One of our clients, a high-end personal training studio owner, had a problem that she just couldn’t figure out. 

She knew how many clients she had and how many sessions each had purchased in their package, but every month her income would come up short. 

So if she started the month with 160 clients at $480 per month, she’d expect to get 160 X 480 = $76,800 in fee income. But month after month it would come in well below that! What was going wrong?

Spreadsheets to the rescue!

We created a quick spreadsheet to track the client load. 

After tracking the data for just a couple of weeks the problem was clear as day; each week there were ~ 6% of sessions that either canceled (and the space was not re-filled) or where the client no-showed. Trainers weren’t enforcing the cancelation/reschedule policy, and that accounted for most of their lost revenue. With the data in hand, we explained to the trainers what not enforcing the policy was costing them and poof, another $4,600 in monthly revenue appeared!

But we learned some other interesting things tracking this spreadsheet for a few weeks.

• The client churn rate was higher than they expected, and that also contributed to the shortfall. How could they do a better job following up with clients who dropped off?
• They had a lot more unused capacity than they thought — but most of it was outside of the prime workout hours. Could they offer a lower cost membership for those who could work out off-peak? Could they do outreach to shift workers or restaurant workers who work out off-peak?

Within just two months of tracking this spreadsheet, they had added over $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue! (Yes, that’s $72,000 annually.) How’s that for ROS (Return on Spreadsheet)?

What are some examples of how you’ve used a spreadsheet to discover important insights about your business? I’d love to hear about them!

Hit reply and let me know!