Opening a fifth location feels manageable. Opening a fifteenth still feels controllable. But by the time a brand reaches 40 or 50 units, something subtler starts to happen.
Locations begin to drift.
Managers begin running their four walls slightly differently. Onboarding varies. Opening checklists get shortened. Communication moves from formal channels to group texts. Standards don’t fall apart overnight — they slowly soften. And by the time the impact shows up on a P&L sheet, the damage is already done.
According to Matt Goebel, the founder and CEO of Woven, this “drift problem” is one of the most underestimated risks in the fitness industry today.
Growth Is Easier Than Consistency
Capital is flowing into fitness. Expansion is accelerating. Private equity investment has made it easier than ever to open new doors. But operators are discovering that scaling locations is not the same as scaling standards.
“The concern isn’t how do we open our 51st location, the concerns now how do we get the 47th location operating the same as the third location,” said Goebel.
As brands grow, leadership often relies on traditional communication hierarchies: corporate to regional managers, regional to district, district to club, club to frontline. Somewhere along that chain, execution fragments.
Goebel refers to this breakdown as a “game of telephone.”
“The most damaging thing that I see from a traditional management hierarchy structure in the fitness space is what I refer to as the game of telephone for communications,” said Goebel. “Everything an organization does and rolls out at scale has to be done through communications. The best ideas only matter if they can get implemented at the field level consistently across the entire organizational footprint.”
In many organizations, once communication reaches the club level, visibility disappears. Enterprise leaders often do not know whether directives were received, implemented or sustained.
Without systems to measure that penetration, the drift begins.
Drift Happens Slowly
Goebel clarified this drift usually isn’t intentional.
Most operators aren’t waking up and deciding to ignore their brand standards. What happens is they lose visibility. Over time, the small shortcuts add up. Reporting gets inconsistent. Processes loosen. Team engagement dips. None of it feels urgent on its own, but together it creates very real erosion.
Without systems that passively capture what’s happening day to day — while teams are simply doing their jobs — leaders end up managing by lagging indicators. The P&L becomes the first red flag. And by that point, the issue isn’t a tweak. It’s a reset.
What could have been corrected early with better visibility and course correction turns into something much harder to unwind both operationally and culturally.
“You can start seeing slippage in some of the accountability items and measurables without being intrusive, without making them go out of their way and log into three or four different systems and add stuff to an Excel spreadsheet and email their DM and then their DM manually correlates that onto something else,” explained Goebel. “That era is dead. It just needs to be seamless where they are on their phone doing what they do every day and passively capturing all that.”
Consolidation as a Solution
Woven was built specifically to address this fragmentation on the operational side of the business. The nine-year-old platform consolidates people management, communications, training, facilities and maintenance into one system of record.
“There’s a need for the consolidation of siloed systems and data across the industry,” said Goebel. “The only way to do that, and especially as it’s accelerating towards the AI side of things, is that single point of truth, bringing everything together into one place.”
While AI dominates industry headlines, Goebel has been cautious about hype.
“I’ll say I’m not a hype person necessarily on the AI front,” said Goebel. “I’ve been quite skeptical up until this point, but this is finally matured to the point now where it is going to have impact.”
In his view, the shift is not about prettier dashboards. It’s about execution.
“All this intellectual work we do to just move things around and track things is going away,” explained Goebel. “How do you eliminate the computer intensive, what I’ll just broadly call production work?”
But that leap requires consolidated, reliable operational data — something operators have been told for years.
Many invested heavily in dashboards and consulting engagements that failed to meaningfully change execution at the club level, and Goebel acknowledges that fatigue.
“For non-technical executives that have been told and promised the value of data and why we need to consolidate all of our data into a single point and clean our data and all that other stuff, you probably felt burned over the last two decades because you probably paid really high consulting bills and you’ve been left with some, probably fairly decent looking dashboards,” said Goebel.
But he argues this moment is different.
“And now you’re hearing it again, ‘You need clean consolidated data, AI needs this, blah blah, blah,’” said Giebel. “It’s the fuel. And what I would say is this is different this time. This isn’t just let’s consolidate data to build you a pretty dashboard.”
Instead, consolidation becomes foundational for what comes next — getting your employees back in front of your members.
Reinvesting Time Into People
For operators concerned about what automation means for staff, Goebel sees opportunity. “I generally don’t believe that all of this is going to result in huge job loss,” he said. “I think there’s going to be significant career changes ahead of us in a lot of industries.”
He believes removing administrative production work can create space for higher-value engagement.
“I don’t know anybody that wakes up and says, ‘Oh God, thank you. I get to work in Excel all day and send 50 emails and respond to customer reviews online.’ This is just part of the job because it was necessary,” he said. “I am very happy that this is what AI is very good at taking away from us.”
Overall, as brands scale and complexity increases, Goebel argues the operators who build centralized visibility now will protect their brand standards before drift threatens performance and free their teams to focus on what members notice most: the experience.
Growth doesn’t break your brand, ignoring drift does.
Learn more about how top enterprise gym and fitness brands strengthen their club and member experience with Woven. Visit startwoven.com/gym-fitness-facilities-management
