Growing a Healthy Fitness Company With $35M in Funding
How do you grow a healthy fitness company with $35M in funding?
Ensure your company is generating sales with healthy margins. Then control your burn and manage your capital well to keep your stakeholders happy. That’s the philosophy that OxeFit has been applying when building and growing their young fitness company.
OxeFit has orders across both their product lines, and they don’t have to do a lot of specials to get their fitness products sold. OxeFit also has access to capital because its co-founder and CEO, Rab Shanableh has been in business for 30 years.
OxeFit has raised roughly $35M in capital, and they’ll continue to raise money as they prove themselves to their shareholders.
But OxeFit knows that the amount of capital raised has nothing to do with the health of a company.
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Featuring Rab Shanableh, CEO of OxeFit, on F**t Insider - Episode 144
Validating Your Product With Well-Known Athlete Investors
What is the benefit of having athletes that invest in your fitness products?
Having athlete investors validates your fitness product when they see performance improvements through real-time data and a positive impact on their health because athletes want to stay healthy while performing consistently in a competitive environment.
OxeFit is one example of a fitness company that has athlete investors on board. Despite having access to all the tools that typical professional sports organizations have, they go to one of OxeFit’s facilities and work out there, or deploy their rehab regiment.
The fitness machines that OxeFit offers are real tech and not just another gadget. There is science behind the machine that provides real-time data that helps them stay healthy and improve session over session, pre-game and post-game.
By getting validation by a wide spectrum of athletes with different backgrounds, from football to basketball, to baseball, and to golf, you know you’re something right without your fitness product.
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Featuring Rab Shanableh, CEO of OxeFit, on F**t Insider - Episode 144
Capturing Market Demand Through In-Person Live Events
How do you capture marketing demand in the fitness industry so that more people work out at home or go to a gym to experience in-club fitness?
60% of people want an in-gym experience, and 40% also want to work out at home. That’s what Les Mills’ research shows. Of the people having an in-gym experience, 80% are using digital fitness apps to work out at home. That’s why gyms must offer digital fitness.
Fitness companies like Les Mills are working with clubs to offer their content, services, and digital solutions with Les Mills Plus and Les Mills content, which allows club owners to embed their content in their app.
You can benefit from working with Les Mills by driving people to Les Mills Plus, and be an affiliate partner with them.
Content businesses like Les Mills provide a solution that gives your members the same experience in-club and complementary when doing at-home workouts.
By completing the fitness ecosystem through an omnichannel approach, you can bring in more people, grow your business, and grow the industry as a whole.
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Featuring Clive Ormerod, CEO of Les Mills, on F**t Insider - Episode 143
3 Pillars That Help Accelerate Growth
What are the three key pillars that help accelerate business growth?
Be laser-focused on moving the needle by having an amazing product, providing digital experiences, and building a team that helps you aim big and achieve your ambitious goals. That’s the attitude that Les Mills has been applying for 50 years.
Les Mills is a content business, and they ensure they have an amazing product, which is high-quality, world-class fitness content. They strive to be the best in the industry through their content.
Running a content business around fitness and providing digital experiences through their platforms and technology is crucial for companies like Les Mills to reach more customers.
But Les Mills and similar content businesses can only thrive when they have the right people and skills at hand. That’s why having expertise in-house is crucial for their success as well.
If you invest in your product, if you invest really well in your technology, and if you bring great people together to create a championship-winning team, you have a formula that can help continue to accelerate your growth.
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Featuring Clive Ormerod, CEO of Les Mills, on F**t Insider - Episode 143
Helping People Get Active Through World-Class Fitness Content
How do you get people active and make an impact as a global fitness company?
Make the world’s best fitness content that inspires customers all around the world to work out. That’s what Les Mills has been doing for 50 years. Their mission is to create a fitter planet: a healthy planet and healthy people.
Les Mills is passionate about creating a place that makes the world better for the long term by inspiring and motivating people to work out to great fitness content–at home or in a studio.
Working with fitness instructors, Les Mills is making sure they have a community of instructors all around the world that love teaching people and inspiring people.
Les Mills has also been active in the direct-to-consumer business, where they believe to have all the tools and assets to create an omnichannel fitness experience that makes the world a fitter place.
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Featuring Clive Ormerod, CEO of Les Mills, on F**t Insider - Episode 143
Serving Customers Everywhere Through Omnichannel Experiences
How do you serve customers that crave the convenience of working out everywhere while having a connection to their community?
Create an omnichannel experience where customers can work out at their convenience while still maintaining a level of connection and community. Les Mills is a family-held business that loves personal human connection, and they provide omnichannel fitness.
COVID increased the necessity for the industry to create omnichannel fitness experiences that help complete the ecosystem. Companies like Les Mills want to drive people into studios, so they can experience the thrill of live fitness.
Through Les Mills Plus, fitness customers can be served at home, on the road, or in-studio. COVID accelerated their business despite the many challenges the industry has been experiencing, because they’re passionate about growing the industry as a whole.
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Featuring Clive Ormerod, CEO of Les Mills, on F**t Insider - Episode 143
Teaching People How To Take Care of Themselves for Free
How do you teach people to take care of themselves without charging them at all?
Remedy Place’s end goal is to be a free educational platform to teach people how to take care of themselves, and then to fund research for alternative medicine to be able to show that there is science and proof that their treatments work.
By providing free health care education, Remedy Place wants to help the masses, so that people know the foundational pillars of health: knowing how to move to be pain-free, knowing how to eat, because anything you put in your body is either fueling or fighting disease, and knowing how to take care of your mental health, when the world’s getting more and more chaotic.
