EUROPE EUROPE
FOCUS
I realised this
was complete virgin territory – even better than Hong Kong, and even easier
“We soon realised that, in the space needed for four or fi ve tennis courts – catering for maybe a dozen people – we could have 2,000 people doing fi tness. It didn’t take us long to realise that’s where the business was. One thing led to another and we started leasing space in hotels in Hong Kong: the Excelsior, the Sheraton and so on. We began running small, hotel-based health clubs, but with a private membership, under The Spa brand – by defi nition they had wet areas too. “Then we were approached by Sun Hung Kai Properties, one of the big property developers in Hong Kong. It was building a lot of commercial and residential properties, which included on-site clubs to incite tenants in: swimming pool, tennis courts, small gym. But it didn’t know how to manage those clubs, so together we started a joint venture company – Sun-Sportathlon – to manage its residential clubs, and in the end also its ice rinks. “But the real business wasn’t there: the
tennis coaches, but we expanded into swimming coaching, gymnastics coaching, something we called ‘all sports coaching’. “We worked with sports clubs – the Hong Kong Football Club, for example – but primarily we ran group exercise classes in around 20 or 30 of the international schools in Hong Kong. There were no extracurricular activities for expat children at the time, and we began to bring in coaches from the UK to meet demand: at one point we had some 3,000 children a week on our books.” Franklin continues: “That went on for many years until we had enough money
october 2012 © cybertrek 2012
to start our fi rst club. A large, local real estate company, Hong Kong Land, decided to build an indoor tennis centre on the roof of the World Trade Centre in Hong Kong, and approached us to lease it from them and run it. “We ran that alongside our
Sportathlon Coaching business, and then Hong Kong Land approached us about a fi tness centre it owned in Exchange Square above the stock market, which was losing money. We leased that too and it became our fi rst ever fi tness centre – The Spa at Exchange Square – and was very successful.
real business was building and running large fi tness clubs. We knew it, but although our businesses were going well, we didn’t have any serious capital behind us to do it. So instead we decided to go overseas, fi nding hotels and residential complexes with sporting facilities that needed managing in markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines. “In the end we had around 15 or 20 leased sites operating under The Spa brand, and we were spending a lot of money on buying equipment. We therefore developed another company, Sportathlon Leisure Supplies, which became the local agent for a number of equipment brands, including Star Trac.”
Learning curve And then there was a gear change, as Franklin explains: “In the mid-90s, by
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