The fitness industry. One of the fastest growing and most diverse industries in the world can be difficult to traverse for beginners. Many people with a fitness or military background find themselves turning to entrepreneurship and looking to open fitness businesses can be overwhelmed at first. That’s where a company like Arbox comes in. With its fitness management platform, Arbox aims to help ease the daily operations of gym and studio owners.
SourceForge recently sat down with Alen Debensason, the CEO and Co-Founder of Arbox to discuss how fitness business owners can use a platform to optimize their operations.
Q: First and foremost, can you please share a brief overview of your company and how you got started?
Back in 2015, my co-founder and friend Ran Lev and I were working out in our local CrossFit gym and we noticed all of the issues with managing the gym efficiently. While we were able to come and workout successfully, we noticed that there were ways that the gym could improve its efficiency and connection with us, the members. We thought that there must be a better way for gyms to manage their day-to-day operations so we developed a platform to do just that. The Arbox platform was created to solve the core needs of fitness business owners who want to simultaneously grow their business while still focusing on training and working directly with their members. In fact, most members of our team at Arbox are a part of the fitness industry, including personal trainers, amateur athletes or gym and studio managers. Essentially, we want to help gym and studio owners maintain their love of coaching while also taking their business to the next level.
Q: You’ve mentioned the concept “fitness business”. What sort of companies fall under that definition?
It’s no secret that the fitness industry has exploded recently with so many different disciplines and options available for all types of people. That’s why Arbox doesn’t limit itself to being available just for gyms, but rather we pride ourselves on being available to a more general concept of a “fitness business.”
This includes your regular run-of-the-mill gyms, CrossFit gyms, yoga and pilates studios, more specific studios with offerings such as MMA, functional fitness and all kinds of dance. We’ve also put a lot of effort into creating a platform that can be available for complexes offering a multitude of disciplines such as country clubs.
Owners of these various types of fitness businesses can each benefit from the diverse set of features within the Arbox platform and we’ve even received (and implemented) many requests from different types of fitness centers looking to tweak the platform to better serve their needs.
Q: Why do fitness businesses need a management platform?
That’s actually a question we’ve heard a lot from our own customers as well as leads throughout different points in the sales cycle and it’s a fairly simple one to answer. As gyms and studios grow, their demands grow and that generally manifests itself in demands on the owner’s time, which then makes it more difficult to continue any sort of growth.
So, for fitness owners who are looking to stay on top of or automate some of their daily tasks in order to spend more time actually coaching and interacting with members, they need some sort of solution. We’ve also seen many owners come at that same problem from a different angle by embracing the growing pains of their business and looking for a way to help continue or even expand on that growth.
Also, many fitness owners struggle with growth and overall management of their businesses because they’re not experienced with data management and analysis. There’s a ton of data that rolls into our platform every month from each gym or studio and if presented properly, these reports can vastly improve the overall success of a business.
Fitness owners can essentially let Arbox do their work for them by optimizing and automating many daily and monthly tasks involved with running a successful fitness business. They can then focus more on their members, which will also help improve their growth by boosting member engagement and retention.
Q: What are some of the main pain points the Arbox platform can help solve?
From the numerous conversations that we’ve had with our clientbase as well as business owners across the industry, there are basically three main paint points that fitness businesses struggle with:
- Day-to-day operations
- Retention and engagement
- Growth
With these points in mind, we’ve put a lot of time and resources into crafting the Arbox fitness management platform to aid gym and studio owners in these specific areas. We actually have split our platform into three main categories to address each of these main pain points:
- Be Better Tools: aiding in day-to-day operations and improving your business core
- Get Stronger Tools: focusing on retention of and engagement with members
- Think Bigger Tools: enabling sustained growth of the business
First and foremost, simply implementing our platform within your business will immediately help to optimize your daily tasks and operations. Having all of your members, payments, schedule and reporting all within one location is a game changer for fitness businesses. Remember, most of these owners cut their teeth in the fitness world and not in the business world, so helping them automate tasks and optimize their operations is the key component of the Arbox platform.
Not surprisingly, one of the biggest challenges to our users is handling their payments in an efficient and organized manner every month. That’s why as we grow globally it’s important for us to find reliable payment processing partners that we can incorporate into our platform. These partnerships, including First American Payments and Paysafe, were added to provide security, stability and peace of mind to our users all over the world when handling their finances within Arbox.
Next, we incorporated a set of retention and growth tools within the platform to help boost these areas of each fitness business. One of our highest priorities was to make data and reporting a breeze for each fitness business owner. In fact, a lot of our product decisions have been data driven and efficient data has been our “north star” with recent updates to our platform. We’ve improved our quick-glance dashboard that shows the owner nearly everything they need to know about their business in real time from payments to memberships and leads. We’ve also created a whole list of detailed yet simple reports for owners to look at in order to better understand their business as a whole.
Additionally, we’ve made it easier for gym and studio owners to communicate with their members through automated SMS messages and push notifications.
Especially during these uncertain times of COVID-19, we’ve discovered a lot of new pain points that our users have had to overcome. While many gyms and studios have unfortunately been forced to close their doors, there were many others looking for help in staying afloat. As early as March of this year, we pivoted a lot of our product efforts to provide a platform that allows owners to stay engaged with their members throughout lockdowns, quarantine and the other realities of 2020. We enabled owners to quickly and easily convert a class to online as well as create digital medical forms and health waivers.
Of course, the best method for fitness businesses to interact and engage with their members is through the members mobile app which allows members to receive updates right from their gym or studio, register for classes and interact with other members by inviting them to join a workout. We’ve even enabled fitness businesses to create a fully branded members app that will be available in their colors and branding and can be downloaded from the App Store as if it was created by the gym or studio itself. We’ve seen amazing results with how these branded apps can significantly boost engagement and retention among their memberbase.
Q: What are some trends that you predict for the future of the industry?
Recently, we released a report in collaboration with Deloitte Catalyst with our outlook on the current state and future of the fitness industry, but I’ll also elaborate on it here.
I think that without a doubt the COVID-19 pandemic will permanently impact the fitness industry as many gym and studio members will demand more online availability and locations with fewer people working out at the same time. That’s why I believe we’ll see more hybrid fitness businesses, those that can successfully combine efforts in both a brick and mortar location as well as online. Not only will this help in terms of health concerns that likely won’t go away any time soon, but also in providing a more diverse offering to a much broader audience.
In that same vein, I also wouldn’t be surprised to see a rise in more boutique fitness locations, at the expense of larger franchises. People will want to work out in a place they trust and connect with their coaches who they might have just spent an entire year with in the more intimate setting of Zoom classes. There will be more emphasis on smaller classes and groups and this will allow smaller businesses to thrive.
Finally, I believe we will be seeing more of a “fitness to business” transformation among many owners as they can take advantage of what they learned during 2020 and use that to create successful businesses out of something that began as a passion project. So many of our users have told us how much they enjoyed teaching smaller groups, engaging one-on-one with members and that will allow them to learn what their members and new potential customers want out of their business moving forward. This is also an important part of our roadmap at Arbox as we work to empower fitness business owners and provide them with automation, business and management skills as well as professional knowledge from our partners and experience.
In short, look out for the “little guys” of the fitness world as we move forward into the new COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 reality.
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