Industry Insights
From 1 Club to 50+: Why Operational Consistency Is the Real Growth Challenge in Fitness
Published on:
January 16, 2026
Growth is the goal for most fitness brands, but growth has a way of quietly magnifying every operational weakness you already have.
After nearly a decade working with multi-location wellness brands, serving as a fractional CIO/CTO, and eventually becoming a multi-unit operator myself, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself across the industry: what works at one or two locations slowly breaks down as you scale, and completely collapses once you pass a certain point.
The challenge isn’t ambition. It’s complexity.
The Hidden Cost of “Cobbling It Together”
When you’re operating a single club, or even two or three, you can get away with a lot. PDFs, spreadsheets, shared drives, text threads, and disconnected point solutions often feel “good enough,” especially when an owner or key leader is still closely involved.
That human glue holds things together.
But somewhere between 5 and 15 locations, many operators enter what I like to call business purgatory. You’re big enough that problems are scaling, but not always big enough to feel ready to invest in the systems required to solve them. Manual processes multiply. Managers invent workarounds. Different districts adopt different tools. Acquired locations bring their own ways of doing things.
The result? You aren’t just scaling locations, you’re scaling inconsistency.
By the time brands reach 20+ locations, the wheels often fall off. At that point, you can’t throw enough people or capital at the problem to compensate. The disconnect between the brand promise and the in-club experience becomes increasingly visible to members.
The Most Overburdened Role in the Business
When we think about where operational breakdowns show up first, the answer is almost always the same: the club manager.
Club managers sit at the intersection of people, process, facilities, and guest experience. They’re responsible for staffing, scheduling, training, communication, compliance, equipment issues, and member satisfaction, often using half a dozen disconnected tools that were never designed to work together.
At Woven, we consider the club manager the hero of the operation. If you can reduce the administrative burden placed on that role, even slightly, you unlock meaningful gains across the entire business.
Most organizations we work with see five to seven hours of administrative time saved per manager, per week. That’s not “extra time” for busywork. That’s time returned to coaching teams, building culture, and engaging members, the things that actually drive performance.
Why Unified Systems Matter More Than Ever
One of the biggest mistakes growing brands make is treating HR, operations, and facilities as separate worlds. In reality, they’re deeply connected.
A broken piece of equipment isn’t just a facilities issue, it’s an operations issue, a guest experience issue, and often a communication issue. If frontline teams don’t know what’s happening with a repair, they’re left fielding complaints without context. If managers are juggling multiple systems, accountability gets fuzzy and follow-up suffers.
The same is true for communication. When different locations use different tools, or tools designed for desk-based corporate teams, leaders lose visibility into engagement, culture, and accountability at the front line. Important messages get missed. Sensitive information gets shared the wrong way. Leaders are left guessing instead of managing.
Consistency doesn’t come from good intentions. It comes from systems that scale accountability, visibility, and execution across every location.
A Practical Take on AI in Fitness Operations
No conversation about the future of technology is complete without mentioning AI, but it’s important to separate hype from reality.
AI feels magical at the individual level. Upload a document, ask a question, get a polished answer. But enterprise environments are different. Organizational data is messy. Policies exist in multiple versions. Files live in dozens of places. Without a clean, centralized source of truth, AI simply amplifies the mess.
I often describe this as a “garbage in, pixie dust sprinkled garbage out” problem.
Where AI does shine is in narrow, well-defined use cases, especially where it can reduce mental load for managers, surface insights faster, or automate repeatable work. That’s where we see real opportunity: not replacing human judgment, but supporting it.
The Unsexy Work That Pays Dividends
My advice to operators is simple: it’s never too early to step back and examine the operational burden you’re placing on your managers.
Ask yourself:
How many tools are they expected to use?
How many processes exist simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”?
Where are inconsistencies quietly creeping in?
This work isn’t glamorous. It’s not flashy. But the brands that take it seriously early are the ones that scale with confidence later.
Growth doesn’t fail because of a lack of vision. It fails when operational chaos outpaces leadership’s ability to manage it.
And that’s a problem worth solving, no matter what tools you use to do it.
Bringing Maintenance Into the Operational Flow
Facilities and equipment are often managed in isolation, even though downtime directly impacts operations and member experience.
Woven’s Maintenance Suite brings equipment and facilities management into the same operational system as communication and daily workflows so teams can track issues, share updates, and stay ahead of problems without relying on emails or disconnected tools.
If you’re looking to reduce downtime and bring maintenance into a unified operational rhythm, learn more here.
Want to go deeper?
This article is based on a recent conversation with Club Solutions Magazine, where we discussed the realities of scaling multi-location fitness operations, the role of unified systems, and what operators should be thinking about as they grow.
You can listen to the full podcast episode here.
Growth is the goal for most fitness brands, but growth has a way of quietly magnifying every operational weakness you already have.
