Fitness Club Management Automation - A Case Study

Fitness Club Management LLC (FCM) deployed Vena Solutions to automate and streamline its financials and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reporting. Citrin Cooperman worked with FCM to automate financial and operational reports with Vena Solutions that took reporting from 100 hours per week to just seconds. The FCM finance team was able to view real-time data to assist in making data-driven decisions that helped them meet their growth goals.

The Company

Fitness Club Management LLC (FCM) is the operating company arm for one of the largest Crunch Fitness franchisees in the health club operations industry. FCM has over 40 Crunch Fitness club locations across the United States and manages the day-to-day activity, including in-club operations, sales and marketing, finance and accounting, payroll, HR, and more. FCM manages clubs which have revenues in excess of $70 million.

The Challenge

FCM had a lean financial team of two people who were tasked with manually creating multiple financial and KPI reports in Microsoft Excel on a recurring weekly and/or monthly cadence for over 50 key company stakeholders. Data was extracted from FCM’s human resources system, membership and revenue system, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, and then manipulated for the specific end user.

These reports were excessively time-consuming to create and were prone to errors, complicated by the unique intricacies of being a multi-unit franchise. Information was not always consistent between the locations, and FCM had to segment its data to accommodate the many different views that were required. This made it challenging to consistently extract and aggregate data across the portfolio, and the key decision makers had difficulty viewing and leveraging live statistics between the 42 national locations.

The Strategy

Citrin Cooperman worked with FCM to implement Vena Solutions, a corporate performance management software, with the goal of automating and developing financials and KPI reporting.  Within four months, Citrin Cooperman’s team created custom reports, automations, and workflows within Vena and trained FCM’s stakeholders on how to effectively use the system. FCM’s data is now recorded in Vena, allowing the team to create reports and dashboards in real time and with up-to-date information.

Key Benefit Areas

Vena Solutions simplified FCM’s data collection and reporting processes. Key areas where this automation delivered significant value included:

• Increased employee productivity
  Fully automating these financial and operational reports and workflows with Vena saved FCM’s finance team nearly 100 hours per month and $125,000 annually. Streamlining and improving old systems and manual reports provides financial teams with invaluable time that they need to focus on making data-driven decisions and taking action to drive growth and improvement in the business.
• Real-time data reporting
  The FCM team is now able to view accurate, real-time KPI and profit and loss (P&L) reports quickly in Vena. The platform uses a first-in-class workflow tool that determines which reports are needed and who can see them. Decision makers can gather data instantaneously from over 40 different locations in the cloud-based platform, which is accessible from anywhere, allowing them to shift and pivot as needed with clean and accurate data.
• Scalable solution
  The automation and reporting capabilities that Vena provides can scale with the future growth of the business. Citrin Cooperman can help build additional capabilities for FCM to double its business without having to add additional finance employees.

Key Cost Areas

The largest cost area of the FCM deployment was the initial purchase and consulting for the implementation of the Vena Solutions software. Other cost areas included the annual subscription charges for FCM users and employee time spent being trained on the new system.

Working with Citrin Cooperman

FCM and Citrin Cooperman maintain a collaborative relationship and are improving and optimizing processes through managed services. Thanks to the foundation that has been built, FCM continues to grow and see returns on their investment.

ROI: 1 year payback period

Cost Benefit: $125K average annual benefit

“The biggest challenge for FCM, prior to implementing Vena, was the manual nature in which data was collected, transformed, and reported on.  The touchpoints not only caused delays, but inevitably led to recurring human error.  On top of that, we had a dedicated resource who was responsible for the recurring production of these daily, weekly, and monthly reports.  Vena eliminated the errors from human intervention and scaled down that resource to drive labor efficiencies for FCM.”

"The biggest value in working with Citrin Cooperman was their familiarity with the industry, the business, and the franchise model. We had a long-standing relationship with Citrin Cooperman as they are also our tax advisors, so we were aware of the high quality of their work. It was a no-brainer when we learned they have a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) service and we could turn to them for the Vena implementation because they were going to get it done efficiently, effectively, and help us make strategic decisions to position us for success with the tool."