Fitness Software Provider Momence Talks AI & More in 2025 Predictions
Partnership
Sponsored By Momence
As a software provider for thousands of health and wellness businesses, few have a better viewpoint of the fitness industry than Momence. As a result, few organizations are in a better position to forecast what’s to come in 2025.
Touching on facets of the business such as franchising, marketing and back-office operations, as well as popular modalities or features from the prior year like strength training, wellness and artificial intelligence, Momence CEO Vojta Drmota predicts how things will transform when we flip the calendar — and how brands can best position themselves to field those changes.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length
Athletech News (ATN): In what ways do you see the franchising side of the fitness industry evolving in the future and what role will tech providers play in it?
Vojta Drmota (VD): There is a shift happening in the way that technology supports businesses. We’ve seen it primarily with the AI boom, where it’s acting as a time saving tool. AI will replace tasks business owners or managers would normally delegate to a virtual assistant. The responsibility of determining how these AI applications can support franchises is falling into the hands of technology partners.
Previously, and this still happens a lot today, as franchises aimed to reach new markets, they often looked for a partner with deep knowledge and expertise of the region. This will evolve in the future with technology providing insights to help make those decisions. That includes figuring out what regions contain your ideal customers and what their buying behavior is like to establish pricing models — such as monthly memberships, class packages or a mix of both.
ATN: How have you seen fitness franchises already make adjustments to better position themselves for the future? How has Momence helped them make those adjustments?
VD: Most recently we’ve seen StretchMed — an assisted-stretching franchise — leverage Momence’s appointment functionality, data and insights with its assisted-stretching technology to help them make data-informed decisions that reduced their pricing membership costs by two-thirds in comparison to their competitors. It made their services more accessible to more people and therefore increased their pool of opportunity.
They migrated from their old software provider to Momence over a year ago. Bradley Kennedy, the brand’s Director of Sales & Operations, recalled that they were formerly “using a hodgepodge of different platforms and software solutions.” Since consolidating the back end of their business with Momence, they’ve doubled in growth and expect to see rapid scale in the next 3-4 months.
ATN: Where do you foresee some fitness software providers running into issues in the future? What’s your plan to avoid them?
VD: Legacy software solutions all take a plug-and-play approach to enhance the experience of their software solution — relying on third party solutions to fix entrepreneur pain points. When integrating with these several other software solutions, it results in a franchise’s data living across multiple platforms rather than in one place.
Franchises can choose to do business more efficiently. Our single software solution allows every data point for franchises to live all in one place. That includes employee or independent contractor information, monthly payroll and other expenses, class capacity, waitlist data, email open rates and more. We’re not following technology and AI trends in terms of generating content or automating sales processes. Instead, we’re focused on helping business owners operate more efficiently.
ATN: What’s an aspect of the fitness industry you have a better view of than most being a software provider? Has that unique viewpoint led you to any specific takeaways or bold predictions for the future?
VD: It will always come back to the impact a truly consolidated software solution has on businesses from those in the startup phase through to franchise. When you operate your entire business within a single platform solution, you’re able to see growth metrics like conversion rate of lead sources, the returns on marketing and sales campaigns and more.
Second, is growth across industries or verticals such as yoga and Pilates, to gym and to wellness concepts. Given that we serve more verticals and sub verticals than other software providers, we are best positioned to support business as they seek to offer other services in addition to their primary offering. Take a Pilates studio as an example that would like to provide physiotherapy and massage services. They are able to easily add this on with us.
Third, is the rate at which AI is adopted and is useful to franchises. There are traditional ways in which AI is being leveraged within software platforms to create efficiencies such as writing emails, designing stock images and/or AI chat bots. Most recently, we launched the AI-powered corporate dashboard that includes our AI chat function, making it easy to get answers on the health of the business instantly by interacting with the chat.
We’re also seeking to address how AI can replace human resources, like the need for virtual assistants to help with the day to day of business operations. The goal is for us to help franchises save on these costs by replacing sales and support efforts that franchises have a tough time scaling in a consistent way today.
ATN: Which of your brand’s tools or features do you expect to be the most impactful for franchising brands in 2025? Why do these tools and/or features stand out?
VD: We’ve focused on several key features to alleviate the pain points. This includes customizing royalty fee collection, where we set it up to automatically happen at the source as soon as the transaction takes place. This occurs before leaving the merchant account of the franchisee and saves on merchant fees. Royalties collected go directly into the corporate merchant account so it never hits the franchisee bank account. This completely removes the risk of franchisees defaulting on fees. Momence allows the flexibility to set up interval fees and one-off fees as well.
There’s also aggregate reporting at a glance. Corporate teams now have the ability to prepare for franchisee or board meetings within minutes. Our latest release of funnels also allows the capability to see the entire lead-to-member journey and identify areas of opportunity where it can be improved to increase conversion rates.
Then there’s our AI-powered insights, which unlock the ability for corporate franchises to easily grow and scale. Users get suggestions on areas of improvement, completely informed by the data within the corporate dashboard. Take class capacity as an example. You can see if a certain region or individual franchisee location has lower capacity than normal. It then offers insights into building a sequence to help increase class capacity. You can interact with the AI too and ask it questions to guide the process.
ATN: Do you expect surging health and fitness concepts like strength training and wellness to continue surging in 2025? Why or why not? And how do you plan to help the partners facilitating those services?
VD: Yes, in the past 5 years there has been such a boom from end consumers prioritizing wellness in combination with strength training. Brands that have been able to wrap their arms around these concepts have done exceptionally well and we continue to see more brands popping up like Chelsea Piers Fitness, The Health Club or HEIMAT.
All of these concepts include upgraded member management with open communication lines, 24/7 check-in or door-access integration, high-end appointment and recovery services and omni-channel communication with leads and current customers. We support businesses in each of these ways, all in addition to the core functionality of Momence.
ATN: If you had to guess, will 2025 be a year for notable franchise growth or will things be more moderate? Why one or the other?
VD: Yes, increasingly we’ve seen end consumers prioritize their health and wellness more and more over the last five years. So if I had to guess, 2025 will be a year for notable franchise growth.
Eric Keller, Vice President of International Support at Self Esteem Brands, recently told us that all of the brands under the Purpose Brands platform have aggressive growth plans for 2025, citing stronger yields, healthy AUVs and double-digit SSS globally as his reasoning behind that belief. He also added that several of his multi-unit operators are attracting private equity to capitalize their continued expansion.
Bradford Smith, The Pure Gym Group’s Chief Development Officer, also agreed, recently telling us that the notable rise in expansions of emerging markets, domestic and abroad, paired with improved franchise regulations, are reasons to expect further growth. As we can see from these enterprise franchise brands, the future’s looking bright going into 2025.
ATN: From your perspective, what’s the best thing a fitness brand with the goal of furthering its franchising growth can do to achieve that goal in the coming years?
VD: It has to be the focus on profitability — setting up individual franchisees on the path to profitability. The challenges we see among individual franchisees is quite similar to individual single location studios. A lot of them rely on word of mouth or referrals to drive business growth. Where they differ is franchises often have marketing teams that build out quarterly marketing calendars. Essentially, all franchisees have to do is pick it up and implement it — it’s that simple!
We know that a lot of owners or managers need their marketing and sales to be done for them. Momence comes in to make this streamlined and more efficient for franchises by setting up these marketing campaigns at the corporate level and pushing them down on Meta through the Momence Ads manager, automated SMS and email Sequences. Franchisees only have to press the button to launch these campaigns.