After nearly a decade working with multi-location wellness brands, serving as a fractional CIO/CTO, and eventually becoming a multi-unit operator myself, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself across the industry: what works at one or two locations slowly breaks down as you scale, and completely collapses once you pass a certain point.
The challenge isn’t ambition. It’s complexity.
The Hidden Cost of “Cobbling It Together”
When you’re operating a single club, or even two or three, you can get away with a lot. PDFs, spreadsheets, shared drives, text threads, and disconnected point solutions often feel “good enough,” especially when an owner or key leader is still closely involved.
That human glue holds things together.
But somewhere between 5 and 15 locations, many operators enter what I like to call business purgatory. You’re big enough that problems are scaling, but not always big enough to feel ready to invest in the systems required to solve them. Manual processes multiply. Managers invent workarounds. Different districts adopt different tools. Acquired locations bring their own ways of doing things.
The result? You aren’t just scaling locations, you’re scaling inconsistency.
By the time brands reach 20+ locations, the wheels often fall off. At that point, you can’t throw enough people or capital at the problem to compensate. The disconnect between the brand promise and the in-club experience becomes increasingly visible to members.
The Most Overburdened Role in the Business
When we think about where operational breakdowns show up first, the answer is almost always the same: the club manager.
Club managers sit at the intersection of people, process, facilities, and guest experience. They’re responsible for staffing, scheduling, training, communication, compliance, equipment issues, and member satisfaction, often using half a dozen disconnected tools that were never designed to work together.
At Woven, we consider the club manager the hero of the operation. If you can reduce the administrative burden placed on that role, even slightly, you unlock meaningful gains across the entire business.
Most organizations we work with see five to seven hours of administrative time saved per manager, per week. That’s not “extra time” for busywork. That’s time returned to coaching teams, building culture, and engaging members, the things that actually drive performance.
Why Unified Systems Matter More Than Ever
One of the biggest mistakes growing brands make is treating HR, operations, and facilities as separate worlds. In reality, they’re deeply connected.
A broken piece of equipment isn’t just a facilities issue, it’s an operations issue, a guest experience issue, and often a communication issue. If frontline teams don’t know what’s happening with a repair, they’re left fielding complaints without context. If managers are juggling multiple systems, accountability gets fuzzy and follow-up suffers.
The same is true for communication. When different locations use different tools, or tools designed for desk-based corporate teams, leaders lose visibility into engagement, culture, and accountability at the front line. Important messages get missed. Sensitive information gets shared the wrong way. Leaders are left guessing instead of managing.
Consistency doesn’t come from good intentions. It comes from systems that scale accountability, visibility, and execution across every location.
A Practical Take on AI in Fitness Operations
No conversation about the future of technology is complete without mentioning AI, but it’s important to separate hype from reality.
AI feels magical at the individual level. Upload a document, ask a question, get a polished answer. But enterprise environments are different. Organizational data is messy. Policies exist in multiple versions. Files live in dozens of places. Without a clean, centralized source of truth, AI simply amplifies the mess.
I often describe this as a “garbage in, pixie dust sprinkled garbage out” problem.
Where AI does shine is in narrow, well-defined use cases, especially where it can reduce mental load for managers, surface insights faster, or automate repeatable work. That’s where we see real opportunity: not replacing human judgment, but supporting it.
The Unsexy Work That Pays Dividends
My advice to operators is simple: it’s never too early to step back and examine the operational burden you’re placing on your managers.
Ask yourself:
How many tools are they expected to use?
How many processes exist simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”?
Where are inconsistencies quietly creeping in?
This work isn’t glamorous. It’s not flashy. But the brands that take it seriously early are the ones that scale with confidence later.
Growth doesn’t fail because of a lack of vision. It fails when operational chaos outpaces leadership’s ability to manage it.
And that’s a problem worth solving, no matter what tools you use to do it.
Bringing Maintenance Into the Operational Flow
Facilities and equipment are often managed in isolation, even though downtime directly impacts operations and member experience.
Woven’s Maintenance Suite brings equipment and facilities management into the same operational system as communication and daily workflows so teams can track issues, share updates, and stay ahead of problems without relying on emails or disconnected tools.
If you’re looking to reduce downtime and bring maintenance into a unified operational rhythm, learn more here.
Want to go deeper?
This article is based on a recent conversation with Club Solutions Magazine, where we discussed the realities of scaling multi-location fitness operations, the role of unified systems, and what operators should be thinking about as they grow.
You can listen to the full podcast episode here.
Growth is the goal for most fitness brands, but growth has a way of quietly magnifying every operational weakness you already have.
After nearly a decade working with multi-location wellness brands, serving as a fractional CIO/CTO, and eventually becoming a multi-unit operator myself, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself across the industry: what works at one or two locations slowly breaks down as you scale, and completely collapses once you pass a certain point.
