£16,502 in ten months.
Annualising to ~£19,500/yr.
Angela Cole runs an owner-operated swim school in Weymouth. Adding Hydrohex expanded her adult programme from 3 instructor-led classes a week to 11 total. First 44 weeks: £16,502 revenue, full setup paid back in 3 months, 323% ROI — annual run-rate ~£19,500 with no additional aqua-fitness instructors on payroll.
Splash Together · Weymouth, Dorset · Independent owner-operator · Hydrohex since Aug 2024
£16,502
revenue in the first 10 months post-launch (Aug 2024 – Jun 2025 · 44 weeks)
~£19,500
annual revenue run-rate reached inside year one
3 months
to payback — screen setup + first-year license recovered
323%
ROI within the first 10 months of operation
Source: Splash Together – Hydrohex Performance Report, Aug 2024 – Jun 2025 (44 weeks), supplied by operator.
The story
One owner. Adult programme goes from 3 classes to 11.
Splash Together is a purpose-built swim school in Weymouth, Dorset — a 12×6m pool with warm, shallow, low-chlorine water designed for children's lessons and parent-and-baby classes. That children's programme is Angela's core business, and it fills the after-school block and the weekend intensives.
The adult side of a small swim school is the harder commercial problem. Specialist aqua-fitness instructors are expensive and hard to book reliably; hiring a rota of them to fill a broad adult timetable isn't viable for a single-owner operator. Angela's in-house instructor-led adult programme — Aqua for health, Adult swim, Aquanatal Yoga — was three classes a week. Which is roughly the ceiling of what one owner can staff.
She launched Hydrohex in August 2024. Within three months she had recovered the entire setup — hardware and first-year license both paid back before the fourth month opened. Ten months in: £16,502 of new revenue, 2,255 sessions sold, ~£375 average weekly line, ~£19,500/yr run-rate. Just as important, the adult programme expanded from 3 classes a week to 11 — a 3.7× uplift — without any additional aqua-fitness instructor on payroll.
In the operator's words
“We earned £6,700 in under three months after launching Hydrohex classes — recovering both the screen setup and the license fee. The concept has been particularly successful with older local residents attending evening sessions. We're now expanding with 30-minute lunchtime classes aimed at slightly younger audiences.”
Angela Cole
Business Owner, Splash Together
Live weekly programme · verified from booking widget
8 of 11 weekly adult classes are Hydrohex.
Splash Together's entire publicly-bookable adult programme is 11 classes a week. Only 3 rely on a specialist instructor being on deck — Aqua-for-health, Adult swim, Aquanatal Yoga. The rest is Hydrohex: a 3.7× expansion of the adult offering that no owner-operator could staff from scratch, plugged in around the weekend and after-school swim-school peaks. The evening 19:15 slot rotates through CARDIO / MOVE / POWER / BEAT Mon–Thu; the Hydrohex 30 short format runs at weekday lunchtime for the working-age audience Angela added last.
Mon
Monday
Tue
Tuesday
Wed
Wednesday
Thu
Thursday
Fri
Friday
Sat
Saturday
Swim-school members only
Sun
Sunday
Swim-school members only
Source: splashtogether.co.uk/book-online ↗ — scraped every publicly-bookable class endpoint (11 in total) and verified across two consecutive weeks (Jul 6–19, 2026) to confirm the steady-state weekly pattern. Sat/Sun bookings are gated behind the swim-school members login and not exposed in the public widget; per Angela, weekend peak is the children's programme (Starfish / STAnley / Goldfish / Angelfish + weekend intensives).
Where the revenue came from
PAYG and monthly passes, in parallel.
Angela ran both models side-by-side: PAYG at £8 per 45-minute class, plus a 5-session monthly bundle at £35 (£7/class) and a 10-session bundle at £65 (£6.50/class). Nearly half of revenue came from the two monthly-pass tiers — the same recurring-income shape a boutique studio runs on. Class-level revenue shows the fitness audience picking MOVE and CARDIO by ~2:1 vs BEAT and POWER.
Monthly-pass revenue
45%
Recurring — 5-pass + 10-pass tiers combined
PAYG class revenue
55%
MOVE + CARDIO + POWER + BEAT single-class bookings
Both models running in parallel gave Angela flexibility: passes de-risked her month-to-month; PAYG captured curious first-timers and older evening walk-ups who didn't want a subscription.
Share of £16,502 first-10-month revenue
Source: Splash Together performance report, Aug 2024 – Jun 2025 (10 months / 44 weeks). Class formats priced at £8 for 45 min; the £5 Hydrohex 30 short-format is bundled into monthly-pass usage.
Why the arithmetic works
Fixed costs run whether the pool is booked or not.
A small swim-school pool's P&L is dominated by fixed costs — heat, chemicals, insurance, rent, staff on shift — that don't change if the pool sits empty for an hour. Every filled session against those fixed costs contributes almost 100% to the bottom line, ifyou don't need to hire an instructor for it. That's the whole game for an owner-operator.
