COVER STORY
FRANCHISE-FIT From Princess Diana’s personal trainer to sports and conditioning coach for elite AFL and soccer teams, Body Fit Training founder Cameron Falloon has a high-performance based background that informs the fast-growing, award-winning fitness franchise.
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ere Cameron talks about discovering a big gap in the fitness marketplace and why being fair is the foundation of the franchise. INSIDE FRANCHISE BUSINESS: First up Cameron, congratulations on winning the Fit Summit APAC franchise of the year award for 2021! Cameron: Thanks, everyone is excited. It reflects the growth of the business, franchise sales and membership growth, financial performance. When I founded the business and set up four test pilot studios, I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of lessons. The traction and feedback across four sites in 18 months validated my thinking and research. Then I met Richard Burnet and Hamish McLachlan – Hamish is a silent investor, Richard has a sales and marketing background. Business owners can wear a lot of hats but we can do ourselves an injustice if we stretch too thin. I had the opportunity to get complementary skill sets to partner and grow something with people who share my vision. I’ve spent most of my life working in soccer and AFL, in high-performance management. I stepped away and moved back to Melbourne and started to think how I could utilise my skill set without getting into sport. It’s very physically demanding and time consuming, and job
security is not the best. I started to explore ways to put what I have learned in almost 30 years into business. Group fitness was trending so I researched it and felt there was a big gap for a more well-rounded approach – genuine strength training in addition to cardio and alternative preventative programs. Also a progressive method of training. For elite athletes all programs progress over a period of time. I didn’t see that happening anywhere in fitness. If the best athletes train this way why not use this methodology in the commercial space for weekend warriors? It leads to better, long-lasting results and fewer injuries. We learned some lessons around the space of the studio – making sure we had the right space, commercial viability, how many members we needed and some tweaks to programming. Learning that this is how you would do it in an elite environment but it won’t resonate in a commercial space.
4.7 weekly visits across our member database, that’s double the industry average.
IFB: What’s the specific appeal for gym users? Cameron: The target market is early 20s to mid 40s. A lot of people go to group training for high intensity aerobic exercise and a high percentage have secondary memberships, they utilise a 24-hour gym for weights. We do all of that. We have Olympic lifting equipment, cardio, lower intensity days for rehab exercises; it’s got a broader appeal. We have
IFB: Why does the business model attract potential franchisees? Cameron: It is low cost, high yield and 153 members is the average member opening number for 2021. Depending on the site rent (different for each site) studios most likely will be profitable from day one with that number. We’ve just won the APAC award, against some strong international competition.
IFB: It’s hard to grow the fitness market and bring in new customers to the sector, most users will rotate between brands. How does this compare to your experience with Body Fit? Cameron: We have three buckets – training, community and cyclical gym users. Our base is training and conditioning. The industry is driven by fads, but strength training is always a staple, it never leaves the annual reports trends. Our model is built off strength training and that underpins most human pursuits, it’s beneficial to lifestyle. Our franchises are good on communities. The sense of community, attachment to staff and feeling part of something is really big in our model. In addition to community and the progressive strength element, we have the cyclical gym users. If we can capture them and make them feel part of the community and help them get results, that’s great.
AUG/OCT 2021 | 20 | WWW.FRANCHISEBUSINESS.COM.AU
