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Customer Story

Fitness Franchise Gets Fit with Google Cloud

Fit20, a global franchise network of fitness studios, optimized its communication and innovation by leveraging Google Workspace to scale up

Related services
Google Workspace

Industry
Public | Utilities

Company
Xebia

Established in 2009, fit20 is a global franchise network of fitness studios operating in nine countries. The company’s training methods are based on the latest scientific research on slow muscle training to improve fitness and health, helping customers train once a week with a personal trainer. The company has recorded over 2 million training sessions online.

Why
Needed effective IT tools to keep pace with growth
What
Improve scalability, security and innovation through the cloud
How
Business fully mapped into Google Workspace

Reaching Goals via Cloud Computing

To grow its franchised studios as quickly as projected, fit20 needed effective IT. The company was initially set up on a Microsoft Small Business Server and MS Exchange and faced numerous issues, mainly, new accounts had a lag time of several weeks. MS security and admin costs also ran high, causing fit20 to look for an alternative platform to support fast, easy growth.

In 2012, fit20 migrated its MS calendar data to the cloud, though the junior partner responsible lacked the skills to do it right. As the company’s success depended on creating, storing, and sharing information, particularly planning training sessions, it turned to Xebia for expert support.

Create, Share, and Sore

Many of fit20’s franchise partners are personal trainers, often busy physically training clients, leaving their studios with limited or no back-office staff. Also, as most trainers are not digitally savvy, fit20 wanted to create a highly integrated, automated business process that franchise owners could use straight away.
The company needed a platform offering scalability, growth, innovation, and support while remaining affordable. It approached Xebia, which advised it to leverage Google Workspace. The franchise handbook and all supporting documents were put into Google Drive, so as soon as a franchisee had a Google Workspace account, they were in business. The fit20 CEO Walter Vendel said, “Drive contains the ‘golden formula’ for fit20’s growth.”

“Continuous innovation has given us the lead in a very competitive market… We want to leverage the innovative hardware that the Google ecosystem generates.”
Fit20
Walter Vendel Chief Executive Officer

Diving Deep into Google Drive

Xebia helped fit20 set up Google Workspace to support its business needs and workflow — including security, privacy, and integrations. Together, they created the domain structure, organizational units, and user groups with the roles and privileges that reflect fit20’s complex business environment. To help franchise owners streamline their work and give clients an improved training program, Xebia provided second-line IT support. It also assisted fit20 with app development and in using other Google innovations, such as App Engine, BigQuery, Data Studio, Android, ChromeOS, and Chromebooks.

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