Case Study — Fitness Industry

How a Brazilian Gym Chain Automated Membership and Payment Collection

Força Fitness went from losing R$38,000/month to failed payments to running a fully automated membership engine across 12 locations — in under 90 days.

Company: Força Fitness (fictional composite based on real industry patterns)
Location: São Paulo metropolitan area, Brazil
Size: 12 locations, 8,400+ active members
Industry: Health & Fitness
Tools Used: Mewayz CRM, Invoicing, Payment Automation, Email Sequences, Landing Pages

The Brazilian Gym Market: A $3.2 Billion Opportunity With a Payment Problem

Brazil is the second-largest gym market in the world, behind only the United States. According to the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHRSA) and market research from WorldMetrics, the country boasts over 31,000 fitness facilities serving approximately 9.6 million gym members, generating an estimated $3.2 billion in annual revenue as of 2025.

But beneath those impressive numbers lies a persistent operational challenge: payment collection. Industry surveys indicate that Brazilian gyms lose between 15% and 28% of expected monthly revenue to failed payments, expired cards, and manual billing errors. For a mid-sized chain like Força Fitness, that gap translated into tens of thousands of reais vanishing every single month.

This is the story of how one gym chain plugged that revenue leak — and transformed its entire operation in the process.

The Challenge: Manual Processes Draining Revenue and Staff Time

Ricardo Menezes founded Força Fitness in 2017 with a single location in the Pinheiros neighborhood of São Paulo. By early 2024, the chain had expanded to 12 locations across the city's metropolitan area, with a combined membership of over 8,400 active members.

Growth, however, had brought complexity. The gym chain was running on a patchwork of disconnected tools:

• A legacy gym management system (desktop-only, no API integrations) for check-ins
• Spreadsheets for tracking membership renewals and payment status
• Manual bank transfers and boletos (a common Brazilian payment method) for billing
• WhatsApp groups for internal communication between locations
• A basic website with no online sign-up capability

"We were growing, but our systems weren't growing with us. Every month, my admin staff spent the first two weeks just chasing payments. We had three full-time people whose primary job was calling members about overdue invoices. It was unsustainable."
— Ricardo Menezes, Founder & CEO, Força Fitness

The problems were quantifiable and painful:

The financial toll was stark. At R$38,000 per month in failed payments alone, the chain was leaving R$456,000 per year on the table — enough to fund the opening of an entirely new location.

Meanwhile, the 7.2% monthly churn rate meant the chain was effectively replacing its entire membership base every 14 months. A significant portion of that churn was involuntary — members whose payments failed and who were never properly re-engaged.

Why Força Fitness Chose Mewayz

Ricardo's team evaluated several solutions, including gym-specific platforms like Tecnofit and EVO, as well as general-purpose business tools. The requirements were clear:

1. Automated recurring payments with retry logic for failed transactions
2. CRM functionality to track member lifecycles across all 12 locations
3. Online sign-up and self-service for new and existing members
4. Email and messaging automation for payment reminders and re-engagement
5. Affordability — the solution needed to work within their operating margins

"Most gym-specific software did one or two things well but forced us to keep using other tools for the rest. Mewayz was the first platform where everything — CRM, payments, email, landing pages, invoicing — lived in one place. And the pricing was a fraction of what we were paying for our disconnected stack."
— Ricardo Menezes

With Mewayz's modular architecture — over 207 integrated tools on a single platform — Força Fitness could activate exactly the modules they needed without paying for bloated enterprise software. At $49/month for the premium tier, the cost was less than what they were spending on spreadsheet add-ons alone.

The Solution: A 90-Day Transformation

The implementation followed a phased approach, rolling out capabilities across all 12 locations over three months.

Deep Dive: The Payment Automation Engine

The core of the transformation was Mewayz's payment automation workflow. Here's how the dunning sequence worked in practice:

The cumulative result: 73% of previously failed payments were now recovered automatically, without a single phone call from staff. The remaining 27% were flagged for manual outreach — a dramatically smaller workload than before.

Critically, Mewayz's system also addressed a Brazil-specific challenge: the popularity of PIX (Brazil's instant payment system, used by over 150 million Brazilians) and boletos (bank-issued payment slips). By offering automatic fallback to these methods when card payments failed, Força Fitness captured revenue that would have been lost entirely on a card-only system.