The keys to being healthy are simple, and there are no quick fixes and no shortcuts. But there are still plenty of unreliable sources that provide information that is not healthy at all.
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Featuring Dr. Jonathan Leary on F**t Insider - Episode 142
Building a Global Self-Care Movement
How do you build a global self-care movement?
If you focus on the average person that is far sicker and in a lot more pain than professional athletes or performers, you’re dealing with some of the unhealthiest bodies in the world. By changing the health of everyday people, you can change healthcare.
Remedy Place is aiming to create a movement that focuses on finding leaders in the healthcare industry that lead by example and do something amazing in the world. Their marketing has been happening solely through word-of-mouth, and it’s been spreading because they’ve helped the right people.
The word-of-mouth marketing of Remedy Place works so well because when you make someone healthy, when you actually fix something that people have been struggling with for a while, they want to pay that forward. Remedy Place built up a global community of people who feel better thanks to their self-care treatment.
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Featuring Dr. Jonathan Leary on F**t Insider - Episode 142
The Shift to Focusing on Preventative Self-Care
How do you help people understand the importance of health and prioritize their health care?
Create a movement around health, so that you can make people healthy and eventually change the healthcare system. That’s been the mission of Remedy Place for 10 years. The effect of their work is a rise in people in preventative care and holistic care.
Throughout the pandemic, people started to understand that taking care of themselves is a must. That’s why Remedy Place was thriving through the whole pandemic, and they’ve been insanely busy because of people looking at wellness at a different level, focusing on prevention, and focusing on pushing their self potential and what they can do.
The pandemic and the work of organizations like Remedy Place shifted people’s perspective towards, “If I’m trying to be healthier and focus on well-being, that needs to happen across every different sector of my life.”
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Featuring Dr. Jonathan Leary on F**t Insider - Episode 142
How To Enhance Your Health and Your Social Life
How can you enhance your health and your social life at the same time?
One way to socialize and work on your health is by joining a wellness club where you hang out with people, just like you’d be meeting friends in a bar or café. Remedy Place is the world’s first social wellness club that is centered around holistic self-care.
Remedy Place is made to enhance your health and your social life at the same time. It’s not like a spa where you isolate yourself in every room, although you do have the option to be by yourself if you’d like.
You can enhance your health through human connection because that is the most important form of self-care, and it’s a cool way to strengthen the relationships you have.
Remedy Place takes the approach of creating a social place that is free of temptation and toxins: it’s designed to heal instead of being designed to intoxicate.
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Featuring Dr. Jonathan Leary on F**t Insider - Episode 142
Successful Customer Acquisition in Connected Fitness
What are the channels you can use successfully for acquiring customers?
You can use word-of-mouth, ads, and content marketing on social media–Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube–for customer acquisition. But note that what’s working well in terms of acquisition may not work a month from now.
For example, rowing machines can have a very long sales cycle of about 12 months or more. It’s a high-consideration product because of its high price.
Companies like Aviron are constantly testing new acquisition channels in terms of what language they use and how they get their message across. During the pandemic, using the messaging around working out at home was really strong. But you can’t use that same messaging now. That’s why they’re constantly iterating on how to acquire customers.
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Featuring Andy Hoang, CEO of Aviron on F**t Insider - Episode 141
Operating Your Company Efficiently in a Recession
How do you efficiently operate your company in a recession?
You must have a good amount of runway, raise money, have your economic metrics in check, and keep on acquiring customers, even though acquisition can be tough.
A recession requires business owners to have their fundamental business metrics on their radar, like churn, retention, and growth rate. Ignoring core metrics can lead to overspending, hiring too many people, and raising an unnecessary amount of capital.
Companies like Aviron raised their Series A before the pandemic hit the market, and they were lucky. Most companies trying to raise their Series A right now receive valuations that are down by at least 40%. So, If you’re lucky enough to get funding, it’s going to be a depressed valuation.
The economic cycle of boom and recession that is to be expected at any time requires businesses to watch their unit economics, and it filters out some of the companies that have not been operating at their best.
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Featuring Andy Hoang, CEO of Aviron on F**t Insider - Episode 141
Bootstrapping a Fitness Company
How do you start a fitness company in a new market?
If you start a company in the fitness world, you can bootstrap your way up. And instead of going after B2C, you can approach vertical markets: gyms, hotels, and apartments.
For example, Aviron uses gaming psychology and game design to make their rowing experience more fun. They use streaming, coached classes, races, and virtual rows.
Aviron was founded in 2018, and they’re one of the first companies in the market of gamified rowing. By bootstrapping, they reached their first million dollars in sales, but it was a real grind.
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Featuring Andy Hoang, CEO of Aviron on F**t Insider - Episode 141
Helping People With Chronic Conditions Achieve a Healthier Lifestyle
How do you create a platform that enables people to lead a healthier lifestyle?
Focus on one thing that is your company’s specialty and serve people that way.
Season Health is one example of a platform that helps clinicians care better for patients with chronic conditions and for the patients to take advantage of the care. But the treatment itself is what the clinicians are responsible for.
Season Health is focused on food as one of the pillars of health. They can’t be all things to all people, so they specialized their service. But certainly, over time, they’ll look into partnerships with experts in areas like sleep and exercise.
Food is one tool in the toolbox that Season Health has picked when it comes to helping people achieve a healthier lifestyle and deal with some of the chronic conditions they have.
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Featuring Josh Hix on F**t Insider - Episode 140
