How we measure time given back, fairly

At a glance

In a five-club gym with 10,000 members, your team loses about 197 hours a week to walking to the desk, finding the one person who knows, and doing things later from memory. Kula gives that time back: about 10,240 hours a year, roughly five full-time people's worth. Nobody is let go. Your managers, desk and sales team spend it on members, sales and the floor, and finish the day with less in their heads.

• Your club manager gets back about a day a week. The biggest single time-waster is staff questions: about 460 a week across five clubs, each one a walk to find the manager.
• Doing it later costs more than walking. Rework and forgotten items from tasks pushed to the end of a shift cost about four times the walking.
• Your sales team calls leads inside the hour. A lead called within an hour is seven times as likely to qualify as one called an hour later.
• The figures are a model, not a promise. The member volumes are measured at a real five-club Australian chain. How long each task takes is a working estimate until we time it in your club.

A day in the club today

Your membership system, your roster tool and your accounts each do their job. What no system does is the work around them: the question at the desk, the follow-up on a lead, the broken treadmill, the handover to the next shift, the cancellation that needs the manager. That work is done on foot, by phone and from memory, and when someone leaves, the memory goes with them.

• 6:02 am, the door. The front door won't open. The shift lead finds the fault, finds the contractor's number, rings, tells the manager, tells the team. 7.4 minutes, three people, and the manager is awake.
• 10:15 am, the question. "Can I give her a free week?" A staff member leaves the floor to find the manager, who is at another club. The member waits.
• 12:30 pm, the tour. The consultant shows a prospect around, then goes back to the desk to write it up. Two web enquiries have been sitting there since 9.
• 3:00 pm, the floor walk. The duty manager notes a torn bench, a spill and a cable machine fault, then walks back to the desk to log each one.
• 6:00 pm, the cancellation. A member comes in to cancel. The desk takes the notice and goes looking for the manager to make a retention offer.
• 9:15 pm, the handover. The note for the morning shift is half written in the desk notebook. Tomorrow's 6 am door happens again.

None of it shows up in a report, so nobody counts it. This post counts it.

The ten biggest time-wasters

Ten everyday tasks carry 117 of the 197 hours a week. The work itself stays; what goes is the walk, the wait, the re-orienting and the redo. With Kula, your team says what happened or asks a question on their phone, wherever they are, and Kula answers from what it knows about your club or does the task under your rules.

One that has been timed. At a five-club chain already running Kula, dealing with the faulted door at 6 am went from 7.4 minutes to 2.2. The shift lead says what happened; Kula knows the equipment, the contractor and who is on, raises the job, tells the people affected and logs it.

Who gets the time back

The most comes back to the few people your clubs cannot run without: the sales team, the club managers and admin. The front desk gets about 2 hours a week each, mostly spent with members on the floor instead of walking them to the desk.

Beyond the hours:

• Less stress. The work gets done once, where it comes up, instead of being carried to the end of the shift. Three in four operators are contacted out of hours every week about cover.
• Members who feel seen. Members stay where staff use their names and remember their goals. Time off the desk is time with them.
• Knowledge that stays. When a casual leaves, their answers and handovers stay with the club.
• A club that runs without you. If you ever sell, a business whose management is written down and running carries a smaller key-person discount.

Member money that stays in the club

The time is capacity, not a saving, so it is counted in hours. The money is in the member tasks the time goes to: about A$72,000 a year in a cautious case, up to A$204,000 if the gains are stronger. That is 0.7% to 2.0% of what five clubs of this size bill.

Every percentage in that table is a working estimate. The counts behind it, debits, failures and member numbers, are measured.

Paying instructors and trainers. In most clubs, casual instructors and contractor trainers are paid from timesheets, invoices and a list someone checks against the timetable. Kula already knows which classes ran and who taught them, about 304 a week across five clubs, and trainers record each session on the floor, about 100 a week. The pay run builds itself from that record: no timesheets or invoices to chase, commissions worked out from the sessions, and each person can be paid as soon as their class or session is done. It works alongside whatever membership and billing software the club already uses.

How the numbers were built

The figures come from a model of a five-club, 10,000-member Australian 24-hour chain, built the way an industrial engineer studies a factory floor.

1. Every role and every task. Fourteen roles, from owner to cleaner, and 119 recurring tasks: who does each one, how often, and where.
2. Real volumes. How often each task happens comes from a real five-club chain's own systems: about 16,700 door entries, 304 classes, 588 membership changes and 4,759 debits a week.
3. The time lost. On top of the work itself, the model counts the walk to the desk (about 2 minutes each way), finding a person (about 4 minutes), getting back into the task (about 2 minutes), and the rework and forgotten items when a task is left for later.
4. The time back. The lost time that goes when the task is done where it comes up, on a phone, with the answer coming from Kula rather than a person.

How firm it is. The volumes are measured. Pay levels and role shapes come from the Fitness Industry Award and industry staffing figures. How long each task takes is a working estimate, set from published work-study values, until it is timed in a real club. The model counts walking, waiting and redoing inside a club; it does not count driving between clubs, or a member left waiting at the desk.

How the time is proven. Nobody is asked to log their day. The time given back shows in what your team does in Kula: which tasks moved onto the phone, and how fully.

What it would look like in your club

As a first estimate, carry the figures per club and per member, not the five-club totals: about 39 hours a week back for each club, and about A$7 to A$20 of member money a year for each member.

This is straight-line scaling of the five-club model. A single club with one manager and a small desk team will look different in its detail, which is what timing it in your club settles.

To turn this into your club's numbers, we need three things: your membership, payment and roster data, which Kula reads from the systems you already use; a 20-minute walk-through with one of your managers to time the everyday tasks; and how you pay your instructors and trainers today.

Sources

• Member volumes, door entries, classes, debits and the 6 am door timings: a five-club Australian chain's own systems, read through Kula, October 2026.
• Member retention, 66.4% a year on average across 175 operators: Health & Fitness Association, 2025 benchmarking report.
• Members stay where staff know their names and goals: Bedford, Health Club Management, 342,759 UK members.
• Operators contacted out of hours about cover: Leisure-net Operators Report 2023 (UK), via Health Club Management.
• 7% to 12% of dues payments fail: ABC Fitness.
• Leads called within the hour: The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, 2011, summarised by CrankWheel.
• Pay levels and roles: Fitness Industry Award 2020.
• The work-study method: ILO, Introduction to Work Study.

Planning figures, not a forecast or a guarantee. Every estimate is replaced by your club's own data before it is used for anything.