The big thing for me is the customer support. I would not necessarily always compare to what different softwares can do, but how they help you when things don't quite go right. I can guarantee at some point along the line you're going to need them. And the guys at TeamUp are really very good for that.
How TeamUp helps me manage my CrossFit box
I'm James, I'm the owner and head coach at CrossFit 13. We are a CrossFit box based in Essex, so just outside London. We opened in 2013, February 2013, and it's been going ever since. Providing functional fitness for people and covering all aspects of strength and conditioning and gymnastics and a wide range of fitness for people heard about TeamUp just from other friends and people that opened up their own boxes or had something similar along the lines back in the early days and needed something really just to provide some structure for the classes and ways of delivering memberships and pricing and whatnot and, you know, try and cover income coming in, as well as the organizational side of the gym. So someone mentioned TeamUp and then got the call with Tim and then went from there really. And just, yeah, we've been using it ever since.
So it just really provided that kind of organizational element that was needed, especially as a new business trying to find your feet. It really did help. I'm not the best on sort of software and whatnot, and I had to learn a lot of stuff from the ground up. But I found TeamUp was fairly easy to set up. And so we predominantly use it to manage our memberships and membership payments, plus our class structures, you know, our whole online timetable and all the different classes that we manage. We obviously have to limit the numbers because of the size space that we have. So, TeamUp really enables us to create, waitlists and manage the class numbers in and out and also manage the membership options. We have different options.
You can only train certain times a week with certain memberships. That's all kind of dealt with behind the scenes with the software. So it really has helped. And that would be a lot of time on my part going through and checking everyone's membership and what classes they're allowed in and all that. So you have really found that quite helpful. And for me, the customer support is actually what sets TeamUp apart. I'm always onto them about asking how to do this, how to change that and know that we're having some problems, certain members having problems booking in, etc. and they've always come back really, really quickly with an answer, a solution, and sometimes even just contacted the customer themselves. And so I cut myself out. So rather than having to email the customer, then email TeamUp them back and forth, TeamUp have gone straight to the customer themselves and actually sorted out the issue. So and that's been a massive, massive help.
So obviously we've had to switch to an online environment like a lot of people have over the last 12 months. This was quite difficult at first, how to manage it. Obviously now having no experience of running online classes, we've always been a physical training facility. So we switched pretty quickly. I think we closed on the Friday and then opened on the Monday with regards to our online classes back in March last year, 2020, and been using TeamUp now as well to book in and to set up the online classes with integration with Zoom has been really, really, really helpful. And we've even started organizing quiz nights now on Saturday nights.
And during the last lockdown, we even had some virtual escape rooms, which are really quite good from where we sort of locked in and split the split everyone up into teams and it was like three, two, one, go. Who can you can get out the escape room. Sadly, my team lost, which I want revenge on. So we need to find a new escape room to try and do on that. But yeah, it's just trying to find ways of keeping the community together. Obviously, training's fine and an online class is good, but it's just trying to do some fun things outside of training to keep things going. And even this year at Christmas, we still tried to do our awards ceremony, which definitely wasn't the same as actually being in person and our member awards, but we tried to get everyone to log in and still try and have some form of normality. But, um, yeah, it's been an interesting time.
I would definitely recommend it. I would say it was a game-changer for organizational elements behind the scenes that customers don't always see. It's fairly easy to use even for non technically minded people like myself. So if I can manage it, then I'm sure pretty much everyone else can. And as I said, that the big thing for me is the customer support. I would not necessarily always compare to what different softwares can do, but how they help you when things don't quite go right. I can guarantee at some point along the line you're going to need them. And the guys at TeamUp are really very good for that.
To hear from more of our TeamUp customers about their experience using our software, check out our testimonials page.