Step 1
Fixed costs don't move
Energy, chemicals, insurance, rent, front-desk staff on shift — these run whether the pool has 0 people in it or 20.
Step 2
Instructor is the marginal blocker
Traditional aqua-fitness needs a specialist instructor per class. At £25-40/hr in the UK, an owner-operator can't afford to keep one on payroll to fill idle hours.
Step 3
Software replaces the instructor
Hydrohex delivers the class autonomously from a poolside screen. Fixed license, zero per-session marginal cost. Every ticket sold is contribution margin.
The Splash Together outcome, in first-principles terms
£16,502
revenue in first 10 months (£19,500/yr run-rate)
3 months
to payback — hardware and first-year license both recovered
2,255
sessions sold across the 44-week window
The Hydrohex license is a flat fixed cost — it doesn't rise with more sessions. The 10-month numbers annualise to ~£19,500 of revenue, and the same license unlocks the same run-rate in every subsequent year with no additional cost. That's the compounding structure that turns a 3-month payback into a permanent revenue line.
Deployment summary
The setup behind the numbers.
- Operator type
- Independent swim school — owner-operator
- Business owner
- Angela Cole, Splash Together
- Site format
- Purpose-built 12×6m teaching pool · constant 1.2m depth · warm, low-chlorine water
- Location
- Weymouth · Dorset · England
- Launched
- August 2024
- Reporting window
- Aug 1, 2024 – Jun 3, 2025 (44 weeks)
- Commercial model
- PAYG single-class + 5/month (£35) and 10/month (£65) passes running side-by-side
- Live classes shipping
- Hydrohex 30 (£5) · CARDIO · BEAT · MOVE · POWER (£8 each)
- Total sessions delivered
- 2,255 in the first 44 weeks · ~£375 average weekly income
- Current adult programme
- 11 bookable adult classes/week — 8 Hydrohex (73%) + 3 instructor-led (Aqua-for-health, Adult swim, Aquanatal Yoga); Sat/Sun reserved for children's swim school (verified from live booking widget Jul 2026)
The bigger picture
Why this matters at every UK pool.
This isn't a site-specific playbook. UK aquatic operators face the same equation: a finite pool estate, expensive to maintain, serving an ageing audience, with a shrinking aquatic workforce.
Workforce crisis
~12,000
vacant UK aquatic-sector roles
Swim England + STA Workforce Audit · Jun 2023 ↗Owner staffing ceiling
3 → 11
adult classes/week at Splash Together — Hydrohex added the 8 classes one owner couldn't staff with specialist instructors
Splash Together booking widget · verified Jul 2026
What this case teaches operators
A single-site independent operator can't staff a rota of specialist aqua-fitness instructors — the ceiling is 2-3 instructor-led adult classes a week, which is exactly the shape Angela's pre-Hydrohex adult programme had. Hydrohex doesn't fix a utilisation problem the owner is guessing at; it fixes the staffing ceiling that caps the adult programme at 3 and lets it expand to 11. The ~£20k of annualised revenue on a flat annual license is the arithmetic. The programme expansion — 8 extra classes a week with no additional coach on payroll — is the mechanism. That's the playbook for every UK swim school and small independent aquatic operator.
Sources & methodology(9 citations)
- 1
£16,502 revenue and 2,255 sessions sold across a 44-week window (Aug 1, 2024 – Jun 3, 2025)
Site dataSplash Together – Hydrohex Performance Report · supplied by operator
- 2
3-month payback on the full setup; 323% ROI within the first 10 months
Site dataSplash Together – Hydrohex Performance Report · supplied by operator
- 3
Angela Cole on 3-month payback and older-resident evening take-up
Operator quoteAngela Cole, Business Owner, Splash Together · supplied to Hydrohex
- 4
Live class pricing: Hydrohex 30 £5; Hydrohex CARDIO / BEAT / MOVE / POWER £8 each; 5-session bundle £35/mo; 10-session bundle £65/mo
Live pricingSplash Together — Book Online + Plans & Pricing pages ↗
- 5
Full publicly-bookable adult programme = 11 classes/week: 8 Hydrohex + 3 instructor-led (Aqua-for-health Tue 12:30, Adult swim Wed 18:30, Aquanatal Yoga Thu 18:30). Sat/Sun public bookings closed — reserved for children's swim school (members-only login)
- 6
Purpose-built 12×6m teaching pool, constant 1.2m depth, warm, low-chlorine water
Site dataSplash Together — Our Pool page ↗
- 7
22 million UK adults aged 50+ by 2035 (growing demand)
Industry researchONS 2022-based national population projections ↗
- 8
~4,400 swimming pools across ~3,256 sites in the UK (finite supply)
Industry researchWIRH UK pool register, 2023 ↗
- 9
~12,000 vacant UK aquatic-sector roles (~15% workforce shortage)
Industry researchSwim England & STA Workforce Audit, June 2023 ↗
Run the same playbook at your pool.
30-minute call. We'll walk through how Splash Together turned dead pool hours into ~£20k/yr of new revenue — and what the same playbook looks like at your swim school or independent venue.