The Client
A UK fitness operator running two studios under one umbrella. A CrossFit box on one site and a small group personal training studio on another, each with its own lead coach.
The owner also runs an internal coaching qualification with student cohorts moving through it. Small team of freelance staff, no prior Notion system.
The Problem
Everything was being run from inboxes, spreadsheets, and memory. Monthly reporting was scattered across four separate Word docs and Excel sheets.
No visibility into new member enquiries per week, ad spend vs results, leaver reasons, or staff issues. Weekly meeting action items kept dying in notebooks.
The owner’s private work (HR issues, director meetings, monthly finance) was bleeding into shared documents and needed to be cleanly separated.
The two studios had different lead coaches with different responsibilities, so any cross site view created confusion rather than clarity.
The Solution
One Notion workspace covering both studios, member relations, new member sales, weekly meetings, the education arm, and the owner’s private dashboard.
Each studio operates independently with its own databases and views, so each coach has a clean home that doesn’t show the other site.
A shared time spine of Weeks, Months, and Quarters connects every operational record, so the monthly health of the business and quarterly progress show up automatically. Nothing has to be re-entered for reporting.
What I Built
Core Databases
Two parallel database sets, one per studio, covering events, projects, programming, the coaching team, tasks, and notes.
A shared time spine of Weeks, Months, and Quarters that every operational record relates into.
Reporting databases for joiners, leavers, and issues. A sales funnel covering weekly enquiries, ad spend, and closed sales.
Meetings and action items connected so action items survive the meeting. A students database for the education arm. An OKR stack for quarterly goals.
A private set of databases for the owner covering HR, director level work, and monthly finance.
Pages & Views
Seven top level spaces, one per category the owner thinks in. Each studio has its own home with tasks grouped by status, by coach, and on a kanban.
Action items can be viewed by meeting (for debriefs) or by the person responsible (for accountability).
Weekly enquiries show as a today list, a status board, and a monthly calendar. The owner’s OKR view stays pinned to the current quarter.
Formulas & Rollups
Joiner rows roll up into their Month with front end and back end counts and revenue, so the monthly report writes itself.
Project and objective progress computed from rollups of their child tasks and key results.
Coach on a task pulled through a project rollup, so the By Coach board works without anyone setting the field on individual tasks.
ROAS and conversion rate computed on every ad spend row.
Access & Permissions
The owner’s private space is hidden by parent page permissions, not by filters, so it can’t leak even if a coach is given workspace wide access elsewhere.
Each lead coach scoped to their own studio space. The owner sees both.
System Architecture
The Result
The owner now runs both studios, the sales funnel, the education arm, and their private operating layer from one workspace.
Monthly health of the business is a single Month row with joiners, leavers, issues, sales revenue, and ad spend already rolled up.
Weekly meeting action items survive into the next week, grouped both by meeting and by the person responsible.
The two lead coaches each have a clean home for their own site without seeing the other. The owner’s private work stays private through page permissions.
The system was signed off on first review after one revision cycle.
