CS Interview with Dave Harig, the CEO of Fitness On Request.
>>>Fitness On Request was born of a marriage between myself and our President Dave Kraai and his partner Nathan Jespersen, who run a group of boutique style convenience health clubs. After being open for a while, Dave and Nathan’s members came to them with a request to use their studio to watch fitness videos with some friends on a big screen TV. They engaged my company to fit out the space and I saw the bigger opportunity to create a complete system to solve the need. Dave Kraai came on board soon after we got started and we have been operating together ever since!
>>>Group fitness is a great solution for helping people engage in a healthy lifestyle, but live programming has some staffing and space limitations. We saw the chance to enhance a club’s ability to offer a more comprehensive solution to meet the needs of a hyper-convenience society. We also saw an opportunity to offer a wider breadth of programming options on an extremely economical platform.
>>>One of the greatest successes we have experienced here at Fitness On Request is simply proving the concept. We have gone from a small tribe of people who believed to now being in over 200 locations by the end of this quarter. Seeing people take classes, and having our customers call and say “The room is always busy!” is an exciting thing for us. There have been a lot of naysayers along the way, so to believe as much as we did in the concept and see it blossom into a proven solution has been a blast!
>>>First, Fitness On Request helps customers focus on delivering the best programming they can no matter what their situation. They can keep their most talented instructors around and get more out of them, while simultaneously removing some headaches related to lower performing classes — all while actually increasing their class offerings. Second, we have proven we can help clubs make money by increasing the effectiveness of their sales and marketing efforts. We have clubs showing significant increases in their sales ratios. They also note that they are getting great success bringing people in the door by promoting our service. Last, we have definitely heard plenty of “Joe was going to leave, and when I told him we had this solution he decided to stay.” There are a number of ways it can improve the bottom line for clubs!
>>>Simply put: flexibility, convenience, and reliability. Our instructors are available whenever people want them. You can schedule them to show up at a prescheduled time — and be sure they will start on time — or just allow users to walk up and select them as they choose. Plus, our instructors won’t take customers to the competition!
>>>We believe we are a great COMPLIMENT to live programming. Our solution is a great supplement to a personal training regimen as well as a way to make better use of group fitness space between live classes. We also know that in cases where there just isn’t a lot of instructor talent available, our product can stand by itself and get raves from customers and their clients.
>>>We are in over 150 clubs in Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United States — and coming soon to New Zealand!
>>>Right now, every 17 seconds there is a person in the U.S. starting a Fitness On Request class. We are providing over 100,000 classes per quarter and by the end of the year we expect to deliver our 1,000,000th class! Our system not only can manage interactive fitness classes, it also can be the management center for live programming. We have some exciting partnerships and key alliances in the works with established brands in the fitness industry that we hope to unveil later this year, so watch for some news!
>>>We aim to make it even easier to interact with fitness and help a new generation of people who are still on the couch get off it, into a club and actively working to lead a healthier, happier life!
>>>Fitness programming should be fun, challenging, and convenient enough to fit with people’s lifestyle needs. We will be able to tie into trends and facilitate new ways for people to interact with fitness. This industry has lagged behind the rest of society in adopting technology, and we are positioned to be part of the industry push to better understand that data and deliver improved solutions.
>>>I’m a tech junky. Anything on the bleeding edge of technology is where I would land, but right now we are pumped about the team here at Fitness On Request! This team is extremely talented and committed to the vision of what we are trying to achieve. That vision is much bigger than any one of us, and it’s an honor to be part of it. -CS
