An unsold court hour is gone. Hotels and restaurants worked out how to measure that decades ago
Nine on a Tuesday morning cannot be stored, discounted later, or sold twice. That is the same problem as an empty hotel room on a Tuesday night and an empty table at three in the afternoon, and both sectors built a measurement discipline around it. Padel has borrowed the courts and the booking software but not the metrics.
This page sets out the framework we run for every venue we work with, and the one number the whole pack drives towards.
What each court earns after the costs that court actually causes, before rent, finance and central overhead. It is the number that tells you whether to open another one.
A statutory P&L is built to satisfy Companies House, not to run a venue
One turnover line covers court hire, coaching, membership, hire and bar. One wages line covers front desk, coaches and cleaners. Nothing in it tells you which of those carries the venue.
Revenue up twelve per cent means nothing without the court hours that were available to sell. Every metric on this page is a rate, not a total, because capacity is what changes when you add a court or extend opening hours.
Annual accounts filed nine months after year end describe a venue that no longer exists. Yield decisions are made weekly, against a booking sheet that is still open.
Three sectors, one problem, three metrics worth stealing
Hotels, restaurants and health clubs all sell time-limited capacity to walk-in and contracted demand at once. Each built a headline rate to manage it. The padel translations below are what we actually calculate.
RevPAR multiplies occupancy by achieved rate, so a hotel cannot flatter itself by discounting into a full house or holding rate into an empty one. It is the industry's single comparable number.
Court revenue divided by every hour the court was open to book, not by the hours that sold. Split peak and off-peak, because a single blended figure hides both problems.
Restaurants gave up managing thirty cost lines and manage two: prime cost, being food plus labour as a share of sales, and sales per hour rostered. Both are checked weekly, not monthly.
Direct labour plus floodlight energy as a share of venue revenue, with revenue per rostered hour alongside it. Energy belongs here rather than in overhead: it is switched on by a booking.
Gyms are valued on the share of revenue that recurs and the rate at which it leaks. A club with the same turnover but a higher contracted share is worth more, and borrows more cheaply.
Memberships, league entries and standing block bookings as a share of total, with the monthly leak rate against it. This is the line a lender reads first.
The translations are not cosmetic. Each one changes where a cost sits, what the denominator is, and how often the number is produced — which is why a generalist's chart of accounts cannot produce them retrospectively.
From available hours to margin per court
Every metric in the pack is a rung on one ladder. Capacity at the top, margin at the bottom, and each step is a decision someone at the venue can actually make.
Built this way, a bad month is diagnosable. You can see whether you sold fewer hours, sold them cheaper, or spent more to serve them.
Contribution stops before rent, rates, finance and central overhead. Those are site and structure decisions, not court decisions, and loading them onto individual courts makes the number useless for the choice it exists to inform.
Five on the front page, the rest behind it
A board that is handed fourteen metrics reads none of them. The monthly pack opens on five, each with the prior month, the trailing quarter and a direction. The full set sits behind, for the month someone asks why.
Yourself first, the cohort as it builds
Most of the value in benchmarking is not the peer number. It is having a definition stable enough that your own trailing months are comparable, and a build-up consistent enough that a variance points somewhere.
We publish no sector averages here, because the honest ones do not exist yet. Filed accounts are too aggregated and too old to produce any of the rates above, and a number we cannot show the working for is not worth putting in front of a lender. The cohort comparison arrives when there are enough venues signed up to anonymise it properly, and not before.
Same definitions, same denominators, every month. Available from the first close, and the comparison that drives most decisions.
The model you raised or borrowed against, restated onto the same build-up so variance is attributable rather than argued about.
Court by court across the estate, on one definition. For multi-site operators this is usually more useful than any external cohort.
Anonymised, banded by court count and location type, and released only when the sample is large enough that no venue is identifiable from it.
We will build the first one from your booking export
Send a month of bookings and last month's P&L, and we will come back with the build-up filled in for your venue. No pitch deck, no obligation.
Accountants
