Midtown Athletic Club began as a single tennis club in Chicago in 1970 and has grown to become a leader in the upscale tennis and fitness club industry. Today, the company is comprised of eight clubs throughout the U.S. and Canada, combining health and wellness with community and a member-first mentality.
At the heart of Midtown Athletic Club is the desire for members to find a home away from home. This was shown through the $75 million transformation of the Midtown Athletic Club Chicago, completed in 2017.
Growing from 150,000 to 575,000 square feet, the high-end sports resort was ready to tackle its new era. By 2019, the club had a waitlist for membership and was taking steps to aggressively grow the business. However, the nearly 50-year-old company realized they were not built for scale.
“Our organizational structure at both the corporate level and at the club level was not efficient for a growth mindset,” said Brad Houx, the vice president of operations at Midtown Athletic Club. “Very few of our business processes were documented or standardized. Our technology stack was quite outdated, and our data management systems needed significant improvements. We wanted to grow, but the business was not prepared to grow.”
To combat this, Midtown Athletic Club began by building a cohesive leadership team and identified an executive group tasked with setting the direction for the organization.
“We started standardizing our business processes and reimagining our technology systems,” explained Houx. “On a parallel path, we started construction on two major renovation projects at our clubs in Bannockburn, Illinois, and Rochester, New York, to align those clubs with the same design elements and studio spaces as our flagship Chicago club. Then COVID-19 hit.”
When the City of Chicago announced lockdowns in March 2020, like the rest of the industry Midtown had to cancel or freeze thousands of memberships indefinitely. Midtown’s flagship had gone from its biggest asset to its biggest liability.
Faced with this grim reality, the Midtown executive team spent the lockdown rethinking the future of the company. The team came up with two major priorities:
- To stay afloat financially and reopen the clubs as quickly and safely as possible.
- Continue positioning the organization for growth in a post-COVID world.
“COVID-19 was obviously completely out of our control,” said Jon Brady, the president of Midtown Athletic Club. “We were closed by the government and then we had to operate under multiple jurisdictions in terms of states and countries because we operate in Canada as well. We were learning as we go. I like to say to our team, ‘Look, we got an MBA in business through a six-to-nine-month period, in real time and in real life.’ That was not theoretical in any way, shape or form.”
Through and through, Midtown’s outlook remained the same: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
Thanks to the work done during the shutdowns, Midtown Athletic Club was able to reopen with a completely reorganized and standardized leadership structure across all clubs. This change has been critical to expediting the clubs’ growth and culture the past three years.
Technology Investment and Data Utilization
A major component of the club’s recovery plan was getting its technology stack up to speed and improving its data management systems.
Midtown switched from a fitness-industry CRM system to HubSpot in order to connect the customer’s online journey with their first in-person sales experience at the club. This enabled Midtown to better target subsequent virtual and in-person touchpoints during every step of the customer journey from prospect to member.
“We went through a process right before we chose HubSpot, studying what creates a highly engaged, long-term membership,” said Alex Schwartz, the chief marketing officer. “One of the things we found is the most important time in someone’s membership to determine if they’re going to stay for a very long time is their first 60 days. But if they become engaged with the club very early in their membership, that’s the best possible sign they’ll stay a year, two years, three years. The difficult thing is that’s when we know the least about them. We wanted to make sure before they ever even walk in our door, we can talk to them about what they’re interested in.”
With indoor and outdoor pools, a warm yoga studio, 60-bike Spinning studio, group exercise theater, 10,000-square-foot cardio fitness floor, 40-yard turf indoor sports field, full-service spa with five treatment rooms and a hair salon, men’s barber shop, childcare, 16 indoor tennis courts, and much more, Midtown wanted to create a prescriptive onboarding and prospect journey.
“We couldn’t do that before. Our marketing systems did not speak at all to our systems the membership team was using to engage with those prospects, which didn’t speak at all to our member management system,” said Schwartz. “Every time we had a handoff, we were losing all the information we have on a person.”
Knowing they had a structural issue, Midtown wanted to invest in an out-of-the-box technology tool to help them create cohesive data, language and experience for both staff and members. That’s why they decided to go all in on HubSpot.
“Initially we were just going to use it as a marketing tool for communication to members,” explained Brady. “But once we started digging into it, we found we could use it for sales management, pipeline management, a CRM platform, a marketing automation platform, a metric measurement platform and we could use it for operations, like net promoter score, member survey, etc. We decided we would go all in on that because that would give us a more cohesive approach and data, and a central data point for members as well. I think the HubSpot decision was a critical one, and I think that’s probably had the most significant impact.”
