Chris McNabb and the Trouble with the Front Desk

A hot dog stand is an unusual place to look for the future of a software company. For Chris McNabb, it was one of several places where the early team behind iClassPro came together. A graphics specialist was eating lunch there. Some programmers came from a local computer store. A salesman was handing out flyers in a parking lot. The recruitment story has the pleasing untidiness of a business assembled by someone with a problem to solve and an eye for available talent.

McNabb owned and operated a gymnastics business. He had looked at the software on offer and found it wanting. In 2008, he founded iClassPro in Longview, Texas, to build something that better suited the work he already knew. The company began with a small team in rented space above a bank. There is something fitting about that address: a business devoted partly to collecting tuition, learning to operate upstairs from people devoted to collecting money.

The career change can sound abrupt when reduced to two job titles. Competitive tumbler becomes software CEO. Add the years of coaching and gym ownership between them, however, and the route becomes easier to follow. McNabb had experienced the activity, taught it and managed the enterprise that made teaching possible. By the time he went looking for better administrative tools, he had already been their prospective customer.

Before the software, the landing

His earlier accomplishments belonged to a very different scoreboard. In 1992, in Dallas, McNabb won the USA Tumbling junior elite national championship. He trained at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and was part of the 1996 USA Tumbling and Trampoline Olympic Exhibition Team in Atlanta. The word exhibition matters: this was an exhibition-team appearance, a particular distinction in a career with several competitive chapters.

He also represented the United States on a World Championship team in New Zealand and earned silver at the Nissen Cup in Switzerland. Those places give his story an international geography long before the software business acquired one. Dallas, Colorado Springs, Atlanta, New Zealand, Switzerland: the future founder had already spent time in a world where practice had to survive contact with an audience.

After competition, he opened a school in Texas and coached tumbling and cheerleading for more than two decades. In 2000, he served as a USA Gymnastics Tumbling and Trampoline state director. Athlete, instructor, administrator: each role brought him closer to the work that surrounds a performance. A successful lesson needs a coach. A continuing school also needs arrangements that allow the next lesson to happen.

It would be easy to attach a motivational slogan to this sequence. The more useful observation is practical. McNabb accumulated experience on several sides of the same transaction. He understood what was happening on the floor and had responsibility for the operation around it. That combination helps explain why his eventual software business stayed close to a particular kind of customer.

An education in other people’s businesses

McNabb’s work extended into web design and development as well. Key Creative lists him as a co-owner, sales director and web solutions engineer, alongside co-owner and web development director Lance Hutcheson. The agency describes a team covering design, programming and implementation. It records a merger with its sister company iClassPro in 2014, bringing the two operations’ resources into closer alignment.

That part of his career is useful context for the founder’s apparent change of profession. A gymnastics operator’s complaint alone cannot produce functioning software. Design, development and selling require other kinds of knowledge, and other people. The Key Creative connection adds a concrete piece to the picture: McNabb’s business experience included helping companies present themselves and operate online.

Payments opened another adjacent door. Todd Ablowitz and Deana Rich worked with iClassPro on the challenges of building a payment facilitator platform for its class-management business. The experience led to a wider collaboration involving their payments expertise and McNabb’s developers and designers. In May 2017, Infinicept announced the resulting platform, intended to help other payment facilitators establish their operations.

The collaboration followed a recognizable pattern in McNabb’s career: encounter a difficult internal job, then see whether a shared solution could serve others. Here, the job had moved beyond class schedules into the machinery of accepting payments. His gym business had exposed him to administrative friction; the software business exposed his team to a second layer of it. Solving one problem had introduced the next.

A family account travels a long way

The international reach becomes easier to understand at the level of a single club. Manly Warringah Gymnastics Club in Australia explains its move to iClassPro through everyday family arrangements: a shared login for family members, clearer invoicing, an app and ways to manage classes. Its guidance also addresses automatic monthly payments and prorating the first month for someone joining partway through it.

