A community that needed a gym
Silverback Flex didn't come from a business plan. It came from a gap. The local council facilities were small, and the community had simply outgrown them. For three years, the team researched sites, ran forecasts, and tested whether the demand was real.
It was. They found a building whose owner was keen to see something new in it — a new build, available to rent with an option to buy. For a new business unsure whether it was going to work, that was the right arrangement. They went for it.
Why ClubRight, before the doors even opened
While still in the planning stages, Silverback Flex came across ClubRight. What drew them in wasn't a feature list or a price. It was the person behind it.
ClubRight's founder had been a gym owner himself. He'd lived the same experience the Silverback Flex team were about to go through — the admin, the payments, the membership management — and had built software specifically to solve it for independent gym owners, not chains.
“What drew us to it was the fact that he was a gym owner and he had gone through the process of owning and running a gym, and then looked to work on a system that actually worked for independent gym owners rather than a generic system.”— The team at Silverback Flex
That connection mattered. The founder met with the Silverback Flex team in person, travelling to discuss the business, understand what they needed, and show them what he'd built. Two young businesses, both finding their feet, talking about how to do things properly.
Set up before day one
Silverback Flex had two to three months with ClubRight before they opened, time to run dummy trials, learn the system properly, and get comfortable before a single paying member walked through the door.
“We had time. I had time to really sit at the kitchen table and work through the system because we did not have a gym open. So I could really learn it before we opened.”— The team at Silverback Flex
That preparation paid off. When the doors opened, the software was ready. Silverback Flex, now running three gyms across the Scottish Highlands, has been with ClubRight ever since.