Volo Innovations

I was asked yesterday “What is the difference between online schedule management and other forms of scheduling like paper, Excel, Outlook calendar, I-calendar or Google calendar?” I realized that to me, a co-owner of Volo Innovations, a company that does online schedule management, the question answers itself but lots of people don’t see the differences and think they are all interchangeable.

The first two, paper and Excel, you can create a calendar on and are some of the most common methods that our clients used before upgrading their business.

The last three on that list are all online but they all end in the word ‘calendar’ not ‘schedule’, this is the fundamental difference. A paper, Excel or online calendar is where you can enter your events or appointments for the day week or month but that is it; an online schedule manager focuses on management of your schedules and tracks, reports and bills for all of the scheduled events or appointments.

What does this mean for a fitness business? Control, without being a control freak.  You want to be able to control the business process or systems and billing for any services, memberships or packages the fitness business offers.

Online schedule management allows a fitness business to use the latest and greatest in software technology to advance their business and improve their business management, systems and billing. This is done by connecting all of the activities that are on the schedule to a powerful CRM (customer retention manager) and in-depth billing features. So everything that happens on a schedule is tracked to the member or client’s account and is either deducted from pre-bought packages or the software will store the activities to be billed for at a later date. No matter how you charge your clients there is a way for us to bill and track your money.

With Volo’s online schedule management system you can easily create new online schedules and manage them separately.

By having different appointments and packages tied to each schedule you,the business owner, have the ability to personalize the schedule based off of your business logic.

Addin this dynamic flexibility to your fitness company will allow you to grow, enhance, build or adapt your business to the often changing market.

Whether you decide to use Volo’s online schedule management or one of the calendar options you must decide what you want for your business.

• Do you want to grow?
• Do you want accuracy in billing?
• Do you want to be viewed as a professional?
• Do you want to know what your business is doing through in-depth reports?
• Do you want unlimited access to your schedules, accounting and business systems?
• Do you want a system that can adapt to how you run your company?
• Do want to save time on administration of your business?
• Do you want to save money eliminating costly errors?

If you answer yes to the above then you have essentially figured out what your business needs an online schedule manager or another form of scheduling like paper, Excel, Outlook calendar, I-calendar or Google calendar. The five options listed cannot provide any of those benefits to your business only an online schedule manager can.



It’s been nearly ten years since my partner Barry and I opened our own personal training studio. Like all trainers, we believed that running our own facility would be better than working for others – and it is!

But we quickly realized that for our business to succeed, to grow and to prosper we would need to be more than just great trainers. We would have to become – Business People.

Not the role most fitness professionals want for themselves! Our passion is for training, for working with our clients, seeing their health, their fitness and their lives improve. Every minute spent on bookkeeping or scheduling was a minute stolen from the gym. Accounting and data entry were sapping our energy.

If this sounds like you I have some very good news. It is possible to keep doing the training you love AND run a successful, profitable business at the same time. But you need the right systems in place to streamline your operations.

Whatever business you’re in the two biggest challenges are to control scheduling and to control billing. Time and money. Lose track of these and your chances of succeeding in a competitive business like ours are not good to say the least.

Choosing software to help you run your business is a big decision.

There are a lot of options out there and it is a bit overwhelming. Figuring out what questions you need to ask, what features you need and what is going to make your life easier and help improve your revenues.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Do you work day to day in your business?

If you do then you will be wearing lots of different hats and you will want to make sure the software has an interface that you are comfortable with for the day to day activities like booking appointments or making a sale as well as the reporting options that you will need when you have your owner/manager hat on.

• Do you offer services like personal training, massage and group training that needs to be tracked accurately to billing?

The more services that you offer the more challenging it can be to ensure accurate tracking of sessions to billing. You may sell packages for training, do monthly memberships and bill your corporate group training contracts at the end of the month. Make sure that the software that you choose can handle the different ways that you have set up your business in as few clicks of the mouse as possible. Be aware the number of clicks to complete daily activities can add up so think about that when you are assessing software.

