Bobby Hines, the owner of five Anytime Fitness clubs in Louisiana, joined the Anytime Fitness family in 2008, after serving in Iraq as part of the National Guard. Recently elected to Anytime Fitness’ franchisee advisory council, Hines sat down with Club Solutions to discuss the influence of a club’s member experience and his role within Anytime Fitness.
CS: How did you get involved with the fitness industry?
BH: I joined the National Guard in 2001, and in the military you have to be able to hold a lot of weight and have endurance. When I got deployed to Iraq in 2004, I think that was really the turning point, when [fitness] became something serious. We would work long days over there, and when you’re off, there’s not much to do on military bases overseas. They did have a big tent with weights in it, so everyday, if I wasn’t out in the field, I was working out. Before getting deployed I had been going to school for business because I’d always wanted to own my own business. After falling in love with health and fitness overseas, I came back and switched my major to kinesiology to focus on exercise science. That’s kind of the short story.
CS: How did you become a franchisee of Anytime Fitness?
BH: Like I said, I always wanted to open my own business. I guess from around 10 years old, that’s something I knew from that early on that I wanted to do. For others it’s being a professional football player or a fireman or something like that, but for me, it was always to own my own business.
Anytime Fitness was really starting to grow around the same time I was falling in love with health and fitness for myself. The passion and the desire to open my own business and [Anytime Fitness’] business model really matched up. Of course I looked at models that were similar. There’s just something about Anytime Fitness — it really seemed like they had more heart, more passion. I liked the design a little more than the others. Some of the others just seemed really sterile and bland. I wanted something with more character — it just had the club culture that I wanted.
CS: Do you happen to have an Anytime Fitness Running Man tattoo?
BH: I do, of course! Doesn’t everybody? I got mine a little over a year ago.
CS: Are there any cool or innovative things your clubs are doing that you’d like to discuss?
BH: We’re trying to do more inside marketing and are focusing more on the member experience. Hopefully we’ll be able to grow our club by giving our members an awesome experience! We hope they’re going out and pulling in more members for us because they love the club. We’ve done outside marketing before — signs, door hangers, stuff like that — but I felt that in doing that, you forget about the hundreds of members in your club that you want to get more usage out of. Cause the higher the usage the more results they get and the more they love the club, and they’ll go out and work for you to bring in more members.
CS: What’s your hiring process like and how do you find employees that members absolutely love?
BH: Recently we implemented a “strengths finder” test. We started looking at some of the managers that have really excelled and done well. These managers love their clubs and the members love them. We asked, “how can we match that personality? Is it something within them, or are we training them differently?” What I’m trying to do with the strengths finder test is see if there’s something consistent within these managers that’s causing them to perform really well. The test is similar to a DiSC test. We’re trying to find the right personalities. It can really destroy a member’s experience if you don’t have the right personality in your club.
CS: What is your role on the franchisee advisory council?
BF: We play a liaison role where we represent the franchisees and help to gather information about what the franchisees are looking for. We help get that information to corporate. [The franchisees] look to us to aid in development. We’re not the final say-so, it’s just that connection between franchisees and corporate. It’s an elected position, and we’re elected by the franchisees. We get a two-year term, so it does rotate.
CS: Is there anything else you’d like to add about your experience with Anytime Fitness and the club industry?
BH: One thing Chuck Runyon says is, “People, Purpose, Profit, Play.” That’s kind of our priority list, and that’s something I truly believe in. I love what I do. It’s been a lot of hard work but I have a great team. It’s fun.
By Rachel Zabonick