The challenge isn’t ambition. It’s complexity.
The Hidden Cost of “Cobbling It Together”
When you’re operating a single club, or even two or three, you can get away with a lot. PDFs, spreadsheets, shared drives, text threads, and disconnected point solutions often feel “good enough,” especially when an owner or key leader is still closely involved.
That human glue holds things together.
But somewhere between 5 and 15 locations, many operators enter what I like to call business purgatory. You’re big enough that problems are scaling, but not always big enough to feel ready to invest in the systems required to solve them. Manual processes multiply. Managers invent workarounds. Different districts adopt different tools. Acquired locations bring their own ways of doing things.
The result? You aren’t just scaling locations, you’re scaling inconsistency.
By the time brands reach 20+ locations, the wheels often fall off. At that point, you can’t throw enough people or capital at the problem to compensate. The disconnect between the brand promise and the in-club experience becomes increasingly visible to members.
The Most Overburdened Role in the Business
When we think about where operational breakdowns show up first, the answer is almost always the same: the club manager.
Club managers sit at the intersection of people, process, facilities, and guest experience. They’re responsible for staffing, scheduling, training, communication, compliance, equipment issues, and member satisfaction, often using half a dozen disconnected tools that were never designed to work together.
At Woven, we consider the club manager the hero of the operation. If you can reduce the administrative burden placed on that role, even slightly, you unlock meaningful gains across the entire business.
Most organizations we work with see five to seven hours of administrative time saved per manager, per week. That’s not “extra time” for busywork. That’s time returned to coaching teams, building culture, and engaging members, the things that actually drive performance.
Why Unified Systems Matter More Than Ever
One of the biggest mistakes growing brands make is treating HR, operations, and facilities as separate worlds. In reality, they’re deeply connected.
A broken piece of equipment isn’t just a facilities issue, it’s an operations issue, a guest experience issue, and often a communication issue. If frontline teams don’t know what’s happening with a repair, they’re left fielding complaints without context. If managers are juggling multiple systems, accountability gets fuzzy and follow-up suffers.
The same is true for communication. When different locations use different tools, or tools designed for desk-based corporate teams, leaders lose visibility into engagement, culture, and accountability at the front line. Important messages get missed. Sensitive information gets shared the wrong way. Leaders are left guessing instead of managing.
Consistency doesn’t come from good intentions. It comes from systems that scale accountability, visibility, and execution across every location.
A Practical Take on AI in Fitness Operations
No conversation about the future of technology is complete without mentioning AI, but it’s important to separate hype from reality.
AI feels magical at the individual level. Upload a document, ask a question, get a polished answer. But enterprise environments are different. Organizational data is messy. Policies exist in multiple versions. Files live in dozens of places. Without a clean, centralized source of truth, AI simply amplifies the mess.
I often describe this as a “garbage in, pixie dust sprinkled garbage out” problem.
Where AI does shine is in narrow, well-defined use cases, especially where it can reduce mental load for managers, surface insights faster, or automate repeatable work. That’s where we see real opportunity: not replacing human judgment, but supporting it.
The Unsexy Work That Pays Dividends
My advice to operators is simple: it’s never too early to step back and examine the operational burden you’re placing on your managers.
Ask yourself:
How many tools are they expected to use?
How many processes exist simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”?
Where are inconsistencies quietly creeping in?
This work isn’t glamorous. It’s not flashy. But the brands that take it seriously early are the ones that scale with confidence later.
Growth doesn’t fail because of a lack of vision. It fails when operational chaos outpaces leadership’s ability to manage it.
And that’s a problem worth solving, no matter what tools you use to do it.
Bringing Maintenance Into the Operational Flow
Facilities and equipment are often managed in isolation, even though downtime directly impacts operations and member experience.
Woven’s Maintenance Suite brings equipment and facilities management into the same operational system as communication and daily workflows so teams can track issues, share updates, and stay ahead of problems without relying on emails or disconnected tools.
If you’re looking to reduce downtime and bring maintenance into a unified operational rhythm, learn more here.
Want to go deeper?
This article is based on a recent conversation with Club Solutions Magazine, where we discussed the realities of scaling multi-location fitness operations, the role of unified systems, and what operators should be thinking about as they grow.
You can listen to the full podcast episode here.
Growth is the goal for most fitness brands, but growth has a way of quietly magnifying every operational weakness you already have.
After nearly a decade working with multi-location wellness brands, serving as a fractional CIO/CTO, and eventually becoming a multi-unit operator myself, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself across the industry: what works at one or two locations slowly breaks down as you scale, and completely collapses once you pass a certain point.
The challenge isn’t ambition. It’s complexity.
The Hidden Cost of “Cobbling It Together”
When you’re operating a single club, or even two or three, you can get away with a lot. PDFs, spreadsheets, shared drives, text threads, and disconnected point solutions often feel “good enough,” especially when an owner or key leader is still closely involved.
