We all know the phrase ‘a good problem to have’. And I think most of us in the fitness industry would agree that being in the position where you can expand to a second site is a good problem to have.
But a good problem is still a problem and the approach that worked at your first site might not translate directly into success for the second. Every area is different, in demographic, footfall, space, transport links. And that is to say nothing of scalability problems many independent gym owners eventually run into.
Most independent gyms and fitness clubs aren’t set up with scalability in mind for good reason.
It isn’t down to a lack of ambition or vision, it is just a matter of practicality. Setting up an independent gym or fitness club is an exercise in constant problem solving and few owners have the luxury of thinking beyond the walls of their first facility.
But that is today’s question. Once your first site is up and running, will the systems, procedures, and culture that you have put into practice at your first site successfully scale?
Let’s take a look at what happens and why, including a look at an Ashbourne partner that went from their original site to 24 sites!
Why Single-Site Systems Break Under Expansion
When a gym is growing, informal systems work well enough. But as soon as a second site opens, that picture fragments. There are now two sets of members, two sets of staff on the books, two sets of accounts to manage, and if left to their own devices they will soon be managed in two completely different ways.
This is forward planning and a unified approach is vital.
This fragmentation tends to deepen with each additional location. One site uses a spreadsheet to track memberships, another uses a different piece of software that was installed by whoever managed the opening. The result is a reporting landscape that makes genuine oversight and insight nearly impossible.
No gym owner wants to be faced with a situation where, to understand how the business is actually performing, someone has to manually pull data from multiple sources, reconcile them, and produce a summary.
A reliance on manual admin for tasks will only cause more pain, and more potential failure points, as an operation grows.
Chasing membership payments and renewals, access queries, direct debit failures, these are tasks that scale directly with member numbers. The small bad habits and inefficiencies that were manageable with one site becomes genuinely unmanageable with two, three, or four. Luckily, there is a solution. One that can be implemented at any time, not just at the founding of your first facility.
The Difference Automation And Centralisation Makes To An Expanding Fitness Business
The independent gym and fitness club owners who are able to scale their businesses well tend to share one characteristic.
When setting up a new site, transplanting the systems that worked was a main focus, not as an afterthought. They know that certain procedures, processes, and technology made their first gym work. They know that if this second, third, or fourth gym is going to live up to that standard, it will need to follow this pattern.
They understand that a centralised gym management system, one that handles membership data, payment collection, access control, and reporting across all sites from a single point, is not a luxury for larger businesses. It is part of the successful formula that made those larger businesses possible in the first place.
Centralised membership management means less repeated manual admin, less potential points of failure and less effort to get the full picture. It means that a direct debit failure at any location will trigger the same recovery process that has been put in place, handled the same way.
The ability to sit down on any given morning and just know how all your sites are performing is invaluable. No need to contact managers or frontdesk staff, you can just see the information in one place, in a consistent format, at the click of a button.
This kind of insight and clarity changes how you are able to run a fitness business. Rather than reacting to problems after they have already grown, you can see them forming. If the new site is experiencing a decline in membership renewals while the old site is still growing something is amiss.
If one location is suffering more payment failures, or errors in sign-up, it is important to be able to identify the issue in real time.
And that is to say nothing of the other important benefit of centralisation. Consistency.
When every site operates on the same platform, with the same processes, the member experience becomes predictable. Your fitness business is a brand. It is a brand that is easy to manage when you are just at one site, but a bad reputation for one facility can quickly translate to bad word-of-mouth for other sites.
Staff training is simpler because you have the same systems in place everywhere. And when it comes to opening a new site, you are not building processes from scratch, you are replicating the formula that you know works.
What Stops Independent Gym Owners From Getting There
If centralised systems are so clearly valuable, why do so many multi-site independents tend to veer towards a more fragmented approach? Part of the answer is a combination of time and resources.
The moment when a gym most needs to invest in proper infrastructure is also the moment when it is most stretched, cash is going into the new site, staff time is consumed by the opening, and nobody has the capacity to overhaul their back-office systems at the same time.
