Case Study: How Dixon Performance Handles the Summer Rush

When school lets out in Maui, Jojo Dixon's gym goes from manageable to packed overnight. Here's how the TeamBuildr Strength + OS bundle became the backbone of their busiest season.

Jojo Dixon started coaching out of a garage in Maui. Today, he runs Dixon Performance out of a 12,000 sq ft field house complete with indoor turn, a full weight room, batting cages, and recovery space. He also founded the Underdog Foundation, a nonprofit that keeps his facility tied to the broader community around him.

His roster spans ages 8 through professional, covering youth athletes, high school and collegiate competitors, gen pop adults, and everyone in between. Football, baseball, softball, volleyball, basketball, soccer, wrestling, MMA, Jiu-Jitsu, even water polo and surfing. The philosophy is long-term athlete development: speed, strength, power, movement quality, injury reduction, and mindset, all in one program.

But none of that is possible if the operation behind it falls apart. And in summer, operations are stress-tested like no other time of the year.

Summer in Maui: A Different Kind of Chaos

For most gyms, summer means more clients. For Dixon Performance, it means an entirely different operational reality. School ends and the facility shifts overnight with youth classes, camps, clinics, private lessons, team trainings, speed work, and community events all running simultaneously. Collegiate and pro athletes come home to Hawaii and need time on the floor. Parents want flexibility. Athletes are traveling for showcases. Schedules change constantly. 

"The hardest part of summer is managing the volume and the logistics right away," Jojo says, "because it starts basically overnight. The gym goes from manageable to packed. And you're trying to coordinate and program and manage attendance and handle staffing and scheduling and billing and communication all at once. On the operational side, it can get overwhelming really fast if you don't have the right systems in place."

What "Winging It" Actually Cost Them

Before having an integrated system, the operation was fragmented. Jojo was managing most things himself, and what wasn't on his plate was scattered across staff who had no shared visibility. The result: missed billing, missing inquiries, double bookings, and communication gaps that only got worse as volume increased.

"We were winging it early on, and it was a mess," he says plainly. "It just never worked out the way I envisioned it would. Shooting from the hip is not advised."

One of the most painful examples: client training for free for months at a time because no one caught the billing lapse. It wasn't anyone's fault; there was just no system catching it.

How They Run It Now

With TeamBuildr Strength and OS working together, Dixon Performance built a summer playbook that's become almost second nature. A few things they do consistently:

Flip the schedule on day one. During the school year, they run a 7 PM evening session for athletes coming off practice. In summer, that class moves to 7 AM. It spreads attendance across the day, relieves overcrowded morning sessions, and consistently ends up as one of their busiest classes of the week, all managed and communicated inside the platform.

Cap classes with real numbers. Every session is capped at 18 inside TeamBuildr OS. The facility can technically hold 2, but keeping a buffer protects quality and accounts for scheduling irregularities like late parents or last-minute adds without blowing up the session. "We have to make sure our classes are capped because we have more people throughout the facility in the batting cages, using the fields, sometimes a classroom," Jojo explains. "We have to make sure we have enough space for everyone."

Distribute the admin load. Three staff members now share scheduling, registrations, and waivers in a single system. Everyone has visibility. "It's one of us will get it type of deal," Jojo says. "Everything's not on my plate anymore. Everyone sees the same thing."

Keep traveling athletes on the program. When athletes leave for summer camps, showcases, or family vacations, Jojo doesn't put them on pause; he adjusts. Athletes share what equipment they'll have access to, and he remotely customizes their program before they leave. "It's been a piece of cake to make adjustments," he says. "Some will know ahead of time what they'll have and tell me before they leave so I can prepare them and when they get there, they're golden."

Programming: Summer Is the Season to Go Hard

On the training side, summer is actually Jojo's favorite time to program. Without the constraints of in-season management protecting athletes from overload, keeping them fresh for games, he can treat summer as its own season.

"I can make training their season," he says. "Put a lot of the emphasis there, focus on development, which is enjoyable for me." Speed work ramps up significantly. Strength phases and hypertrophy blocks get prioritized. Conditioning gets layered in. For athletes heading to camps and showcases, there's combine prep built in. Movement development, position-specific work, all of it becomes fair game in a. way it isn't during the school year.

The strength platform makes this manageable at volume. Individualized programs across a full roster of athletes at different levels, different sports, and different travel schedules would be unmanageable with spreadsheets or email threads. With TeamBuildr Strength, it's one system, always up to date, always accessible. 

What About Gen Pop? Consistency Wins There Too.

Youth athletes get most of the spotlight in summer programming conversations, but Jojo's adult gen pop clients face a different challenge: just showing up. Vacations, schedule chaos, and low motivation make summer the season when most facilities bleed members. "I'll be back in September" is a sentence every gym owner knows too well. 

Jojo's found that the quality and continuity of the programming itself have become the retention tool. His adult clients regularly credit their training when real-life moments demand it, catching a fall, outperforming in Spartan races and HYROX events, and moving through daily tasks with it. When people feel results, they stay.

"That sort of discipline and motivation factor, from what I've been told, seems to be the thing that keeps them most consistent." The platform ensures the programming stays consistent and accessible, whether they're at the gym or on the road.

The Bigger Lesson: Growth Exposes Weak Systems

Jojo's advice to gym owners thinking about the summer influx or any period of rapid growth is direct.

He's shared this perspective firsthand with other gym owners, not as a pitch, but because he's lived the alternative. " I've recommended it as hard as I possibly could," he says. "I think it's allowed us to handle more athletes while maintaining our quality and our organization."

For Dixon Performance, summer is no longer something to survive. The platform handles the operational weight so the coaching can stay at the level their athletes expect.

"During the summer, that season can either help you grow or overwhelm you and hinder you." Jojo says, " I can't recommend it enough. It's been a huge tool and a huge help for us in our season of growth and success."