Nuffield Health may boast an exceptional healthcare heritage, but its fitness proposition aims to stand alone as consumers’ #1 choice, as its new COO tells Kate Cracknell

What drew you to the fitness industry?
I’ve worked across numerous industries, from hospitality to telco, large format retail to ecommerce and now fitness. The common thread is that all roles have focused on managing large consumer operations, improving the customer experience and achieving good outcomes for the organisations. In fact, it’s been a conscious decision on my part to remain a customer expert rather than becoming an industry-specific expert.

My last job at IKEA saw me leading the omnichannel programme, bringing the physical stores and digital offering together. Prior to that I spent many years in telco, where the subscription model was not so different from a gym membership: a monthly fee in exchange for goods and services, with the onus on the provider to differentiate its proposition and ensure it holds value for the customer.

What’s your main remit?
I joined Nuffield Health in 2023 to help digitise the experience for customers and my role has now been elevated as COO of the fitness and wellbeing clubs – a role I take on not as a fitness expert, in spite of my many years as a fitness consumer, but as a customer expert who has surrounded himself with fitness experts.

My task is to apply my experience of managing the P&L of paid monthly customers to optimise the Nuffield Health Fitness and Wellbeing business, establishing a commercial set-up that shapes it as an engine for growth and creating an amazing experience for our members over the coming decades.

How are your clubs performing now?
We have two parts to our fitness business – a consumer business with 110 clubs, making us the UK’s fourth largest private sector operator – and a corporate business with over 80 sites, making us the largest on-site corporate fitness provider in the UK.

When I joined, we were on the path to recovery from COVID. However, even as a business starts to bounce back from something like that, the commercial reality becomes very tricky. This is where my expertise came into play, managing P&Ls and ramping up businesses to refill customer bases and start investing back into the experience.

How have the last four years been?
We’ve built the business back up over the last four years and we’re busy, with member numbers at our consumer clubs reaching just shy of half a million. That exceeds our pre-pandemic high and is conservatively driving 40 million visits a year. We also have more than 50,000 corporate members. We’re driving good profitability and generating the resources we need to invest in our products, services and teams.

Tell us about Nuffield’s purpose
For over 65 years Nuffield Health has been a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to building a healthier nation. We’re at the forefront of providing high quality healthcare and fitness support through our network of 110 fitness and wellbeing centres and 36 hospitals.

We work as a team to help people achieve their health ambitions, providing high quality hospital care and fitness support and championing free wellbeing programmes in local communities by giving more people the tools they need to live a healthy life.

How do these two parts of the business fit together?
We want to become even sharper in how we run our fitness business, so we’re even more profitable. The greater our profitability, the larger our runway to invest in community outreach and Programmes-for-all. Our Joint Pain programme, for example, is open to everyone and fundamental to our charitable ethos – as well as in the experience of our paying members.

We want our members to see Nuffield Health as the best place for health and fitness and to tell their friends and families. Of course, as more people come into our already busy clubs, it will put further pressure on facilities which – as a result – will require even more investment. It’s a virtuous cycle that could become vicious if we don’t invest wisely.

What are you investing in?
We have a choice: do we invest to grow our footprint or do we invest to make our existing footprint even better than it is today? And for the next couple of years at least, our focus will be on improving and updating the product, proposition and experience across our clubs.

Last year, we digitised the booking of health assessments and bundles of personal training hours. Members can now choose how many hours they wish to buy and pay for them online or through the app, using modern methods such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.

This year, as I’ve stepped into the role of COO, we’ve started to look in earnest at how we set our fitness business up for growth.

We have high membership levels, but we have to earn the right to keep those members by providing products and services they appreciate. With north of 40 million visits a year, we also have to look after our health and fitness clubs, constantly reinvesting in gym equipment, locker rooms, showers and so on.

Half of our clubs had an equipment upgrade five years ago, but the process was halted during lockdown. We’ve now started again – the trends five years ago aren’t necessarily the trends now – and 50 Nuffield clubs will get brand new equipment this year.

Crucially, we aren’t taking a national approach. We’re taking a very localised approach based on customer preferences in each club, making targeted investments based on what members there want to see changed first.

We’ll continue to roll out this upgrade programme to ensure that our members can exercise better than ever before at Nuffield Health, with equipment that’s on-trend and tailored to their fitness needs.

We’re also investing in group exercise. We currently offer 10 million group exercise spots every year and classes run at 85 per cent capacity – most have waitlists – so we’re doing what we can to increase our capacity and enhance our provision.

For example, we’re taking under-utilised space in our clubs and converting it into new studios. That includes reformer Pilates for 10 locations, with classes included in the membership; we don’t want our members to have to go elsewhere and pay extra to do these activities. Where we already have two or three studios in a club, we might convert the under-utilised areas into additional gym floor space instead. We'll invisibly grow without necessarily adding more clubs, expanding the space available for activity within our existing clubs.

Other group exercise investments include new bikes and refreshed AV systems in 30 of our indoor cycling studios so far, with more to come.

By the end of this year, we’ll have Les Mills – which I see as great, accessible programmes – across all 110 of our clubs. Next year, we’ll look to introduce a more competitive, social group fitness format for those who are more advanced in their fitness journey.

What’s next on the list?
We’re about to embark on two important investments that I believe will really elevate the experience.

Across our 110 consumer clubs, we operate 126 swimming pools as part of our core proposition. As a result, our locker rooms and shower spaces get a lot of wear and tear and need continuous reinvestment. This year, rather than replace like with like as previously, we’ve started a programme of work that has a completely new template for how we want our showers and locker rooms to look. Our members have told us they love some of the more premium spaces they’re seeing from independent providers, so we’re going to deliver that to them. They want it and they deserve it.

