INTERVIEW
Resistance equipment occupies a 325sq m space and sits alongside the CV area on the lower ground floor
“The issue I want to
address in our clubs is staff retention, as that contributes to the
friendliness and sense of community of a club”
you can start from scratch and make it great, but it’s much harder to take a chain and put change through it. “But if you look at our member
surveys, the members are happier. Are they off the Richter scale happy? No. But we’re certainly not alone in that. I think the vast majority of chains are pretty well run and give pretty good service and pretty good value, but the industry still suffers from reputational problems that go back to the old times. Fair play to ukactive – it’s doing a lot of work on the broader reputation of the sector – but that’s still outweighed by the dissenters, by the history. We’re still fighting that every day of the week. “The other problem the industry has
– and it’s almost impossible to change this now – is that it’s devalued itself over time. Yield has gone down over time, not up. Inflation has gone up. We have LA clubs today charging less than they did 10 years ago. “The consumer perception now is
that £50 a month is a lot of money for membership – I get members who pay £19 and use the club every single day, doing classes, and they still think they’re
42
over-paying. Honestly, they’re not even covering the water bill. “But all in all, the majority of members
are happy. We want them to have a good experience and feel they’re getting great value. Do we hit that box every day of the week with every member? No, but with the vast majority we do. “The other industry-wide issue I really
wanted to address in our clubs was staff retention, as I believe that contributes to the friendliness, familiarity and sense of community in a club. Honestly, that’s probably the area where we’d still like to be doing better. We’ve invested heavily in training and introduced a lot of loyalty mechanics – performance-related pay and so on. And I do think we give a good grounding to staff – I think we’re very good at inducting, training and creating good people. I’d just like them to stay longer so we benefit from that, but gym staff come from a young, portable generation and it hasn’t been easy to drive that change through the business.”
Growing participation When we last spoke, Long was very enthusiastic about the potential of the
Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
health and fitness sector, envisaging a big period of growth ahead. In practice, gym members continue to make up no more than around 12 per cent of the overall UK population. So has Long witnessed any signs of the market growth he predicted? “Consumer participation in fitness
and lifestyle is definitely improving. The difficulty is measuring growth in one particular segment of the market, because the market has broadened, particularly in the area of outdoor lifestyle – not just boot camps and military fitness, but running and especially cycling. “So the broader market has certainly
grown; measuring growth simply in the gym sector is the hard part. We’re trying to measure an uplift in just one tiny segment of a very broad market for consumer wellbeing. “That said, there’s been a lot of
change in the health and fitness industry already, with operators upping their game, and I do believe there are further opportunities for growth, provided the right concepts can be designed for the right locations.” ●
January 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
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