10,000 sites and 10 million members by 2030 – this the ambitious goal of Purpose Brands, spearheaded by its Anytime Fitness and Orangetheory Fitness brands. The CEO speaks to Kate Cracknell

What attracted you to the role?
Purpose Brands came together in April 2024, formed by the merger of Orangetheory Fitness and Self Esteem Brands. I joined in November 2024, drawn primarily by three factors.

Firstly, I love working with great brands and Anytime Fitness and Orangetheory Fitness are globally iconic. Anytime has a much larger global footprint, but Orangetheory has phenomenal brand recognition in the US.

Secondly, integrating the businesses and leveraging our new scale will be a large and complex task over the next three to five years and I’ve always been drawn to big challenges.

Thirdly, the fitness industry as a whole drew me in. We make the world a better place and that’s important to me, giving me energy as I get out of bed every morning.

It’s why Purpose Brands is such a great fit. A lot of companies talk about mission, vision and values. Purpose Brands talks about purpose, vision and values. It’s purpose that drives us – and our purpose is to make health and wellness accessible to people around the world, to in turn improve their lives.

We already touch seven million people every year, but believe we can do even more. In this industry, scale matters. It isn’t about just setting up a gym and putting in equipment any more. Technology, recovery, 24/7 wellness support… all of this plays into people’s overall wellness. We can leverage our scale to have a big impact.

Tell us more about the benefits of scale
From a member standpoint, we can share best practice and harness the best minds across our business, enhancing the member experience and delivering even greater health outcomes across all our brands.

Let’s take Orangetheory as an example. This brand has led the industry in science-backed health improvements, building muscle and burning fat and all the other great things an Orangetheory workout does for you; we talk about it as a daily health and wellness ‘vitamin’. Moving forward, we can use this expertise to help shape the physical training on offer at Anytime Fitness, The Bar Method and Basecamp Fitness.

It goes the other way, too. Anytime has a well-established strength offering that might give us new learnings for Orangetheory’s Strength 50 programme, for example, while The Bar Method and Basecamp Fitness will have their own expertise to share.

Are you working on specific new offerings?
Other member benefits include the likelihood of cross-brand access for members from 2026. It’s too early to share many details, but we’ve selected a couple of geographies to run a pilot. We’ll go out with three different options and let the members decide what works for them; particularly in big multi-site businesses, I firmly believe decisions on programmes should not be made while sitting in a corporate office building.

So, we’ll be going out to some existing Anytime Fitness locations and offering members discounted Orangetheory memberships – and vice versa – as well as offering bundles to new prospects. We’ll see what’s most successful. Maybe all three will work. Maybe none will. But with complementary brands in our estate, it feels like a valuable opportunity to explore.

As a franchise business, we’ll need to transfer payments between franchisees to enable this. We’re looking at revenue splits on a per-member basis, which will likely factor in who’s doing the selling and who’s receiving the member or if the sale has been driven by corporate marketing – we can track and report of this.

Who else benefits from your scale?
The benefits of greater scale are even more straightforward for franchisees than for members. Anytime Fitness and Orangetheory were both major players, but we just became twice as big. Whether it’s for equipment purchases, technology, reporting or marketing – and more – that scale drives down costs for franchisees across the business, meaning they can make more money.

The merger also brings new opportunities for our franchisees. We’ve already had enquiries from existing Anytime and Orangetheory franchisees interested in buying a franchise for the other brand – particularly internationally. We’ve seen a lot of interest from Anytime Fitness master franchisees wanting to take on Orangetheory too.

We’ve even had one franchisee ask if they can open a combined studio where the two businesses share a reception desk – an idea we may explore further down the road. While we’re not currently moving that idea forward, it’s certainly interesting. We get a lot of great ideas from our franchisees.

For our team, greater scale brings enhanced career progression and development opportunities. We’re seeing some team members support all the brands in a new shared service role, while others are going back and forth across the different brands. It’s all valuable experience that will help them grow and gives us greater strength in depth.

What innovation news can you share?
Recovery is an interesting area for us and one we’re actively promoting it to our Anytime Fitness franchisees. We’re encouraging the roll-out of red light saunas into the clubs, to bring red light therapy to people across the US and ultimately the world.

Then there’s longevity, which sits at the heart of the Orangetheory concept: the core Orangetheory 60 programme is specifically designed to help improve VO2 max, which we know is a key factor in longevity.

Another exciting one is our partnership with telehealth service Dr B This allows our members in the US to use the dollars in their Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) to help fund their gym memberships, so it directly supports our purpose of making health and wellness accessible. The service is already available at Anytime Fitness, Orangetheory Fitness and Basecamp Fitness in the US and will come on-stream at The Bar Method before the end of this year.

What has been your focus so far?
Since joining, my primary focus has been the integration of the two businesses. The way we’re approaching it, each brand retains its own brand leader and is independent from both member and franchisee standpoints. However, we now have shared services to increase efficiency behind the scenes – single teams in charge of areas such as finance, supply chain and technology across all our brands.

We’re also investing heavily in systems that will be implemented across our brands, even as they continue to act independently. We have a new HR system, a new ERP coming in late 2025 and new franchise development systems in the works. We’re also building an ecommerce platform that will run across all our brands, making it easier for us to execute our marketing and facilitate easy, best-in-class sign-ups for members.