That human glue holds things together.
But somewhere between 5 and 15 locations, many operators enter what I like to call business purgatory. You’re big enough that problems are scaling, but not always big enough to feel ready to invest in the systems required to solve them. Manual processes multiply. Managers invent workarounds. Different districts adopt different tools. Acquired locations bring their own ways of doing things.
The result? You aren’t just scaling locations, you’re scaling inconsistency.
By the time brands reach 20+ locations, the wheels often fall off. At that point, you can’t throw enough people or capital at the problem to compensate. The disconnect between the brand promise and the in-club experience becomes increasingly visible to members.
The Most Overburdened Role in the Business
When we think about where operational breakdowns show up first, the answer is almost always the same: the club manager.
Club managers sit at the intersection of people, process, facilities, and guest experience. They’re responsible for staffing, scheduling, training, communication, compliance, equipment issues, and member satisfaction, often using half a dozen disconnected tools that were never designed to work together.
At Woven, we consider the club manager the hero of the operation. If you can reduce the administrative burden placed on that role, even slightly, you unlock meaningful gains across the entire business.
Most organizations we work with see five to seven hours of administrative time saved per manager, per week. That’s not “extra time” for busywork. That’s time returned to coaching teams, building culture, and engaging members, the things that actually drive performance.
Why Unified Systems Matter More Than Ever
One of the biggest mistakes growing brands make is treating HR, operations, and facilities as separate worlds. In reality, they’re deeply connected.
A broken piece of equipment isn’t just a facilities issue, it’s an operations issue, a guest experience issue, and often a communication issue. If frontline teams don’t know what’s happening with a repair, they’re left fielding complaints without context. If managers are juggling multiple systems, accountability gets fuzzy and follow-up suffers.
The same is true for communication. When different locations use different tools, or tools designed for desk-based corporate teams, leaders lose visibility into engagement, culture, and accountability at the front line. Important messages get missed. Sensitive information gets shared the wrong way. Leaders are left guessing instead of managing.
Consistency doesn’t come from good intentions. It comes from systems that scale accountability, visibility, and execution across every location.
A Practical Take on AI in Fitness Operations
No conversation about the future of technology is complete without mentioning AI, but it’s important to separate hype from reality.
AI feels magical at the individual level. Upload a document, ask a question, get a polished answer. But enterprise environments are different. Organizational data is messy. Policies exist in multiple versions. Files live in dozens of places. Without a clean, centralized source of truth, AI simply amplifies the mess.
I often describe this as a “garbage in, pixie dust sprinkled garbage out” problem.
Where AI does shine is in narrow, well-defined use cases, especially where it can reduce mental load for managers, surface insights faster, or automate repeatable work. That’s where we see real opportunity: not replacing human judgment, but supporting it.
The Unsexy Work That Pays Dividends
My advice to operators is simple: it’s never too early to step back and examine the operational burden you’re placing on your managers.
Ask yourself:
How many tools are they expected to use?
How many processes exist simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”?
Where are inconsistencies quietly creeping in?
This work isn’t glamorous. It’s not flashy. But the brands that take it seriously early are the ones that scale with confidence later.
Growth doesn’t fail because of a lack of vision. It fails when operational chaos outpaces leadership’s ability to manage it.
And that’s a problem worth solving, no matter what tools you use to do it.
Bringing Maintenance Into the Operational Flow
Facilities and equipment are often managed in isolation, even though downtime directly impacts operations and member experience.
Woven’s Maintenance Suite brings equipment and facilities management into the same operational system as communication and daily workflows so teams can track issues, share updates, and stay ahead of problems without relying on emails or disconnected tools.
If you’re looking to reduce downtime and bring maintenance into a unified operational rhythm, learn more here.
Want to go deeper?
This article is based on a recent conversation with Club Solutions Magazine, where we discussed the realities of scaling multi-location fitness operations, the role of unified systems, and what operators should be thinking about as they grow.
You can listen to the full podcast episode here.
Ready to Transform Your Operations?
Talk to our team about your current needs and biggest pain points, and we'll build a personalized demo customized for your organization.
Ready to Transform Your Operations?
Talk to our team about your current needs and biggest pain points, and we'll build a personalized demo customized for your organization.
Ready to Transform Your Operations?
Talk to our team about your current needs and biggest pain points, and we'll build a personalized demo customized for your organization.
One platform driving consistency, accountability & productivity for multi-location success.
Woven | 11350 N Meridian St # 400, Carmel, IN 46032
One platform driving consistency, accountability & productivity for multi-location success.
Woven | 11350 N Meridian St # 400, Carmel, IN 46032
One platform driving consistency, accountability & productivity for multi-location success.
Woven | 11350 N Meridian St # 400, Carmel, IN 46032