This Week on The Run Rate
Weekly Roundup · Sep 12–18, 2026
True Fitness Closed Overnight. What It Means for Your Prepaid Packages.
True Fitness and True Yoga closed every one of their Singapore clubs on September 10. No warning. Within a day, 241 members had complained, and between them they’d lost more than $609,000 in classes they had already paid for. Those members are now creditors of a company in liquidation, and that usually means they get little back. Here’s the part for you. Every class pack you sell is money you owe until the member books the class.
Solidcore Built a Strength Class So Its Members Stop Lifting Somewhere Else.
Solidcore announced Ascend on September 14. It’s a heated strength class, opening in December at Manhattan West in New York. Members can book it with the credits they already have, at no extra cost. That tells you what it’s for. Most Solidcore members were getting their strength work at another gym, and a second membership is where people start to leave. The upsell comes later, with a new top tier for members who want both.
Planet Fitness’s Free Teen Pass Stalled at 3.7 Million. It Hasn’t Said How Many Paid.
About 3.7 million teens used Planet Fitness’s free summer pass this year. That’s the same as last year, the first summer the program didn’t grow. The number that would show whether it works is how many of those teens went on to pay. Planet Fitness has never published it. You probably run a smaller version of this, like a free week or a trial class, so judge it on who pays 30 days later, not on sign-ups. The follow-up that turns a trial into a regular is in our 10-visit onboarding playbook.
Fitstop Is Opening Four Studios in Houston. Its Model Was Built to Travel.
Fitstop, a strength brand from Brisbane, is opening four studios in Houston. The owner looked at six other franchise brands first, and his general manager helped grow Orangetheory in Houston to 27 studios. Australian formats travel well because they were built to be copied from the first studio: the same programming, the same design, everywhere. F45 is the warning. It spread fast too, then left the New York Stock Exchange in 2023. If you’re planning a second location, the same test applies. Write the programming down.
Read This Week
Three posts worth your time. One is about class spots you’ve already paid for. Two are from owners working out what their studios actually need from them.
Your No-Show Policy Is Costing You Five Figures a Year — Courtney Clapper, The Business of Pilates
Read this after our Solidcore piece. Solidcore is letting members move credits between formats, and every credit that moves also moves a spot in a class. Clapper does the maths on the spots nobody uses. Take a studio running 20 reformer classes a week with ten spots each. At a 15% no-show rate, that’s about $54,600 a year in spots that were booked and never filled. Her sharpest point is about late-cancel fees. If a class is worth $35 and the fee is $15, “you’ve priced skipping at a discount.” Waitlist auto-fill won’t save you either. It only fires when someone cancels, and a true no-show never does.
What Happens When the Founder Takes a Backseat — Kenzie Wesp, The Founder’s Files
Pair this with our Fitstop piece. Fitstop travels because it runs without its founder in the room. Wesp is testing that with her own business. She owns four studios and is taking four full weeks of maternity leave, not “available if needed.” Her studios haven’t run perfectly, and she says that’s the proof it’s working. If everything ran exactly as if you’d never left, either you weren’t as needed as you thought or your team never got room to lead. The practical part is one handover document and one skill she taught her managers first: telling “this needs me right now” from “this needs me eventually.” As she puts it, “Not every fire is actually a fire.”
The Weight of Getting Everything You Asked For — Andrea, Elevéte with Andrea
Read it straight after Wesp’s. Andrea runs a dance studio and a Pilates studio that’s about to turn one, and she’s in her final year of law school. Her studio manager is moving to a virtual role, and she still hasn’t found all the right hires. So she’s building what she calls an attention filter for owners. It’s four questions to ask when something lands on your desk. What needs me? What only needs my eyes? What needs someone else? What can wait? Her line: “Maybe capacity is knowing what you’re supposed to carry in the first place.”
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