When Ohana Growth Partners, a fast-growing Planet Fitness franchisee needed to bring order to a fragmented operational landscape, it turned to a purpose-built platform and found something more valuable than software.
Running 99 Planet Fitness locations is not simply a matter of scaling what works at one. The complexity multiplies. There are more teams to align, more standards to uphold, more communication channels to monitor and more opportunities for things to fall through the cracks.
For Ohana Growth Partners, one of the brand’s largest franchisees, that reality came as the organization expanded. What they needed was not another point solution. They needed an operational hub.
“Before partnering with Woven, we had every club with their own ‘communication’ method,” said Justin Drummond, the president of Ohana. “That was ineffective, took too much to manage, could have even blurred the lines of professional and personal. We were looking to make a change from our equipment and asset manager system.”
That search led Ohana to Woven, a platform built specifically for multi-unit gym operators. Five years later, the partnership has evolved well beyond its original scope, and the results offer a blueprint for operators grappling with the same fragmentation challenges.
When Ohana Growth Partners first partnered with Woven, the primary objective was straightforward. They wanted to centralize asset management and streamline work order ticketing across IT, equipment and facilities.
“Woven delivered on that immediately and then far exceeded our expectations,” said Andrew Poirier, the VP of operations at Ohana. “Beyond core ticketing, Woven allows us to integrate third-party vendors directly into the workflow and communicate within tickets, which has significantly improved visibility and accountability.”
Over time, Ohana expanded its use of the platform to encompass team chat, company announcements, incident reporting, record keeping, a knowledge library and internal audits. What began as an asset management solution had become the operational backbone of a nearly 100-location enterprise.
This evolution reflects a pattern Woven’s founder and CEO Matt Goebel sees repeatedly: operators come for the maintenance suite and stay for the organizational clarity.
“Woven was specifically built for the back office — scaling the enterprise but keeping consistency even at the frontline at every single location,” said Goebel. “We have an extensive footprint across people management, communications, operations, compliance and risk management, and equipment and facility maintenance — a full comprehensive maintenance suite built just for the gym industry.”
For operators running multiple locations, the accumulation of disconnected tools is rarely the result of poor planning but a natural byproduct of growth. A new need arises; a solution is put in place and over time the tech stack becomes a patchwork that requires an increase in effort just to manage.
“As technology advances, one of the biggest challenges businesses face is managing an ever-growing number of disconnected systems and logins,” said Poirier. “Woven consolidates many of those functions into one intuitive platform, reducing complexity for both our field teams and our support staff.”
“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.”
With this, clubs are able to manage things from a single source and are not constantly chasing information from one system to the next.
For gym operators, operational efficiency comes all the way down to the member and Ohana’s leadership understands that connection.
“Woven has helped us become significantly more organized and consistent across SOPs, incident management, ticketing and internal communication,” said Poirier “That operational clarity directly impacts the member experience.”
Poirier pointed specifically to Woven’s auditing tools as a lever for protecting and elevating the Planet Fitness brand standard. “From a member’s perspective, our teams appear better trained, more prepared and more professional,” he said.
For franchisees operating under a nationally recognized brand, that consistency is not optional. And for any multi-unit operator, the challenge of delivering a uniform member experience across dozens or hundreds of locations without a system built for that purpose is significant.
Technology aside, both Drummond and Poirier emphasized the quality of the relationship itself between them and Woven.
“One of the most pleasant surprises was the people behind the platform,” said Poirier “Woven is a small but mighty, highly tenured team that takes a very hands-on, relationship-driven approach. Rather than feeling like a transactional vendor, they operate as a true partner. Over the years, they’ve worked closely with us to understand our challenges and have made numerous meaningful enhancements to the platform based on real operational feedback. That level of responsiveness and personalization is rare in vendor partnerships.”
Drummond echoed that sentiment.
“Woven has certainly grown since we came on board,” said Drummond. “But, to this day, I still feel like we’re not just another company they service. We’re a partner. I can pick up the phone and call Matt or Lauren and they will answer. We can have dinner, chat about our families and the business. They make it easy to work with them. And the icing on the cake — their system gives us what we need too.”
Goebel, for his part, points to cultural alignment as a foundation of the relationship. “Ohana has been a Woven partner for five years and as a company they walk the walk when it comes to culture — they actually do care,” he said. “It’s great to partner with a company that has similar values for how they treat their people, and we hope to work together for years to come.”
Perhaps the most telling indicator of a successful technology investment is whether it holds up as an organization grows. For Ohana, that has been the case.
“As our organization grows and our operational needs change, the platform has consistently adapted to meet those needs, allowing us to scale without constantly rethinking our tech stack,” said Poirier.
According to Poirier, that scalability is one of the platform’s defining characteristics for multi-unit operators. Another benefit, he pointed out, is time efficiency for leadership. “Woven helps leadership teams stay out of the weeds and focused on growth. When communication, audits, maintenance and accountability all live in one system, operators can spend less time chasing information and more time leading their teams.”
Looking ahead, Woven is positioning itself at the intersection of operational consolidation and the emerging influence of AI on club management. Goebel’s goal is making it about the people.
“You should be able to free your team from doing all the office button-pushing stuff and let systems handle a lot of that kind of work to really spend more time with your members in your community, making those people connections,” said Goebel.
For Goebel, the way to do that is the data infrastructure that consolidation makes possible. Organizations that have unified their operations into a single platform are better positioned to leverage automation and AI tools than those still working across fragmented systems.
For operators still managing their businesses through a collection of disconnected tools, the Ohana story presents a practical argument for taking stock. The investment is not simply in software — it’s in the organizational clarity that makes everything else possible.
