How club management software helps a Parkour business owner

When the customers of Team Kinetix came to Brad Wendes in need of assistance with their day to day bookings and memberships, he saw it as an opportunity to improve his customer experience. With a foundation based on helping people, Brad has built community and encouragement into every aspect of his Parkour business and in the wider Parkour community. A TeamUp customer for over three years, we started noticing the new steps Brad was taking to show his own customers how easy using TeamUp is after he began posting "how-to" videos on his Instagram and Youtube channels.

Brad is thrilled to share those videos to lend a hand to other TeamUp customers who may need some assistance showing their customers how to manage their memberships and bookings, and we are thrilled for you to get to know Brad, his story, and how he grew Team Kinetix and Parkour in the UK to what it is today.

In April 2018 we opened the Kinetix Academy. All of this has really grown out of wanting to do something. We have created our own marketplace; we created a legitimate sport, got insurance, wrote a syllabus, and between us all—Parkour UK, my team, and the teams I work with—we've really done something quite special. More recently I was a semi-finalist on Ninja Warrior UK, which is quite nice for our kids to see the coaches doing cool stuff, and we try and do as much as we can to show them and act as good role models for the kids.

Growth and collaboration between the Parkour community

Between myself and the other Parkour gym owners in the UK, we help each other out. We have a group chat and we talk every single day about what's working, what's not working, what software we are using, what classes we are running, what age groups we are teaching, and what our experiences are. I think it's helpful that there aren't many of us so we aren't in direct competition with each other. But again, given the community that we've built, it would be inappropriate to open another gym near one of us because we don't want to be in competition with each other. We want to help each other grow. I can refer people to their businesses in other areas and vice versa, and we can visit each other's gyms and become stronger as a result of working together.

Teaching Parkour and freerunning kids classes

We teach the kids we train by leading by example. At the risk of getting too deep and preachy, Parkour itself and its origins come from altruism, a desire to help other people. Its origins were in the French military who have a saying "Être fort pour être utile" meaning "Be strong to be useful", so there's no point in being strong if you can't do anything with it. The fundamentals we teach are about overcoming obstacles and about working together and helping each other. We do team challenges where the kids have to work together to achieve a challenge and we teach people to encourage each other. There is no one person who is the best, we encourage them to egg each other on, and as will happen with young people, there will be some friendly competition but that isn't the focus. The older ones encourage the younger ones and their peers—rather than being in competition with each other, they're helping each other and growing as a result. We try and encourage them to help each other out rather than trying to fight each other to be the best.

Building a better customer experience through video

Lockdown has given me an opportunity to sit back, take a step away, and to re-assess what I am doing. A year of no income has been painful, but in terms of business development and looking at what we're doing and what the customer experience is, being forced to step back has been quite good.

Video content and curation

During lockdown, I started doing a lot of videos, including daily training videos from my living room at home. We started putting them on social media and YouTube to give our customers exercises they could do at home to stay fit and strong so when they came back to class, they wouldn't have missed out. While I don't mind standing in front of people and talking, I hadn't done a lot of videos in the past, it wasn't something I particularly liked, and I was a bit nervous. I see people do those vlog style videos where they talk to the camera incessantly and there are a lot of influencer style videos that I never wanted to do. But when I started to get positive feedback and saw people getting a lot of value from the videos, I had to reframe my own way of thinking and say actually this isn't something someone is doing because they are being narcissistic, for the most part, there is actually some value to the content they are creating.

On-demand video content

It was very difficult when trying to decide how to do an online offering when we have an enormous warehouse filled with bars, mats, boxes, and enormous pieces of equipment. The guidance from the government was not to go outside or share equipment, so I had to work really hard to think up relevant challenges that people could do from home, which is why I think I made over 60 on-demand videos that people could do right from their living room with objects they found around the house. Some were strength and fitness and some were skills-based, and yes it was hard, and by the end of summer 2020, I was running out of ideas. I started with daily and then scaled down. 

Creating TeamUp instructional videos

We looked at what we were doing and we started doing more tutorials and really short videos, particularly for Instagram, that were under a minute that someone could look at and digest really quickly. We had an FAQ page on our website with a couple of downloadable PDFs on how to use TeamUp in a very basic way, but I started getting a lot of phone calls from people asking "how to do this" or saying they had looked at the system but didn't know "how to do that".

I spent some time making videos showing them how to do different things. The TeamUp system is so easy and quick to use, and the aim of these videos was to help people. We wanted to provide a resource to educate them, and a couple of our friends who run other businesses started sharing the videos I made because there is a lot that's universal that other businesses can use.

You can see Brad's videos on his Youtube channel, Team Kinetix and Instagram page.

Re-opening live Parkour classes and the future

Reopening offered a few challenges. The first thing we had to take into account was the government guidelines and regulations, for example, having a screen at reception, hands-free automatic sanitation stations around the building, and a marked one-way system, which makes it easy for customers to enter one way and exit another. We also have our customers wait outside at the beginning of every class and then bring them in. The parents have an outside waiting area where they have coffee and tea.

Parkour UK also set up their own guidelines, which were slightly stricter, and then I looked at our specific business and we went a little step further as well. We have an enormous amount of space to keep distance, we didn't do warm-ups so we could have a normal number of children and put them into really small groups with one coach per group, so we had a large number of staff on site. All of our equipment is always sanitised with fast-acting sanitisers and antibacterial fluids, and hands had to be sanitised upon entry and equipment sanitised every 15 minutes.

As the government restrictions started to ease up, we started cleaning between classes and also wiping things down if our customers came into contact with certain equipment. Simple things like that do affect our business, but in terms of the customer experience and people feeling safe that was more important and meant more customers would come back and we'd be stronger as a result.

Video: Why Brad chose TeamUp for his Parkour club

To learn more about TeamUp for your Parkour or fitness club, sign up for a free 30-day trial, here.