How Cassie Day Kept Gym Rent at 20% of Revenue in a Brand New Space

What’s up, Gym World?

Cassie Day spent a decade building All Day Fit inside a shared training space in Toronto. No lease of her own, no build-out, just a rented block of time and a growing group of loyal clients.

Then she hit a ceiling.

So she went and found her own space, and she didn’t let the excitement of a fresh build blow up her numbers. Rent on the new spot? Still sitting at 20% of revenue, the same ratio she ran in her old shared space.

We sat down with Cassie Day for a construction tour of the new All Day Fit, and she walked us through the lease negotiation, the design choices, and the rebrand that’s coming with it.

Here’s the breakdown 👇

Why Cassie Day Finally Left Her Shared Space

For almost three years, All Day Fit ran steady out of a shared facility.

Cassie Day had built a small group training model that worked.

The problem was capacity.

She’d filled every available time slot the shared space could offer, and there was nowhere left to grow without finding another shared space.

At the same time, Toronto’s fitness scene was moving in a different direction:

• New gyms opening with large group formats

• Classes running 60-70 people at a time

• A citywide push toward bigger, louder facilities

The gap got obvious enough that she decided to build a space made specifically for her community instead of trying to compete with the big-format gyms.

The Lease Negotiation Behind the New Space

Cassie Day looked for the right location for two years before she found it.

She wasn’t just hunting for square footage because she had a specific look in mind: high ceilings, natural light, and an industrial feel, without being stuck on the outskirts of the city. Most of what she toured was one or the other, never both.

When she found a ground-floor retail space with big windows in a busy part of Toronto, she felt at home. But getting the lease terms right took work.

One sticking point stood out: the lease included a shared storage space that most tenants would have ignored. Cassie wanted exclusive rights to it so she could tuck away a washer, dryer, and staff area without eating into her training floor.

Her advice for any gym owner heading into a lease:

• Hire your lawyer earlier. Cassie says her realtor told her to wait until after the lease was signed. That cost her time and money.

• Get insurance sorted before signing. Another piece of advice from her realtor that turned out to be a red flag, not a shortcut.

• Remember whose incentive you’re following. A realtor wants the deal closed. That’s not always the same thing as a good deal for you.

How Cassie Day Kept Rent at 20% of Revenue

Here’s the number that matters most in this whole story: 20%.

That’s the share of revenue Cassie has kept tied up in rent for years, and it’s the target she held onto even while moving into a much bigger, nicer space.

She didn’t get there by accident. When she started touring properties, she filtered every option against that ratio before considering anything else.

The tradeoff is staffing.

Running a bigger space at the same rent ratio means Cassie needs more full-time hires to fill the extra hours, which she’s factored into the plan from day one.

Inside the New All Day Fit

The new space isn’t just bigger. It’s built around a few specific decisions that reflect Cassie's thinking about the member experience.

A staffed front desk. The industry has swung between two extremes here: some gyms staff it heavily, and some cut it entirely. Cassie’s landing on staffed, because she believes a human greeting at the door still matters, especially as more of daily life gets automated.

A member lounge instead of more training space. In her old shared facility, members would stay and hang out for hours after sessions. When she surveyed her community about what they wanted in a new space, a lounge kept coming up. She built three tables with a curved bench, enough to work as a spot for one-on-one consults or a hangout space for a bigger group.

A 60-foot turf lane. Rare for a gym in the city. Cassie’s already fielding pushback from equipment vendors who say rubber flooring could do the same job. She’s not convinced; she sees that turf handles speed, agility, and general movement work better, plus long-term plans to host coaching conferences and courses in the space.

Heavier equipment. The old shared space topped out at 35-pound dumbbells, which her longtime members had long since outgrown. The new space goes up to 75 pounds, a deliberate move to attract members with more training experience.

Building a Team That Lasts

One of the biggest shifts in the new space is how Cassie is structuring her coaching staff.

She’s watched coaches burn out for years running large group classes back-to-back, so the new organization chart is built to prevent that:

• Head Coach—coaching hours plus programming for every member’s personalized plan

• Member Experience—handles everything off the training floor, plus the onboarding journey once a member joins

• Facility Operations—running the space day-to-day, filled by a coach with hospitality management experience from a previous career

She’s hiring two coaches with over a decade of industry experience each to run the new location, rather than posting a job and hoping for the best.

The All Day Fit Rebrand

The new space comes with a repositioning of the brand itself.

All Day Fit built its early identity as a loud, explicitly anti-diet-culture space, no photos, no measurements, no talk about weight. That messaging built a loyal following, but Cassie is shifting the focus for the next chapter.

The new positioning: helping members live better lives outside the gym, rather than making the gym the center of their identity. It’s a deliberate contrast to the wave of high-intensity branded gyms opening across the city.

Cassie’s also bringing back a content strategy she cut entirely two years ago, just to see what would happen. Referrals and organic search kept the leads coming in without a single paid ad.

With a brand new space to fill, she’s rebuilding that content engine from scratch.

One new addition: classes where parents train while their kids do age-appropriate movement work alongside them, an idea Cassie borrowed from a spa trip to Romania, where wellness culture starts young.

TL;DR

Cassie Day spent a decade building All Day Fit in a shared space before deciding it was time to build something of her own.

What made the move work:

• She filtered every property against a 20% rent-to-revenue target before falling for the space

• She negotiated for the exclusive rights to a shared storage area most tenants would have ignored

• She designed the space around what her community wanted, including a lounge that isn’t directly revenue-generating

• She built a staffing model meant to keep coaches around for years, not months

• She’s repositioning the brand for its next chapter instead of chasing the industry’s large-format trend

Building a new gym doesn’t have to mean blowing up your numbers. Cassie’s proof that the ratio you protect matters more than the size of the space you protect it in.

📣 If you found this useful, share it with a gym owner thinking about their own move.

cheers,

j