The Recruitment & Replacement dimension of your GMLB report is the starting point for understanding the structure of your membership. Before the report looks at retention curves, engagement patterns, or demographic sustainability, it establishes the most basic question: how many members are joining your club each year, how many are leaving, and what does the balance between those two numbers tell you about where your membership is headed?
The dimension does not measure recruitment activity or the success of your marketing. It measures the outcome — the net flow of members through the club, and whether that flow is sufficient to maintain, grow, or allow your membership to gradually decline.
Joiners and leavers
Your report shows the number of members who joined and left the club across the analysis period. These figures establish the raw inputs to the membership lifecycle — joiners are the source of all future established members, and leavers represent the attrition the club must replace.
A positive net change — more joiners than leavers — is the precondition for membership growth. But net change alone is an incomplete measure of health. A club can show positive net change while still carrying significant structural vulnerability if joiners are not being successfully retained and the club is relying on a high and sustained volume of new recruitment simply to stay in place.
The replacement ratio
The replacement ratio is the key metric in this dimension. It is calculated by dividing the number of joiners by the number of leavers. A ratio above 1.0× indicates the club is recruiting more members than it is losing. A ratio below 1.0× indicates the reverse.
Replacement ratio · Joiners vs leavers
Recruiting 25% more members than are leaving. Net positive, but the higher joiner volume is reflected in elevated early-tenure exposure.
A ratio above 1.0× is generally positive, but its significance depends on context. If a club is achieving a strong replacement ratio through high recruitment volumes, the report will also show that reflected in the early-tenure exposure figure — more joiners means a higher proportion of the membership is still in the most vulnerable phase of the lifecycle. Recruitment is creating an opportunity; whether that opportunity is realised depends on what happens to those members in the years that follow.
Churn rate
Churn rate measures the proportion of the active membership that departed in a given year. It contextualises the leaver number relative to the size of the membership, and makes comparison across clubs of different sizes meaningful.
Established base is highly stable. Recruitment needed mainly to allow net growth.
High volume of leavers each year. Recruitment is substantially replacement-driven, not growth-driven.
A club with a low churn rate is building on a stable foundation — recruitment can be focused on growth. A club with elevated churn is, in effect, running to stand still. Even a strong replacement ratio in a high-churn club can mask the fact that the membership is cycling through a large number of people who are not staying long enough to become established.
The risk rating
The Recruitment & Replacement risk rating reflects whether the club is generating sufficient joiners to replace leavers, how the replacement ratio has trended over time, and whether the churn rate suggests a structurally stable or structurally fragile membership base.
A Strong rating indicates a consistent replacement ratio above 1.0× and a churn rate at or below benchmark — the membership base is genuinely growing and the established cohort is expanding over time.
A Moderate or Moderate-Elevated rating typically reflects either a replacement ratio that is close to breakeven, a higher-than-benchmark churn rate, or a pattern where strong headline recruitment is masking an underlying retention problem that is not yet visible in the net change figure.
Recruitment & Replacement is the first dimension of the GMLB report. It sets the context for everything that follows — how well the members who are joining are being retained, how engaged they are becoming, and whether the pipeline is building a membership that is structurally sustainable.