Greg Mikolap shares how easy and professional using TeamUp makes his small group PT business

Greg Mikolap, owner of ICON Gym, shares why he loves using TeamUp to run his small group PT business and how having software allows him to be more professional and personal for his clients.

I would say TeamUp would be the best money you will spend because it is money you will save in the long run and it will make your life easier. You will make your life easier, you will make your business more personal, but also more professional at the same time. So I would highly recommend TeamUp.

Why I use TeamUp to run my small group PT business

Hi my name is Greg and I run ICON Gym in Maidenhead in England, which is a small group personal training business. So ICON was opened two and a half years ago. The idea for it was going on for many years. 70 percent of our customers of our members are women. The average age is 42. 85 percent of members are 30 and above. So it's an adult gym where we train mainly doing strength training. And I always wanted to have a place or work in a place that is nonjudgmental, that is encouraging, that is not threatening. And since I've spent most of my life in commercial gyms, I know how sort of free weights areas were sometimes a taboo place for women to go. And there were sitting cross trainer on the treadmill, whereas we know for your longevity and health, these things are great, but strength training should be prioritized.

I just wanted to create a space that everyone will feel welcome to use weights and it will be under guidance and supervision. I wanted to open a gym of my own or a place of my own for many years now, and many different softwares were considered. I had about TeamUp from a fellow gym member and I had a call. I actually don't remember the initial sort of introductions. I didn't know about TeamUp much at the beginning of my journey as a gym owner, but I quickly realized this is a great software because on the front end it looks very attractive for the members to book sessions and manage their memberships, manage sessions, manage coffees purchased and so on and so forth. But also more important on the backend for us in the office, it allowed us to make changes seamlessly without any effort. So especially going into a lockdown, we had to make a lot of changes, as you can imagine, like many businesses and TeamUp allowed us to seamlessly transition online and move our customer base online.

And as soon as nothing has happened and we are able to do that again going back into the gym and we are just after our third lockdown in the UK and TeamUp has been better than ever in terms of allowing us to make changes to our timetable, adding new things, asking customers, sending in a notification. So it made a journey of our members, I think very allowed, allowed us to make that journey very personal. Actually, the support is one of the better things, best things about TeamUp because you can call the number or send an email or send now something I haven't seen before, but it's very visible on your sort of the main website. You have this popup window where you can ask questions and you always get a response within 24 hours on the email and or if you leave a voice note voicemail on the phone if no one is able to pick up, I've always had a response back within a day.

And so many things I think are set up now it's very ICON-like. So I don't even think of it as go TeamUp. I just think it's my software that I run memberships because so many things are very personal to me of how I want to deliver my experience and the TeamUp team was just able to allow me to do that and always come up with ways to do things which I would never sort of think of. TeamUp was always great in terms of, you know, now the app and us changing the classes changing the capacity. We changed our business model for a third time now. And it was always sort of with the help of TeamUp. Online was great because of the Zoom integration where we struggled initially on the first lookdown. We had to set up everyone's profile and we had to sort of inform people almost during their session who are they training with. And only then I discovered quite late that Zoom integration with TeamUp. And since I've done it, it was the best thing for all my training, because you set up a coaches room in TeamUp and person just had to click on the class, they got sent the link and they would join the class. So there was no confusion of who's coaching.

Some of our coaches who are not great with technology, they got notifications that they just have to click that button and coach, you know, and do what they do best, which is coaching. On-demand section is actually great now because for months I knew that once we are able to see people face to face online is something I will not compete at and I will not join further.

So I wanted to do all the things that we've done on-demand to store them somewhat. And I got my developers to create a specialist sort of folder on the website and send our customers them. And so it became really complicated. But then I realized there is a feature on-demand and TeamUp, and all you have to do is send a link to your YouTube video, send a description that you have in your YouTube video, and it just goes really quick. For example, one of our members is a news reporter and she just travelled to Rome yesterday and she was just checking how our on-demand section is. Is it updated and it is so she will be able to do ICON workouts even when she's in Rome now before she comes back and joins us again. So it was fantastic, actually.

So TeamUp was very helpful every step of the way. I would say TeamUp would be the best money you will spend because it is money you will save in the long run and it will make your life easier. You will make your life easier, you will make your business more personal, but also more professional at the same time. So I would highly recommend TeamUp.

To hear from more of our TeamUp customers about their experience using our software, check out our testimonials page.