On Demand Webinar: Digital Fitness & Member Engagement

Get ready to discover the key to longevity and success.

In this webinar Doug Mahlum, Owner/Operator at Montana Athletic Club, and Nik Herold, Customer Experience Director at Les Mills US, address how the fitness landscape has changed, the importance of personalization and convenience, and the role of omnifitness in the industry. They also provide real-world examples and advice for operators on how digital solutions can be implemented to stay fit for your purpose.

Some of the topics they cover include how to:

• Integrate live and digital experiences
• Minimize member intimidation
• Create an experience that matters

You can watch the first 5 minutes here or access the full recording by clicking the button below!

You can read the full transcript below:

Faith Reece (00:04):

Hello everyone. Welcome to today's session. Super excited for this session in particular, we've been a long time in the making, just waiting to share a lot of insights around digital fitness and how we can use that to drive member engagement. So we'll give our participants just another minute just to join the session and we will go ahead and get started in just a bit. If you're joining us though, we'd love to see where you're coming from, what facility, and just see who we've got in the room today.

(00:46):

University of Iowa. I'm a cyclone, so love to see that. Go Hawks. I'm seeing a lot of hawks here. Got Snap Fitness. Awesome, Alabama. Someone from up in your neck of the woods. Doug and Bozeman. Awesome. Well, I will go ahead and get us started with just a few housekeeping items. Feel free to keep joining us in the chat again, just again, want to welcome everyone to today's session, capitalizing on Digital Fitness to drive member engagement. We've got Doug Malam from Montana Athletic Clubs, Nick Harold from our LMUS team, and Nick Gustafson from the Fitness On Demand team. So we'll get to them in just a second for some housekeeping items. For the best viewing experience, we recommend using a wired internet connection and closing any programs or browser sessions running in the background that could cause issues or delays. Google Chrome will give you the best viewing experience and is preferred.

(01:59):

However Live Storm is compatible with all browsers. You can go ahead and click the bell icon in the bottom right corner in the chat or questions tab, just to mute any of those notification sounds coming through. We've got lots of engagement here today, so I'm sure there'll be plenty of that, that some networks will cause slides to advance more slowly. So if you are behind or you can't hear audio, try it refreshing your browser, and if that doesn't work, you may need to clear your cache and cookies or restart your computer. We've got a couple opportunities to engage throughout the session. So we've got a questions tab in the bottom right corner. We'll have some polls throughout the session, and lastly, you will be able to watch the recording after the session has ended using the same link that you used to join us. So with all of that exciting stuff, I'm going to go ahead and pass it on to Doug for a quick intro.

Doug Mahlum (02:59):

Hello and I welcome everybody to this webinar. I'm excited to explain some of the things that we've done that has achieved success and has been able to fulfill our membership. My name's Doug Mahlum up in Montana, born and raised here, and we have seven facilities in Montana, the Peak Clubs in Gray Falls and Missoula and the Wave and Whitefish and the Montana Athletic Club, which is our home club. Been in the business about 35 years, which makes me 40 I think. I hope and I will really enjoy it and I'm looking forward to going through this and then talking about the successes and the trials and tribulations that we've had.

Nik Herold (03:53):

Awesome. Thanks for the introduction, Doug. Yes, I do think that puts you at about 40, so that's perfect. By the way, if nobody realizes that that is Doug's actual background, it is not a fake background, so enjoy the view. Hey everybody, my name is Nick. I'm the customer experience director for Les Mills us for the western part of the country. I've been in the fitness industry now for just over 20 years. Started as a personal trainer coming out of athletics and no longer having a career in baseball. So it was my way of staying connected to fitness and had an opportunity to be in some leadership positions for several key brands through the US Lifetime Fitness, Equinox, 24 Hour Fitness and even had a five-year stint as a boutique fitness owner. Really excited to be here today. My whole goal is to see how we can help you help your members fall in love with fitness. Nick, I'll pass it over to you.

