Q&A with Frank van de Ven, VP International at Life Fitness

Frank van de Ven, VP International at Life Fitness talks to Fusion Associates about the current challenges & future opportunities within the fitness market, their digital innovations and his reasons for returning to the business following its acquisition last year.

In conversation with Alex Pescott, CEO at Fusion Associates.

Photo Frank 2.jpg

Frank van de Ven

VP International - life fitness

Tell us a little about yourself and Life Fitness?

As Vice President, International at Life Fitness, I lead the international sales business units for both the EMEA and APAC regions, where I’m responsible for driving continued growth across the regions. Currently, I oversee a team of over 400 employees and a network of 50 distributors. I’ve been with Life Fitness for 24 years, having joined in 1996, and have served in various leadership roles in general management, sales and marketing within the company.

Life Fitness is dedicated to creating tailor made fitness and digital solutions that benefit both commercial fitness facilities and consumers. We also specialize in industry-leading service support and maintain a global sales network to serve our customers around the world. Our mission – to inspire healthier lives – started in 1968 with the Lifecycle exercise bike and continues today with the widest range of cardio, strength and group training products in the fitness industry.

The Life Fitness Family of Brands delivers a wide variety of premium, specialized fitness solutions and game tables and furnishings from Life Fitness, Cybex, Hammer Strength, Indoor Cycling Group (ICG), SCIFIT and Brunswick Billiards.

You returned to Life Fitness last year following the acquisition of the business by KPS Capital Partners. What made you want to return? Where does your focus lie over the next couple of years?

When current CEO Chris Clawson asked me to return in 2019, I knew I couldn’t turn down his offer. Returning to Life Fitness meant an opportunity to work with a talented team under Chris’ leadership and great opportunities to bring new products and connected solutions to market. I’m excited to be back and to help further establish Life Fitness as an industry leader.

Looking ahead, we are focused on product development and innovation by creating inspiring solutions to help our customers attract and retain their members.

We’re also continuing to pursue new digital partnerships across our open API platform to advance our connected fitness offerings. Solutions, like HALO Premium, enable operators to communicate with their members and create compelling, personalized experiences. Additionally, we are doing more content creation for our Life Fitness™ On Demand, Digital Coach and ICG platforms to engage exercisers in both the commercial fitness and consumer markets.

The crisis has made the home fitness market very popular. How prepared is Life Fitness to compete against the likes of Peloton, Mirror, Hydrow, Tempo etc. in the future? Do you think at-home, on-demand workouts are here to stay or just a temporary crisis response to Covid-19?

While we have no doubt been challenged, we were able to quickly pivot our business to respond to the needs of our customers and their clients in order to compete. Our digital and on-demand offerings have been available at the commercial-level across all verticals, and we made many of them free for operators and exercisers around the world to access during the pandemic.

For example, our Digital Coach platform offers free, daily on-demand workouts and is also available to facilities as a custom, subscription-based model to deliver functional training experiences. During the pandemic, Digital Coach had over 53,000 unique visitors globally. Our ICG Online Coach cycling classes were also made available and accessible on-demand via Vimeo. We know that on-demand fitness is not new, but the way we are approaching it today is new and is here to stay. Facilities are now being forced to adapt and find new ways to communicate and engage with their members.

Successful club operators will need to understand their members’ individual profiles and customer journeys in order to define the right mix of experiences, products, and solutions their exercisers want before they deliver them.

In most countries gyms & leisure facilities have been forced to close. How have your ‘facility’ customers managed this challenge? What kind of support has Life Fitness been able to provide to these customers?

We continue to be inspired by the resiliency of our customers throughout this pandemic. During the extended closures, many have leveraged our solutions to help keep their members active until they are able to return. As more facilities reopen, we are seeing enhanced health and safety measures, as well as redesigned floor layouts to allow for social distancing between equipment. We’ve continued to support our customers in a number of ways.

At the onset, we pivoted to provide a variety of free content and solutions, like HALO Premium, Digital Coach and ICG Online Coach classes, to allow our customers to engage with their clients and keep people active at home. We also partnered with our Life Fitness Academy trainers to promote our offerings and lead free, virtual workout classes via Instagram.

As the pandemic progressed, we developed a series of resources to help our customers safely and successfully reopen. Our reopening guide includes service, cleaning and safety tips, as well as staff training and member engagement ideas. This was complemented by a comprehensive reopening eBook, educational webinars and social media content.

