Home/Industries/Gyms and studios
People enquire about joining a gym at the hours they'd be training, which are the hours every coach is on the floor. My partner and I learnt that in our own gym. So we built the system that answers them in seconds and keeps following up until they walk through the door.
Trial enquiries and member follow-up need a process of their own.
Answer a few questions and try the response on your own phone.
See what happens when an enquiry gets a reply while you're busy with the job. Add your details and watch the response arrive on your phone.
It's the same system we use in our own business, built around the way you work.
Most gym enquiries arrive before work and after it. Those are also the hours with the most people on the floor.
6:05 pm, during the class
An Instagram message asking what a membership costs, or a missed call from someone who drove past on the way home. Every coach in the building is mid-session, which is exactly where they should be.
They've just decided to do something about their training, and that decision is at its strongest right now.
7:15 pm, after the class
The last class wraps up and a coach picks up the phone to find the message sitting there. They reply, politely and helpfully, an hour after it arrived.
By then the person has often messaged another gym, and someone there answered. At our gym, some enquiries heard back days later. Most booked somewhere else.
At Fit For Life, closing that one gap turned out to be worth more than $4,000 a week, in revenue we hadn't known we were missing. Run your own numbers
Every coach is on the floor when a new enquiry arrives.
An Instagram message asks how much membership costs. A reply goes back within seconds, in your words, asking what she's hoping to get out of training.
She hasn't trained in a few years and is worried about keeping up. The system answers what she's really asking, that beginners start here all the time, and offers a free trial.
Two real class times from the timetable. She picks Wednesday at 6 am, and the booking lands in your gym software with her goal and notes attached.
A reminder for the morning, with where to park and the name of the coach who'll meet her at the door.
Runs the trial. They already know her goal and that she's nervous, so the first five minutes go on that instead of paperwork.
A message in the coach’s name checks how the session went and explains the first month. The coach approves the wording in advance.
A short check-in explains what happens if someone can’t make every session.
She replies asking about membership options. The sequence stops and the conversation goes to the desk.
Signs her up after her second class. The team runs the trial and has the membership conversation.
Every message is written with you and approved before it goes live. Anything that needs judgement, like an injury or a complaint, goes straight to a person with the whole conversation attached. How the enquiry system works
My partner and I own Fit For Life Health & Fitness in Melbourne. This system ran there before we built it for anyone else. The figures below cover the gym’s peak six months.
enquiries turned into new members
a week, more than $200k a year, in revenue we weren't seeing before
We're coaches, so when classes are running nobody can touch a phone, and that used to mean enquiries just sat there. Some heard back from us days later. Most booked somewhere else, and we never really knew how many we'd lost. Now every call and message gets answered within seconds, trial sessions get booked while we're still on the floor, and the follow-up keeps going until someone actually walks in.Laura Healy, Fit For Life Health & Fitness, Melbourne
For a while I thought we had a coaching problem. Replies were slow and trials weren't getting booked, so surely somebody wasn't pulling their weight.
The enquiries arrived in the same hours the floor was full. The coaches weren't slow to reply. They were doing the job we hired them for.
Asking them to reply faster would have meant asking them to coach worse. Nobody should be checking Instagram while someone is under a barbell.
So the fix couldn't depend on a person being free. The first reply, the questions, the trial booking and the follow-up had to happen on their own, in our words. The coach handles the session and the conversation afterwards.
Check the phone between classes. That lasts about a week, until a class runs over or a member wants a word at the door. A front desk casual for peak hours helps, until they're also signing in the 6 pm crowd.
Gym management software is good at billing and class bookings. It'll take a booking from someone who already knows what they want. It won't answer a stranger asking whether beginners are welcome, and that question is most of what an enquiry is.
Each of these leaves the enquiry waiting on a person, at the one hour people are hardest to find. What we build answers it without anyone, and brings a coach in once there's a real person booked into a real class.
A reply within seconds, a trial booked into a real class, and a message from the coach afterwards. Then polite follow-up on day two, day six and day thirteen until they join or say no, none of it depending on a coach remembering.
No. It keeps running billing and class bookings. The system works around it, answering the enquiries your software was never built to answer and putting trial bookings straight into it.
Less. Most of it runs without them, and what they do touch is short and written for the floor. We test the process with our Saturday casuals at the gym to check it’s easy to follow without a manual.
Yes, and smaller studios often feel it sooner, because the owner is usually the one teaching. An intro pack replaces the trial. Someone still needs a reply while you’re teaching, so the system handles the first steps.
We aim to have the first system live within 30 days of kickoff, and for a gym that's almost always the enquiry side. It's scoped after a systems map, with a fixed price in writing before anything is built. We won't promise a number of new members, only show you ours.
We check your existing member, booking and payment software before adding anything. The work may be connecting new enquiries to trial bookings and follow-up, with an explicit handover once someone becomes a member.
Where a connection is not supported, we agree a controlled handover rather than promising that every tool will sync. See the Fit For Life case summary for the business where Jonathan runs these workflows, and how the follow-up sequence works.
Try the enquiry follow-up system on your own phone. Add your details, answer a few questions and see the response arrive.