We’ll do about five premium shower spaces this year to make sure they hit the mark, trying out a few different templates. Once we’ve established which is the most popular, we’ll roll it out across all our clubs over the next two years.

The other big investment will be in bringing our digital and physical propositions together. Our digital proposition isn’t currently where it needs to be and we will be completely revamping it – built largely on insight and feedback from our customers and club colleagues – to make it truly industry-leading.

For example, our app is becoming a centre of gravity for our members. It allows them to book classes, view their profile, book a health assessment, buy time with their PT and set up payment options using some of the new capabilities we launched last year.

But we want it to be much more than that – a repository of workout plans and schedules, as well as the diary the member and their PT own together, so they can agree on their plans for the next week, four weeks, 12 weeks. That might include a weekly review of the elements of your regime that will be consumed outside our clubs, because we don’t want our service to start and end with the visit.

We’ll also look at how we digitise the metrics trainers are tracking in sessions, as well as how we build in challenges and gamification to inject fun into workouts and help members achieve their goals. We’ll also start to move our member induction programme – called Personal Best – to the app, to improve accessibility and penetration.

How do you gather robust feedback?
Our members are, thankfully, very vocal. They tell us how they feel, which is indicative of the type of member we attract. They want to be at Nuffield Health and they care about their club, so they tell us when we get it wrong and they tell us what we get right. It gives us the opportunity to react and improve.

We capture customer feedback in multiple ways, with the main source being a monthly survey; it used to be quarterly, but we felt that wasn’t frequent enough.

By next year, we will be gathering micro-feedback in real time through our app. If something isn’t quite right, we need to know there and then so the club can act on it.

Most of our clubs also have a group exercise manager who cultivates a timetable based on what their members say. We encourage each club to have its own flavour, led by the instructors, but we don’t simply tell members what we offer and leave them to opt in or out of that. The modules we deliver are based on what the members of that club tell us they need.

That might mean Karate classes and Tai Chi in our family clubs. It might mean reformer Pilates in an adult-only club, of which we have a few. It might mean the very different delivery of a cycle class where attendees are all in their 30s, versus the clubs where indoor cycling attracts older members or a mix of ages.

We also run quarterly colleague surveys. Members will tell us their experiences, but colleagues can sometimes add a layer of insight around the challenges they see in-club and how we might improve services and standards from that perspective.

What’s the vision for the business?
Five years ago, the vision was to become the UK’s most trusted health and wellbeing brand. We now have a slightly different slant on things and want to be the best place in the UK when it comes to health and fitness.
Trust is an outcome – we’re focusing on the input and obsessing about how we deliver that. If it leads to good, high levels of trust, we’re doing things right.

Of course, our ability to connect different services remains a core part of our feature set, as Nuffield Health has a degree of diversity in its services and products that perhaps our competitors do not.

We run a fitness business that focuses on preventing illness and disease. We have primary care services that can deliver interventions before things get serious, such as health assessments, GP services, physiotherapy and diagnostics at our in-club clinics. We also have curative secondary care and elective surgery in our hospitals.

By stringing these products and services together in a really powerful way, we can offer greater value to our customers, or would-be customers, than if we were running siloed businesses.

However, the real power isn’t just in connecting these services. It’s in being great at each and every one of them individually, because not every person who chooses Nuffield Health will use all our services at the same time – or at all. In fact, the majority of people who access Nuffield Health will only ever access one part of our service line.

So, while the connected proposition is very valuable and an inherent strength for us, we don’t want to only talk about this – we don’t want to market our fitness proposition on the back of our healthcare reputation or our Joint Pain programme, for example – because for someone who doesn’t need this, it’s unlikely to inspire them to join.

To those who already choose us for fitness and to those who might be considering a membership, we want to say – clearly and simply – that we are the place to come for health and fitness, because we offer the best fitness proposition.

If we can communicate this idea more persuasively to more people, we will create an even more profitable fitness estate. In turn, we can scale up the community contribution that’s so important to us as a charitable organisation.

What supports your ‘place to come’ claim?
First, we are for the many, not for the few, with a price point that intentionally makes us more accessible to more people. Our fees vary by location and footprint – not all clubs are built to a standard template, especially having grown by acquisition – but typically range from £70–100 a month.

In return, we offer a diverse, multi-modal, full-service fitness proposition. We’re not a standalone gym, specialist studio or swimming pool. We’re not a physiotherapy centre or a medical clinic where you go for a health assessment. We’re all of these things under one roof, ensuring greater value for money and accessibility across all ages and stages of fitness.

How do you identify development areas?
We already have a really strong core to our proposition – but we constantly ask ourselves if we stand up on all fronts. Do we run the best swim schools, for example? Do we have the best group exercise programme? What more can we do to enhance every aspect of our offering, beyond the work we’re currently doing on our gym floors, in our studios and our changing rooms and how can we get better at communicating everything that makes us special and that already drives 40 million annual visits to our clubs?

Decisions are made based on the outcomes of these conversations.

Will you open more clubs?
We don’t have an imperative to do this. We do have an imperative to improve member experiences across our existing clubs and generate the resources to expand our Programmes-for-All.

So, that’s where my focus and obsession is for the next two years: raising standards, services, products, experience and profitability in our current estate.

Once we’ve done that and are confident we have the template of a hugely popular fitness proposition with amazing cut-through, then we can look at organic growth and further acquisitions to expand into the future.