DURHAM – There’s a new software solution for customer relationship management for fitness studios and wellness facilities, and the company, Plan2Play, is based in Durham.
Plan2Play launched its CRM product this week, ARC, an acronym that stands for attract, run, connect, and it was designed to give health, fitness, and wellness entrepreneurs and small business owners digital solutions to increase and optimize their offerings through engaging leads, customers, and members.
The company, co-founded and led by software engineer and entrepreneur Louise Fahys, CEO, and technology entrepreneur Layton Judd, shared in a statement that the software product interface “allows fitness facilities to interact directly with members while also providing a space for them to communicate with each other, helping foster a sense of community.”
“I’ve had a software as a service business for 13, 14 years,” said Fahys in an interview with WRAL TechWire. “I became very interested in Cross Fit, and became fascinated with the community setting.”
That led her to consider how to cultivate community, outside of work, among her employees. “If people could do something together, including outside of work, I thought performance would be better,” she noted. So, along with Judd, she developed a mobile application that would assist employers in organizing in-person gatherings outside of work, and launched it in early March 2020.
“It did not go as planned,” said Fahys, due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. “It was major pivot time.”
Beyond concept, beyond product, community is the differentiator
Judd and Fahys were on a walk, discussing how and where to pivot the concept. Judd told Fahys that, even without an ongoing global pandemic, he wasn’t sure how he would or could sell employers on the concept of the mobile app.
“What other things are out there right now that don’t have the technology that they need,” Fahys said. They determined they would go back to the origin of the concept, which was the community built in their local Cross Fit gym, and assess how other independently-owned fitness and wellness studios and gyms were utilizing technology.
As it turns out, said Fahys, many owners start their own studios because they’ve developed technical expertise in a specific fitness modality, and they’ve developed that expertise by following a passion for that modality. What doesn’t happen often, said Judd in an interview with WRAL TechWire, is that those owners decide to start a business and then pick an exercise modality to pursue or gain certification.
Plan2Play website image
Fahys noted that she related to this: she was a software engineer, a technical expert, who decided to launch a company as an entrepreneur. “I remember this moment when I was a software engineer, and I launched a business, and then I realized that I wasn’t going to do much, or any, software engineering,” she said. It’s the same for studio owners, it turns out. Once they launch their business, a lot of time must be invested into the business operations, not necessarily the teaching, instruction, or delivery of services that led to the business formation in the first place.
“The fitness industry, and especially, boutique fitness, with independent owners, or husband and wife teams, the existing technology doesn’t really have a full solution,” said Fahys. “There’s nothing out there that does everything, they’ve got to find and pay individual vendors, like a website vendor, and a CRM vendor, if they even have a CRM.”
That’s what the company sought to address, said Judd, who noted that they’ve spoken with more than a hundred owners and operators in conducting the company’s needs analysis ahead of the development of its core product suite. “Owners want to have that experience, but their limiting factor is their time,” said Judd. “That’s what our software addresses, it lets owners get off the hamster wheel of operating each individual aspect of their business.”
“There’s a level of what we’re trying to provide, which is that systems are built-in, that they can use right away,” said Judd. “And then there are ways that you can make it more your own.”
Here’s how it works
There are three critical components in operating a health, wellness, or fitness company, said Fahys in an interview with WRAL TechWire. First, owners and operators must attract customers and potential customers. For this, Plan2Play built-in features to its CRM product, ARC, including tools that enable custom websites, managing leads, and deploying targeted social media campaigns.
“We’re excited by what we’ve seen so far, with the people on it already, because it really has made a difference, because it does allow them to spend their time, doing the things that they love,” said Fahys.
Second, owners and operators must be able to run their business, and to do so effectively and efficiently, allocating their time where it is best invested, which is often not on the day-to-day operational tasks of executing the business. Fahys and Judd built a second set of features to address this challenge of owners and operators, using a software solution that enables collaboration and cultivates communication, and tracks and logs each customer’s activity and touchpoints with the company, and provides payment processing.
“The passion that any boutique fitness owner has is that they have a passion for working with those people to whom they’re providing services to,” said Fahys. “They enjoy making a difference to individuals, and the cool thing about what we do, and providing the service that we do, is that we get to watch the owner spend more time with their clients.”
The final piece, said Fahys, is to build a community, not just a brand. To best connect with a community, owners and operators benefit from connecting members of that community, and the ARC software product includes features that are designed to spur customer-to-customer or member-to-member or client-to-trainer interaction, among others.
Fahys designed the software for independent owners, and the corresponding mobile application is designed for customers, members, and clients of gyms, boxes, and studios. According to a statement, the company charges a few hundred dollars per month to studio owners, and the mobile application is free to members of those studios.
Fitness facilities are likely to be a testbed for what a post-COVID economic recovery will look like, and a true test to see how, whether, or if consumer behavior changed temporarily or permanently, so much so that Xponential Fitness announced this week that it has filed the requisite forms with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to execute an initial public offering to raise capital on the stock market. Xponential Fitness owns fitness brands such as Club Pilates, Pure Barre, Row House, and CycleBar, which operate on franchise ownership models.
While franchises are not the current client target for Plan2Play, those large enterprise customers are potential customers, said Judd, as the software that the company has built is customizable and can scale.
What is important, right now, said Fahys, is that studios that are reopening to in-person classes and events, and those that are doing so are likely to increase their focus on in-person, community-driven events, meaning that owners and operators will be investing in building an active community among members, suggested Fahys.
Create an Event using Plan2Play Connect from Plan2Play on Vimeo.
“The gym or studio are natural places to people to form friendships and ARC makes it possible to help facilitate these relationships,” the company statement reads. “People usually want do events outside of the gym,” said Fahys. “In the past, those have always been maintained over social media, and not everyone is on those platforms, and also, they don’t really know how many people are interested, so people may get left out.”
But people are seeking alternatives to using Facebook, and the ARC platform provides it, for fitness studios and gyms. “Our app is inclusive, so they can send out an event and notify all members,” said Fahys. “You can see what is going on in the community.”
“The cool thing about what we do, and providing the service that we do, is that we get to watch the owner spend more time with their clients,” said Fahys. “That is why we’re here.”