Nick Gustafson (04:51):

Yeah, I'm Nick Gustafson. I'm the marketing director at Fitness On Demand. Nick and Doug are the stars of the show today. Really, I wanted to introduce myself and just be here as a resource if questions come in, being able to help support, support and answer that when Nick and Doug get into the exciting things that they've been doing and how Doug's had some really cool successes with his gyms. So just a quick background on US Fitness On Demand is a digital fitness and member engagement platform. The goal really there is to help our customers improve acquisition and retention rates, activate every screen and studio in your gym or your facility, and then just provide additional fitness members for options, whether they're at the gym, at home, kind of wherever they are. So I'll pop back more for the q and a as well, but Nick, Nick and Doug will be the stars today.

Nik Herold (05:48):

Appreciate the intro. Nick, thank you again, Doug, for joining us today on the call. I think now that we've done our introductions, maybe we just jump right into content. Yeah. How about we talk about how the fitness landscape has changed? Well, I think we can all agree that the post pandemic landscape has definitely changed. It feels different. It looks different. Members are looking for more diverse offerings than ever before. We've seen a big shift in what drives them in terms of their goals with nearly 50% of them now looking at strength as one of their number one goals. I'm sure you see that a lot on your weight room floors and in your studios. The other big shift has been stress reduction, overall health, health and wellness, improving your health, the longevity, being healthy to do other things. We see that as being one of the top reasons that people are now coming into the facility, and we knew specifically that mental health was a top priority to Gen Z post pandemic with nearly 60% of them claiming that they had some very adverse mental health effects after they went through that.

(06:59):

And then millennials just over 50% the same thing. So seeing that being very, very top of mind. The other thing that we've seen shift is really been how digital plays a role in what you do in and out of your clubs and how it affects your members. You have more digital players than ever in the fitness industry now. You don't have to just worry about boutique facilities. You've got Amazon and Apple and TikTok, influencers, all these different players that are coming into look to engage with your members. So I think that just sort of sets the scene for what's changed in a nutshell here in the fitness landscape. I think though something important would be to understand what the modern member mindset looks like. So as we're considering all of these shifts, and by the way, we know that all age groups consider physical activity as being the most crucial to their health, but we want to understand their mindset, what drives them to get into being physical and having that physical activity.

(08:00):

And there's really four emerging trends that we see. The first one is convenience. And we know now that about 80% of gym members don't want to stop using digital fitness. They want to continue to use that as part of their workout plan post pandemic. With that convenience comes flexibility, and we've known for a long time that members are going to want to work out at home and we've seen as high as 84% of 'em want to do that in addition to going into the gym. So those aren't going to change. Convenience and flexibility are going to be top of mind, but as one of my favorites in College Football League, Corso says not so fast my friend Connection is still a huge part of what members are looking for. So while they want those two things, they still rate being connected, the social aspect of things as being the primary driver that they come into your facility and that's not going to go away, that's not going to change. They still are looking for that, and when we consider that, we think about the experience that they have with connection. The last thing that they're really looking for is personalization. And we know that over 60% of consumers now expect that as a standard of the service, not just a bonus. They want it as a standard. Now, I want to pause there just for a second because something that's really interesting to me is that we still see 20% of people being too intimidated to go into the gym, 20%, and it really does beg the question.

(09:43):

Faith, if you could go to the next slide, it really begs the question, is your offering still fit for your purpose? Because if we still have that level of intimidation, we don't understand that member mindset. We're in trouble. We got to be able to figure out what's going on, how we're going to meet that member where they're at. So faith, I think this might be actually a perfect time for you to do a little poll to dive into that question a little bit deeper.

Faith Reece (10:11):

Perfect. Yeah, we've got our first poll here. Just again, get a kind of a sense check of the room. So you'll see this pop up on the screen here on the polls tab on the right side here. So I would love to know, do you currently have any digital offerings in your facility? So in Studio Virtual and at home Options, just in studio, just at home, or maybe you're not offering anything currently in the digital space, so would love to hear kind where we're at. Awesome. Seeing a decent amount actually of us have both in Studio Virtual and at Home Options, so awesome. Let's see. Got a couple more people jumping in here and yeah, feel free to continue answering as we go onto this next one, but we've got a second one here. Again, just trying to see how is your digital offering currently engaging members? So we see sometimes it doesn't get much use. Sometimes we see members are seeming excited and intrigued at the point of sale, but overall they're not using it much. And then we see some, as Doug will jump into later, that members love it and it is really a key engagement tool. So would love to see, for those of you that do have a digital offering, what that looks like for you.