Lastly, we’ve created an online platform with in- facility marketing assets for operators, including signage and digital console messages around social distancing and sanitation for all Life Fitness brands. Our customers can simply download and display the on-console and print signage.

Some large gym firms have experienced an increase in membership cancellations during this crisis, what advice do you have for gym owners to retain their customers through this period? What more could they be doing?

Consistent and clear communication through a variety of channels is critical right now. Continue to communicate new safety protocols and the latest information from your facility to keep your members informed and feeling comfortable about the experience they will have when they return. We also encourage operators to leverage digital and on-demand options to keep their members engaged at home during shutdowns.

Operators must also tailor their communications to their audience. They need to understand what their clients want now and how they want to do it going forward. Our team of cross-function and sector specialists at Life Fitness are partnering with operators to first help them understand their members’ customer journeys and then determine the right products and custom solutions to best serve them. We’re doing this in EMEA at our Innovation Hub in Barcelona, Spain where we bring in clients to meet with our team of experts and work together to co-create solutions. Going forward, operators should be focusing on communication to their current member database and tailoring messages to potential customers.

We believe there is a big opportunity for operators to evolve their business models to incorporate digital platforms that allow them to engage with clients, inside and outside of the club. They should also consider offering digital memberships by providing on-demand and on-product content.

Should fitness clubs continue to invest in traditional gym equipment or should they be investing in digital innovation products?

It all comes down to the clubs’ vision and strategy. This is the “why” that is driving their business. Operators must focus on knowing their audience and understanding the experiences, equipment, and solutions their clients want, when they want them, and how they want to experience them – whether that be in the club or on-demand. We’ve been supporting our customers with custom solutions and expert guidance around fitness equipment and digital offerings to tailor the exerciser experience across all segments, such as health clubs, hospitality, education, multi-unit housing and more.

What is the Life Fitness Academy and how has this benefited your business?

Our Life Fitness Academy (LFA) delivers industry-leading standardized fitness education, accredited by global certifying organizations, around the world. LFA’s mission is to ensure that Life Fitness continues to be the top choice in the industry for both products and education. As part of our commitment to our customers, LFA offers a wide range of educational products including live, web-based and on-demand learning. LFA is also dedicated to developing and offering cutting edge and engaging education through an exceptional global network of trainers who wrap an experience around each product. LFA continues to benefit our global business by developing valuable partnerships to help customers and exercisers achieve their goals.

Several business leaders I’ve spoken to recently have said they’ve enjoyed the fresh challenges this crisis has brought. Do you feel this way?

Now more than ever, people need leaders not managers. Leaders are all facing unprecedented challenges and this has given me a lot of energy to be the leader my team needs to navigate through this. We all need to be thinking about how we can empower our people, communicate more, and ensure we keep working together as one team. We must also adapt our businesses for the current market circumstances. There is an incredible opportunity for our industry to come together to not only communicate the importance of health and wellness, but to determine what the future of fitness looks like in the years to come. For us, this means we are focused on supporting our customers in the short term with strategies that will get them through the next 6 months to a year, so they can be successful in the future.

About Life Fitness

Life Fitness is the global leader in commercial fitness equipment and game tables and furnishings. The company manufactures and sells its strength and cardiovascular equipment, billiards tables and accessories, and game room furniture under the brand names Life Fitness, Hammer Strength, Cybex, Indoor Cycling Group, SCIFIT and Brunswick Billiards. Its equipment is distributed to 166 countries. Life Fitness is headquartered outside Chicago, in Rosemont, Illinois and its European subsidiary is based outside Rotterdam in the Netherlands. For more information about Life Fitness products and services, visit www.lifefitness.com

About Fusion Associates

Since 1998, Fusion Associates has been placing experienced professionals across the globe within consumer markets including consumer goods, fashion, sporting goods, healthy living and luxury.

Environmental, humanitarian, social and political concerns are close to the Partners both in and out of the business. We pride ourselves in partnering with industry leaders who wish to contribute to a better, more sustainable future. Working with global companies that are at the forefront of innovating and integrating sustainability into the heart of their business, we have helped build purpose-led teams from leadership to subject experts in biodiversity and animal welfare. 

 
Q&AAlex Pescott