Stop Thinking About Revenue. Start Thinking About What You’re Actually Collecting. 

By Lee Robinson

I’m going to say something that might sting a little bit. But I think gym owners need to hear it. 

Most of you know your revenue number. You know how many members you have. You know your monthly dues rate. You know your top line. 

What most of you don’t know — and I mean really know, down to the dollar — is how much of that revenue you’re actually collecting. And that gap between what you’re owed and what you’re collecting is where your EBITDA lives or dies, especially if your payment processing system or membership management platform isn’t optimized for collections. 

📝 Check Out: The data that keeps fitness operators up at night.

The 88% Problem 

I’ve been going deep with our payments team on collection rate benchmarking across our portfolio. And here’s what I can tell you: the average operator is collecting around 88% on first attempt. With retries and engagement, the best revenue cycle management gets that up to about 95-96%. 

But the top-performing clubs? They’re at 97% to 98.5%. They are powered by modern software with automated billing, intelligent retries, and payment recovery workflows. 

Think about what that means. If you’re an operator with 5,000 members billing $40 per month, the difference between 88% collection and 96% collection is $192,000 per year per location. That’s not new members. That’s not a price increase. That’s money you’re already owed that’s not hitting your bank account. 

Now multiply that across 5 locations. 10 locations. 50. That collection gap is a real number, and it shows up directly in your EBITDA — which is why gym revenue optimization and billing automation should be a leadership-level conversation, not a back-office task. 

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What’s Actually Driving the Gap 

It’s not one thing. It’s a combination of factors that are all getting worse at the same time. 

First, your member base is changing how they pay. A third of new members at some operators are enrolling with Neobank payment methods — Cash App, Chime, Venmo. These are the primary financial instruments for your fastest-growing demographic. And the first-attempt ACH return rate on Neobank transactions averages 42%. Compare that to 10% on traditional bank ACH. When almost half your Neobank transactions fail on first attempt, and a third of your new members are on Neobanks, you’ve got a structural collection problem that’s growing every month, unless your payment processing system can intelligently manage risk and retries. 

Second, card networks are shifting. Capital One acquired Discover and is migrating 70 million cards to the Discover network. That’s a higher-cost processing network. And Discover’s core demographic? Gen Z. Cash-back cards marketed on college campuses. The exact people joining your gym. Your processing costs are going up and your collection rates on these cards are showing elevated return rates. 

Third, your promotional strategy might be creating chargebacks you don’t know about. One large operator ran a “pay nothing for 60 days” promotion, but their annual maintenance fee hit at day 30. Members who thought they had zero charges for two months got a $75 surprise. Chargeback rate spiked. The promotion looked great on the front end and created a revenue problem on the back end, something better visibility inside your billing analytics dashboard could have flagged immediately. 

📝 Check Out: Learn how a Collections ROI Calculator Can Boost Your Revenue

The Levers You Can Pull Right Now 

This is the part I want every operator to walk away with. You don’t need to wait for PE to come in and fix this. You can do it yourself. And every dollar you recover is a dollar that drops straight to your EBITDA. 

Intelligent payment configuration. Set up rules at enrollment that allow Neobanks but require a traditional bank account as backup. Don’t block Cash App — you’ll lose 11% of new joins. Don’t accept it without a fallback — you’ll lose 42% of those collections. Use intelligence, not blanket rules. 

Biweekly billing. Instead of billing $30 or $79 monthly, split it. $14.99 or $34 biweekly. Your advertised price point drops, which lifts new member joins. Your draft amount drops, which improves collection rates because you’re less likely to hit insufficient funds. And you get an extra billing cycle per year. 

Data-driven retries. The technology exists now to predict when a member is most likely to have funds available based on their payment history, account balance patterns, and even which day of the week they check into the club. One data set I’ve seen shows a 24% improvement in retry success when billing is timed to the member’s pay cycle. That’s not marginal. That’s transformational. 

That kind of performance lift typically requires advanced gym billing automation, intelligent payment retry logic, and revenue cycle management software — not manual follow-up. 

Mobile-first collections. Let your app handle past-due recovery. When a member walks into the gym and their account is flagged, the app prompts them to update their payment before they even hit the front desk. It’s friendlier for the member. It’s cheaper for you. And it removes the awkward conversation your front desk staff was avoiding anyway. 

Operational discipline at check-in. The highest-collecting clubs in our portfolio have one thing in common: they don’t let past-due members walk in unchallenged. That doesn’t mean they’re confrontational. It means their process flags the member, and their staff is trained to handle it with care. One club went from middle-of-the-pack to 98.5% collection rate largely through consistent check-in enforcement. 

📝 Check Out: Build an Unbreakable Gym: The Operational Resilience Playbook

Why This Is an EBITDA Conversation, Not a Billing Conversation 

When PE looks at your gym, they’re not evaluating your community or your culture. They’re evaluating your cash flow. They want to know: what’s the collection rate? What’s the cost to collect? What’s the revenue per member? What’s the unit-level EBITDA? Can I see a trailing 24-month same-store trendline? 

If you can answer those questions today — with clean data and a clear trajectory — you’re in the top 20% of operators. You’ll command a premium multiple. You’ll negotiate from strength. You’ll choose your partners. 

If you can’t? Every one of those improvements I just described is something PE will do in their first 90 days after acquiring you. And every dollar of improvement they make is a dollar they priced as a discount on your sale. 

You can do this yourself. The tools exist. The data exists. The playbook is right here. 

The only question is whether you do it now, on your terms — or later, on theirs. 

Read the first post in this series here.

Ready to transform your member acquisition strategy? ABC Ignite is the growth-driven gym management platform that streamlines your sales, automates member engagement, and provides the insights you need to optimize every strategy in your toolkit. Get a demo today.