Helping a struggling club after they had already been open for 6 months
It bet its growth on the least glamorous product on the schedule — the beginner class — and now out-earns a rival ten minutes away by more than two to one.
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StackEleven · Client Case Study
Working with a club 5 months pre-open
Most clubs start marketing the week they open and spend their first year recovering from it. This one started five months early. By the time the permanent facility opened there were already 2,126 people on the list — and the club has grown every quarter since.
- Client
- Brand new facility, Northeast metro
- Engagement start
- June 2025
- Facility opened
- November 2025
- Data through
- 31 Jul 2026
2,126On the list before the doors openedBuilt from July 2025
5.6×Revenue growth in the first yearFirst trading month to July 2026
$3.10Cost per lead before opening$6.56 after — less than half the price
7,349Paying players on the booksFrom a standing start
Monthly revenue through each milestone
Indexed so the first trading month, July 2025, = 100. Dollar values withheld.
What five months of a head start buys
StackEleven came on in June 2025. There was no facility to sell yet — so the work was to build the audience that would be there on day one.
New leads per month
The list was largest before there was anywhere to play.
JUN 2025
Engagement begins
No courts, no members, no bookings. Just a catchment, a brand and a build date.
AUG 2025
Four temporary courts
A pop-up gave the audience somewhere to play and the club something to sell while the real facility was still under construction.
NOV 2025
The permanent facility
Opened into a list of 2,126 people who already knew the brand and had, in many cases, already played.
EARLY 2026
A second location
The second full facility opened in the new year. January revenue was the highest the club had ever recorded to that point.
The pre-open list was not a vanity number. Those 2,126 people have since spent $224,040 at the club — an average of $105 each, and still climbing, from an audience assembled before there was a floor to play on. The temporary courts mattered more than they look: they turned a mailing list into a habit four months early, so opening night was a return visit for a large part of the room rather than a first impression.
A club that opens cold spends its first year buying an audience. This one opened with one and spent its first year monetising it.
The cost side is the part most operators do not expect. Leads were less than half the price before the club opened — $3.10 against $6.56 — and the cheapest month of all was August 2025 at $2.36. A pre-open campaign is not just earlier, it is better value: the audience is fresh, nobody in the catchment has seen the ad yet, and the club is buying attention before it competes with its own reputation. Waiting until opening week means paying roughly double for the same person.
The year since
Foot traffic tells the same story as revenue, from a different feed. Check-ins ran 115 in the first trading month and 4,307 in July 2026. Monthly revenue is 5.6× where it started. Neither line has a slump in it — the club has not had to re-acquire its own customers, which is the usual cost of opening cold.
How these figures were calculated
Revenue is settled order and registration value synced from the club's booking platform, excluding membership mirror rows and coaching income. It is presented as an index to the first trading month; absolute dollar figures are withheld by request. Check-ins are a separate feed and are shown as raw counts.
- "Pre-open" means a lead dated before the day the permanent facility opened in November 2025. The August 2025 pop-up courts traded before that date, so a minority of the pre-open list had already played on the temporary courts.
- Lifetime spend for the pre-open cohort is counted to date and is still accruing.
- Lead counts, spend and cost per lead are reported by Meta for the club's own ad account, covering the full life of every campaign from the first day they ran. They are independent of the CRM, and they corroborate it: Meta reports roughly 2,214 leads before opening against 2,126 pre-open contacts in the platform.
- The pre/post cost-per-lead split apportions the opening month by day either side of the opening date. Total account spend to date is $17,488 for 3,832 leads. It excludes StackEleven fees, so it is a media figure, not a total-engagement one.
- Every month charted is a complete calendar month; August 2026 is in progress and is excluded throughout.