(11:55):

Okay, it looks like still looking at some low usage, so we'll definitely get into some key approaches that we can use to tackle that, but I'll go ahead and pass it off. Back off to you, Nick.

Nik Herold (12:14):

Awesome, thanks Faith. Yeah, so I think we circled back to some of the landscape that we were talking about. If we go back to in particular one group that we mentioned earlier on as it related to mental health, we really talked about Gen Z and I think it is worth pointing out or going a little bit deeper into Gen Z just for a second because we know that they're going to have some of the biggest impact on our industry over the next decade. And we talked about some emerging emerging trends that we're seeing with member mindset. But something that I think is worth pointing out is just how engaged Gen Z is with some of these digital offerings. And what we know right now is that about 44% of Gen Z exercisers are using some form of paid fitness app or digital offering outside of the gym.

(13:11):

And we already talked about the 84% of gym members are also already working out at home. But what this is very interesting to note this because it makes you ask the question, what am I doing to get involved in that? Am I playing a role in that? And I think the bigger thing here for me is how does some of this also circle back to what you do in your club? Because your live offerings are also impacted that the lifetime value of your membership is impacted by sort of this omni fitness connection. And what you can see here is that someone that's outside of the gym, they're working out right around three times a week. The typical gym member is working out on average 3.3 times a week, not dramatically higher, but when they have both, they're working out over five and a half times a week.

(14:05):

So what that's doing is that setting the scene for exercise becoming more of a habit and it's also changing the loyalty to your club if you have some form of connected solution. Something I want to point out here, and we will get to that here in just a second, but I don't know if you realize that just over one out of three people right now are going to an in-person class or experience because they experience it digitally first. If you didn't get that and you didn't write that down, I want you to write that down one more time. Just out of one out of three people are going to a live experience because they experienced it or took that class digitally first. It's really important because when we circle this back to the impact it's going to have on your club, and we look at Omni Fitness Gen Zers who combine these activities in and outside of the club are 40% more likely to have been a member at your facility for three plus years compared to gym only members.

(15:12):

So again, this is circling right back to their loyalty, their lifetime value of being a member there at your facility and ultimately how long they stay. But hey, you've heard enough about statistics, you've heard enough about all this to me talking about the research, why don't we just talk to somebody who's got boots on the ground and is actually doing this stuff. Why don't we let Doug talk a little bit more about what he sees, a little bit of background on where he's at in Montana and some of the success that he's had at the Mac?

Doug Mahlum (15:47):

Alright, thanks. In listening to what Nick had to say, there's a couple of things in there that I agree with a lot of it, but I also think that one of the things that we need to do as club owners and facilities is really up our social environment. As we obviously ran through covid and everybody was scratching their head and trying to figure out what to do, we were also doing that to the point where we were running our own instructors live classes and virtual classes and putting in less mills classes, that type of thing. But one of the things that I have found is once Covid went away, so to speak, is we have had more and more people that have come back to the club for the social aspect. And I think that's an important part to realize that. Just a little bit about the Montana Athletic Club.

(16:58):

We have three Fitness On Demand units, one in the cycling and one in our mind body studio and one in our group exercise studio. Essentially we decided to put those in six or seven years ago, mostly because Montana has not many people in. We're in a small town and what we wanted to be able to do was the problem we were having was not only were we trying to bring members in, but we're also trying to find quality instructors. A town of 4,000 people does not have a plethora of less mills instructors or top of line instructors. So what we need to do was find something to bring people into our classes and that's when we decided to go with Fitness On Demand.

(18:00):

It is been great. The reception that we've gotten from our membership has been really good. A couple of points on those. One of the things is we use Fitness On Demand for, and this is something that nobody really thinks about. It's a great marketing tool for us when we go bring a member around a club, show 'em what's going on, take 'em up to a studio, show 'em that they're able to take classes at any time, there's a kiosk on the wall and all they can do, and they're always amazed that they can do that and the fact that they can, they always, always say, I can do this anytime I want. Yes, you can. I think that that's a great value on that. But I would say that, oh, and here's my next slide. So when we implemented this, I will say this, it's like any other program that you put in, it takes a lot of work.

