Built to Last: How Urban Fitness Oakland Achieved a 99% Retention Rate

How it Started

Urban Fitness Oakland owner Noah Kinner didn’t grow up in a gym. He grew up on a farm on the other side of the country—upstate New York. For Kinner, “strength training” meant hauling buckets of sap, chopping wood, and moving steel L-beams. When he eventually moved to California in 2006 and started coaching, his background shaped everything about his vision for how fitness should look.

Just a year after moving to California, Kinner opened Urban Fitness Oakland in 2007. His philosophy was built around preparing members for life outside the gym. He knew the training might not appear trendy or glamorous, but he was confident that real-world strength would be the game-changer for his members.

In 2011, Kinner expanded into the space next door and shifted from personal training as a core offering to what he calls “team training.” Classes are offered five times per day, and attendance generally hovers around 16 to 18 people per class.

What makes Urban Fitness unique in its market—even after 18 years—is that the gym has always been clear about the vision. There are no leaderboards. No one cares what someone lifted last week. The long-term members train alongside the ones who just started.

Most importantly, the Urban Fitness Oakland culture runs on a shared understanding that everyone is here for the long haul, so train like it. However, Kinner explained that he preaches the importance of longevity in training, and tells members that their bodies are like a car that they’ll be driving for the rest of their lives.

“Have fun, but don’t ride it until the wheels come off.”

The Win: 99% Retention

When asked about the biggest win after almost two decades of running Urban Fitness Oakland, Kinner said COVID was confirmation of just how important his prior decisions were.

Within 24 hours of the shutdown notice in 2020, Kinner loaned out all of his equipment and moved his entire business online. He remembers setting up a streaming kit inside the gym, with one coach running the class and another doing the workout. They kept their exact same daily schedule, with classes running live on YouTube. In his words, the community didn’t skip a beat, not a single employee was laid off, and not one rent payment was missed.

The result: a 99% member retention rate through the entire shutdown.

The critical takeaway though, is that the retention rate didn’t happen because of the actions they took during COVID. It happened because of what they’d been doing for years leading up to it. 

Kinner had always required 12-month memberships. He explained that even though it can be a tough sell, it ultimately attracts members who are committed. Plus, it builds a financial foundation that month-to-month memberships can’t. When the world shut down, Kinner had built a community of loyal people who were invested for the long run.

Switching from PushPress to Wodify

Before switching to Wodify, Kinner was with PushPress for about four years. He recalls signing up with PushPress after a pitch that sounded really sweet: he was promised one platform with everything integrated, and no more stitching together various tools through Zapier.

However, Kinner says that promise didn’t hold up in practice. The CRM wasn’t native, it was a white-label product that was supposed to talk to the core platform, and the seams showed constantly. A few examples he gave:

1. Inaccurate member/contact lists. Kinner said they couldn’t reliably email or text members without accidentally contacting people who had moved or left the gym years before. He described it as a constant dance of manually removing people who shouldn’t be there. Wodify ties membership status directly to active contracts, so your current list reflects your actual membership base. 
2. Disconnects between memberships and contracts. Kinner explained that renewals required deleting and re-creating records. Wodify connects contracts natively to membership records, so renewals, expirations, and status changes happen in one place without workarounds.
3. Two separate logins. Kinner had one login for the Core platform and another for the CRM. He said the two systems never fully synced with each other, and didn’t realize it until he was already in. Wodify’s member management and communication tools are built into the same system, so everything works together seamlessly.
4. Lead data with no segmentation. After a migration mishap from PushPress, Kinner’s 3,000+ person contact list was left completely unsegmented. This meant there was no way to filter cold leads from warm ones or former members. In an attempt to fix it, Urban Fitness Oakland sent an email to everyone and got hit with an 11% opt-out rate, which suspended their account. With Wodify, you can tag and segment leads to make sure you’re contacting the right people with the right messaging.
5. App glitches affecting the member experience. Kinner mentioned that the member-facing PushPress app would glitch constantly, and coaches would struggle to check-in members because of tagging issues. Wodify gyms are able to consistently rely on the app for bookings, check-ins, payments and more.

The switch back to Wodify came down to needing an all-in-one gym software in which the basics work well. Kinner said, “For 95% of gym owners out there, we don’t want a big, unwieldy thing. Wodify is right-sized. It has the functionalities you need. And I believe in the team that’s building it.”

If you’re not a Wodify customer yet, book a demo with our team today!

To learn more about Urban Fitness Oakland, visit the website here.