The second-location piece is about the numbers before you sign. This one is about the window after — the sixty to ninety days between the lease and the doors — because that window decides whether the new site is a business on opening day or a bet that takes eighteen months to find out about. It comes down to one number, and the studios that get it right treat the presale as a campaign with a goal, a line, and a daily count, not as a waitlist that fills itself.
The day-one number
The number is founding members sold before the doors open, against the site's day-one break-even. The break-even is the new site's monthly fixed cost — rent, the manager, the base teaching schedule, utilities, software — divided by the founding dues. Above it, the site covers itself from the first month. Below it, the flagship is paying for it, and the burn-rate buffer decides for how long.
Two things about that arithmetic. First, use the founding dues, not the standard rate, because that is what the cohort will actually pay. Second, the target should sit at or above the line, never at "as many as we can" — a presale without a number has no pace, and a presale without a pace is discovered to be behind in week seven.
Pacing: the line, and the daily count
A presale is a campaign, and the shape of a campaign is a line: the target, the days available, the sales needed per day, and the cumulative count against it every morning. In the worked example, 180 members over 36 selling days is five a day. That number goes on the wall of the flagship, in the daily message to the team, and in the Monday brief.
The line's job is to make "behind" visible on the day it becomes true. Every presale we have seen runs ahead for the first fortnight, on the warm list — friends, current members at the flagship, the neighborhood waitlist — and then slows when the warm list is spent. Around day eighteen the count crosses under the line, and that is the day the founders' event moves up a week, the referral offer goes out to the founding members already signed, and the flagship's desk starts mentioning the new site to every intro. A studio without the line notices in week five, with eleven selling days left.
One sheet, one row per sale
The presale usually lives outside the booking platform, at least at first: the location may not exist in the platform until it has a schedule, and the founding sale is often rung at the flagship's desk under a placeholder product. That is fine. What matters is one sheet with one row per sale — the date, the source (the waitlist, a current member's referral, the pop-up, the event, walk-in), the offer, the dues, and whether it was refunded before opening — because those columns are the difference between a count and a campaign. Sales by source tells you which channel to push when the line says push. Refunds before opening are a number to watch on their own; a presale that sells 190 and refunds 30 has not hit 180.
The founding offer: real, and only once
Founding members are the cohort that tells the neighborhood what the studio is. The offer that works is a rate that is real and stays real — the founding dues for as long as the membership is continuously held — plus something the studio can only give once: a name on the wall, the first class in the room, a founders' event before opening. The offer that fails is a discount that resets in month three, because a bait-and-switch on the first hundred members is the most expensive marketing mistake a new site can make, and they will describe it to everyone who asks about the studio for two years.
Opening day is the start of a cohort, not the finish line
Here is the part most presales miss. The 180 founding members are a 90-day retention cohort that starts on opening day, and it behaves like every cohort — steep in the first three months, flat after six. Two numbers from day one: activation, the share of founding members who actually attend in the first two weeks, because a founder who paid in the presale and does not come in week one is the pack-holder fade in a new costume; and retention at 90 days, against the flagship's own cohorts. The founders' first month deserves the same welcome arc a new member gets anywhere — a second visit inside the week, a second and third teacher tried early, a personal check-in around week six. The retention piece works the 90-day cliff; it is the same cliff, with more people on it at once.
| Number | How to compute it | When to watch it |
|---|---|---|
| Day-one break-even | monthly fixed cost ÷ founding dues | before the target is set |
| Pace | cumulative net sales vs target ÷ selling days | every morning |
| Sales by source | one row per sale: date, source, offer, refund | the day the line says push |
| Refunds before opening | refunded ÷ sold | weekly · the net is the count |
| Activation | founders attending in the first 14 days ÷ founders | week 2 after opening |
| 90-day retention | founders active at day 90 ÷ founders, vs flagship cohorts | the first quarter |
Where this lives
A presale is one of the few things in a studio that a spreadsheet handles well, for exactly as long as the presale lasts: one sheet, one row per sale, a pace line, a daily count. What the sheet cannot do is what happens next — turn the founders into a cohort on opening day, watch each one against her own rhythm, and keep the new site out of the company averages until it is live so the flagship's numbers stay honest.
That is the shape Xyzios gives a studio opening a site. A location is planned, in presale, or live, and a presale site gets its own board: founding sales against the daily pace line, who is buying by product and by who sold it, and the call lists of people who opened an account or paid a fee and have not bought yet — then, on opening day, the founders become a cohort watched like every other, and the site joins the company rates. Mindbody or Mariana Tek stays your system of record; the presale sheet is read in, not replaced. Nothing is written to Mindbody except what you tap or approve.
Wherever you run the presale, set the number before the campaign, pace it daily, and treat opening day as day one of the cohort rather than the finish line. See how the board runs an expansion, or read the per-site scoreboard the new location joins once it is live.