(19:11):

It is not as simple as putting it in and hoping that people come in, there's staff training and there's a lot of member training. What we wanted to be able to do was create an experience that was absolutely obstacle free because as soon as you get somebody that can't use something that because of a technological reason, the whole thing fails. So what we have is a button on the wall. You push the FOD button and pick out your class simply by scrolling through the screen. The kiosk that's on the wall punch play, you're in the room and it plays. The idea behind that is to make such a smooth experience for them that they want to come back again and again. So that has worked out really well for us.

(20:09):

The other thing is being able to ensure that your membership knows what you have. When we first put in the Fitness On Demand Studios, they were not used much, but with proper training, people have been using it. And then you can see on the class in 2023, we had just over 1600 virtual classes played between all three of these. Our most popular studio is the Group X. Our most popular are actually in the Group X Studio out of the 10 most popular classes, eight of them or Les Mills classes in the cycling studio, which is the second most, I think we did well over 800 in there.

(21:06):

Les Mills is the top 10. Les Mills has five of those classes including the Trip Sprint, that type of thing. It's interesting. The other one that is really popular is BI Vision tours of England. I guess you just like to ride around and in the MINDBODY studio, Pilates and yoga are quite popular. So when we first scheduled these, we tried two different ways of doing this and the first way was bringing it in, scheduling a virtual class so that people could come in. So we'd have live classes and sprinkled in there. We had virtual classes. We discovered that they were not getting used quite as much as we wanted to, and that was simply because there's a reason people can't attend a live class and it's usually scheduled at a time that they can't come in. Well, a virtual class, if it's scheduled at a time, they still may not be able to make it.

(22:17):

They could make it 10 minutes earlier or an hour later, but they can't make that time. So eventually what we ended up doing is we took all of our virtual classes that were scheduled and dropped it with the idea that if somebody wanted to come in and take a body pump class, they could come in at any time, roll it up on the screen and take the class. And we found that people were doing that on an individual basis, but as time went on, they were bringing their friends and pretty soon those virtual classes may have five or six people in them, and that's just a group of teachers getting together after school deciding to do it, that type of thing. So the scheduled versus unscheduled, we're finding that unscheduled works a lot better. It's much more used that way.

(23:09):

Some of those classes, people are go in, they'll try a class for 45 minutes, they'll try it for 10 minutes, decide they don't like it, try a different one. So some of those classes may have not have run to their conclusion, but the idea is that people are trying. The other thing that a point I wanted to touch on, and Nick had talked about this a little bit, was the fact that people were taking virtual classes before they were taking the class that was live. And this is something that we've found that Fitness On Demand works really well. And also our app, we do this on our app quite a bit too, and that is having classes that are more specialized like Tai Chi or Nick's favorite class belly dancing. What we do is,

(24:07):

What we do is we take the instructor and the instructor does basic moves and they're done in big nets so that you have 10 videos and each one's maybe two or three minutes long, but it shows that particular move. Now, people that are intimidated by belly dancing or Tai Chi because they don't want to walk in and appear that they don't understand what's going on, they'll take those classes beforehand, gives them an idea of what goes on, takes that intimidation factor out of that a lot and that we do through the Fitness On Demand. We also do it through the app, and I think that that's worked out really well for us too. So anyway, where are we at, Nick?

Nik Herold (25:00):

Oh, well, I think something to point out is because I know somebody's thinking it. Well, I don't live in Big Fork, I live in Chicago. I live in LA or Seattle or whatever, and that's not my experience. Again, my lead course not so fast my friend. Okay, so before you go down that route, I want you to think about something. Everybody remembers this. Close your eyes for a second and I want you to think back to the first time you went to a movie theater. Okay? And I want you to think about this movie theater may have not been one of the best movie theaters you went to. It might've been a little sticky on the floors. You can actually hear your shoes creaking and squeaking a little bit because someone left Coke there. You might have stale popcorn on the ground and you can smell that steel popcorn.

