Client story

One club. Ninety days. Every number in the owner's pocket by 06:00.

How an énergie Fitness club in Hertfordshire put an AI operating layer over its gym software, and what it found in the first quarter.

Club

énergie Fitness franchise, Hertfordshire

Size

1,617 on roster, 1,472 active paying

Platform

Glofox

Period

July to September 2026

The problem every owner already knows

A 1,600 member club produces roughly £47,000 of billing a month, and none of it arrives cleanly. Direct Debits bounce, cards expire, members drift, and the software reports each piece in a different screen. The owner finds out at month end, from a spreadsheet, what had already gone wrong three weeks earlier.

At this club the owner runs it alongside other businesses. He needed to know three things every morning without logging in anywhere: what came in, who is leaving, and what to do about it today.

What it found in the first quarter

These are the club's own figures, pulled from gymIQ's tables on 6 September 2026. Where a number is a comparison, the basis is stated.

Collection

The retry routine runs unattended three times a week. It retries only temporary shortfalls not attempted in the last two days, once per member, and routes everything else to a named action: new card, mandate to re-set, or a cancellation to review. A month reads worse on the day it closes than a week later, because pending Direct Debits take days to settle; the settled figure is the true one.

Money that was hiding in the membership file

Retention

gymIQ replaced the club's blanket “30 days absent equals dormant” rule with a per member measure: how far each person has drifted from their own habit. Paused members are excluded, overdue members are always contacted, and long tenured low users are left alone. The calls go on the board every morning.

Cash

A price trial on new joiner rates in August was caught within five days: weekday sales fell to 1 against 8.4 expected, odds of about 1 in 450 on the club's own seasonality model. It was reverted at a cost of about six joins rather than a month's worth.

What the owner actually sees

The Sunday evening close, as it landed on the owner's phone on 6 September 2026.

Evening close, Sun 6 Sep: £26,413.94 collected MTD, 1,472 active paying

TOP 3
1. Retention is good. 7 leavers this month against 19 over the same six days of August, and the roster has GROWN six days running, 1,611 to 1,617.
2. Selling is the problem. Joins project 77 against a 100 target and the 95 gate. 20 joins in six days.
3. Overdue is 58, down from 76 on 10 August. 22 on Direct Debit, 28 on card, 8 flexible. The card book is where the failures live.

SALES 1 to 6 Sep: submitted £30,069.78, successful £26,413.94, pending £7,198.20, failed £2,035.31. Collection rate 87.84 pct, failure rate 6.77 pct, the best of the month.

MEMBERS: roster 1,617, active 1,480, active paying 1,472, paused 79, overdue 58. Overdue by method: DD 22 of 1,220, card 28 of 355, flexible 8 of 28, cash 0 of 13.

BIGGEST LEVER: £1,958.35 of September dated arrears across 48 members, worth about £1,567 on Friday if cleared before Wednesday 9 September.

Every brief opens with a verdict, names the one lever worth pulling, and says plainly when the data is stale rather than pretending. The owner can reply to it in plain English and get an answer from the same system.

What it took to run

No new software for staff to learn. The club's gym software (Glofox, in this club's case) stays exactly as it is. gymIQ reads it through the club's own login, keeps its own history, and writes to a one page task board the front desk opens on a tablet. Set up took an evening for the data connection and a week of tuning the brief to how the owner thinks.

Three things to be honest about. The retention calls only work if someone makes them, so the board is capped at a list a small desk can clear in an hour and reports back who cleared what. The payout model is checked against the bank statements by hand each month until the direct bank connection is approved. And the first month is mostly gymIQ learning what “normal” looks like for your club, so the forecasts sharpen from month two.