheme to cut the gym off at the source by closing their bank accounts…

That is the sort of gym I’m going to run.

So here’s my winning gym strategy:

1. Get gym and gym equipment

I already can see the flashing neon sign: “The Jam Tart’s School for Rock Hard Rockin Bodies – where flab turns to fab, where sad turns to stud. Give us your body and we will give you bodylicious. Come inside and let us smack you into shape.”

My gym equipment will be shiny and chrome and space age, with complicated levers and pulleys and buttons and bells and whistles, making it impossible to figure out how to use.

2. Hire ridiculously sexy sales staff

There will be just 2 requirements of staff: Must be hot. Must be natural flirts. Of course, the job description will also spout crap about natural aptitude with people, a minimum education level, and non-discriminatory policies. Ha. Actually, I aim to create the gym version of Abercrombie & Fitch. In addition I will preferentially select insecure morons, so I can take advantage of them.

The level of hotness will be carefully judged. Staff have to give the vibe that such hotness is attainable in the gym, so that the average schmucks walking off the street actually think they too can reach such bodily perfection.

I is so smaht

Uniforms will be minimal and lycra, and it will be a requirement of all staff to douse themselves in baby oil for that extra glistening sheen. Mmm.

Salaries will all be sales based. In monthly employee meetings, I will name and shame and mock the staff with lowest sales. Those with the highest sales will be my darlings and I shall treat them favourably.

I will create an atmosphere of competition and fear and nepotism. It will be like a high school, with cliques and gossip and popularity contests, and I shall rule over it all like the queen bee.

Some people might call that exploitation. I call it business.

3. Entice people

Well, this is just basic marketing – all I have to do is make people feel bad about themselves. The dumbass public make this the easiest step. I will use handy marketing guide “50 Ways to Be Persuasive” as my bible.

Essentially, the gym will be priced double what it is worth and every month I will run a different campaign that gives 20% off to new suckers members. I will ramp up campaigns in the new year, because of all the fools that make resolutions, and just before summer, to play on people’s insecurities about appearing in swimsuits after a few months of being comfortably wrapped up in woollies all winter.

4. Make it fecking hard to quit

In this way, I will take inspiration from that Friends episode.

Anyone that wants to quit won’t be able to do so by phone or email; they’ll have to come in to the gym in person. There, they will be met by one of the most important employees I hire: the “Directors of Membership”. Internally, these people will be known as the “Sucker Retainers”. There’ll be a ditsy hot chick for guys and a handsome slab of muscles for the girls. They will be the hottest, flirtiest people on staff, with the additional knack of making people feel even worse about themselves. They’ll also have the power to offer a greater discount (30%). They should also have no morals and the brains of lichen, just in case they start feeling sorry for poorer members.

The Sucker Retainers will be my aide-de-camps, the position which every staff member desires to reach, because it is there that they will truly feel secure in the knowledge that I like them best of all, that they are popular.

5. Watch the money roll in

My favourite part of all.

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