The Results: Before vs. After Mewayz

Six months after full implementation, the numbers told a compelling story:

Financial Impact Summary

How Each Mewayz Module Contributed

1. CRM — Single Source of Truth for 8,400 Members

Before Mewayz, member data was scattered across spreadsheets, the legacy check-in system, and the memories of front-desk staff. Mewayz's CRM module gave Força Fitness a unified member database with custom fields for membership tier, payment status, attendance frequency, preferred location, trainer assignment, and contract dates.

The CRM's segmentation engine allowed the team to create dynamic lists — for example, "members at the Moema location whose attendance dropped below once per week in the last 30 days" — and trigger automated workflows against those segments.

2. Invoicing & Payment Automation — The Revenue Recovery Engine

Mewayz's invoicing module handled recurring billing for all five membership tiers (ranging from R$89/mo for basic access to R$349/mo for the premium all-locations plan). The automation layer managed retry logic, dunning sequences, and payment method switching — all without manual intervention.

The system processed an average of 8,400 invoices per month and automatically resolved 73% of payment failures through the 5-step dunning sequence described above.

3. Email Sequences — Retention at Scale

Força Fitness deployed five automated email sequences through Mewayz:

• Welcome series (5 emails over 14 days) — 68% open rate
• Attendance drop-off (triggered when visits fell below threshold) — recovered 23% of at-risk members
• Renewal reminders (30, 14, and 7 days before annual plan expiry) — 81% renewal rate vs. 64% previously
• Win-back campaign (for cancelled members, sent at 30, 60, and 90 days) — 12% reactivation rate
• Referral prompts (sent after a member's 30th visit) — generated 140+ referrals in the first 6 months

4. Landing Pages — Opening the Online Channel

Each of the 12 locations received a dedicated landing page built with Mewayz's drag-and-drop editor. These pages featured location-specific imagery, class schedules, pricing tables, and embedded sign-up forms connected directly to the CRM and payment system.

Within six months, 38% of all new memberships originated online — a channel that simply didn't exist before. The average conversion rate across all landing pages was 4.7%, compared to the fitness industry benchmark of 2-3%.

The Ripple Effects: Beyond Payments

The automation didn't just fix the payment problem — it fundamentally changed how Força Fitness operated.

Staff redeployment: The three full-time admin staff who previously spent most of their time on payment follow-ups were redeployed to member experience roles. Two became "member success coordinators" focused on retention and upselling personal training packages. One moved into a digital marketing role, managing the landing pages and social media — a function the chain had never had bandwidth for.

Data-driven decisions: With all member data, payment history, and attendance patterns in one platform, Ricardo could finally see which locations were underperforming, which membership tiers had the highest lifetime value, and which times of day had the most check-ins. This informed decisions about class scheduling, staffing levels, and even the location of their 13th gym (opened in Q4 2025).

Member satisfaction: Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, now sent automatically through Mewayz, showed a jump from 32 to 51 — a significant leap in member sentiment driven largely by the elimination of awkward payment phone calls and the convenience of self-service account management.

"The biggest surprise wasn't the money we recovered — it was how much our team's morale improved. Nobody got into the fitness business to make collection calls. Now our staff spends their time helping members achieve their goals, which is what we should have been doing all along."
— Ricardo Menezes

Industry Context: Why This Matters for Brazilian Fitness Businesses

Força Fitness's story reflects a broader industry challenge. According to IHRSA and industry data aggregated by WorldMetrics and WifiTalents:

• Brazil has approximately 31,000 fitness facilities, the most of any country outside the United States.
• The Brazilian fitness market generates an estimated $3.2 billion annually, yet profit margins for independent gyms average just 10-15% — meaning revenue leakage from failed payments can be the difference between profit and loss.
• Post-pandemic, digital fitness adoption in Brazil surged. Members now expect online sign-up, self-service account management, and flexible payment methods including PIX, which processed over 42 billion transactions in 2024 alone (Banco Central do Brasil).
• Gym member churn in Brazil averages 6-8% monthly for budget and mid-market chains — with involuntary churn (payment failures) accounting for up to 40% of total churn (Fitness Brasil industry association estimates).

For gym owners operating in this environment, the math is straightforward: automating payment collection and member management isn't a luxury — it's a survival strategy.

Key Takeaways for Fitness Business Owners

Methodology Note

This case study is a composite narrative based on common patterns observed across fitness businesses using all-in-one business platforms. "Força Fitness" and "Ricardo Menezes" are fictional representations. Industry statistics are sourced from IHRSA, WorldMetrics, WifiTalents, and Banco Central do Brasil. Individual results may vary based on business size, market, and implementation approach.