(25:58):

It's been sitting there for a while. It hasn't really been picked up. There's a little bit of fray on the seats. Maybe they don't recline like the nice ones. And then you look at the screen, it's a little fuzzy, a little crackling sound. It's not the best, right? Everybody knows that experience. Everybody remembers at least going to a theater like that once in their life. Okay, now I want you to think about going to an IMAX theater for the very first time you walk in. It's completely different. The floors are nice, it's clean. You don't have sticky soda on the ground, you don't have milk duds laying around. The seats recline. Maybe now as an adult, you can even have one those adult beverages while you're there and then the sound hits you, boom, you can feel the difference. What am I getting at here? It's the experience that matters no matter what town you're in, you can be in Bigfork or you can be in la, but if the experience isn't right, it's not going to get you there. And what Doug mentioned earlier about the team and how they service you while you're there, those things are what sets you apart. So it absolutely does apply to you anywhere you are.

Doug Mahlum (27:24):

That's all I I'll say one thing on that too, and I think you're exactly right, is the experience matters. When everybody was going through Covid and everybody and their dog was doing aerobic videos with their phone or whatever they could use, the problem that we were all having was the sound wasn't very good and the video wasn't very good. In this world today, you have mere seconds to get attention and those were not getting attention. So a lot of people were discouraged because either the content wasn't very good or they weren't getting a very good experience. What I have found, and particularly working with Les Mills on this is, and everybody here knows that Les Mills does a absolutely outstanding job on the visual experience, the music that they play, it's all stunning. It's absolutely wonderful and that's what brings people back and that's what brings people in. And that's why most of our videos that are played on our Fitness On Demand systems or on our app are less mills. It is, it's the experience that really matters. And I think that if you can do that either with your equipment, which you have to actually go out and spend money to do or work with somebody like Les Mills that really can produce the content, you'll see those figures go up on virtual offerings.

(29:13):

Is picture here

Nik Herold (29:15):

From your clubs, Doug?

Doug Mahlum (29:16):

Yeah. This is a picture of one of our cycling studios. That's the one in Big Fork. We have the same set up in Peak Great Falls and the Wave in Whitefish. This is a video of the Trip, which is the most popular cycling class that we have. Literally hundreds of those are looked at. People walk into the room. A lot of times we just leave this running and people walk by and they'll see it. They'll look at the music and they're just drawn into it. And I think that's a big part of that is the perfect example of the quality that you see in the Les Mills videos.

(30:02):

And this is, there's our mind body studio and a lot of natural light. We do have shades on those, brings the shades down. You can see the video much better. Once again, you stand outside the studio, you hit a button that says FOD, that screen drops, the video comes on, the sound comes on. Nobody has to turn up volume. Nobody has to. There's not 10 or 12 buttons to push. The experience should be like a freshly paved road that has a little downhill slant and you're on a bike and you don't even have to pedal and there's no obstacles if you get to your finish. Exactly. And that's the way that has to work. And if you end up doing it gets too technical, people won't do it.

Nik Herold (31:01):

Awesome, thanks. That was a great analogy. Got to be perfect on the experience. I guess maybe this would be a good time to dive a little bit deeper into some other questions before we get into q and a. You mentioned, or I think we know now how you implement your virtual solution there in the studios. How do you promote those classes to current members and potential new members? Maybe give us an idea of that, Doug.

Doug Mahlum (31:28):

Well, a lot of the promotion, and once again, Les Mills does an outstanding job of providing you with quarterly marketing materials. And in fact, it's a bit like drinking from a fire hose. A lot of times you'll look at all that stuff and you'll go, I don't even know where to start. And we've talked about that with Les Mills a little bit, trying to do something that's a little bit easier for a marketing director or a club owner that has 10,000 other things to do, and now you have to figure out which of 100 photos you want of beautiful photos you want to use. So part of that is having that resource and part of that is being able to make use of that in the proper way, applying it to your Facebook, Instagram, emails to members and that type of thing really puts that out. Another thing that we do is we really do a lot of social media marketing and we include Les Mills and some of our own instructors on that to get them going. So really part of that is just really trying to keep the thought of those videos out there and what they can do. So marketing really for us is social media mostly Facebook, that type of thing, and our website and our email list.

