INTERVIEW
Old-school fitness at Third Space Marylebone
The Third Space Soho offers a climbing wall
● ABOUT ENCORE CAPITAL
E
ncore Capital is a London- based investment firm focused on backing entrepreneurial growth
businesses. It has over £60m of committed funding and actively seeks to invest between £1m and £10m in buy-outs and development capital opportunities. Encore Capital is opportunity-
driven, with a structure and approach that allows it to make informed decisions quickly and to invest in situations which others may find challenging. The firm is owned and managed
by its five partners who take an active role in building and supporting strong management teams, working closely with these teams to develop strategic plans, enhance organic growth and increase operational efficiencies.
www.encorecapital.co.uk
members more for their money, and we worked very hard on improving service levels and driving retention. We became a lot more proactive with members, making sure they understood the importance of fitness as part of their routine, and encouraging them to attend regularly enough that their membership represented good value. “Our retention improved significantly,
membership started to grow again, and average member visits rose – from an average of 1.5 visits a week to over two a week – and remained at a high. We now average more than 70,000 visits a month from a base of around 8,500 members. “We then had a decision to make.
With any asset we own, at some point we consider selling it – that’s the whole purpose of what we do – and we had potentially reached that point with the Reebok club. However, because of the way our fund is structured there’s no pressure to sell, and we’d realised this was a robust business. It had gone through a very tricky time in 2008 due to the recession and the uncertainty in the financial markets – really the biggest stress test you can imagine – and it came through with flying colours. Even more
32 Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
importantly, the management team learned a lot and came through strongly. “We took the view that this – health
and fitness – was a good space to be in, and we already owned probably the best club in the country with a fantastic management team. So we decided to stay in the sector for the longer term. “We knew that would require building
scale, but first of all we wanted to improve the facility we already had, making it a bit more contemporary without losing the soul, the feeling, it’s always had here. We started by refurbishing the spa in 2011, followed by the restaurant, and then spent a good 18 months going through the fitness floor, moving things around and making the whole member journey much more pleasurable and more sensible. That project was completed last year. “We then knew we really did have
the best club in the country, but there’s a limit to how far you can take a single club. So we decided, if we were going to stay in this sector, that we needed to build a group of clubs that met our criteria: very high-end, in iconic locations across London, with a genuinely holistic approach to wellbeing.
February 2015 © Cybertrek 2015
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