• Do you want online software or desktop software?

This is a matter of what you are comfortable with and if you want to be able to run your business from anywhere. Do you want to be able to go on holiday and still run your monthly billing? If so then online might be the better choice for you, if you live in a remote area with poor internet connectivity then maybe not.

• Do you want to give your members control of their schedules?

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you finish training clients or teaching classes and realize that you have 4 emails, 2 voicemails and 3 texts from clients that need to change their schedules? If you can relate to this then using online software that has a member portal that you can set what your members are allowed to do will save you a lot of time.

• Are you primarily membership based?

Do you need the ability to check members in through a card scanner? Are you 24 hour access? Can the software you are looking at help you with these or will it have to be separate? When a member checks in will you be notified if they have a valid membership or unpaid invoices? You want software that will handle all components of your business in one. As soon as you start having to work with multiple pieces of software there is room for error.

• Do you want to accept credit card, is it critical that it is integrated with your software?

By having your credit card processing integrated into your software ensures more accurate data entry, if you are using a separate terminal you or your staff will need to manually enter the data into your software. Some online software will have an integrated e-store for you to use when you sign up for integrated credit card processing.

• Do you want to handle failed payments with your clients or do you want a debt collection service?

None of us like being a debt collector however you need to think about how big your business is, how close you are with your clients/members and how much you are willing to pay for this service. Typically companies that offer this as part of their software handle all of your billing and charge you a higher percentage on all of your payment processing regardless of whether or not the transaction fails. If you are not working day to day with your clients this might be a good solution for you.

I hope this helps you think about what you need to ask yourself so that you can make sure that the software that you are choosing is the right fit for you and your business.

To learn more about Volo, our online scheduling, billing and member management software enter your name below and we will email you the pre-recorded webinar to check out or call us for a private demo at 1-866-303-1038.

I hope that everything one has taken a moment to be thankful for the freedoms that we have in our countries. My question to you today is what are you doing with that freedom?

Running your own business grants you independence from a job provided you set it up correctly and have the systems in place that allow you the freedom to run your own fitness business without becoming a slave to the clients. This can be tricky at times because we want our clients to have success and we feel obligated to make times work in our schedules because we don’t want them to miss an appointment. While it is great to have that level of dedication to your clients that can also backfire on you as they can grow to assume that you will drop whatever it is you have scheduled to look after them.

3 quick tips to make sure you are setting up your fitness business to ensure your independence:

1. Online scheduling allows the clients to go online and find times that you have marked as available without them looking over your should at your schedule. They won’t know that you aren’t available because you have scheduled a nap all they know is that you aren’t available. I know a lot of Personal Trainers that when we first talk about online scheduling they are nervous to give up the control but if they only open up the times they want clients to be able to schedule in and they book all their regulars into their time slots this can really streamline your fitness business and allow your clients some control to deal with scheduling issues when it is convenient for you.
2. More rules than exceptions, this is a funny one but the more companies that I set up with Volo, our online scheduling, billing and member management software, the more I realize that some business have create a pricing structure that is so complicated due to the fact that they have these packages that they sell but almost every single person that they work with has an exception for 1 reason or another. There will always be exceptions but try to make them few and far between to save yourself a lot of administrative headaches.
3. Never stop learning everyday you can learn something new that will help you grow as a person, as fitness professional and as a business leader. Subscribe to blogs from the fitness industry, marketing industry, business leaders anyone that you might be able to pick up a kernel of information that you can add to your box of tools. As humans our potential knows no bounds so don’t limit yourself.

Yes when you first start any business you will be working long hours getting new clients, putting together marketing efforts, attending networking events with other business professionals attending education conferences to learn more about your craft but despite all of the work you are achieving a new level of independence. The independence to live your life the way that you want!

One of the features Volo provides to help with member management is the member's portal. This is another way to streamline your  fitness business by alleviating some of the work on your end.The scheduling can be done online by your members freeing up valuable time for you.

