interview
PAUL LORIMER-WING The joint CEO of easyGym talks to Kate Cracknell about its ‘premium low-cost’ model “I
t’s a high-profile start-up, so there’s lots to do and get right,” says Paul Lorimer-Wing, apologising for the fact that
his joint CEO at easyGym, Keith Burnet, is unable to join us. That’s something of an
understatement: the launch of easyGym is without doubt one of the more anticipated events in the fi tness industry over recent years. So how did the whole thing come about? Formerly an aspiring pro-golfer,
Zimbabwe-born Lorimer-Wing then moved into accountancy, training for fi ve years at Deloitte: “Not because I’d dreamed of being an accountant, but for the understanding it gives you of business. You get to see a lot of industries, their processes, what makes them work or not work, the controls they put in place.” Moving to the UK seven years
ago, Lorimer-Wing initially joined a privately-owned property company before moving into private equity.
“It was here that I really started to see business for what it was. And seeing that model work – having a good idea, raising the necessary capital, investing it properly, watching it closely – gave me the impetus and courage to do something myself. “I linked up with some people I
trusted and respected professionally (see information box, p30) and we decided to do something together,
28
although at that stage we didn’t have any specifi c thoughts as to what it might be.” And so Fore Capital Partners was born.
foray into fitness One idea to come out of the brainstorming sessions was budget fitness. Although all the founding partners were physically active, none had specific expertise in fitness. But Lorimer-Wing had observed the trend towards low-cost gyms in other countries and felt it was a market with significant potential. “We also liked the fact that fitness is
quite a noble industry in many ways,” he says. “For us, it was important that we weren’t just setting up in business, but that we were doing so in an industry that appealed to all of our senses – something we could live by. When we came up with this idea, we immediately felt it was where we wanted to be.” Fore Fitness was therefore set up
as the fi rst operating division of Fore Capital Partners, to drive forward the new business idea. “We’d usually appoint a separate team to manage each investment, reporting in to us, but with this fi rst project we wanted to run it ourselves on a full-time basis.” Although the budget model was on
the table from the word go, Lorimer- Wing explains: “The easyGym idea only formulated in our minds months later. We were chatting through the concept, trying to come up with a name
Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
for it, and someone said: ‘This feels like an easyGym’. We immediately started looking at how we could make that happen, but it was a long process – it was six months before we could actually meet Sir Stelios [Haji-Ioannou, founder and head of the easyGroup] and talk about the concept in person. “It was a battle, but we felt that –
given the number of other players in the low-cost sector – if we wanted to stand out we needed to be a bit different, a bit more powerful than the rest. And we felt we wouldn’t be able to do that without a brand, so we persisted and
july 2011 © cybertrek 2011
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