INNER ATHLETE CASE STUDY
BUSINESS PROFILE
Inner Athlete is a comprehensive fitness business located in San Leandro, CA. Owned by competitive athlete, Alondra Chatman, Inner Athlete offers boot camp, kettle bell, TRX and nutrition classes, in one-to-one, small group and group class formats. With over 300 clients and seven other trainers, Inner Athlete is well known in their area for providing exceptional coaching for athletes of all fitness levels.
CHALLENGES
When Alondra started Inner Athlete, she worked alone for the first few years, managed the business with an Excel spreadsheet and a calendar. But Inner Athlete grew, it became harder and harder to stay on top of the daily member management tasks. Everything about the business was in different places, including emails and several different spreadsheets. She had the group class calendar and the personal training appointment calendar in different places as well so there was no one place to look at the business in a holistic way.
To create reports, Alondra had to shuffle from system to system, inputting and exporting all relevant data manually. Payments were also a manual process. This meant Inner Athlete was inevitably missing out on revenue from uncollected fees since Alondra didn’t have any automatic way of tracking payments or out-of-date credit cards. Member correspondence was through sending one-off emails and keeping track of who needed what kind of information and reminders became unmanageable. Knowing there had to be an easier way, Alondra spoke to a business mentor about her concerns. He suggested she check out Zen Planner.
SOLUTION
After evaluating Zen Planner, Alondra decided to move forward with the all-in-one fitness software. As soon as she moved over to Zen Planner, Alondra started saving time since she no longer had to do everything herself. In addition, she also started seeing additional revenue since automated alerts and integrated payment processing ensures that Inner Athlete members pay their bills on time. With everything in one place, rather than distributed across different systems, it’s much easier for Inner Athlete to manage their members. Alondra automated the entire member management process and she no longer needs to send individual emails or handle payments manually. This translates into more time for Alondra to spend with her clients and staff and more revenue in the bank.
In addition to improving revenue from members that Inner Athlete has seen, they have also improved sales from retail. While Inner Athlete always stocked and sold retail items as a service for their clients, they didn’t see a ton of revenue from these products. Once Alondra started managing and selling the products with Zen Planner, Inner Athlete was able to embed their retail items and sales process in their website and take payments online. Soon they started to make considerable profit from these sales. “Zen Planner brought my whole retail sales process together and actually helped me sell more products,” explained Alondra. “That was a benefit I didn’t expect.”
Inner Athlete can also be more engaged with their members and clients. With automated welcome emails and reminders, Alondra stays personally connected to all 324 members at Inner Athlete. This might seem like a little thing, but members stop her to thank her for the emails and notifications. These little touches matter and help Alondra provide the outstanding service she is known for.
The benefits of using Zen Planner far exceeded Alondra’s expectations and allowed her to grow her business to what it is today. “There’s only 24 hours in the day and one me. Zen Planner allows me to maximize what I can do, and I wouldn’t have my business without it,” Alondra explains.
BENEFITS
- Increases revenue via Inner Athlete’s retail sales program.
- Saves Alondra more than 10 hours a week in administrative work.
- Automates emails to keep community engaged.
- Makes it simple for members to reserve classes and coaches to see updated schedules.
- Collects all monthly membership and personal training fees, increasing member revenue.
- Makes it easy for Alondra to grow her business.