Part of the answer is also inertia. A system that is working, even imperfectly, is hard to replace once it is up and running. The prospect of migrating membership data, retraining staff, and changing payment processes while the business keeps running is daunting enough that many operators put it off indefinitely.
But the cost of delay is real, and it accumulates. Every month spent on manual reconciliation is a month where errors go unnoticed. Every direct debit failure that requires personal follow-up is time that could have been spent on something more valuable.
The gym owners who navigate this well tend to make plans ahead of time, picking the hardware, software, and procedures that they know were vital to their success and making sure they are implemented in the new site.
Foundry Gym: From One Gym to Twenty-Four
Now that we’ve gone through the theory, let’s take a look at the practical.
Foundry Gym has, at time of writing, grown to 24 sites across England and Wales, with locations stretching from their Birmingham heartland to Newcastle-under-Lyme and across the Welsh border into Wrexham. A further nine sites are planned, in locations as far apart as Bristol, Swansea, Kent and Stafford. This is a fantastic regional expansion by any metric, and that success was certainly not built by a reliance on informal systems.
Co-founder Joe, who reflects candidly on the business’s origins, admits they initially treated it more like a hobby than a commercial enterprise.
Certainly no grand plans. And that is great. As we discussed above, Foundry Gym is a great proof that just because a gym wasn’t set-up with multi-site expansion in mind, that it is still a very real possibility done right.
The gyms Joe runs today are, in his own words, ‘unrecognisable’ from where they started. That transformation was not just about finding the right locations or building the right culture, it was about putting the operational infrastructure in place to support the pace of growth they were pursuing.
In the early days, the problems were familiar ones. Collecting payment was a persistent headache. Cash and card transactions required manual handling, and following up on members who had not paid was time-consuming and inconsistent. This is exactly the kind of friction that, at one or two sites, is irritating but manageable. Scaled across a growing number of locations, it would have become a serious operational constraint.
As Joe put it, simply getting members to pay was one of the biggest challenges they faced before addressing their systems, a problem that was substantially resolved by switching to automated direct debit management.
The impact of getting the operational infrastructure right has been significant. Foundry’s partnership with Ashbourne has, in Joe’s assessment, played a considerable part in the business’s growth.
‘Our business has exploded in popularity, really, and I think Ashbourne has played a big part in that. Ashbourne allowed us to put the stuff in place to be able to do that.’
The message from Foundry is clear. Growth across their multi-site gym business did not happen in spite of operational systems, it happened because of them. The ability to open new sites without recreating the same administrative chaos each time, to maintain consistent member experiences across locations, and to keep financial visibility across the whole estate are not incidental benefits. They are what make the growth sustainable.
For Foundry, this has translated into a clear position when it comes to onboarding new franchisees. The question of which systems to use is not left open for discussion. When a new franchisee joins, there is a preferred list of suppliers and a shorter list of mandatory ones.
In Joe’s words:
‘When it comes to a new franchisee coming on board we basically have a preferred list of suppliers and we have some that you have to have as mandatory. Ashbourne is one of the mandatory ones.’
We can’t think of a better endorsement from an independent gym owner, and we are looking forward to many more years, and many more sites, with Foundry Gym.
And whether you have one facility or more, if you think Ashbourne Membership Management can help successfully scale your business just like Foundry, reach out today. Click here to book a demonstration with our in-house, UK based team and discover why our membership management software has become the cornerstone of businesses across the UK and Ireland.
Fair Rates For Fitness
If you are reading this, you are likely someone who cares about the UK’s fitness industry. If so, we ask for another minute of your time as we discuss something important to all of us within the fitness industry.
Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been proud to work in this dynamic, innovative sector for nearly three decades. At time of writing the UK government has decided to increase business rates as part of the latest budget. While we are always happy to pay our way, we believe that these rates do not acknowledge the incredible benefit that independent gyms and fitness clubs bring to society.
Every party manifesto claims that they want the people of the UK to be healthier, happier and more active. But when the time comes to match action to rhetoric, our industry is too often left out.
So if you want to make your voice heard alongside the hundreds who have already acted, follow the link here to Fair Rates for Fitness, a campaign being championed by our partners over at the Gym Owner’s Forum.
