Ascend Strength & Conditioning Business Plan — Management and Team
The management structure, the nine-coach establishment, and why coach retention and member retention are the same problem.
Management and Team
Jump to section
- Overview & contents
- i. Important Notice and Basis of Preparation
- 1. Executive Summary
- 2. Market and Positioning
- 3. How a Studio Actually Makes Money
- 4. Churn and the Retention Engine
- 5. SWOT and Competitive Position
- 6. Operations and the Capacity Build
- 7. Compliance and Consumer Protection
- 8. Management and Team
- 9. Financial Plan
- 10. Break-Even and Debt Service
- 11. Investment Analysis
- 12. Sensitivity and Scenario Analysis
- 13. Risk Analysis
- 14. Implementation Roadmap
- 15. Key Performance Indicators
- 16. Key Assumptions
- 17. Conclusion and Recommendation
- A. Appendix A: Consolidated Financial Summary
- B. Appendix B: Capacity and Unit Economics Schedules
- C. Appendix C: Funding, Debt and Working Capital Schedules
- D. Appendix D: Risk Register
- E. Appendix E: Glossary
|
Role |
Number at maturity |
Responsibility |
Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Owner or managing director |
1 |
Strategy, funding, lease, corporate relationships |
From inception |
|
Head coach |
1 |
Programming, coaching standards, coach development, member results |
Month 1 — the hire that determines the product |
|
Studio manager |
1 |
Timetable, attendance monitoring, retention interventions, member experience |
Month 2 — the hire that determines churn |
|
Coaches |
9 |
Class delivery, member relationships, movement standards |
Phased with studio openings |
|
Personal trainers, contracted |
4 |
One-to-one training on a revenue share |
From Year 1 |
|
Front of house |
3 |
Sign-ups, enquiries, collections follow-up, retail |
From opening |
|
Bookkeeper, part-time |
1 |
Debit order runs, reconciliations, statutory returns |
From Month 1 |
|
Year 1 |
Year 2 |
Year 3 |
Year 4 |
Year 5 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Overhead, R |
2 780 000 |
3 090 000 |
4 120 000 |
4 440 000 |
4 680 000 |
|
Overhead as a share of revenue |
74.4% |
43.2% |
41.6% |
36.4% |
36.3% |
|
Gross profit, R |
1 036 000 |
3 987 000 |
5 647 000 |
7 670 000 |
8 373 000 |
|
Gross profit as a multiple of overhead |
0.37x |
1.29x |
1.37x |
1.73x |
1.79x |
Overhead falls from 74 per cent of revenue in Year 1 to 36 per cent by Year 5, and gross profit moves from 0.37 times overhead to 1.79 times. That is the operating leverage the plan depends on, and it comes from filling a timetable against a cost base — premises, management, systems, front of house — that was already carried at two studios.
Four numbers govern this business and should be reported weekly rather than monthly: monthly churn by joining cohort, average visits per member per week, class occupancy by time slot, and net member movement. Cohort churn is the most important of the four, because an overall churn figure conceals whether the business is losing long-standing members or failing to convert new ones — and those two problems have entirely different remedies.