Tell us more about these systems
I have to give credit to the Anytime and Orangetheory founders – Dave Mortensen, Chuck Runyon and Dave Long – who, before I joined, made the decision to invest heavily in the integration. Too often, I’ve seen companies cut corners, perhaps using one company system or the other and hoping it will be good enough. They didn’t do that, but embarked on the process of building a brand new foundation into which we can plug our five existing consumer-facing businesses. It’s also configured so we can plug in future acquisitions.

So that’s what we’re doing in 2025: making sure we’re set up right. And I can report that we’re on track, ahead of schedule and under budget.

How do you see this developing?
The exciting part about the integration is what it means when we get into late 2025 and into 2026, because that’s when we’ll be able to start leveraging our scale in ways we haven’t before. As the largest player in the global health and wellness industry, we can do a lot of great things, scaling our expertise to help members across all our brands. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Let me give you one example. We have a tremendous amount of data in the business that we haven’t been able to leverage in the past, due to a systems limitation or maybe an expertise limitation. But now we’re investing in our systems and have great experts coming into the business, we’ll be looking at how we use this data to personalise the experience and help members achieve even better results.

At Orangetheory, for example, we know how often people work out and what they do. We have body scans that show muscle and fat percentages, including for the 130,000 people who completed last year’s transformation challenge; most of them chose fat loss as their goal and lost an average of 9 per cent body fat.

We’re asking how we use of this data not only to make our offering better for Orangetheory members, but also to enhance what we do at Anytime Fitness, The Bar Method and Basecamp Fitness too? This, as I say, is where it starts to get fun.

What’s the latest news from your brands?
In spite of being in an integration phase, our portfolio of brands continues to perform well: we’re positive in same-store sales and are growing revenues, system-wide sales and EBITDA. Anytime and Orangetheory are our largest brands and, from a unit count, our fastest growing.

For Anytime Fitness, I’d highlight the new design we’ve been rolling out. This is the first year where it’s really taken hold, both for remodels and new builds, with a lot of franchisees onboard. It’s a beautiful design that’s also functional, with improved sightlines that make managers and coaches more visible and more accessible, while extra light makes the clubs more inviting to members. We also continue to leverage our relationship with Apple Fitness+, giving members access to great workouts at home as well as in the gym.

Since I’ve been with the company, we’ve entered new countries with Anytime Fitness: we’ve opened in Paris and are having success in the Middle East.

For Orangetheory, 2025 is predominantly about shifting perceptions, helping people realise it isn’t just about cardio but about full-body transformation.

Our new marketing campaign talks about building muscle and burning fat and we'll be really leveraging the transformation challenge.

We also have two Orangetheory studios in early pilots for new workouts and equipment. We'll continue to push things like this: experiments where we test, learn and – if successful – roll out.

Tell us about your growth plans
We have an ambitious goal of 10,000 sites and 10 million members by 2030 (first shared in an exclusive interview with Dave Mortensen in HCM. See www.HCMmag.com/mortensen). Acquisitions will be a core part of our strategy and wherever you are in the world, Purpose Brands will become the acquirer of choice. Our approach allows brands to retain their member proposition and what makes them distinct in the market. We'll simply leverage our scale to make them even more successful, so they can grow more quickly and grow globally. I believe this will be very appealing to entrepreneurs building their businesses.

There's still a lot of white space in the US and we’re far from being saturated with any of our brands, however, the majority of our growth will come from outside of the US.

Anytime Fitness is already 56 per cent international, with a great opportunity to now build out the Middle East. Eastern Europe is also on the radar, as well as north Africa, and there are territories in Asia we haven’t touched yet.

For Orangetheory, we’ve barely begun from an international standpoint. Even in the countries where we have a presence, we’re nowhere near saturated. We’ll probably start with the countries where we already have a small presence – Germany, France, UK – and build those out. Beyond that, our former head of Anytime Fitness International, Sander van den Born, is now leading Purpose Brands International. He has relationships with the international master franchisees and he knows the prospects. He’s already doing a great job growing Anytime’s international operation and will now do the same for Orangetheory.

There’s likely to be some growth for The Bar Method and Basecamp Fitness, too, including internationally and in Japan, there are already two Bar Method sites with a third in the pipeline, while Singapore’s Sumhiit Fitness studios [the brand name for Basecamp Fitness outside the US] are performing well.

There’s tremendous white space for Anytime and Orangetheory, both domestically and internationally, so these two brands are our primary focus. I wouldn’t want to diminish that by setting specific targets for The Bar Method or Basecamp/Sumhiit Fitness.

What excites you in your role?
With the brand founders now on the board, we have very passionate people still involved in the business who are used to making decisions every day. However, when they recruited their team – me included – they recruited passionate people who want to continue to push their vision forward. And I have to say, they’ve been absolutely fabulous: the perfect blend of supportive and empowering.

We now have a complete leadership team, including a new chief financial officer, new brand president for Orangetheory and new chief commercial officer.

Additionally, the leader of Bar Method now also runs Waxing the City. So, we’ve had some changes in our team and now have such a great group of experts – all dedicated to improving health and wellness – that I'm giddy about what we can do. I’m also inspired by the way we’re developing younger people within our business, with lots of initiatives where people skip levels to work directly with senior team members on very specific initiatives. That’s really exciting.

Last but not least, I enjoy getting out to meet with franchisees, especially those with just one or two units. They tell me how their clubs are allowing them to set up their child’s college fund or finally pay down their own student loans. These aren’t the sort of things you’ll see in an income statement, on a balance sheet or even in our monthly operating reviews, but they're evidence of the essential role Purpose Brands plays in their lives. That’s extraordinarily empowering and exciting to me and is extra fuel in my tank to push that bit harder.