The Gymdesk Benchmark
Six things the data told us
Read them in two minutes here, or take the scenic route through the chapters below.
Read these six findings together and they stop looking like six problems.
They're one.
The money never collected. The trials that fizzled. The members who quietlydrifted off—and the growth left sitting on the table. Some of it is money leakingout, some of it is upside never picked up, but the root is the same: a gym doing byhand what the software was built to do on its own. The hopeful part: every one is also a lever. Walk the six chapters and you'll watch the same fix surface againand again.
The money you nevercollect
Ask an owner about failed payments and they picturedeclined cards. That turns out to be the wrong thing toworry about.
Last year, gyms collected about 92 cents on every dollar theywere owed. You'd assume the missing 8 cents is the usual cardtrouble—expirations, banks saying no.
Nope.
Picture every $100 a gym is owed. About $8 of it never shows up.Barely 30 cents of that is a declined card—the rest was nevercharged at all.
And close to $6 of that $8 is the same story every time: themember never had a card on file. They signed up, nothing went onfile to run, and the payment just… never happened.
When a gym does run a charge, it goes through about 99% of thetime. The plumbing works fine.
So the leak isn't in the payments—it's at the front desk, the day anew member signs up and nobody asks for a card.
Two settings protect most of this money. Require a card on file before a membership starts, and leave automatic retries on. That'sthe difference between getting back 6 in 10 failed payments and waving them goodbye.
Turning trials into members
Ask an owner about failed payments and they picturedeclined cards. That turns out to be the wrong thing toworry about.
Out of 175,000 real free trials, 73% became paying members.That's far healthier than the usual gym-world worry that mosttrials just walk.
But timing runs the show. Sign-ups cluster in the first week ortwo, then fall off a cliff.
If a trial hasn't converted by day 14, it's probably already gone.
(We left comped and staff memberships out of this—they're not really trials, and theyconvert at a quarter of the rate.)
Speed is the lever here. A follow-up that fires on day one—automatically, before you've even thought about it—converts about 85%
of trials. Chase each one down by hand and you're closer to 71%. That gap isn't rounding: it's twice as many already-earned
members walking back out the door.
Why members stay
The clearest signal in the whole dataset is also thesimplest: how often someone shows up.
Members who rarely show up quit about twice as often as theones training three or more times a week. Put simply: show-uprate is retention.
And it's a number you can move. Get newer members onto themat more often in their first few weeks and you'll do more forretention than almost anything else you could try.
Size plays in, too. The biggest gyms hold members best, while themid-size 100-to-200 stretch struggles most—big enough thattracking everyone by hand starts to crack, not yet big enough tohave the systems that fix it.
Those first weeks are where it's won or lost. Nearly one in fivenew members quits inside 90 days, and among the membershipsthat end, the typical one lasted just three months—the churn isfront-loaded. Get a member past that first quarter and they're farlikelier to stay.
After that, it settles into a steady drip: 2% to 3.5% a month, withone reliable spike every January, when the new-year sign-ups whowere never going to last quietly cancel.
Two settings protect most of this money. Require a card on file before a membership starts, and leave automatic retries on. That'sthe difference between getting back 6 in 10 failed payments and waving them goodbye.
How gyms actually run
By now the pattern is hard to miss. The gyms that run byhand are the ones leaking time and money. The gyms thatlet the software run it keep both.
None of these gyms are doing anything wrong. They're just doingby hand what the software was built to handle—and paying for itin ways that never look like a crisis.
Look at the two biggest. Mark attendance by hand and you losethe early warning from Chapter 3—you can't see a member fadinguntil they've already quit. Switch off auto-retry and you forfeit the6-in-10 failed payments it would have clawed back for you(Chapter 1).
Here's the hopeful part: every one of these is on by default andworks out of the box. The gyms that simply leave them runningget the hours and the revenue back without doing anything clever.
The quiet tax only lands when a setting gets switched off. It neverfeels like an emergency—just a few hours a week, a couplepercent of revenue, a member here and there slipping out theback. Flip the toggles and it's gone.
The highest-return thing you can do this week takes five minutes. Check three settings: is a card required at signup, are automatic
retries on, and is attendance being captured for you? Almost everything in this report traces back to those three toggles.
The economics of a gym
What members pay, what gyms earn, and why the gymsthat scale fastest look a little different on paper—in a goodway.
The typical member pays about $100 a month—list prices runhigher, around $165, but family and multi-member discounts pullthe average down. Total revenue still climbs hard as a gymgrows.
Per-member revenue dips a little as you scale—and that's afeature, not a leak. It's the fingerprint of family plans, multi-member discounts, and kids pricing: the exact things that bring inmore bodies and longer tenure.
So the gyms earning a touch less per head are usually the onesgrowing fastest. They traded a few dollars per member for a lotmore members—a deal worth taking every time.
Almost 90% of gyms run more than one kind of pricing—usuallymonthly memberships next to drop-ins and trials. The monthlyplan is the engine, about 63% of everyone enrolled.
Benchmark yourself against your own size tier, not the platform average. The fastest path to more profit isn't a price hike—it's thefamily-and-kids growth that scales your headcount, plus closing the billing and retention leaks from the earlier chapters. That'srevenue you've already earned, just not collected yet.
The kids dimension
For most martial arts gyms, the kids program is the engineof the whole business.
More than three-quarters of gyms run a kids program—and thosegyms are a lot bigger. Roughly 237 members each, against 107 atadults-only gyms.
They hold members a little longer, too, at basically the same priceper head.
So a kids program adds bodies without thinning out what youearn on each one. More members, longer tenure, same price.
If you're adults-only and weighing a kids program, the data is encouraging: more members, longer tenure, the same price per head.It's the most common way gyms on the platform grow, and it's not close.
Less admin. More members. Zero guesswork.
The problem in these six chapters belongs to every gym. The fix is the sameone each time, and it's already built. Here's how Gymdesk turns each lever foryou.