Firstly, what is the member’s portal? It is the site in which your members can log into (depending on the permissions you allow):

• Sign up as a member
• View the schedule(s)
• Book themselves into a class/appointment
• Cancel if they can't make it
• Purchase sessions and/or packages
• Update their address/contact information
• Look at all their finished activities and their upcoming activities
• View all invoices (outstanding and paid)

The benefit of setting up a member portal is to allow the member to do some of the administration on their own.

By using the member portal, you can also have prospective members go to your website to get started with the basic tasks such as:

• Sign up as a member
• Purchase sessions 
• Book themselves into the class all on their own without you being involved.

The steps to creating your member's portal are as follows:

1. Setup the member permissions for each schedule. To do this go to Setup - Schedules - and click on Member Permissions

2. Next you'll need to turn on the option if you want non members to be able to sign up on their own. To do this go to Setup - Settings - Club Settings - and click on the box next to 'Allow Self Registration'

3. You will then need to create the login box for your website. The script to do this is in the Help portal. Here is the link to the article on how to add the script.

Setting up the member portal will help automate your business and allow information to be more readily available for your members while freeing up valuable time for you to use to get new clients! 

Running your fitness business is a challenge and finding tools to use that are going to make it easier are a critical step in taking your business to the next level. Finding a piece of software that you can use to have all of your scheduling and billing in 1 system is a big step forward as the software will be able to accurately keep track of personal training that you have provided, bootcamp memberships and so many other parts of your business without you even having to worry about it.

Having worked with both online and desktop scheduling and billing software I have noticed substantial differences between them. Here are a few observations as I have seen as a tech support person:

1. Installations:

Online - Installation is extremely easy, quick, there typically isn't any actual install just opening up a web browser and accessing your secure site.

Desktop - Installation can be like passing a kidney stone and can take many hours/days. The time frame depends on the size of the files being transferred, internet speed, firewalls, hardware, etc.

2. Running Reports:

Online - Reports run quickly. Even when there is a lot of data to go through (such as invoices or payroll, etc) it usually runs in an acceptable amount of time. But if you ever do get bored of waiting, you can just open another window and keep working on something else while your report builds in the background.

Desktop - Reports are painfully slow. For some reason when something is taking forever to build we tend to click the mouse violently like the program knows you're becoming impatient. This usually lands up with the program freezing, sometimes even freezing the computer. Ugh! Start menu... restart computer... restart report...

3. Updates:

Online - Updates are usually seamless and clients don't usually notice the update.

Desktop - Updates are like seeing lightning then waiting for the thunder. You have to send the update. Once the update is sent, you can usually expect a mass amount of calls saying the update destroyed their software to the point it's not even usable. Grey hair starts to grow at this point.

4. Windows / OS updates:

Online - Microsoft Windows updates or Macintosh OS updates don't affect online software... which is awesome.

Desktop - Microsoft Windows updates or Macintosh OS can and do affect desktop software. Sometimes the updates can change settings on the computer, which then can affect the software. When you work with desktop software you are very aware to when Windows and OS are sending updates. You program it into your calendar as you would your mother's birthday.

5. Accessing your system:

Online - If there's internet, you can access your system. With most online software this includes iPhones, blackberrys, laptops, etc.

Desktop - If you're at your computer, you can access your system. Unfortunately I don't think you'd be allowed to setup a desktop computer at a coffee shop because you want to do some work.

6. Data Recovery:

Online - Web-based software usually has automatic backups to their servers. So data recovery is not normally an issue.

Desktop - If you don't have an up to date backup you could lose your data. If the hardware failed, then data recovery could cost you a few hours with a technician or sometimes is impossible to recover at all. Re-entering every member's information and inventory does not sound like a way I'd want to spend my weekend.

Many fitness professionals need to access their schedules from various locations, so online business management software may be more effective. Being able to book appointments and view schedule changes is vital and software should help make this easier.