Members’ Second Place
Another key recovery plan action item was repositioning the brand as its members’ “Second Place” to support their changing professional and personal lifestyles. Pre-COVID, Midtown was positioned as members’ “Third Place” — as in home and work are first and second, with Midtown being their third most-frequented place.
To make this switch, the club redesigned its layout and service offerings to provide convenient experiences for remote workers, expanded the community spaces and social events to meet the pent-up demand for in-person interaction, and designed its food and beverage program to feature meal options for all occasions versus the more traditional club industry lenses of ‘healthy eating options’ or ‘food as an extension of your workout.’
Most importantly, the club established a dedicated customer experience (CX) team to guide the evolution and harness Midtown’s enhanced data and insight capabilities to anticipate and adjust members’ shifting expectations.
“We recognized we had several feedback systems being processed in a somewhat siloed fashion and harnessing the data in a more uniform fashion could help us make better decisions to guide the business,” said Houx. “Additionally, the feedback we were receiving wasn’t being pulled together to give us a full 360-degree view or being cascaded to the frontline levels of the clubs.”
The club first created the role of the CX manager who sits on the senior leadership team of each location. Their most important responsibility is to capture the voice of the customer through a variety of feedback channels and bring that data to the leadership team to support strategic decision-making. Additionally, this role oversees the front desk team and can quickly communicate information both up and down between the leadership team and the front desk, creating a more engaged and informed frontline staff.
“We then aligned the Midtown experience across all clubs by creating hospitality standards and best practices,” said Houx. “We added a national CX director who is responsible for aligning the CX managers across all clubs on hospitality strategies as well as creating and directing a new member support team (MST).”
The MST is a centralized call center which handles incoming calls and online account changes for all clubs. In the second quarter of 2023, the MST handled 1,415 hours of phone calls, alleviating roughly 175 workday’s worth of phone time from the front desk team. This change enables those staff members to focus 100% of their energy on delivering service and in-club experiences for members.
“My role is to ensure we create a positive experience in every interaction we have with a member across their lifespan to inspire them to continue to transform their lives,” said Gennie Soriano, the national customer experience director for Midtown. “Our members are the most important stakeholders we have, and it makes sense to reinvest in the clubs for them. It’s imperative to deliver on our promise to provide our members with the highest quality athletic and tennis club experience in the world. Our entire model is based on our member experience, and we get to play in this premium space where it’s vitally important to deliver on that.”
For Soriano, the most exciting part about CX — and specifically Midtown’s member experience — is there’s no peak. Without an end destination or goal, they can always do better when it comes to members having a positive experience.
“That’s not true for a lot of my colleagues,” said Soriano. “There are only so many hours in a day you can schedule programming and there’s only so much square footage in a club you can improve and rent and renovate. But providing an amazing member experience can never be capped. That’s why I’m here, to continually push the envelope on what we can do for our members.”
Centered on Core Values
Another thing that can never be capped at Midtown Athletic Club is its dedication to culture.
When Brady joined the team in 2013, he was very intentional about Midtown’s purpose, what they do and why they do it. At the time, Midtown’s core values and its purpose were very loose. Brady made it his mission to define those and ensure they were able to share that message consistently, easily and with clarity to everybody in the organization.
“I think that’s been one of the big changes that’s had an impact,” explained Brady. “We talk about it all the time. It’s in every communication, not in a ‘you should know this way’ but rather real-life examples. We share stories of associates, and we relate them to how it’s a great example of certain core values. It’s authentic. I think people get that; I think they feel it’s not just a plaque stuck on a wall somewhere. We actually don’t even have it on a plaque.”
One example of this happened in a meeting a few years ago. A general manager stood up and asked to stop the meeting. He said, “I never really thought I’d say this, but you’ve missed talking about the core values. You’ve always talked about the core values at the start of every meeting, and I always know that because I got sick of hearing you talk about the core values. Now this meeting, you haven’t talked about them at the start of the meeting, and I’m missing it and want you to talk about them.”
For Brady, this was a good reminder that part of his job as a leader is to be the front and center reminder about how important it is.
“Defining your core values and your purpose is critical,” said Brady. “One of the things we joke about on the executive team is that my role is often combined between being chief reminding officer with the chief cheerleading officer. I’m responsible for the culture. The culture of the company starts and stops with me, so I try and lead by example all the time.”
With this commitment to the club’s core values, purpose and desire to be members’ home away from home, Midtown is looking to the future on how to continue inspiring people to transform their lives.
For now, the club is putting its two-tiered approach to growth in place. Tier One includes bringing all the clubs to the same level of Chicago, and then Tier Two includes looking for new opportunities and how the business can grow.
“We never want to get to the stage where we’re cookie cutter, where everything’s the same,” said Brady. “I have no intention of doing that. That’s not our drive. We don’t want to be the biggest. We just want to be the best.”
