Pulse Fitness scaled from 1 to 4 branches in a year
Arjun Kapoor walks us through the systems that made it possible — including the one mistake he'd undo if he could.
When Arjun Kapoor opened the first Pulse Fitness branch in Gurgaon in early 2024, the plan was to break even by month 12. He hit it in month 4. By month 14, he had four branches across Delhi NCR. We sat down with him to understand what worked, and what didn't.
The first branch was the laboratory
Arjun spent the first six months obsessing over operations. He built playbooks for every recurring activity: opening, closing, deep clean, equipment maintenance, member onboarding, churn outreach. By the time he was ready to open branch two, the playbook was 47 pages and battle-tested.
The mistake he'd undo
"I hired managers for branches 2 and 3 before I'd built the manager training program. I assumed culture would just transfer. It didn't. Both branches stalled in their first three months because the manager wasn't running the playbook the way I'd run it."
He shut both branches down for a week, ran a 5-day intensive training program, and reopened. Renewal rates climbed 22 percentage points in the next quarter.
Multi-branch from a single dashboard
Pulse runs all four branches on Kasratbook with branch-level role scoping. Each manager sees their branch only. Arjun sees the rollup. The Gurgaon and Noida branches share trainers, so a member can take a class at either with no cross-billing weirdness — that was a non-negotiable from day one.
The next branches
Arjun is opening branches 5 and 6 in Bangalore later this year. The playbook is now 89 pages.