Customer Profile: Twisted Steel

Twisted Steel is a 10,000-square-foot, 1,000-member gym in La Junta, Colorado, which went through a data transfer to Gym Insight in 2024. Owned by Tim and Kendall Jacob, the facility keeps It simple: one employee, the best gym equipment, and a commitment to serving their core clientele – weightlifters.

How Twisted Steel Started in The Gym Industry.

The two began in the gym industry in 2014, when Tim bought a local fitness club and turned it 24/7 to accommodate his lifestyle as a railroad operator. At the time, the population of La Junta barely surpassed 7,000. Local gym fans quickly discovered the shop. In the meantime, the town’s female-only gym closed, and the two seized the opportunity to open a second gym. 

Miss Fit opened in 2019. By 2020, the Jacobs merged the two growing companies into Twisted Steel. 

Today’s Twisted Steel offers Arsenal lifting equipment, a supplement shop, pre-made meal services, and the women-only section. All this without advertising to the public or even hanging a sign. In the future they hope to expand into wellness and recovery. 

Gambling to Succeed

Although the owners have been in the industry for more than a decade, they only recently stepped back from careers and body building to focus entirely on the gym. As Tim says, he could be a bad dad, a bad body builder, a bad business owner and a bad employee, but at some point, he needed to choose to be the best.

Parents of two children, Tim and Kendall both trained competitively in the fitness world. Tim is a heavyweight bodybuilder, competing in the NPC Rocky Mountain Championships in 2015 and 2023. Kendall competed in the NPC Northern Colorado Championships Wellness and Bikini divisions in 2021. To add to their crazy schedule, their children are homeschooled and they manage investment properties. 

In 2024, Tim left his career position in the railroad to gamble on himself. Choosing to excel at caring for their young family and the growing gym, Tim and Kendall have turned the facility around, gaining more than 400 clients in 2025. For both owners, once the decision was made, a psychological shift changed their entire perspective on gym ownership. It went from gig work to a job – without a guaranteed paycheck. Today, the 24/7 gym is staffed 16 hours a day. The owners also cleaned house – kicking out the troublemakers and switching software to Gym Insight.

Eliminating bad gym software revealed hundreds of freeloading members.

Unfortunately, in transferring their data to Gym Insight, they discovered that many of their 840 members were not paying.  How was this possible? The old software allowed amounts to be listed as “zero.” With this glitch the system reported these members as up to date on payments, since they had paid “zero!” The realization set off a scramble to contact these wayward gym fans, urging them to re-sign up correctly. Eventually with hard work and determination, the company surged from a low of 600 members to their current roll of more than 1,000 paying members. 

Yet, despite these problems, they feel their greatest strength lies in how they handle members. For example, when a member misses a payment, instead of pinging them electronically, they call the individual. Instead of putting the person on the defensive, they try to work with them to solve the issue. 

Kendall says, they believe in taking care of their members. “Do your best…a lot of people are there to improve their lives and we should not make it any harder on them,” she explains. 

What they like about Gym Insight’s data transfer.

Twisted Steel went through a difficult period while switching to Gym Insight from their former software firm. The payment processor would not release their customers’ credit card data. After months of phone calls, the processor finally relinquished the information – only to serve up tokenized data disconnected from client names and details.

Their entire business lay in a digital mess.

By this point, though, our sales staff had been with them for six months, in constant contact with the previous firm and ready to fix any problems. Our tech team jumped on the data and managed to link all their customer names to the matching data. A feat.

Now, administration time is knocked down to 20 minutes a day – Kendall reviews the business while preparing for her morning workout. “There’s not a lot I have to do anymore,” she explains. 

With Gym Insight, Tim and Kendall found: 

• The software’s layout and billing system is user-friendly and simple for non-techies.  Their former software required calls to customer service for basic billing changes.
• Communication is direct, upfront, and honest.  
• Staff is receptive to suggestions. For instance, Tim and Kendall loved the remote unlock system of their previous software provider and mentioned it to our tech team, who evaluated the idea and integrated it into the door system. 
• New member sign-ups with digital keytags are uncomplicated and immediate.

The future is in their hands with Gym Insight.

Thank you, Tim and Kendall, for choosing to run your business on Gym Insight software. We custom write our software, fully integrating every feature. With tools including member management, robust reporting capabilities, club management, automated 24/7 digital keytag access, and a free Members app, we’ve created the easiest-to-use software in the industry. “Fully integrated” translates into data that uploads automatically into your computer system, access keys that are turned off immediately after credit cards are denied, and simple document storage and retrieval. Are you ready for an easier way time to run your gym?  

Call us today at 855-FOR-GYMS.