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Wodify for MMA Gyms: Xtreme Couture’s Member Management

My name is Emily Couture, and my husband and I own the gym Extreme Couture MMA here in Las Vegas. And we have been using Wadify for about a year and a half now.

My dad, Randy Couture, relocated to Vegas from Portland, Oregon area.

Up there, he had founded one of the early, like, true MMA training facilities where they put everything together all in one building and really trained specifically for the sport of MMA. Here in Vegas, there wasn't really a spot that had everything under one roof. So, you know, Extreme Couture was born. Running Extreme Couture for me is, you know, obviously, first and foremost, carrying forward my family's legacy, and and, you know, it's a huge responsibility and a huge honor. It's also a way for me to to stay involved and stay connected to the sport of mixed martial arts even though I can't compete anymore. I had my last fight in 2018 and really kinda dove into to having more of a say in how the business was run. And and in 2020 was when dad decided it was time for me to to take over and and start running the show myself.

The brand was built on Randy and his fight career, and it had all this power behind it. Right? This this recognizable name and all of this fame behind it, but that doesn't carry a business. At some point, the legacy needs to be handed off to longevity of business ownership, and that's where we came in.

When we first took over right in the middle of the pandemic during during lockdown, we weren't even allowed to be open.

Yeah. We took over legal ownership at the height of COVID with the doors closed because we couldn't legally operate. We we had to figure out how do we make this work for us in a way that's manageable, and how do we get some some software and some tech that's gonna help us keep track of all of these members and keep track of what dues are owed because that's what's paying our bills. And we needed to find something to kind of help in that transition because it was a big undertaking when when we took this on in a time where it was very rough to be a business owner.

Yep. In some ways, I think was a blessing that there was so much less going on here because it gave me time to really dive into the systems and, you know, figure out what was working and what wasn't. And we had some different phases we went through and different things we tried that, you know, sort of fit the bill and and sort of didn't. And and, you know, eventually, it was about a year and a half, two years ago now, I came across Wadify and have been super happy with what that's done from the… On the member management side of things and how it ties in with everything else that we do here.

When we were looking at transitioning our member management system into something that was gonna be more user friendly for not only the members but us on the back end, like, I was at home. I had little kids and we needed something that I can log in and I can see, okay, what are the outstanding invoices and what, you know, this inventory report and oh, we need to add a different class or we need to change this. We can all do that really easy from home and it kind of allowed us to succeed not only like as business owners, but as parents too because we didn't have to be physically here on property doing everything because it was just chaos all the time.

One of the things for me that honestly was a selling point was that I could figure it out with minimal intervention on Wadify's end. Right? Like I think Wadify is so user friendly and it's like so intuitive. It was a cleaner look.

I think that the communication that we had with the Wadify team early on was instrumental. Like it was so important to us because any question they had, they met with answers, prompt responses, and they really allowed us to fumble with the system, you know, figure it out for ourselves, customize it to what fits our needs because not every business is the same. Right? Like not everybody has the same check-in process or the same class schedule and the the same requirements.

And I think that Wadify allowed us to kind of mold it to to what fit for us. And that allowed us to not only have a family and still work from home, but make it easier and better to keep track of all things business wise.

I think it's a big help too that so many of the staff that we've worked with and our our onboarding process are all people who came up working in gyms and then got linked up with Wadify through that. So they've had a lot of the same experiences and had a lot of good insight for us.

When we reach out to Wadify, a real person responds to us, and it's somebody that we've most likely met and that we've at least corresponded with via email.

Anything we've run up against that was an issue, you know, the scale of our facility. We've got, I think, five or six different doors that people can come through. So figuring out how to get the check-in process right when we can't funnel everybody just through the front desk and make them stop and check-in before they get access to the gym. There's so many ways to get in here. So finding workarounds for that, you know, we really were grateful for the experience that the Wattify team had being in our shoes that they were able to bring to bear on solving some of those problems.

The gym has grown so much that we've actually run out of parking. And it's a it's a great problem to have, but Wadify has grown with us and I think that they're… That the fact that they've been able to help us reach that goal and I think that Wadify's… The tools that have been available to us that we've been able to use and implement towards member retention and really being able to communicate because that's the number one thing that was missing before we kind of got involved was this member to to ownership management kind of communication. And with this Wodify system, people will send us a message and say, hey, can you put my membership on on hold? You know, I'm going through, you know, I lost my job or I'm gonna be out of town or whatever. Ryan and I often are the ones who are responding to them. Wodify has allowed us to really have that kind of one on one connection with everybody who comes through the door, and I think that's made a huge difference.

I think from our very first interaction with Wadify at JujitsuCon on through the onboarding process and to this day, just the the personal care and attention that we perceived, the way that Wadify puts the founders first, and really any need that we have that comes up, they're prompt and and truly thoughtful about addressing it, you know, from onboarding and training and making sure that we felt confident moving forward with the software, that we knew what we needed to know to apply it in our business, to any little support issue that comes up that I send an email about, you know, the response is prompt, super helpful, really have had zero complaints. I've been so happy with the service that we've received and have made friends with a lot of the people that we've worked with through Wadify. So it has just been a fantastic experience from start to now.