Techflow.ai Helps Raw Fitness Personal Training

Background for the Case Study

Michael Montefusco of Raw Fitness Personal Training is a gym located in Lake Norman, North Carolina, United States. He runs two businesses – A gym business and a Marketing Automation business where he helps other gym businesses  get clients. He offers endurance training, weight loss training, personal training, sports training and boot camps. In December 2009, Mike recently relocated to North Carolina, having previously served as a master trainer at a local commercial gym. He constantly put in more than 8 hours  a day doing his job and settled on opening his own facility. They did 30-minutes sessions, hardly any flexibility work, and no nutrition – but Mike had to cut things short regardless because of time constraints and thus resigned. Since then, he has established a new fitness gym – Raw Fitness. 

After being approached by a gym member due to his success, Coach Mike decided to check out an old barn as an option for extra workouts. He intended to buy used equipment online and made some early purchases of weights, heavy bags, kettlebells, sandbags, and followed up with the purchase of a legendary 360 pound tire! The Raw Fitness gym was aptly named because it really got results. Despite this however, few people thought much of it due to the fact that there was no marketing effort involved by most fitness and exercise companies for this particular niche at that time period. Then, in January 2012, he expanded again and this was followed by another expansion in June 2013 to nearly 4,300 square feet.

The Problem

When COVID-19 hits, he has to shut everything down. He always had a  bit of an industrial bent, like learning auto mechanical things and so on and so forth. He has to face problems with understanding the automation and logic sequences of the process.

Our Goals

Companies have multiple reasons for automating their business, but two of the most common include saving money and increasing productivity. Human factors play a critical role in the process of automating a production system because people are typically good at multitasking – especially if there are quality tools at hand to help them save time so that they’re able to spend more time on more important things. If a human factors framework is applied when designing the automation system, people will become more efficient and comfortable with it over time as well, which leads to an overall better experience when interacting with the environment.

Setting Up the Automation Strategy

His company was keen to get into test automation. Michael had a couple of days of consultancy with Integromasters’ automation expert, Manuel Gick, to explore what they wanted and the best ways of achieving their goal. They discussed good objectives for automation and created an outline plan. After that, he realized the need for a champion who would be the internal enthusiast for the automation initiative. The champion needed to be someone with development skills, so Michael joined Integromasters and had a good start on their automation initiative. Not long after this, he was able to cater to other online personal trainers that are also technophiles who employ him as a freelancer to do their tech stuff and all of their automation.

Use an Incremental Approach

In the first weeks of their new deployment, Mike witnessed his team come to grips with the new software as they explored its freestyle capabilities. Eventually, he started seeing a lot of people adopt it into their daily routines. As an act of human factors engineering, Mike used this information to work his team into productivity and efficiency throughout initial periods where they needed to get acquainted with their updated features and processes at work. Connecting all the dots from A to Z was taxing for users during those times because the tasks were so much more difficult than what they had been accustomed to on previous software iterations. It was important for Mike to develop a dynamic remote infrastructure that could evolve and grow along with them as employees all became familiar with the new tools.

Lesson

If you are starting up a new automation initiative, one of the first things that is important to do is to get expert support. At the same time, you want everyone working for you to be on the same page and ready to help out with it. A person you want on your side for this is someone who has the power to support or assist with the creation of an automation campaign using existing resources within your organization (e.g., writing open source tools or code) along with other skills that prove useful in making its development effective (e.g., networking, relationship-building, leadership). In turn, make sure they have the necessary skill set themselves as well as a positive attitude and commitment towards finishing whatever task they are given. If they do not have these qualities then it will reflect poorly on your team if this project heads in the wrong direction or dies out before seeing daylight – one way or another!

Reasons for automating:

1. a) Increase labor productivity
2. b) Reduce labor cost
3. c) Reduce difficult or unpleasant work for humans
4. d) Mitigate the effects of labor shortages
5. e) Reduce or eliminate routine manual or clerical tasks Technical feasibility
6. f)   Improve product quality
7. g) Accomplish processes that cannot be done manually
8. h) Avoid the high cost of not automating

Integromasters Mind

Constant Contact

During his Integromasters journey, he experienced getting a 400 error with the software,  Constant Contact. He tried to set up any custom fields for some reason. Based on the API, he tried the exact names of the fields and the field IDs, but nothing worked. He used the direct API call instead.  He had to refresh his OAuth2 token every hour, but he deemed that he would have a happy client soon enough. Manuel shared that sometimes the documentation is wrong or incorrect and a fix is needed. He suggested contacting Constant Contact support to help verify what’s going on and if a new token needs to be generated again in order for the site to work correctly. 

Error Handler

He also suggested that Mike should use an error handler as well. Basically what this would mean is if the API call for the custom field were to fail, then it would generate a new token, save it in the data store and retry the custom field update. This could be accomplished by using the  resume error handler, so that once the  scenario starts one can get the most recent authorization details for the token (a data store with 1 entry will suffice). 

Raw Fitness’ API

Another time as he used Integromat, he had a question regarding his company’s API. Manuel told him that he pretty much has to iterate through it if the API call returns an array of objects in order to make another API call in one specific place of that array. Manuel also had a recommendation for Luis which was that it’s vital to know what your API is capable of because otherwise you might end up doing something unnecessary and wasting valuable time!

Date Difference Between Two Given Times

Mike also asked how to find the date difference between two given times. Manuel explained that one can format dates in a number of ways, such as, e.g., “2015-06-22T09:28:02Z”. He went on to show Mike how to calculate time differences and suggested that an example for calculating differences between timestamps could be found in  the time function help page under Integromat.

His Thoughts on Integromasters Course

Mike found the Integromasters Course “super well explained.” At the same time, he looked forward to seeing more examples and uses of the Integromat functions. He attests that the explanations are very well-structured and complete. The first 4 parts were coherent, especially the JSON topic. He loved that every 15-minute video per course had led him to learn a lot of stuff. He may have struggled with the error handler in Integromat but after taking the course he has no problems now.

Conclusion

Automation can help your business run more smoothly around the clock, enabling you to focus your attention on higher-level activities that could benefit from your attention and insight. You might be tempted to invest a lot of time in setting up back-end processes for automation, but it’s important not to reinvent the wheel! Free tools are available in almost all categories that can be helpful for startups, and it’s always best to consult people who have relevant knowledge before investing a ton of time into finding free solutions.It is important to understand the different types of automation tools out there and how they can affect your business’ bottom line. There are many options available, but the most important thing is to keep costs low and get your automation set up as soon as possible!