Churn is the rent you pay on growth
Every studio knows its member count; few know their monthly churn, and churn quietly decides everything else. Lose 6% of members a month and the average membership lasts around sixteen months; lose 10% and it lasts ten, so the same intro-offer spend buys a much smaller business. We rebuild churn from your own platform exports, Mindbody, Glofox, Wodify or whatever runs the front desk, and we track it by cohort, because January joiners behave nothing like the members who found you in October. Leaving is rarely random, either: contract anniversaries, September schedule changes and failed payments cluster, and retention effort aimed at those moments beats blanket discounts.
Lifetime value follows directly: revenue per member per month multiplied by the months they stay. Set beside what an intro offer and the advertising behind it actually cost, it answers the only marketing question that matters, whether acquisition earns its money back before the member walks. When it does not, the fix is usually retention or pricing, not a bigger ad budget.
The timetable is a portfolio
Each class has unit economics: the instructor's pay for the hour against attendees multiplied by effective revenue per visit, which differs depending on whether they came on an unlimited membership, a pack or a drop-in. Fill rate by time slot shows which classes subsidize which. Mix matters too: pack buyers pay more per visit but lapse without ever cancelling, while unlimited members are cheaper per visit and stickier, so the dashboard prices both on purpose. A CFO view prices and prunes the schedule the way an investor manages a portfolio: the packed 6 a.m. earns a second coach, the half-empty mid-afternoon slot finds a cheaper format or gives its hour back. None of this is visible in a statement with one revenue line and one wage line, which is why the stream-level books from our End-to-End Accounting work are the raw material for everything on this page.
A cash calendar for a seasonal business
January inflates the bank account with cash the studio still owes back as workouts; summer thins the billing while rent, base payroll, HST remittances and tax instalments arrive on their usual schedule. We keep a rolling 13-week cash view that nets the deferred obligation out of the January number and plans the summer from real cover rather than the bank balance. Payment-failure recovery sits on the same calendar: chased declines are the cheapest revenue a studio can add, and a weekly recovery rhythm is worth more than most promotions.
Second-location math, built the way a lender reads it
The second location is the biggest cheque a studio owner will ever write, and it deserves a model built from evidence rather than enthusiasm. We construct it from what the first location has already proved, in scenarios:
| Model input | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Ramp to break-even membership | Your first location's actual cohort history, not industry folklore |
| Fit-out and equipment cost | Real quotes, with Class 13 and Class 8 treatment and the financing structure attached |
| Member migration between sites | Postal-code analysis of the current base, so cannibalization is explicit |
| Coach coverage and staffing | The intended timetable priced at real per-class and salaried rates |
| Cash reserve required | The slowest plausible ramp, not the average one |
Financing is where Tauro's background is unusual for a boutique firm. Walla Assaf came out of banking and corporate finance, and the lender package we assemble through Business Financing Advisory is built to read the way a credit file gets read: clean statements, a deferred-revenue balance explained rather than apologized for, and projections with their assumptions shown. Studios walk into those meetings prepared, which is most of the outcome.
A cadence, not a report
Our Fractional CFO engagement runs monthly or quarterly, sized to a single studio or a small GTA group. Each close updates the short dashboard, churn, revenue per member, fill rate and cash cover, and the meeting spends its time on the one or two decisions that are actually live: raise the membership price or grandfather existing members, add the 7 a.m. or cut the 2 p.m., commit to the second site or wait two quarters. Decisions get written down with their reasoning, so next year you can check whether the assumption held, not just whether the memory does. The engagement is scoped and quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
