But also as a business owner, I didn't have a drop in income overnight because we didn't have these systems in place. So I think that has been really reassuring, a big boost in confidence and has allowed us to survive in this period.
My name is Katie, first of all, I run a physio and Pilates business, and we have people that do online classes with us and face-to-face classes normally when we are not in a lockdown position. And we've been going for about six years and we have around 400 people a week that do Pilates with us. And then my other side of the business is that I use this go TeamUp for my clients to our health and wellness business owners.
And I run an online coaching program basically to help them get more clients and make more money and get back to loving what they train to do, which is teach Pilates or be a physio, or be a gym instructor but are lost with it in terms of how to run a business.
We originally were kind of paper-based because we didn't know anything different and we were, you know, growing at a rate of naughts and being consumed by admin. We didn't really have our head round kind of payments, so we were still doing standing orders and we didn't have a direct debit system in place.
And, you know, the normal stuff that happens when you first start a business, you just have to figure it out along the way. And so we'd been going for a few years and we decided to invest in some software that's going to make the whole process super easy. And that's how we came across you guys and then, you know, invested in putting this Pilates studio software within the businesses. Well, it just changes how you do business. It just makes everything so much easier.
So from a business perspective, we are spending less time on admin. So therefore your overheads are less because you're not, you know, paying somebody to do all this kind of stuff for you. It can all be automated. From a client experience, the journey is much easier for them. Particularly as well, now, we've had to move online our face-to-face customer experience is now gone completely.
And therefore, we needed to have a system in place that meant people could manage their own memberships, their own classes, their own bookings without needing to speak to us. So really, you know, having this software in place has enabled us to pivot very quickly and run it an online service that has been very effective and not been affected too much because of the lockdown.
You know, we've been able to just allow our clients the access that they needed to because of using the software. I don't think there's one particular tool. I think there's a lot of things that that we use. And perhaps I'm the wrong person to ask this. I think if you are asking my client care team, they would tell you a million things because they're using it all the time. And I think notifications is a great thing and automation of emails. So when something happens to a customer's memberships, things are set up.
So, again, you can rest knowing that that process is in place without you having to be involved all the time. And I really like class waiting lists because that means when you're running busy classes, people have got the ability to book in and get offered that space when somebody cancels or removes themself from a class, I think the payment system works seamlessly. So, you know that that's really effective. And just the ability to kind of build your timetable and have the ability to integrate directly with Zoom now is you know, it's a game-changer, really.
I'm a Pilates instructor, I still teach in the week with my team. But I'm a business owner in that in that respect, we had a system in place that meant we had reoccurring revenue. So when this crazy pandemic hit, we pivoted and didn't have to drop all prices. We didn't have to reduce all our kind of or change the way we did stuff, we just moved online, we kept pricing the same, and we maintain revenue.
We've been able to launch new memberships because we're now online and, you know, we've developed a whole new service. So rather than, I suppose, relying on a pay-as-you-go system or relying on a four-week, six-week, eight-week course of Pilates, we focus on these people being with those for a longer period of time. And because that's what the clients need, that's what they need to get the results that they're looking for.
But also as a business owner, I didn't have a drop in income overnight because we didn't have these systems in place. So I think that has been really reassuring, a big boost in confidence and has allowed us to survive in this period. And then I think from our coaching side of things, it's trying to encourage business owners to use this opportunity to really relook at how they did business. And how resilient they were as a business, because businesses owners that didn't have systems in place and didn't have memberships and packages and long term commitment of clients, that, you know, those are the businesses that are going to have really struggled.
But this is the perfect opportunity to change how you do it because you can, this is the right time to do that, to look at your business from top-down and make those changes and make sure that you protect yourself as a business owner. And you don't have to drop in prices. You don't have to slash prices because you're teaching online. And if you want to go back to face to face, go back to face to face in the way that you want to do business moving forward and use the software to enable you to set those systems up and make sure that you become a much more resilient business in the future.
Ok, so I would say if you are a new Pilates business that doesn't want to waste time, doesn't want to waste money and doesn't want to waste energy doing it on paper, this is such a massive investment in terms of time, energy, and, you know, for me, it's not expensive because you can return that investment really quickly by not spending hours and hours and hours doing the admin behind it, because that's not what we look to do as Pilates instructors or gym owners or yoga teachers.
We just want to teach, teach the stuff or do the class or, you know, whatever it is. So if you are a new business, be brave, be bold and get software in place quickly. And if you are an established business who hasn't got software and you're just on this hamster wheel of admin and organization and people cancelling and letting you down and not collecting the money in time and then, you know, invest in good software, that's going to it's going to streamline your business.
To hear from more of our TeamUp customers about their experience using our software, check out our testimonials page.