How Club4 Fitness Uses Nova to Support Growth Across a 44 Location Estate

Club4 Fitness is a fast-growing fitness operator with 44 locations and counting. With clubs across Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana, Club4 has built its brand around accessible, high-value fitness, with most locations offering 24/7 access.

That operating model creates a clear expectation: members and prospects want convenience, speed, and availability. But for any growing multi-location operator, delivering that experience across every location and every enquiry is difficult to do with staffing alone.

Club4 Fitness needed a way to engage prospects the moment they showed interest, even when teams were off the floor, clubs were closed, or enquiries arrived outside staffed hours. That is where Nova, the sales agent within the Keepme Antares platform, came in.

Club4 Fitness deployed its Nova agent, Sam, to manage prospect conversations across every location, 24 hours a day. Sam now handles thousands of conversations every month, engaging leads instantly, answering questions, and converting interest into booked tours.

At a glance

• 44 locations

• Thousands of conversations handled every month

• Over 30% conversion across all conversations

• 36% conversion outside staffed hours

• More than 270 after-hours tours booked in one month

• Very low day-to-day management required from the Club4 team

The context: a growing operator building for scale

Club4 Fitness is not growing by accident. In August 2025, the company announced a strengthened executive team to support continued expansion, with Stephanie Strachan promoted to Chief Operating Officer and Stephen Trapani appointed VP of Personal Training & Ancillary Revenue. The move reflected the priorities of a business scaling quickly: stronger operational control, sharper revenue leadership, and a consistent member experience across a growing estate.

That makes the Nova use case more interesting. Club4 was not looking for a novelty AI tool. It needed something that could support the standards and speed of a serious growth operator.

Club4’s growth is not just a story of adding more locations. It is also a story of building a more differentiated fitness experience at scale.

In a 2025 Les Mills case study on Club4’s programming strategy, Mike Rowe, Club4’s Director of Group Exercise and Small Group Training, described how the operator uses group training to drive participation, enjoyment, retention, and member loyalty across its clubs. Club4 was already running group workouts in 37 out of 41 sites, using programming innovation to serve everyone from beginners to advanced members and to help people feel welcomed, supported, and more likely to stay.

That matters because it shows the kind of operator Club4 is. This is not a business relying on a basic gym proposition and hoping scale will do the work. Club4 is actively shaping the member experience through programming, instructor quality, community, and innovation.

Nova supports that same growth logic on the prospect side. If the in-club experience is designed to feel consistent, motivating, and easy to engage with, the sales journey has to match it. Every enquiry needs a fast, accurate, on-brand response, whether it comes in during staffed hours or after the team has gone home.

For Club4, Nova has become part of the infrastructure that helps protect that experience as the business grows. It turns interest into action quickly, keeps the brand experience consistent across locations, and makes sure a prospect’s first interaction with Club4 reflects the same level of responsiveness and quality the operator is building inside its clubs.

The challenge: high-intent leads don’t wait for staffed hours

Across 44 locations, Club4 Fitness needed a way to engage leads immediately, consistently, and at scale, without depending entirely on staff availability.

That mattered most outside staffed hours. Prospects do not only enquire when teams are on the floor. They research gyms in the evenings, overnight, and at weekends, often at the exact moment their intent is highest. Keepme’s own after-hours lead study found that up to 52% of gym searches happen after hours, with demand peaking between midnight and 5am. Get free access to the study here: How Many Gym Leads Are Lost After Hours?

For Club4, the challenge was bigger than speed to lead. It needed every enquiry to receive the same accurate, on-brand response, whether it arrived at one club or another, during the working day or after the team had gone home.

The business needed a way to respond instantly, answer questions, book tours, reduce pressure on staff, and scale sales engagement across every location without adding operational complexity.

The solution: Sam, Club4’s Nova sales agent

Club4 deployed Sam, its Nova sales agent, through Antares to give every location the same always-on sales capability without handing control of the customer experience to an unchecked system.