These are modest subjects for a technology story. They are also the subjects a parent needs answered before trusting a new system. Can both children appear under one account? When does payment happen? What changes if a child starts in the middle of the month? The details make the business legible. They show how a tool conceived by an operator in Texas can find a role in a gymnastics club on the other side of the world.

McNabb’s company now serves thousands of children’s activity businesses worldwide and describes handling millions of online class registrations each year. Its remit includes gymnastics, swimming, cheer and dance. The shared administrative work gives those different activities a reason to use related tools. The sporting instruction varies; the need to connect a child, a class and a payment keeps recurring.

The bank office gets crowded

By its fifteenth anniversary in 2023, iClassPro had added jobs and space at its Longview headquarters. New areas of work included marketing, research, app development and data analytics. That year brought an appearance on the Inc. 5000, a national ranking of private-company growth. McNabb’s response emphasized the team and customers behind the result, rather than treating the recognition as a solo achievement.

The published rankings give this chapter a useful set of dates: number 2,742 in 2023, number 2,097 in 2024 and number 3,546 in 2025. Those are rankings, rather than revenue figures, and they do not describe a smooth annual climb. What they establish is repeated inclusion over three consecutive years. A company that began around one operator’s dissatisfaction had become a continuing business serving other operators.

The organizational changes were visible in the product, too. In 2024, iClassPro described automated communication workflows, a QuickBooks integration and integrated websites. Enrollment follow-ups and payment reminders were among the tasks the workflows addressed. These additions moved into the surrounding work of maintaining a relationship with families, keeping accounts aligned and helping a local business show its programs online.

The coach keeps a place in the room

McNabb’s interest in the businesses using the software also took the form of an Education Sponsorship Program, announced in October 2023. Customers could apply for support to attend conferences, mentorship programs, workshops and certifications. The offer acknowledged a familiar limitation of any business tool: an owner can have better software and still benefit from learning how to run the operation around it.

In describing the program, McNabb spoke about “ensuring our customers have access to quality education they deserve.” The aspiration has a specific mechanism behind it: sponsorship applications for professional development. It also fits the teaching chapter of his own career. For someone who spent years coaching, helping another person become more capable is familiar work, even when the lesson concerns a business.

His connections within cheerleading remain part of that story. Randy Dickey and Courtney Smith-Pope are identified as mentors who influenced his approach to community and shared industry growth. McNabb has continued attending events, collaborating with coaches and speaking on subjects including AI, marketing and business strategy. The topics have widened, while the audience still includes people doing work he once did himself.

In 2025, he joined the inaugural class of the Cheerleading Legends Hall of Fame. The recognition gathered the different parts of his career into one frame: athlete, coach and software founder. Later that year, a November episode of The MotUS Edge paired him with hosts Stacy Rowe and Casey Jones to discuss the journey, including the Rolodex that helped inspire iClassPro.

A 2025 industry appearance placed him in another part of that audience. The Australian Swim Schools Association promoted McNabb for a SPARK 2025 panel in Sydney on how technology and data can streamline swim school operations. The subject was a long way from a tumbling championship, but it addressed people facing a familiar balance between delivering lessons and managing the business around them.

The panel’s subject offers a useful measure of how his working world has widened. A coach needs to understand an individual student. An owner also needs to understand the operation that brings students through the door. A software founder serving those owners has to make information useful across many such operations. McNabb’s successive roles have placed him at each of those levels. The setting and vocabulary have changed; the connection to lessons, instructors and families remains visible.

“Ensuring our customers have access to quality education they deserve.”

Chris McNabb · on education sponsorship, 2023

The Rolodex makes an apt companion to the hot dog stand in this biography. Both keep the story at a human scale. One is an ordinary tool that proved insufficient; the other is an ordinary place where useful talent happened to be found. Between them lies a founder’s recurring task: notice what is making the work harder, find people who can help, and make something another operator can actually use.

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