The truth is that the very thing that made Forge Fitness special, is the same thing that nearly sank us. It just took me far too long to see it.
People don’t join our gyms for the dumbbells; you can get those anywhere. They join for a specific instructor teaching a specific class at half-past six on a Monday, and they build their week around it. That devotion is our entire business. But it means every single class on the timetable is a promise. When you have one gym, you keep those promises with your phone and your memory.
When you have nine gyms, the phone and the memory fall apart. You start quietly breaking promises you don’t even know you’re making.
The Promise We Were Quietly Breaking
A cancelled class is not a minor inconvenience in our world. It’s the first domino in someone cancelling their membership. I can draw you a straight line from a class vanishing twice to a member stopping their direct debit. And we were letting them down constantly. An instructor would get double-booked across two sites because two managers grabbed them without talking. A class would have no cover when someone was ill, leaving forty people at a locked studio door with just a Post-it note for company. A new site would open with a timetable that was half guesswork.
For ages I treated the timetable as an operations chore, the boring bit, the thing you delegate and forget. It is not the boring bit. It is the product and it is the retention engine, and we were running the single most important thing in the company on goodwill and a WhatsApp group.
When I finally said that out loud in a board meeting, it was genuinely embarrassing. The consensus was, “Well, yes, obviously. So why have we never resourced it properly?” That was the moment the search began.
A Single Source of Truth
We needed one version of the truth, accessible everywhere, that understood our business. That’s what we found in Northpeak. The Crew platform gave us one master timetable across all nine sites, but the real magic was that it had instructor certifications built in. It physically will not let you schedule a spin class with someone who isn’t signed off to teach spin. That alone killed an entire category of mistake at the source.
When an instructor calls in sick now, the panic is gone. Instead of a manager frantically phoning around, Crew instantly shows them every qualified and available instructor, even if they’re based at a site twenty minutes away. A 40-minute staffing crisis became a two-minute job.
On top of that, the Pulse dashboard gives me a single screen with fill rates, cover stats, and cancellations across all nine sites. I can see a studio starting to drift weeks before it would ever show up in the membership numbers, giving us time to actually fix the problem before it costs us members.
The Mess That Made Us
Of course, it didn't all go perfectly. We got cocky. We were opening our Liverpool studio right in the middle of the rollout, and we assumed the system would just magically create the perfect opening timetable. The problem was, we hadn’t actually put the local instructor data in properly.
Launch week was a mess. Classes were mislabelled, we had gaps in the schedule–it was the exact chaotic opening we were trying to leave behind. This time, I couldn’t even blame our old spreadsheet-and-hope system. It stung, because the failure was completely self-inflicted. It was a painful fortnight, and I hated every minute of it. But I wouldn’t hand it back.
We owned it, fixed the data, and learned the hard way that the tool amplifies whatever you feed it; garbage in, faster garbage out. But this is exactly why I'd still do the whole thing again without hesitation: the very next studio we opened, in Sheffield, went live with the timetable full and fully staffed from day one, and it had the strongest opening month of any site we have ever launched.
The Liverpool mess directly bought us the Sheffield success. We’d never have developed the right data discipline without that scare.
Builders, Not Rota Clerks
The easy numbers are great. Class cancellations have collapsed from a genuinely embarrassing level to just a handful. Fill rates are up because we’re finally building the schedule around what members actually want. But the metric I care about most is what I call “thirty-day churn after a let-down”-how many members cancel within a month of their class being cancelled. It’s now low enough that it has stopped being the thing that keeps me awake at night.
But the real change is personal. For a long stretch, my co-founder and I were the two highest-paid rota clerks in Manchester. We spent our evenings untangling timetables instead of thinking about what Forge could become.
The night the Sheffield studio opened, the two of us just stood at the back of a packed class, and for once neither of us was on our phones fixing something. We just watched it work. And he turned to me and said, this is the job we thought we were signing up for.
That’s what this was all about. We didn’t start a company to administer spreadsheets. We started it to build rooms full of people who walk out feeling brilliant. We’d lost sight of that for a while, and this whole process is what gave it back to us.