Nik Herold (33:08):

That's awesome. Thanks for going into such detail on that. I think another thing that pops up a lot too is questions on just how do the virtual classes perform relative to some of the live classes. What type of attendance do you see? What kind of trends do you see there? Maybe could you give us some insight into that?

Doug Mahlum (33:32):

Now, live classes are more popular than the virtual class, and I think that's simply because they're live gyms are like bars used to be in Prohibition. Everybody wants to, you can drink for virtually free at home, but you don't. You want to go socialize, you want to be with people, you want to see other people. And that's what fitness facility provides. We've always told our people that a 45 pound weight weighs 45 pounds at their house and it weighs 45 pounds here. Why are they paying us to lift that weight in someplace? So the reason is it's not so much that they have the equipment. They can get the equipment, they can do that. They want to see people, they want to be treated right at the front door. They want to be said hello to, they want to feel like that they're going to have fun and they're going to enjoy themselves and they're going to get fit. So in order to do that, I think that that's just an important thing to look at. So

Nik Herold (34:50):

Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, we do always talk about live still being the pinnacle experience and that's what we want to drive them to. Maybe talk a little bit more about that. You mentioned it earlier that you've seen some of the digital formats actually drive some more demand for some of the live classes or act as sort of a feeder into 'em. How do you see that playing out there at the Mac?

Doug Mahlum (35:14):

Well, all the facilities, I think that that's an important aspect of it. I think as I touched on before, many people are a bit nervous about how to walk into a class. Less mills Classes can be intimidating for people that are unconditioned or older. They just get intimidated. But to be able to say, put that up on their computer or on their app and they can look and they can see and they can see how the moves work, I think that's a huge benefit for them. The hard part is getting people to realize that they can do that, that they have the opportunity to go out and watch the videos and practice before they even get the class. I think that takes a lot of the intimidation out of it. And as I said before, if you can put together, if you've got a specialty class, if you can put together some type of video instructional with the instructor and they walk in the door, they see the instructor, they see other people in the class and people are smiling at 'em, they're going to come back and they're going to ask their friends to come back.

(36:30):

And the whole goal is to create such a wellness, fitness, social event that they never want to leave. And that's what we try to do.

Nik Herold (36:43):

Love that. What are maybe some trends you're seeing demographic-wise using your digital solutions? Are you seeing anything stand out to you or is it all over the map? What do you see with your member base?

Doug Mahlum (36:58):

Well, as you talked about earlier, there are a lot of people that are working out the facility. They're on their phones, they're watching a workout that they have on their phone, have their headphones in and they're doing their thing, which is great. We provide the specialized equipment that they can come in and do that with. So what we want to be able to try to do is engage them somehow. And I think that's the new part is other than you have a lifting platform, why is that person coming into your gym on their phone and not really interacting? How do you create an environment that kind of breaks into that a little bit to create a little bit of a social event that they want to? And part of that is having people that they know come in, that their friends come in and maybe they're meeting some people. So I think right now, as far as the challenge for us, that's been a real challenge. How do you engage the person that's on their phone and doing that and keep them as a member as opposed to them maybe trying to go out and do something on their own.

(38:19):

Yeah,

Nik Herold (38:21):

Yeah. Great. Thoughts on that. Maybe getting more into just the implementation of your platform. How has Fitness On Demand really helped you get that up and running and what your experience has been like with them? We'd love to hear more about that.

Doug Mahlum (38:41):

Well, Fitness On Demand when we first started out with them was when they first started out, and I'm sure Nick wasn't there at the time, but I mean it was a push. I mean, there was a lot of times where maybe the videos weren't as good. We had technical problems, that type of thing. I think it was a real learning experience, not only for us, it was also for Fitness On Demand, but I'll say that they have improved a thousand percent. The fact that they, I would say we haven't had a technical problem in, well, we've got three in Big Fork, three in Whitefish, a couple, so we've got five or six studios around and we really haven't had any technical problems with them. They've been very, very good about correcting that and making sure that the videos are top notch professional, that type of thing.

