How Swift River CrossFit grew 26% and hit record revenue months

Aimee Moller opened Swift River CrossFit in Conway, New Hampshire in 2015. For the first stretch she ran the place with no gym management software at all, chasing paper every month.

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She eventually went looking for billing software. What she found was a system that also handled scheduling, lead follow-up and programming, and it arrived right before the busiest growth year the gym had ever had.

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In 2022 Swift River went from 170 members to 230, a 26% increase, and started stringing together record revenue months.

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The Problem

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Payment collection ran on checks

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Before any software, Moller collected payment by hand from every member, every month.

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"We were cashing checks every month from everybody."

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Billing was only the visible half of it

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Moller thought she needed a way to charge people. What she actually had was a gym with no front end for leads, no automated follow-up and no way to absorb a busy month without adding hours of admin.

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Growth would have broken the old setup

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A seven-year-old gym adding 60 members in twelve months creates real volume: inquiries, consults, onboarding, drop-ins. Handled by hand, that volume becomes a reason to stop growing.

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The Solution

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A paid marketing push with LASSO

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In 2022 Moller joined the MRR Challenge, run by PushPress with LASSO, the paid marketing and website firm founded by Sherman Merricks and Blake Ruff. The challenge brought in a run of high-quality, high-paying clients.

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Grow to catch what the ads brought in

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Leads are only worth what you convert. Moller paired the ad spend with PushPress Grow, the CRM and lead gen add-on to Core, so every inquiry landed in a nurture sequence instead of a notebook. She called it a one-two punch.

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"It made it easier to handle big numbers."

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On the Grow gym CRM specifically, Moller is blunt about what would have happened without it:

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"It wouldn't have been possible to keep up with the volume of new clients."

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Core for billing, scheduling and a heavy drop-in load

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PushPress Core runs billing and class scheduling. Swift River takes a lot of drop-ins, so check-ins and charges have to be quick. Members book their spot in the app and talk in the Social Feed, and coaches handle admin through the Staff app.

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Train for the workout side

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Programming reaches members through Train, where they log their sessions and keep measuring progress instead of guessing at it.

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A nutrition program through Healthy Steps

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Moller also took up the PushPress partnership with Healthy Steps Nutrition and rolled out ongoing nutrition coaching. Selling it was hard at first, so she used QR-code posters in the gym and social posts to explain the benefit. Once requests started arriving she hired two coaches to handle them.

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Result

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Membership up 26% in one year

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Swift River grew from 170 members to 230 across 2022.

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Record revenue months

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The gym had never grossed more than $30,000 in a month before 2022. It has been consistently above that line since, and at the time of this story was tracking toward $36,000.

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35 clients paying for fitness and nutrition

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Nutrition coaching ran $179 a month for the first 90 days, then $125 a month. That raised average client value without needing more bodies in the room.

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Better margins, even with new costs

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Bigger classes brought bigger class caps and two coaches per session. Moller says profit margins still went up, because the revenue went up faster.

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Conclusion

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Moller started out looking for a way to stop cashing checks. Four years later the ads bring people to the door and the software makes sure none of them get lost on the way in.

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Ready to grow without drowning in follow-up? Book a demo and see what PushPress Core and Grow can do for your gym.