Australian Fitness Network gets in shape with Google Apps

Posted by Ryan Hogan, CEO at Australian Fitness Network

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Ryan Hogan, CEO at Australian Fitness Network, a member-based fitness organization in Australia. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Fitness is all about variation. You have to push harder and switch up your exercises to get real results. You could say the same about my company, Australian Fitness Network. Our 22-person team in Sydney provides our 10,000-strong network of trainers, gym managers and other industry professionals with a healthy mix of new exercise ideas and resources to keep them motivated and focused on feeling the burn.

In 2011, we realized our IT environment was out of shape (and we really don’t like being out of shape). We were running Microsoft Exchange 2007 and did most of our work in Microsoft Word and Excel. As we grew increasingly mobile, we found that simple tasks, like sending a calendar invite from the phone or pulling up a doc on the go, felt like slogging through an ultramarathon uphill in the rain.

We turned to Perth-based Fortix, a Google Apps Reseller, for help. They carried us through a seamless, two-day migration so our work didn’t skip a beat while our technology got a major makeover. They also implemented a custom solution that integrates Google Apps with our Human Resources, CRM and project management tools so our operations are in sync instead of in silos. Having our email, documents, sales conversations and recruiting efforts tracked across multiple platforms means we can finally look at our business holistically.

Google Apps has vastly improved our team’s efficiency. Our fitness class instructors can create customized workout plans in Docs and share them directly with their clients, rather than putting them in Word and printing or emailing each updated version. They even link to the docs in the Calendar invites they send their clients to remind them of their appointments, so each fitness regimen is easy to find and track.

Google Drive helps our team get more work done with less. Every year, we host an annual industry convention called FILEX for 2,500 members of the fitness community. Nearly everyone contributes to the event including our sales, marketing, events, design and editorial teams each share some of the weight, so having our key documents in one central repository is essential. This means folks can organize and share planning information from a single spot, rather than having to email a chain of contacts to hunt down the keynote speaker points or seating plans they need.

Albert Einstein once said that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That’s as true for creating a fitness regimen as it is operating a business. Using Google Apps hasn't turned us into Einstein, but getting our infrastructure in shape has helped us work much smarter, and that’s good enough for me.