Fitness and More: Thirty-Six Years of Results in 15 Minutes
Last Updated on 4 August, 2026
How a 36-year Illinois personal training studio built on a 15-minute method moved off QuickBooks and onto WellnessLiving — without changing the way it trains.
A Method That Has Not Changed in 36 Years
Steve McKinney does not sell time. He sells results — packaged into a 15-minute workout he has been refining for more than three decades.
His training philosophy is rooted in old-school high-intensity principles drawn from the Nautilus era of the 1970s, applied to free weights and delivered in short, deliberate sessions. The pitch he gives new clients is simple: treat your appointment like a doctor’s appointment, and you will end up needing fewer of them.
“I do old-school high-intensity training back from the ’70s, Nautilus principles applied to free weights. But my workout’s only 15 minutes long. The workout’s brief, but I still get people great results.”
That conviction has carried Fitness and More through 36 years of business, two Illinois locations, clients who have trained with Steve for as long as 30 years, and a steady online training practice that extends his reach well beyond the studio walls.
A Practitioner’s Studio, Built Around a Specific Method
Fitness and More is not a big-box gym, and Steve does not pretend otherwise. The studio runs on a tight operating philosophy: appointment-based training only, one-on-one, with a brief but demanding 15-minute protocol that is the foundation of every client relationship.
Steve himself is a black belt in jiu-jitsu, a pastor, and the author of a fitness book he uses as a marketing anchor. The jiu-jitsu space sits next to his personal training floor. The two sides of the building share ownership but operate separately, and the WellnessLiving rollout focuses on the fitness side — the side built around his proprietary method.
The clients reflect the method. Many have trained with Steve for decades. Some prefer recurring credit card billing. A few pay per session. The business values relationships over volume, and the operational systems have to bend around the way Steve actually works, not the other way around.
What Fitness and More Offers
The studio runs on a small set of core services delivered by a lean team. Every new client starts with a free consultation that Steve runs himself — no one books a training session without meeting him first. From there, clients move into 15-minute personal training sessions, in person at either Illinois location or online through integrated virtual sessions.
Steve’s wife runs a separate online personal training offering. A small retail line of supplements and branded apparel sells primarily on the jiu-jitsu side of the operation. The team includes Steve and five part-time trainers, each working roughly one day per week. Active clients typically train twice a week at the same recurring time slots, with Steve and his staff managing the bookings directly.
Why Steve Chose WellnessLiving
The move to WellnessLiving started with frustration. Steve had spent years on QuickBooks and had reached the point where the value no longer matched the cost or the lock-in. He needed cleaner reporting, a system that consolidated his bookings and client records, and marketing tools that could do some of the prospecting work for him.
He needed visibility that his old system couldn’t give him. WellnessLiving’s reporting breaks out revenue by category, payment method, and service type — supplement sales, training revenue, and merchandise separately. His accountant can pull reports directly without Steve exporting anything manually.
He needed one system for appointments, payments, and client records. Steve was juggling a separate CRM for his email list, manual tracking for outside payments, and Google Calendar for staff scheduling. WellnessLiving consolidates the booking calendar, the client profile, the transaction history, and the communication log in one place. Once the migration is complete, the separate CRM goes away.
He needed marketing tied to operations. “If he is going to pay for software, it should help him grow” — that was the standard Steve set from the first conversation. WellnessLiving’s automated drip campaigns, triggered by client actions like lead capture, missed visits, or expiring packages, gave him what he described as “a bunch of fishing poles in the water” without manually chasing every prospect.
He needed the platform to handle how clients actually pay. Some long-term clients settle monthly on recurring billing. Others pay per session. A handful use Venmo for supplement and merchandise purchases. WellnessLiving accommodates all of it: integrated card processing for recurring payments, custom payment methods so outside transactions still appear in reports, and account-balance logic for clients who prepay.
How WellnessLiving Fits the Operating Model
Three operational problems shaped how Fitness and More is configured inside WellnessLiving.
#1. Gating the client journey through the free consultation.
Steve does not want new prospects booking training sessions cold. WellnessLiving’s client groups and service permissions are configured so that only clients who have attended and checked in to a consultation can book training sessions online. When a consultation is marked checked in, the client moves into the active-client group and online booking unlocks automatically.
#2. Recurring appointments with monthly batch billing.
Long-term clients who train twice a week at fixed times prefer to settle monthly rather than per session. WellnessLiving’s recurring appointment booking lets Steve schedule those clients out indefinitely as unpaid visits, then process a single bulk payment at month-end that marks all eight sessions paid in one transaction. The calendar stays accurate and the per-session admin drag disappears.
#3. Mixed payment realities tied to clean reporting.
Custom payment methods for outside transactions let Steve record payments made outside the platform inside WellnessLiving without double-charging anyone. Each method ties to a distinct revenue category, so the all-sales report filters cleanly by payment type when it is time to break out supplement income for taxes.
What Steve Is Building
Fitness and More is already the business Steve set out to build. Thirty-six years. Two locations. Clients who have been showing up every Tuesday and Friday for decades. A 15-minute method that has not needed revision because the results have always spoken for themselves.
What he needed was infrastructure that matched the scale of what he had built — something that could handle the operational complexity of two locations, five part-time trainers, multiple payment types, and a client base that runs on consistency and trust. A back office that works the way he does, not the way a generic platform assumes he should.
The next chapter is already in motion: the email marketing running in the background, the consultation pipeline bringing new clients into the method, and the online training side growing through integrated virtual sessions. All of it running underneath the same 15-minute philosophy Steve has been refining since before most fitness apps existed.
That is Fitness and More: a practitioner’s studio, built on a specific method, now with the operational backbone to carry it forward.
Evaluating fitness studio software and weighing whether to leave QuickBooks, Mindbody, or a patchwork of disconnected tools?
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