Every fitness professional, whether they run their own business or work for someone else, has to contend with clients canceling their appointments. "Too busy at work", "I have no time" or "I have a cold" are really familar phrases. While these are all good excuses none of them are reasons not to exercise.

At this time of year a lot of us get the "I have a cold" excuse and today I read this great article from the NY times telling everyone why it is important to keep exercising even when you have a cold! They did a study and it showed that while the people felt more fatigued their actual performance wasn't affected by the cold. In fact more often than not the people that exercised with a cold reported that they felt better than the non-exercisers.

So the next time cold season threatens your business make sure to keep this information on hand so that you can convince your clients that continuing to exercise is what is best for them.

Business management software for clubs, studios and trainers. Scheduling, invoicing, member and staff management all in one place, accessible anytime, anywhere. Cut the clutter, end the errors, provide killer customer service.

Vancouver, Canada - March 5, 2008

Volo Innovations introduces a revolutionary new business management software called Volo today at the 27th Annual International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association Convention and Trade Show (IHRSA). Volo provides the health and fitness industry with a remarkably affordable and easy to use business management software that centralizes and integrates appointment scheduling, facility reservations, invoicing, client and staff management, inventory and business reporting. The result is an immediate end to expensive scheduling errors, the ability to do accurate invoicing within seconds and superb one-on-one customer service, all at the simple click of a button. Gone is the clutter of paperwork, the complexity of multiple software programs and the waste of time and risk of error inherent in both.

With Volo, sophisticated functionality is balanced with simplicity. The highly intuitive interface and navigation greatly minimizes the learning curve for management and staff. Even the initial set-up, which is facilitated by Volo support, has businesses up and running within an hour.

Volo is uniquely adaptable. All segments of the industry, including independent fitness trainers, yoga studios, physiotherapists and sports clubs can benefit from comprehensive business management without sacrifice due to budget or size.  Volo is also capable of seamlessly evolving as businesses grow in membership, location and services offered. Say goodbye to expensive add-on modules or the need to suffer through complicated migrations of business data to different software in the future.

Volo uses a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, which provides customers with the added benefit of never having to worry about updates, backups or maintenance. Gone are the days of having to buy expensive new releases for out-of-the-box software. With Volo, everything is done automatically and seamlessly at no cost. Volo also delivers the confidence that everything is safe and secure with SSL 256 bit encryption, secure logins and daily data backups.

"We are thrilled to be able to offer such a robust and dynamic business management software and at the same time make it accessible in terms of price and ease of use", says Barry Duncan, Volo Innovations Founder and Innovations Director. "The long term sustainability of the health and fitness industry is something we are passionate about. With 60% of the industry still relying on paper to manage their business and at the opposite end of the spectrum businesses spending $2,000 to $6,000 a year on software, we're proud to offer Volo as the viable solution".

In celebration of the launch, Volo is offered at promotional pricing for the first year of service. The cost for individual health professionals is $25 per month, (regular $50) and the cost for clubs and facilities is $100 per month, (regular $150).  The $200 initial set up fee is also being waived. Software upgrades, maintenance and backups are free and there are no cancellation fees.

"Volo has been an invaluable tool to keep our business organized and efficient", says Troy Dalton, owner of Groundwork Athletics.  "The scheduling function is ideal for our staff to book and change appointments in real time.  As a manager, the invoicing features have reduced my time spent at month end by 50% and the administration reports allow me to keep a handle on where our business is at currently and what we need to plan for.  I highly recommend Volo to anyone in the training business!"
For more information visit www.myvolo.com
 

About Volo Innovations
Volo Innovations is a technology developer and vendor of online business management solutions via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology. Founders Nikki Layton and Barry Duncan have translated their combined 20 years of experience in the health and fitness industry into software design that has an inherent respect for real world situations and practical usability. Volo Innovations is based in Vancouver, Canada. 

IHRSA 2008

27th Annual International Convention and Trade Show
March 5th - 8th San Diego Convention Center
Visit Volo at booth 448