Case Study: How IronWorks Fitness filled more classes and freed up its front desk with PosterBooking

The Client

IronWorks Fitness opened in 2015 in a converted warehouse unit just outside Leeds city centre. It is independently owned by Marcus Webb, a former competitive powerlifter who built the gym around a simple idea: give serious lifters and everyday members a no-frills, always-open space to train. The gym operates on a 24/7 keyfob access model, with staffed hours from 6am to 10pm and unmanned overnight access for members.

The facility includes a free weights area, a cardio floor, two group exercise studios, a functional training zone and a small reception and juice bar area. IronWorks runs around 35 group classes a week, from HIIT and spin to yoga and powerlifting technique sessions, and regularly rotates membership promotions, personal trainer availability and seasonal offers. With roughly 1,400 active members and a small team of four front-desk staff plus eight freelance instructors, communication has always been a challenge, particularly because so much of the gym operates without staff present.

Before PosterBooking, that communication relied almost entirely on paper and word of mouth, which created ongoing friction for both staff and members.

Life Before PosterBooking

Every Sunday evening, assistant manager Priya Chandra sat down with a spreadsheet, the following week's class timetable and whatever promotional flyers head office or Marcus had put together. She would then open a template in Canva, tweak the timetable, export it as a PDF and send it to a local print shop or run it off on the gym's own inkjet printer when the print shop queue was too long.

Once printed, the sheets had to be laminated so they would survive being handled, Blu Tacked to walls, slipped into plastic wall-mounted frames, or pinned to the corkboard by reception. Old versions had to be peeled off first, which often left behind curling edges of tape and faded paper that nobody got round to removing. When a class was cancelled at short notice, usually because an instructor was ill, there was no way to update the printed timetable. Staff resorted to handwritten "CANCELLED" signs taped over the relevant class slot, which looked messy and were easy for members to miss entirely.

Membership offers followed a similar pattern. When a new joining promotion launched, somebody had to design a poster, print several A3 copies, laminate them and place them around the gym: by the entrance, near the water fountain, on the studio doors and by the changing rooms. If the offer changed or expired, those posters needed to be found and removed, which rarely happened promptly. It was common for a gym to be advertising a promotion that had technically ended three weeks earlier.

Instructor playlists and video content for the cardio screens were handled separately again. One of the personal trainers had put together a rolling slideshow of form-check tips and gym etiquette reminders, but the only way to display it was from a laptop connected to an old TV, with the files carried over on a USB stick. If the laptop needed restarting, or the stick went missing, the screen simply defaulted to a cable news channel or sat on a blank "no signal" message for days until someone noticed.

Reception bore the brunt of all this. Staff estimated that on a typical day they were asked the same four or five questions dozens of times: "What time is the spin class?", "Is there a new joiner offer on at the moment?", "Has the Thursday yoga class moved?", "Do you do a student discount?" and "What's the WiFi password?". Priya calculated that across the team, answering repeat questions like these consumed roughly six hours of staff time a week, time that could have gone towards member check-ins, equipment maintenance or simply keeping the front desk area tidy.

Taken together, Priya estimated the gym spent around seven hours a week on designing, printing, laminating and physically mounting signage, plus the six hours a week answering questions that signage should have been answering on its own. That is roughly 13 hours of staff time a week, or just over 56 hours a month, spent on a system that was still routinely out of date. On the print side, between laminating pouches, ink cartridges, paper and occasional print shop invoices for bigger posters, IronWorks was spending approximately £95 a month keeping its noticeboards current, more during busy promotional periods such as January and September.

Marcus had looked at digital screens before but had been put off by the idea of expensive proprietary signage boxes, long-term contracts and software that needed an IT specialist to manage. It was only after a conversation with another independent gym owner who had switched to PosterBooking that he decided to try it.

The Solution

Marcus and Priya chose PosterBooking because it did not require any specialist hardware beyond cheap streaming sticks they could buy off the shelf, and because the dashboard was something Priya could manage herself from her phone between shifts, without needing design software or a print budget.

They started on the free plan, since IronWorks needed fewer than ten screens, and used PosterBooking's playlist and scheduling tools to replace every piece of static paper signage in the building. Class timetables, instructor bios, membership offers, safety reminders and gym etiquette tips were all rebuilt as rotating digital playlists, scheduled to change automatically depending on the day and time.

Where They Implemented It

IronWorks installed five screens in total, each with a clearly defined job:

• Reception screen (mounted behind the front desk): rotates the day's class timetable, current membership offers, the WiFi password and opening hours for staffed periods, so it answers the most common questions before members even reach the desk.
• Gym floor screen (above the cardio area): plays a looping mix of form-check tips, gym etiquette reminders and a live countdown to the next class starting in Studio 1.
• Studio corridor screen (outside the two group exercise studios): displays the live timetable for both studios side by side, with the next three classes highlighted and automatic "starting now" and "fully booked" flags.
• Changing room entrance screen: shows safety notices, locker policy reminders and seasonal promotions, content that needs to be seen but does not need constant updates.
• Juice bar screen: promotes the gym's partnership offers, personal training packages and member referral scheme on a slower five-minute rotation.