(39:48):

And they're also really working on expanding their ancillary offerings as far as you can do a Fitness On Demand workout, you can do a flex membership where that person can take that Fitness On Demand, put it on their phone or put it on their home computer. You have control of how that works. One of the things that we try to do is if we have a big summer population, they take off in the winter and in order to try to keep a connection with them, we say, Hey, listen, we have less mills online and we have Flex memberships with Fitness On Demand. You can get all these same videos and you can have 'em at home in Arizona or wherever you are, and when you come back, you'll still have your same membership. So we charge a little bit $15 a month for them to have that keeps a connection to them, keeps them engaged with what's going on at the facility. And I think that works pretty well. But with Fitness On Demand, the quality of their videos are great. The fact that they're working with Les Mills is really good because then you get the best of both worlds. And also the fact that they are continuously upgrading their experience, we couldn't be happier with them at this point.

Nik Herold (41:25):

That's awesome. That's again, great detail on how you use it and your journey with them. Maybe for one more question, could you speak to or make a recommendation for someone who's not using or actively promoting a virtual solution in their club, how do they get started? What do they do? How do they go? What would you recommend?

Doug Mahlum (41:49):

Well, it is like anything else in life, and everybody here has gone through it. If you don't work at it, it's not going to work. It's virtual programs. You just can't put in a less in a kiosk Fitness On Demand and say, okay, it's going to work. It's like a person that wants to be a personal trainer goes out and gets their license and puts their name on the door and says, pt. And they just sit back in their chair and go, okay, where's everybody? Where's all my clients? Well, you got to go out and work at it. It's hard. And the payoff is that, well, you saw we're doing over 1600 classes a year last year, and as an owner operator, that's awesome. Keeps people coming to the club, keeps 'em as members. But the other important thing is there's 1600 aerobic wages that I didn't have to pay aerobic class wages that I didn't have to pay an instructor.

(42:59):

Now take half of it. It's still a big deal. So you have to go out and work at it. You have to market it, you have to sell it to your members, your staff has to totally understand it, and your staff has to be ready to say, okay, lemme go help you with this. And you have to make that experience for the members as smooth as possible. If you do that, it'll work. If you don't, then you've just got a nice little kiosk on the wall and it's not going to do much for you. So you put the work in and it'll work for you.

Nik Herold (43:42):

Wonderful advice. Love it. It's not going to just work if you just slap it on the wall. You got to get out there. You got to educate people.

Doug Mahlum (43:50):

Yeah. It's not like you Nick, where you just call Nick and Nick gets it done.

Nik Herold (43:57):

Well, I appreciate the shout out there, Doug. Appreciate that. I was going to say perhaps enough questions for me, we'd love to open it up to the room. I know we have some questions in the chat. Faith, do you maybe want to hop on and dive into those?

Faith Reece (44:13):

Yeah. Perfect. Quick one, just for some clarity, we got one from Ken asking about the difference between Fitness On Demand versus Les Mills virtual. We've got that answer just plugged into the chat for some clarity, but essentially just wanted to offer a little bit of context there. So we are currently integrating the two platforms. So we've got both the Les Mills offerings within the Fitness On Demand platform, which is Les Mills Virtual, as well as some of the additional workouts that are offered through the Fitness On Demand app. So just for some clarity there, Theresa was asking, and this is a little bit more technical, but she was asking, do you ever have technical difficulties and how do you handle them? So Doug, I know you had mentioned it's been a while, but I guess between you and Nick G, anything to add to that for Teresa?

Doug Mahlum (45:17):

Well, I would say your number one is how's your internet connection? If you don't have a good internet connection, it's really going to be tough to get it because there's so much, the videos are so large anyway, but as far as we're concerned, as I said before, the technical aspect of the nuts and bolts of it, Fitness On Demand has that figured out pretty well. And really, as Faith said, the connection with Fitness On Demand and less Mills is seamless, and we don't even see that. It just appears up there. So that part's great.

Faith Reece (46:05):

Awesome. Yeah, and anything to add there, Nick? Or, I feel like we covered that one pretty good.

Nick Gustafson (46:11):

I think Doug covered it pretty well. I think the only thing I might add is that if there are technical issues that do come up, hopefully they're not common as Doug's experienced, but we do have a team that's here and ready to help. So we've got people on standby should something come up, we're not going to leave our customers alone to try and troubleshoot that. We're here to help should anything happen.

