Jeff's Thoughts

• The Demise of the Fitness Industry and What We are Doing About It

  1 December, 2014

  When I look at where clubs are going these days and the trends happening in the fitness industry (yes I have been around long enough to see trends which is a little worrying). Currently to be a successful gym owner, you need to know the magic formula,

  1. Have a lot of money.

  2. Buy a lot of Equipment (mostly cardio)

  3. Open your gym 24 hours and give people a swipe card.

  4. Fire all staff, including sales managers and fitness managers (you make more if you keep your costs down)

  5. Never engage or actually talk to your members (unless the members are willing to pay for it). 

  Most of the gyms in Wellington are owned by people who do not live in Wellington. I can only think of 2 others where the owners help to run it and are on the floor with members and staff on a daily basis.

  Actually to have a gym where the owners work in it and on it, know the results members are getting and help those who need to be helped seems to be an unfortunate dying breed. A gym has become just a place – a place about being as cheap as possible but yet giving you nothing in return expect for a treadmill to run on and weights to be lifted badly. A major chain (influence heavily by american trends) have just fired all staff including sales consultants. How do you buy your membership you ask? –  by going to the computer in the wall of course.

  Surely we can do better than this. To have a location that still wants to help people through what is an incredibly difficult time – to walk into a foreign environment and push yourself to get the results you have wanted for so long. These results do not simply come by sitting on a cross trainer.

  I am proud to be going against that trend.  I want to provide an environment that helps people to pursue their health and fitness goals, where you talk to fitness professionals who up skill and learn and who ultimately have the time to care. We write programs for people to use without going to a personal trainer and we have an experienced fitness professional there to help you through those programmes. We of course have high staffing costs and we want a smaller membership base (we are capping on 200) so we can still know people and care without over crowding. So yes we are more expensive – but proudly so.

   

   

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