The co-founder of Orangetheory Fitness feared the essence of the brand would be compromised when the pandemic disrupted its controlled approach. He talks to Kath Hudson

By the time the pandemic hit we’d spent 10 years fine-tuning the Orangetheory brand and building a robust franchise toolkit. Our differentiator was clear: brick-and-mortar studios offering a science-backed workout, with heart rate monitors and expert coaches, all providing a consistent, high-quality experience globally.

Then all of a sudden every studio was closed and I was momentarily at a loss. My initial thinking was to hunker down, lean on financial reserves and wait it out until studios could open again. However, the message coming back from franchisees was loud and clear: we had to keep people’s workout routines going, no matter what.

There were calls for a virtual platform. Initially, I resisted, because it wasn’t what Orangetheory had been built on and I worried about brand damage in the long term. But after listening to the team I gave the go-ahead and within 48 hours we were offering online workouts.

If I could go back and give myself some advice it would be to embrace the feedback and drop the resistance

It wasn’t polished. Members were lifting whatever they had in their homes – tins of beans and bags of flour – and coaches were filming on their phones from their homes. But the authenticity, energy and motivation were clear and the charisma of our coaches resonated. Some of those early workouts reached a million people a day.

Then our franchisees started coming up with ideas about how they could offer outdoor workouts. All over the world, equipment was being dragged outside and workouts were happening in parking lots and on rooftops, any place where they could get approval. While part of me was concerned about brand consistency, what I was witnessing was innovation, grit, and an unshakable commitment to our members.

A lot of the action was happening at a local level, so we were spinning up new templates and all kinds of new toolkits to support our studio teams. It wasn’t the uniformity I was used to – but it was working. What felt like chaos at first was actually creativity in motion.

I learned to listen more deeply and trust more completely

A fully virtual platform, Orangetheory Live, was built in just eight weeks. This allowed the coaches to interact with members and their performance data in real time. It was different from the usual in-studio experience, because the members were at home, but we had hundreds of thousands of members proving its impact. In markets like Canada, where they weren't even able to do outdoor workouts, it was a lifeline.

See crisis as an opportunity to learn

It was a wild time, but a crisis is when you really learn, and I don't know if there’s been any period in my business career where I learned more in such a short space of time. I had to get outside of my comfort zone and fully trust the talent and heart of our team. And they delivered – beyond anything I could’ve imagined.

I realised I’d underestimated how powerful the Orangetheory community was. On social media, I kept reading how people were so grateful that they could get any type of workout with their coach.

There was barely any negative feedback, because everybody could feel that as a brand we were trying to deliver whatever we could. As a result, when our studios started to re-open, a tremendously high percentage of people came back, so all those scrappy programmes kept the connectivity and routine alive.

I take no credit for the way the team stepped up. I’m so proud of how committed and dedicated to the brand they all were. It wasn’t about money, it was about trying to keep the members engaged and healthy and deliver on the promise we’d made to them. It was so powerful.

While part of me was concerned about brand consistency, what I was witnessing was innovation, grit, and an unshakable commitment to our members

I'd also underestimated the community that we had built over the preceding decade. In this emergency time all the studio staff and members came together. Members would show up to help studio staff move the equipment and set up an outdoor studio. It was incredible.

Scrappiness and innovation is in our DNA

This experience has changed the company for the better. We’d always embraced innovation, but it accelerated how we thought about collaboration and saw us doubling down on listening, which became more important post-pandemic. It’s a more challenging marketplace than before COVID, so our ability to tune into the franchisees, members and our staff is more important than ever.

The biggest lesson I learned personally was to listen more deeply and trust more completely. If I could go back and give myself some advice I would say to embrace the feedback, trust the team sooner, drop the resistance and allow things to move at the speed they need to.

The pandemic made us appreciate that scrappiness and innovation are in our DNA

That shift in mindset changed everything. And looking back, although the brand had evolved to be very systemised and consistent, it originally started out scrappy, just with an idea that we could do something different and that foundational thinking helped us through the pandemic and made us appreciate that scrappiness and innovation are in our DNA and that really helped us through.