Growing Gym Location to 10,000+ Members

Can you tell us a little bit about your business?

The brand is Gym Location, we provide large, high-use, 24 hour commercial facilities in busy central locations. We're operating 4 locations in and around London, including Sutton, Bromley, Crawley and Eastbourne, with a 5th location coming soon to Maidstone. All sites are 15,000+sf and have over 3,000+ members per location.

For large gyms, we operate a pretty low staffing model, with one manager per location and some centralised staff that work across the group for marketing, maintenance and administration.

What systems had you previously used?

I've been in the fitness industry for over 20 years, running everything from Yoga studios, HIIT studios and gyms. I've worked with franchised brands and now my own private brand. During that time, I've used pretty much all the systems out there, Mind Body, Club Wise, Club Right and more.

With all other systems, the same problems existed; the interface was clunky, they felt old and outdated and were very hard to use, which made training our teams hard and made the experience for the customers even worse. I picked other systems because they were offering all-in-one solutions with heart rate tracking, marketing and the works. But later realised that most of these features either didn't work or were not to the standard we needed.

What made you decide to use Gymflow initially?

One of the first things I noticed when seeing Gymflow for the first time on the demo was how easily everything was organised. It was intuitive, clean, and everything could be done in 2-3 clicks maximum. I liked that the payment system was modern and instant and allowed customers to use things like Apple Pay & Google Pay, which are essential these days, yet most other systems still dont utilise them.

How has Gymflow helped power your growth with each new location?

Gymflow has allowed us to build a repeatable process that makes opening new locations easy and systematic. For each new location, we start advertising 16 weeks out from launch and capture new leads into Gymflow's lead pipeline, which allows us to measure which marketing channels are working for us. From about 10 weeks out, we go live and start pre-selling memberships in Gymflow, and for the majority of our clubs, this means we are cashflow positive from day one, with every gym opening with between 1,000-1,500 members on day one.

What features do you use the most that you couldn't live without?

Previously, we did this using landing pages and seperate marketing systems like MailChimp, but now we do everything in Gymflow. The Gymflow lead pipeline is one of the features we couldn't live without; it saves the staff about 3 minutes per lead vs messing around between multiple systems.

The automatic failed payment re-try system is also a big time saver, saving our admin team around 20-30 hours per month of follow-ups. As well as the live reporting dashboards, this is really easy to use, and all the numbers I need are right in front of me.

What advice would you have for other owners considering making the switch?

I've done this for 20-odd years, working for different companies and running my own business. I've tried them all, this is the one. I would never change. This is the best one I've ever used.