Why Ashbourne Runs Its Own Gym
How operating a real gym helps us build better systems
Ashbourne occupies an uncommon position in the UK fitness industry, given we are a gym membership management company that owns and operates The Fit Club Redditch, our very own fitness facility in the heart of the town.
Located, unsurprisingly, in Redditch, its convenient location near our UK Head Office in Birmingham meant when the chance to take over the facility emerged, it was an opportunity that was too good to pass up.
For over twenty years (at that point), we had prided ourselves as being a gym membership management company that didn’t mind getting into the thick of it. We know that a lot of our competitors build their products far away from the gym floor, or even without the fitness industry in their mind at all.
We wanted to take a different approach by stress testing our latest developments and innovations in a real, operational gym, day in, day out. So before any new development reaches our partner clubs, we make sure everything is run inside The Fit Club first, tested with real members and real staff, and against the same schedules and pressures that shape every independent gym and fitness club across the UK and Ireland.
More Than A Test Facility
The Fit Club Redditch gives every department in the Ashbourne team something that a production roadmap or client feedback could never replicate. It gives us a live environment where new developments meet actual gym conditions and our teams get to see whether their outputs survive contact with reality.
But we don’t use The Fit Club just to demonstrate new features and innovations. We use it to stress test, to make sure every aspect of our system stands up to the day-to-day club use. From the moment the doors open to the moment they shut.
And has been an invaluable asset to that end. A feature that looks great on paper can end up working (or not working) very differently when integrated into an live, pre-existing eco-system. One that might be being used by three different members of staff in three very different ways at any given time. By testing any changes or new features out in The Fit Club, we can reveal any flaws, weaknesses or concerns before they ever reach our partner gyms.
Staying Close To The Reality Of Gym Ownership
Anyone who has worked in the fitness industry for any length of time knows that ‘ideal conditions’ rarely last long in an independent gym. Whether it is staff sickness, membership dips, equipment faults or last-minute cover, any one of these (and many more besides) can start to derail what had previously been a smooth running afternoon.
While a membership management company that helps gyms deal with their support tickets and onboarding calls is providing a value service, they won’t be seeing the whole picture, and that isn’t where Ashbourne wants to be.
Operating The Fit Club helps us to close that gap. It helps put us here at Ashbourne on the same page as the gyms we work with, dealing with the same admin, the same member expectations, the same success metrics, and, of course, the same pressures around the margins. Every operational challenge we face at The Fit Club feeds directly back into how we build, maintain and improve our systems.
Introducing Dieter
And with that in mind, we are pleased to introduce one of the newest members of the Ashbourne team, Dieter.
At 6 foot 9, he is hard to miss!
While he is an Ashbourne employee, Dieter has joined The Fit Club as General Manager. He will be spending the running the gym on the ground before moving into Ashbourne’s sales team.
As part of our ongoing plans to maximise the benefit The Fit Club can provide to Ashbourne, Dieter’s time there is a perfect fit. By spending time as part of The Fit Club’s operational team, Dieter will build up practical, first-hand experience and understanding of runs using Ashbourne’s system, this is lived experience that theory alone could never teach on such a granular level. He’ll be handling everything from rotas to the pressures of member retention, all while learning how Ashbourne’s membership management system helps to make the day to day running of a gym that much easier.
From Gym Floor Experience To Better Conversations With Gym Owners
Across our nearly thirty years of experience in the fitness industry, we’ve seen that any conversation grounded in genuine operational experience carries more weight than one where someone is just reading off a list of product features.
When Dieter moves to Ashbourne’s sales team, he will be speaking to gym owners having recently managed the same pressures he will have faced: staffing gaps, member churn, and the daily balance between service quality and cost control.
Already in the short time he has been there, Dieter has learned just what makes Ashbourne’s services so invaluable when it comes to running an independent gym full-time.
In our experience, independent gym and fitness club owners don’t want a pitch from someone who has never set foot inside a gym, they want to talk shop with someone who knows the industry. If the person on the other end of the phone has experience dealing with the sort of problems they are having, all the better. Dieter’s time at The Fit Club will not only give him that knowledge, but also allow him to funnel more insights back to Ashbourne, some of which will make it onto our next articles.
What The Fit Club Series Will Cover
Which leads us neatly onto what’s next for Dieter and The Fit Club. Upcoming articles in this series will cover everything from what Dieter noticed in his opening weeks running the gym, to how to get more value from a gym’s existing software and systems, what shapes genuine member experience day to day, the real value of responsive support when things go wrong, how a gym can function as more than a facility, becoming a proper community hub for its members and more.
So why go to all this trouble of writing it all down? Well we have seen endless articles written about gym management ‘in theory’. We thought it was time to put something a little more practical and grounded out into the world. Rather than tell you we understand what running an independent gym is really like, we’d rather show you, with any challenges and problems included along the way.
That means these articles won’t always be a highlight reel of the greatest hits. We want to capture the practical challenges that someone has to come when they start running a fitness facility at a managerial level. The aim is for these pieces to be genuinely useful to gym owners and managers, not just a series of nice stories about our operations.
Some articles will be practical, focusing on overcoming a specific problem or how to implement a shift in focus. Others will be a bit more reflective, focusing on how to better appeal to certain members, how Dieter was able to make the best use out of certain systems, or even how to best utilise the resources The Fit Club already had to hand.
For any gym owner or manager who wants a fresh perspective, this is a unique chance to see a new gym through the eyes of an experienced gym manager. With fresh insights, a different mindset, and maybe even some familiar problems cropping up on the way, there will something for everyone.
Each piece will draw on what has been actually happening inside The Fit Club, what challenges Dieter has experienced and helped resolved, and to get a glimpse of what happens when a membership management company runs its own independent gym.
The next article will focus on Dieter’s first impressions of The Fit Club, as well as the challenges and problems he faced. So keep an eye out for the next article as we dive deeper into Dieter’s time as General Manager at The Fit Club.
