Daxko Partnerships Through COVID

Daxko sells software to YMCAs, JCCs, gyms, and boutique fitness studios. I took over partnerships in early 2020, which meant I took over partnerships roughly a month before every one of those customers closed its doors. The plan for the year did not survive; the job became finding partners who could help members stay members while the buildings were empty.

The first wave was virtual: fitness content, streaming, and engagement partners onboarded fast so customers had something to offer a member who could not come in. Alongside that I revived a dormant Conversica partnership for automated member outreach and led the initiative to land Silverware, both of which mattered more in a year when every club was chasing retention.

The deal I am proudest of is Netchex. It was the first partnership of its type for the company, a payroll and HR partner integrated into a platform whose customers had never bought that from us, and I negotiated the agreement end to end. It became a large share of the partnership revenue goal. The VFPNext partnership was the other long game: the work I did to build it led, after I had left, to Daxko acquiring them.

Underneath the deals was the platform work. I launched DaxkoExchange, the marketplace where customers discover integrated partners, and ran the API backlog: discovery sessions with future partners, scoping with partner engineering teams to help them build against our APIs, and the prioritization arguments with product about which endpoints unlocked which revenue. Over two years partnership revenue grew 6x, with over $6 million in sourced and attributed revenue in the pandemic year, the company’s highest partnership revenue year.