INTERVIEW
JOHN PENNY W
hen you take over the reins at a large, successful club like the Reebok Sports Club London, the
temptation must be to sit back, assess the situation and not do anything too dramatic in the first few months. Not so John Penny. With the advantage of having already been general manager of the club for almost five years – and with a background in managing large, high-end facilities such as the Harbour Clubs – on being promoted to MD in 2011, Penny immediately embarked on an ambitious and comprehensive review of the offering and operations. “We were starting to recognise the
opportunities we had to really develop our secondary services, with the three main ones being personal training, the restaurant and the spa,” he explains.
Getting personal
“One of the big things we did towards the beginning of my time as MD was
32
re-organise the PT set-up. We used to have a contract agreement with someone we’d known for a very long time, and who worked with his team within the club. We changed that, bringing someone in from New York to head up our personal training. Some of the trainers are still self-employed, but the PT business as a whole – including the new manager – is now directed by me and my team. “It’s going very well. We’ve grown the
team from 15 to 20–25 PTs and our PT revenue almost doubled within the fi rst 12 months of the new system. We’ve also started to branch out into other areas of private training, which is very big in the States, such as yoga, martial arts, boxing and small group training.
Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
HEALTH CLUB SPA
The MD of Reebok Sports Club London talks Kate Cracknell through the extensive redevelopment project that’s seen a “total transformation” of the offering
“As part of that, around 18 months ago
we introduced three new areas to the gym fl oor: a boxing and combat area, a functional zone and a heavy lifting area. “But we still have more to do. If you
look at some of the large format clubs in the States, the top-performing sites will have 20–30 per cent of their members doing personal training. We’re currently around 7–10 per cent, and I want to move that up to 15–20 per cent. “That’s challenging, because of course
members need disposable income to do PT, but there are many different ways to approach it. That was one of the main reasons I brought in a very experienced PT director from New York – because the US is ahead of us, with many different ways of packaging PT. They do
August 2013 © Cybertrek 2013
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86