The Implementation

IronWorks bought five Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K devices, one for each existing screen, at a total hardware cost of under £250. Priya installed the PosterBooking app on each stick, which took about two minutes per screen; she simply searched for PosterBooking in the Fire TV app store, logged in with the gym's account and paired the device using a short on-screen code shown in the PosterBooking dashboard.

From there, all content management happened centrally. Priya built the first set of playlists over a single afternoon: the class timetable playlist pulled from a simple spreadsheet upload, while offers and etiquette tips were built using PosterBooking's built-in templates, with the gym's logo and brand colours added once and reused across every screen. She scheduled the reception screen to show opening hours and the WiFi code more frequently during early morning and late evening slots when unstaffed access was in use, and set the studio corridor screen to automatically highlight whichever class was starting within the next 15 minutes.

Training the rest of the front-desk team took around 20 minutes. Because updates are made from a browser or the PosterBooking mobile app rather than on the screens themselves, staff did not need any technical training, just a walkthrough of how to log in, edit a playlist and push the change live. Marcus asked for one safeguard: any new membership offer still gets approved by him before Priya schedules it, but that approval now happens over a WhatsApp message rather than a design-and-print cycle.

Life With PosterBooking

Sunday evening poster-making sessions are gone. If a class is cancelled, Priya removes it from the timetable playlist from her phone in under a minute, and it disappears from all three relevant screens at once. When a new six-week challenge or joining offer launches, the design goes up on every screen simultaneously the moment it is approved, and comes down automatically on the date Priya set when she scheduled it, with no one needing to remember to take it off.

The gym floor and studio corridor screens have become part of the member experience rather than just information boards. Members often check the corridor screen to see which class has spaces left before deciding whether to join, something that was simply not possible with static printed timetables. Staff have also started using the reception screen to showcase new personal trainers and highlight five-star Google reviews, content that would never have made it onto laminated paper.

Priya says the biggest shift has been not having to think about signage as a separate job anymore. Updates happen as part of her normal daily routine rather than as a dedicated weekly task, and because the content is scheduled in advance, much of it now looks after itself.

The Results: Time and Money Saved

• Time spent designing, printing and mounting signage fell from around 7 hours a week to under 1 hour a week, a saving of roughly 6 hours weekly, or about 26 hours a month.
• Repetitive reception questions dropped noticeably once the timetable, offers and WiFi details were always visible and current, saving an estimated 4 hours of staff time a week, or about 17 hours a month.
• Combined, that is close to 43 hours of staff time saved monthly, more than 500 hours a year, which IronWorks has redirected towards member check-ins and gym floor supervision.
• Monthly spend on laminating pouches, ink, paper and print shop invoices fell from around £95 to effectively £0, since all screens update digitally.
• Studio classes flagged as "starting soon" or "fully booked" on the corridor screen saw a measurable increase in walk-in attendance, with Priya estimating class fill rates improved by around 10 to 15 percent in the months after rollout.
• Membership offer visibility improved enough that staff reported more new-joiner enquiries referencing the exact promotion seen on screen, rather than a vague recollection of a poster from weeks earlier.

Testimonial

We used to spend half of Sunday night making timetables that were out of date by Wednesday. Now I update everything from my phone in the car park before I even clock in. The front desk is calmer, members are better informed, and I have got hours of my week back.

Priya Chandra, Assistant Manager, IronWorks Fitness

Frequently Asked Questions

How many screens can a gym run on PosterBooking for free?

PosterBooking is free for up to 10 screens, which covers most independent gyms comfortably. After a 3 month trial, free screens display a small watermark, but all core scheduling and playlist features remain available.

What happens if a gym needs more than 10 screens?

From the 11th screen onwards, PosterBooking costs $6.49 per screen per month, which covers larger gym chains or multi-site operators without requiring a separate enterprise contract. There is no requirement to upgrade the whole account at once; pricing simply scales with the number of screens connected.

What hardware do we need to run PosterBooking screens in a gym?

PosterBooking runs on affordable, widely available hardware including the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, the Amazon Signage Stick or Display, Android TV devices, Windows PCs, Chromebox units and Raspberry Pi. Most gyms, including IronWorks, use Fire TV Stick 4K devices because they are inexpensive and easy to source.

How long does it take to set up a new screen?

Setting up a new screen typically takes about 2 minutes: install the PosterBooking app on the device, enter the pairing code shown in the dashboard, and the screen is connected and ready to receive playlists. No on-site technician or specialist installer is required.

What happens if the gym's WiFi goes down?

PosterBooking screens cache their content locally, so if the internet connection drops, each screen keeps playing its most recently scheduled playlist without interruption. Once the connection is restored, the screen automatically syncs any new updates or schedule changes.

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