The CEO of LifeFit Group tells Kath Hudson how the pressures of the pandemic tested him and his team to the limit, while customer support turned out to be an unexpected and invaluable lifeline

In 2012 I was appointed to handle the restructure and sale of Fitness First in the UK. It was an old-fashioned mid-market brand that had been built in the 90s to the standard of the 70s, so as soon as the low cost operators came in, it lost market share.

That period was very challenging: we had to dust off the old Fitness First, starting with how the teams worked and then the whole look and feel of the brand. But it wasn’t stressful, because we had a huge investment programme, successful teams and members who liked the product, which meant there was a lot of excitement.

It was a fantastic period and I would do it over again.

In 2017 I moved to Fitness First Germany, which was experiencing a lot of self-created troubles. We took the appropriate learnings from the UK and strategically invested in and repositioned the company, founding the LifeFit group in 2019 – a multi-market segment platform with a number of brands, including Fitness First, Elbgym and Smile X at the beginning. These were followed by brands such as Barry’s and Xponential’s Club Pilates.

But the pandemic stopped our ambitious expansion plans in their tracks, and the last three years have been by far the most challenging of my career on many levels: people, cash position, process transformation, as well as on a personal level.

With more than 20 years’ experience in the international fitness market, I’ve experienced many ups and downs, but none have been as bad as the pandemic. We didn’t know what we were dealing with and hadn’t been trained for it.

Thanks to my international connections we had some warning about what was coming when the coronavirus hit, so we made plans and got off to a good start, but the length of the pandemic meant the challenges just kept on coming, which put an enormous strain on everyone.

It felt as though I was in crisis mode 24/7, dealing with the uncertainty of how long the lockdowns would last and responding to the regulation changes against the backdrop of the huge disruption in society itself. I was concerned about the health effects on co-workers, friends and family.

A time to invest
When our operating business was at a standstill we used the time to invest in our clubs and drive digitisation forward across the business. This led to a decisive leap forward in the development of our brands and fortunately we’re now benefiting from this investment, with membership numbers now back above pre-COVID levels.

I learned that every crisis helps you to grow personally and from every crisis a learning or even something positive can be drawn. I was reminded about how important teams are: the combined resilience of our teams helped us to succeed. I also discovered that our customers are more loyal than I imagined, so I wish I’d worried less.

It made me appreciate the importance of defining small challenges and keeping personal fitness levels high. I allowed myself to get very unfit and had to challenge myself to do a family relay Ironman to come back strong.

All senior operators had the same experience as me. Looking around our colleagues in Germany, it’s obvious who had a brilliant product and good market position before COVID, as they are fine now, while those who didn’t invest during the pandemic are experiencing problems.

The rebound has been strong in Germany, which means we’re still adding members. We haven’t experienced the inflation issue which the UK is dealing with and individual wealth tends to be higher in Germany so there are more households that can stomach five to 10 per cent inflation.