Scaling Galactico Coaching without adding to the workload

Making growth easier to manage

Galactico Coaching can now add more children, coaches and sessions without the work behind the scenes growing at the same rate. With Thrive4Activities bringing bookings, payments, attendance and customer information together, founder and director Max Marshall has more time to develop his team, improve what the club offers and focus on where the business goes next.

Galactico Coaching is a sports activity provider that delivers weekly football development sessions, holiday camps, school coaching and other programmes for children. As the business has grown, Max’s role has changed with it. In the early days, he was doing pretty much everything himself – coaching, bookings, payments, messages, registers and all the other bits that somehow end up on the founder’s list.

Now, his time needs to go somewhere different. He wants to develop his coaches, improve programmes, grow the business and make sure children and parents keep getting a great experience. Having the right structure behind Galactico Coaching is helping make that possible.

More children, sessions and coaches without more work to match

Growth is obviously a good thing. But when every new child brings another booking to process, another payment to manage, another register to update and more information to keep on top of, it can quickly become a very busy version of success.

That was the point Galactico Coaching had reached. Managing different parts of the business in different places had worked when the company was smaller, but it was becoming harder to scale. None of the individual jobs was especially huge. The problem was the sheer number of them, and how much time they took away from everything else.

With Thrive4Activities, bookings, payments, attendance and customer information can now be managed together, with less manual input needed as more children join. It has also given the club a better way to look after the information it holds about children and parents, rather than having important personal details spread across spreadsheets, messages and different systems.

There is more clarity around the financial side too. With less need to manually manage or chase payments, Max has a better view of what is coming into the business, which makes forecasting and planning ahead much easier.

For Max, that all comes back to one simple ambition:

“If we want to double the number of children we coach, I don’t want that to mean doubling the amount of admin we have to do.” Max Marshall, Founder and Director of Galactico Coaching.

That is really what scalability looks like for the club: more children, more coaches and more sessions, without needing twice as many hours behind the scenes.

Better prepared before the first whistle

One of the nicest knock-on effects is that better organisation behind the scenes is helping the team do a better job on the pitch too.

Galactico Coaching now has a clearer view of how many children are booked onto each session and who is actually attending. That means coaches can prepare properly before they arrive, rather than finding out what they are dealing with when everyone is already through the door.

“The biggest difference is visibility.”

And that visibility matters. Planning for 20 children is very different from planning for 35. The team can make better decisions about coaching numbers, equipment and activities before the session starts, which means less scrambling around and more time focused on delivering a really good session.

It is a practical change, but it has a direct impact on the experience families get. Coaches are better prepared, children get sessions planned around the group that is actually there, and parents get a smoother experience too. For Galactico Coaching, that is all part of keeping standards high as the business grows and giving families a reason to keep coming back.

More of Max’s time can go into moving Galactico Coaching forward

The biggest shift is probably what all of this means for Max himself.

Galactico Coaching is becoming less reliant on one person knowing where everything is, remembering what needs doing and stepping in to sort it. Instead, it is building a way of working that can support a bigger team and more children without everything continuing to land back on the founder.

“We’re building systems that aren’t completely reliant on one person knowing everything or doing everything.”