Clubworx Virtual Assistant: a VA who works your prospects, sequences and failed Ezidebit payments

You don’t search “clubworx virtual assistant” for fun. You search it at 10:15 on a Tuesday night, after teaching the 6pm kids class and the 7:30 adults, with the Prospects list still showing four enquiries you haven’t answered, two unsigned waivers for Thursday’s trials, and a fortnightly debit that bounced on Monday and is still sitting there, flagged and untouched. Clubworx is doing its job. Nobody is doing yours.

And because Clubworx is Australian-built, out of Brisbane, for exactly this kind of business, boutique gyms, martial arts schools, PT studios, the odds are you’re an Australian owner reading this, billing through Ezidebit, running gradings twice a year, and doing the whole back office yourself. The platform earns its keep: prospects and members tracked as separate records, Sequences automating the email and SMS journeys, digital waivers, class bookings, failed payment flags, attendance reports. Users praise it precisely because it cuts daily admin. But cutting admin is not the same as finishing it. Every one of those features surfaces work; almost none of them completes it. The flag is not the phone call. The Sequence is not the follow-up judgement. The waiver link is not the signed waiver. That last stretch is a person, and until now the person has been you.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Clubworx

Morning, while you’re coaching or before you open: the Prospects pass. Clubworx keeps prospective members in their own pipeline, and overnight it will have collected whatever your website capture forms and Facebook enquiries produced. Your VA answers each one while it’s warm, books the trial class straight into the calendar, moves the status along, and, this is the part that actually converts, makes the day-three follow-up contact that most schools never make because the owner was mid-class when the reminder fired. A prospect list worked daily is the cheapest growth a membership business has, and it’s the same discipline as any well-kept CRM pipeline, applied to people who want to hit pads.

Then money. When an Ezidebit or Stripe direct debit fails, Clubworx flags it, and that is the entirety of what it does. Your VA works the failed payment list each morning: re-attempts where the gateway and your rules allow, texts the member whose card expired so it’s fixed before the next fortnightly run, and escalates anyone two failures deep so you can offer a pause before it hardens into a cancellation. On fortnightly billing a decline caught on day one costs you nothing; one discovered at month end has usually already become a second decline and an awkward conversation. This is standard payment chasing shaped to a membership book, and for most clubs it is the single task that pays for the VA outright.

Then the calendar and the room. Timetable published with the right capacities, instructor swaps actioned, casual bookings and appointments managed, waitlists worked so a late cancellation becomes a filled spot. Kiosk check-in and roll call data tidied, because every retention report downstream is only as good as the attendance records feeding it.

Then waivers, the quiet legal housekeeping. Every trial booked for this week gets chased for their digital waiver before they step on the floor, not after. For a martial arts school the stakes are higher again: minors need a parent or guardian signature, and your VA checks for it rather than assuming the parent read the form properly at 11pm on their phone.

Weekly, the work that separates a managed club from a drifting one. The Sequences audit: who fell out of the trial follow-up journey, whether the onboarding emails still describe the current timetable, whether the win-back sequence is actually enrolling the members the attendance report flags, the same craft as any client onboarding email system, kept alive instead of set and forgotten. The attendance and at-risk pass: who hasn’t checked in for a fortnight, which class is quietly emptying, which suspended memberships are past their agreed return date. And the SMS plan: because Clubworx meters SMS as a paid add-on, campaigns get planned against a credit budget you’ve set, segmented to the people worth texting, and tracked, so marketing by text stays a tool and never becomes a surprise on the invoice.

Twice a year, or however often you grade: the grading machine. Grading event built in Clubworx, eligibility lists pulled from attendance counts, invitations and payment requests out to families, RSVPs chased, and every belt record updated afterwards. You decide who grades. The VA makes sure the decision is the only part you have to do.

The honest bit

Some things Clubworx will not do, whoever you hire, and you should hear them plainly.

Sequences automate messages, not outcomes. A prospect who ignores three automated emails needs a human text or a phone call, and no journey builder makes that call. The platforms that promise “set and forget” lead nurture are overselling; Clubworx, to its credit, mostly doesn’t, but the gap still has to be filled by a person.

SMS costs real money per message. It’s a metered add-on on top of your plan (which itself runs roughly $109-169 a month once you’re past the free tier’s 20 members). That’s not a criticism, it’s how SMS works everywhere, but it means an unmanaged account either avoids texting entirely and loses the channel, or blasts the whole base and bleeds credits. The fix is management, not the software.

The failed payment flag is a flag. Whether a re-attempt makes sense depends on why the payment failed, and an expired card can only be fixed by the member. Clubworx surfaces the problem faster than a bank statement ever would; resolving it is human work.

And Clubworx is member management, not a marketing engine. It will not run your ads, write your content or generate demand. It manages the people your marketing produces. If the Prospects list is empty, the problem is upstream of the software and upstream of the VA, and we’d rather tell you that on a call than place someone into a pipeline with nothing in it.

What stays with you

The boundary is partly Clubworx’s permission model and partly common sense, and we hold both. Staff logins in Clubworx are permission-scoped per person, so the VA’s login opens prospects, members, bookings, communications and reports, and does not hold the owner account where the Ezidebit and Stripe gateway settings, plan pricing and your Clubworx subscription billing live. The VA recovers a failed payment; the VA cannot reroute where money settles or reprice a membership, because their login has no door into that part of the system.

The judgement stays yours too. Who passes a grading is the instructor’s call, always; the VA administers the event, never the standard. Refunds, membership plan structure, what a struggling member gets offered, whether a chronic no-show gets a call or a cancellation, those are owner decisions the VA queues up with context attached rather than makes. Anything a member raises that touches an injury or an incident escalates to you the same day under a written rule.

What it costs and where to start

Clubworx admin sits on our admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, and for a single-location gym or martial arts school 10-15 hours a week covers the prospect pass, failed payment recovery, waivers, bookings, Sequences upkeep and the weekly reports, roughly $500-1,100 a month. Grading-season weeks run heavier; quiet January runs lighter, and you’re billed for hours worked.

Placement takes 7-10 business days. The first 5-7 days are supervised inside your Clubworx account, starting with the Prospects list and the failed payment list because those two leak the most money the fastest, before the VA does any solo work. There’s a $500 refundable deposit that credits against your first month, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. Jenn has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024 and takes every discovery call herself, including the ones where the honest answer is “you’re too small for this yet, stay on the free tier and call us at 80 members.”

For the wider picture, the fitness studios page covers how a VA fits a coaching-led business, the CRM hygiene task page goes deeper on the pipeline discipline that makes the Prospects list convert, and the VA cost guide has full pricing. Otherwise book a discovery call and bring two things: last month’s failed payment list and your current Prospects tab. Between them is almost always where the VA’s first fortnight pays for itself.