Saturday, August 1, 2009

My visit to Urban Active, Columbus, OH

I spent an entire day in Columbus and toured 5 Urban Active Fitness clubs. For those of you who followed this story in the industry the owner, Royce Pullman, was a former Gold's Gym operator with 18 locations. He created his own brand, Urban Active, and broke off from Gold's. Two+ years later and he now has 33 locations with the ultimate goal of 100. I have no doubt they'll get there. Really nice clubs and the value proposition is incredible. 40,000+ square foot locations; group x, basketball courts, Cycle rooms, Cardio Cinemas, childcare, tanning, big juice bars and monster cardio and strength training areas and indoor running tracks. All this for $39/month!

Too much to type about in one blog posting but let me bullet point out key insights I took away.
* Strong sales force (3+ per location).
* Scoreboarding every single day.
* Strong guerrilla marketing by every sales staff member.
* Add-on EFT's for tanning and personal training.
* PT contracts are for ONE YEAR. Yes, you read that right. More on that later.
* Very open floor concept creates a great environment with lots of energy.
* Sales systems with a lot of accountability (what a concept).

Two videos are below. One is a tour of their most recent Columbus location and the other are sales, marketing or operational insights that I took snipits of. Enjoy.



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