How Country Strong Fitness built a $20k a month learning center

Karina and Lani Bangay had just finished renovating Country Strong Fitness, a 6,700 square-foot gym in Palo Cedro, California, when the pandemic hit. Two thousand of those square feet sat as open space with a full kitchen attached.

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They filled it with kids. The Country Strong Learning Center opened in September 2021 as a supervised day program for homeschooled students, built around schoolwork in the morning and workouts through the day.

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It now runs at capacity with 60 students, a waiting list, and more than $20,000 a month in revenue.

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The Problem

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The gym was not going to survive the path it was on

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The Bangays are direct about this. Had they carried on the way they were going, they do not believe the gym would have made it through the pandemic.

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Dead hours in an expensive building

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Gyms fill early and late and sit empty in between. Country Strong had 2,000 square feet doing nothing in the middle of every weekday, in a building they paid for around the clock.

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A price ceiling on the core product

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Lani puts the underlying math plainly:

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"For starters, the average person thinks $40 a month is what a gym membership should cost. So asking them for four to five times this amount is already a tough game to play."

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The Solution

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The billing system was already standing

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Country Strong already ran the gym on PushPress Core. Launching the learning center meant creating new membership options, not building a second system from scratch.

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"Everything we needed was already built in and it was easy to customize contracts."

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Sub-accounts for children

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Families needed a profile for each child tied to a paying parent. That already existed for gyms, so it worked for the learning center with no special handling.

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Landing pages for a brand new program

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Generating pages for the learning center used the same website tools the gym already had, so the program had somewhere to send interest from day one.

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Grow for the parent relationship

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PushPress Grow, the CRM and lead gen add-on to Core, carries communication with parents. Karina points out that when the customer is a parent and the member is a child, communication counts for more than usual.

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"It is so easy for us to send out anything we need to send to parents."

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Parents who had tried other programs in the area noticed the difference. Karina relays what they tell her:

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"They're shocked by the level of communication they are receiving. We look good compared to other programs, even compared to public schools."

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Automated workflows on a steady stream of inquiries

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Inquiries kept arriving, and Grow workflows handled the follow-up without Karina and Lani touching each one. Lani singled out the chat window, which turned into the single biggest source of leads for the center.

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Result

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More than $20,000 a month in new revenue

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Parents pay between $450 and $550 a month on average, depending on how many days a week their child attends.

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60 students and a waiting list

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The learning center opened in September 2021 and is now full. Demand has outrun the space.

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Half of all leads arriving through chat

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Fifty percent of learning center leads come in through the Grow chat window, then run through automated workflows into enrollment.

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Quiet hours turned into a business

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The pivot solved a problem the Bangays had struggled with for years: making the middle of the day pay for itself.

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Conclusion

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The advice the Bangays give other owners is to stay open to adding a layer to the business. Lani frames it as breathing room, and Karina frames the reason for doing it at all:

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"It's the pinnacle of where health begins. This is how we're going to change the trajectory in the U.S. when it comes to diabetes and obesity."

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Ready to turn quiet hours into revenue? Book a demo and see what PushPress Core and Grow can do for your gym.