That distinction matters. Inside Antares, Club4 defined the knowledge Sam would use, the tone Sam would speak in, the actions Sam would be allowed to take, and the moments where a conversation needed to be handed back to the team. Antares is built around that kind of controlled autonomy, with approved messaging, escalation rules, full conversation visibility, and clear boundaries for where the AI’s role ends and the team’s begins.

In practice, that means Sam can answer questions, guide prospects, and book tours across the entire estate, while staying inside Club4’s approved brand and operating rules. If a question falls outside the approved knowledge base, Sam does not guess. Antares is grounded in the operator’s approved data and triggers human handover when needed. It is also designed with negative constraints and brand voice controls, so the agent avoids forbidden topics or phrases and communicates in the vocabulary the operator has approved. You can read more about those safeguards here: Why Antares Is A Safe Decision

For Stephanie Strachan, COO at Club4 Fitness, that control is what makes the autonomy useful:

“Once trained, they can provide things specifically how it is written in the tone of the brand, and there's less human error.”

That’s the point. Sam gives Club4 additional sales capacity, but does so in a way the team can govern. One agent can represent dozens of locations because the knowledge, tone, rules, and escalation paths are set centrally, rather than left to chance.

The outcome is not another system the team has to babysit. It is an agent that can keep working inside approved boundaries.

“I haven't had to dive into it at all.”

For a growing operator, that is the real operational win. Nova gives Club4 the ability to respond, answer, guide, and book at scale, while the team stays focused on running clubs, supporting members, and converting the prospects who are ready for a human conversation.

Because Sam runs inside Antares, Club4 is not deploying a standalone chatbot or isolated automation tool. It is adding a specialist sales agent to a governed AI platform designed to support multiple use cases across the operator’s growth and member lifecycle.

The results: over 30% conversion and nearly 300 extra tours in one month

Club4 Fitness has seen rapid results from its use of Nova. Sam is now handling thousands of conversations every month across 44 locations and is consistently converting at over 30%. That is more than 13 percentage points above the industry benchmark.

The clearest impact is out of hours.

When the Club4 Fitness team is off the floor and the doors are closed, Sam continues engaging prospects, answering questions, and booking tours. In a single month, Sam converted at 36% outside staffed hours and generated more than 270 booked tours purely from after-hours engagement.

Sergiu Hortolomei, VP of Operations at Club4 Fitness, says the impact has been significant:

“We've seen a significant impact from after hours engagement. Antares is contacting inquiries immediately, and it's already driven nearly 300 extra tours this month. It gives us the speed, consistency, and 24/7 customer service we couldn't provide with staffing alone.”

For Club4 Fitness, this is the commercial value of Nova in action. The agent is not simply automating replies. It is creating new conversion opportunities from demand that would otherwise be delayed, missed, or dependent on staff availability.

Why the after-hours result matters

The 36% after-hours conversion rate is the commercial story. It shows that these were not low-quality enquiries being swept up at the edge of the day. They were high-intent prospects who were ready to act, provided Club4 could meet them in the moment.

That is what Sam made possible. Instead of waiting for the next staffed shift, prospects could ask questions, get answers, and book a tour immediately. For Club4, that turned after-hours demand into measurable tour volume without requiring more people to be available around the clock.

Club4 Fitness already operates in a market where convenience matters. Its own club model includes 24/7 access across many locations, meaning the brand is built around availability and flexibility.

Nova extends that same expectation into the sales journey.

The takeaway

For Club4, the value of Nova is not only the extra tour volume. It is the ability to scale a high-quality prospect experience without scaling manual effort at the same rate. Across 44 locations, Sam gives the business speed, consistency, control, and conversion capacity at the exact points where traditional staffing models struggle most.

By deploying Sam across 44 locations through Antares, Club4 Fitness has created a 24/7 sales engagement layer that responds instantly, represents the brand consistently, and converts high-intent enquiries into booked tours.

The numbers tell the story: over 30% conversion overall, 36% conversion out of hours, and nearly 300 additional tours generated in a single month from after-hours engagement alone.

That is the wider value of Antares: specialist AI agents that do the work operators need done, inside a platform built for control, visibility, and scale.