How On Track Wellness Left Mindbody and Got 5-6 Hours a Week Back

On Track Wellness is a martial arts and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academy in San Diego, California, run by Nate Church and Eric Romo. Two people manage the whole operation — coaching, billing, leads, cleaning, social media — for adult, teen, and kids' programs. Since switching from Mindbody to PushPress, they've gotten 5-6 hours a week back, doubled their weekly leads, grown 5-star Google reviews by 20% in six months, and seen a 25% lift in search visibility.

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Introduction

When On Track Wellness opened in 2019, Church and Romo did what most new academy owners do: they picked the software everyone else was using. Mindbody ran their memberships, payments, and communications, and for a while that was good enough.

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It didn't stay good enough. Rates went up, features didn't, and the pieces a martial arts academy actually needs — belt tracking, real family memberships, client tagging — either worked badly or didn't exist. For a two-person team, every workaround came out of the same finite pool of hours.

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The Problem

Costs kept climbing. The software didn't keep up.

Budget strain became a regular conversation for Church and Romo as Mindbody's rates kept increasing with little improvement in features or service quality. Communications, payment systems, and membership structures were complicated and disjointed.

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To fill the gaps, they bolted on SurveyMonkey and MailChimp. That solved the immediate problems and created new ones: more tools to log into, more places for information to live, more manual work to keep it all in sync.

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Built for studios, not academies

As a martial arts and Jiu Jitsu academy, On Track Wellness needed belt and class tracking, accurate family membership structures, and client tagging. Those were either inadequate or entirely absent in their former software.

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The result was slower growth, more frustration, and hours drained every week — the most expensive resource a two-person team has.

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The Solution

Why On Track Wellness chose PushPress

Looking for something that fit both their needs and their budget, Church and Romo started investigating alternatives. They first heard about PushPress from a friend who runs a CrossFit gym, and two things stood out.

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The first was pricing — more reasonable than what they had been paying. The second mattered more: PushPress was immediately willing to build martial arts-specific features, including a belt tracking system. That told them the platform was flexible and forward-thinking, and it previewed the kind of support they'd get from day one.

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“Spark is the big software in the Jiu Jitsu space and people just default to it because that's what the school down the street is using. But I think gym owners need to do their own investigation, and be open to consider what the customer service is like, what are the fees like, and what is it doing to make your life easier. And I think a lot of time people are using archaic systems, and don't realize they can upgrade,” Church said.

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When Church and Romo did that investigation, they landed on PushPress — and they haven't looked back.

Support that answers the same day

Same-day responsiveness was a change from the hours-long delays they'd grown used to. During one critical moment — a Saturday afternoon when On Track Wellness hit an issue while hosting a tournament — CEO Dan Uyemura personally stepped in to solve it.

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“When a CEO jumps into a chat on a Saturday afternoon, I think that says a lot about the company and culture,” Church explained.

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Dan isn't always the one answering, but the priority is the same. Gym owners get a real human on the support team when they need one, and can self-serve with an AI agent when they don't.

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One CRM instead of three tools

By adding PushPress Grow to their stack, On Track Wellness consolidated client communications, lead management, and workflow automation into one place — and retired MailChimp and SurveyMonkey in the process.

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Lead status is now visible at a glance in Grow, which cut the back-and-forth between Church and Romo and got leads immediate responses instead of eventual ones. Surveys run inside the same system, so collecting feedback no longer means exporting lists to a second tool.

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Turning drive-by parents into real relationships

Like many martial arts studios, On Track Wellness runs programs for teens and kids as young as five. Before PushPress, a lot of those parents were “drive-by” clients — dropping kids off at the curb and going months without talking to staff.

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Which is a problem, because parents are the ones making the decisions and paying the memberships.

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Grow's communication features make it easy to reach parents one-on-one or as a class to check in, build rapport, and ask how their kids are doing.

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“It's important for us to build that rapport and to ask them about the values they're seeing that we're instilling in their kids,” Romo said.

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Google reviews without the reminders

When two people are handling coaching, bills, leads, cleaning, and social media, asking members for Google reviews is the kind of thing that quietly never happens.

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PushPress's GymHappy sends members a message with a link to leave a review, automatically. In the first six months, On Track Wellness saw a 20% increase in 5-star reviews — which both set them apart from nearby academies and contributed to a 25% boost in SEO.

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Numbers Church can actually see

Church points to PushPress Core's reporting as the tool that lets him keep a finger on the pulse of the business — something his old software never gave him.

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“You have to deep-dive your numbers as a business owner,” Church said. “It's about more than just knowing your membership count.”

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The reports give both owners a clear read on revenue trends, membership stats, and growth patterns.

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Result

5-6 hours back every week

Between Core and Grow, On Track Wellness estimates it saves at least 5-6 hours weekly — time that had been going to disjointed tools and manual follow-up.

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Double the weekly leads

Since integrating Grow, the academy has doubled its weekly leads. Automated responses mean no inquiry sits waiting for someone to get to it.

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A stronger presence in San Diego search

GymHappy drove a 20% increase in 5-star reviews in six months, which contributed to a 25% lift in search visibility — more prospective students finding the academy without additional ad spend.

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Software that fits the sport

Belt tracking, family memberships, and client tagging now work the way an academy needs them to, instead of being approximated with workarounds.

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Conclusion

For Nate Church and Eric Romo, switching to PushPress wasn't just a business decision — it was a lifeline for their academy. Between the support, the martial arts-specific features, and a streamlined experience, PushPress lets them focus on what they're actually good at: teaching and inspiring their students.

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Romo summed it up best: “A lot of software is written by software people…(but with PushPress) they understand where we're coming from, because they're gym owners themselves, and I think that's everything.”

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Running a martial arts academy on software that wasn't built for one? See how PushPress gives owners like Nate and Eric their week back. Book a Demo Today.