Faith Reece (46:35):

Absolutely. Awesome. Awesome. We've got one from Heather, and I might start with you Doug, and just get some different takes around the room, but she asks, how do you handle class selection if it is up to an individual member? Is it just first come first serve? Do you ever have issues with member disagreeing on which virtual class to choose if they show up to use a studio at the same time?

Doug Mahlum (47:05):

We've not had that problem. Now of course, we have to talk physical sizes here. We've got 2,500, 3000 members versus some other clubs maybe that have 10, 12,000 members. You may have that situation pop up. And I think really at the wave and the peak where got those types of members, I don't think we have that problem. Generally what happens is somebody will come in if the room's open, they take the class now, somebody may pop in with them to take the class, they might pop in halfway through, take the class how that works. And that's usually, we haven't had any problems with that. The nice thing about Fitness On Demand is that the way that their schedule is, if you put your live classes in the schedule, they can't run a virtual class that would overlap onto a live class, which is great. But I would say we haven't had that problem. People have been pretty good about first come first serve. Generally if you've got a group that comes in at a certain time, people realize that and they either join the group or wait until after it's done.

Faith Reece (48:30):

Perfect. Yeah, love to hear that. This goes on the tail end. As a follow up here from Erin, she asked, do you have dedicated virtual studios or do you have one space that virtual and in-person classes share? So I know you answered that they're shared spaces, but maybe you can talk to a little bit more in depth around how you balance those. I know at the beginning you obviously mentioned something around the pool of instructors and using the Fitness On Demand and Les Mills offerings as a supplement to that alongside your live classes. But anything to add on that?

Doug Mahlum (49:17):

Well, we do as a supplement, once again, being in Montana, wherever you are, if you have a member that comes up and says, I really want to try this latest axing or whatever class it is that's brand new, you may not have an instructor. There may not be an instructor in Montana that does that, but you're able to dial up a class more than likely on Fitness On Demand or less mills that may have that type of thing. So you're able to offer that solution to that client. Now, I think that's an important part of it as far as doing virtual rooms and live rooms, spaces that are premium. We've combined the two. I've seen facilities that have virtual and live rooms at the same time.

(50:12):

If you have the room for it, it's definitely worth try. You can run a couple different classes. It's hard to say. We don't really have a problem with, I guess what we're trying to do is everybody has a spin. Everybody has a mind body room that you might have seven or eight classes a day in it, but the rest of the time it's empty. So that's a big chunk of real estate. How are you going to fill that real estate? How are you going to get people in there and Fitness On Demand less Mills does that. And like I say, if you don't schedule the classes, people walk up and they're very comfortable about going into it at that point. So yeah, that's what I think. That's where we are with that.

Faith Reece (50:58):

Love that take. Yeah, absolutely. Want to make sure you can use that space efficiently and effectively as possible. So Awesome. Well, it looks like we've wrapped up on all the questions. If anyone does have additional questions, feel free to reach out to your Les Mills rep and or in the follow-up email that you'll receive with the recording. Just after the session ends, you'll see an option to reach out and get in touch with us there. So feel free to reach out with any questions that may come up after the sessions ended. And we are always here to help answer and collaborate on those. So,

Doug Mahlum (51:41):

And then on that email, if you go ahead and put my email on there too, I'd be more than happy to answer questions for anybody that's looking at doing this or having problems getting people in roll out here, trying to create a better environment for people. And that's one of my goals is to do that. So if I can help somebody with that, I'd be more than happy.

Faith Reece (52:09):

Perfect. Appreciate the support there, Doug, and have absolutely loved hearing from you and your approach when it comes to everything digital and combining that with your live current offering. So just want to give a quick shout to our three speakers and participants today, Nick Gustafson, Nick, Harold and Doug. And just really appreciate your expertise in this area. So we will go ahead and wrap for the day. Like I said, feel free to reach out with any questions and have a great rest of your day. Appreciate your time. Thanks everyone.

Doug Mahlum (52:47):

Alright, thank you

Nik Herold (52:49):

Doug. I'll see you at the belly dancing class later today.

Doug Mahlum (52:52):

Bring your belly buddy.

Nik Herold (52:57):

You got it.