Survival of the fittest

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CLOCKWISE: Gerhard Pretorius, Louise Oakley, Hayley Cottan, Greg Boucher, Simon Brown, Devon Graham, Louise Birchall and Daryn Berriman.

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MEFITPRO CEO Greg Boucher is based in Dubai.

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Simon Brown, H&F manager, The Aviation Club.

Attracting skilled staff and new memberships is a challenge for the region's fitness industry. Health club management experts talk to Leisure Manager about how to train your team, retain members and find your niche.

You all have hands-on fitness training and operational experience. How does this benefit you as health club managers and what training gaps do you see in the industry?

Brown: This is a trait particular to the people that choose to come to Dubai. Typically in the UK, the way to club general management is through sales, whereas here it's people with experience in group exercise, personal training (PT) and sales. I think that a lot of club managers here are multi-skilled.

Boucher: It helps managers understand what's needed in a gym and to move clubs forward more than those that have people making decisions who aren't from a fitness background. Budgets are halted or spent in the wrong areas, whereas if you've come from a PT background you'll realise it could be spent in another way.

Pretorius: Most of us are from abroad, bringing experience over here. I haven't seen a lot of management development courses available in the Middle East itself.

Graham: There aren't any here. So it's really up to us to get that going.

Brown: Any ongoing training and development is predominately on the fitness side of things. When it comes to supervisory or health club management-specific skills sets, unless you are with a commercial set up it's extremely difficult here.

Boucher: Part of the reason that there's not many of these courses coming out here is that companies have tried to set them up in the past but the uptake wasn't very good. Maybe they haven't got the database to actually tell people about it - that might be one of the problems.

There's a company that wants us to help them in launching and bringing club management training out here. But they've tried before apparently and no one was willing to invest in their staff to up-skill them.

Graham: Why do you think they did not actually want to do this?

Boucher: It's not a commercial industry right now and a lot of gyms are in hotels, which would rather have staff doing a service-based course they run in-house than send someone on an outside course. There's never been a budget for it. Or they might not want to invest in their management, because they think they might leave after a few years.

We hear stories of instructors not qualified to international standards and of lifeguards that can't swim. What staffing challenges do you face?

Pretorius: Finding the right skilled and qualified people, from fitness instructors and PTs through to lifeguards and recreation attendants, has been quite a big challenge for us. We're working with Impact British Training Solutions to qualify our team.

The minimum requirement we'd expect from a fitness instructor is CYQ Gym Instructor Level 2, which is recognised internationally by the Register of Exercise Professionals (REPs) and Central YMCA Qualifications (CYQ) in the UK. From this, there is further progression for our instructors through Impact. There are other qualification bodies too, such as the American Council on Exercise (ACE).

Graham: Even when they have that certification it's lacking. I have a training programme that I've developed because I expect people to come not totally qualified, so I start them on my programme going through basic physiology, anatomy, biomechanics etc, and we have ongoing testing, because they have to be up to speed.

Boucher: We need to look at the basics too. Does everyone have a current CPR certificate in the fitness club? There's no regulation to say that they're being kept. Is the basic foundation there?

Again it comes back to who we're hiring and where we're able to get this talent pool from around the world. Typically, in the Asian market there are no formal standards but in mature markets such as the UK, US or Australia, people aren't willing to move for the salaries or the packages that we're able to offer in this part of the world.

That's really where the challenge lies, it's the people coming in and I think what Devon's doing, while pretty unheard of, is definitely good for the industry.

Brown: But one thing I've found that has changed in the industry over the last five years is there are now enough people coming to Dubai who want to work in the fitness industry out here. I haven't had to use any recruitment companies overseas for the last four years and that surprised me, especially when I set up the first club with Fitness First; a lot of the people who were recruited were all local, they were working here already.

How do you attract new members?

Berriman: We've got 15 members at the moment and 60 is our limit. It's a small facility so I want to keep that exclusive approach and create that culture of belonging to something. For example, tonight we're holding members' cocktails to bring them together with PT clients and hotel management so they get to know one another.

I'd say about 10% of guests use the gym. It's mostly a business hotel so it's very difficult to get personal training out of them; we get that from outside guests.

Graham: We have a similar approach. We're attracting private membership as well as corporate. Fortunately for us, next door is a tower with 35 floors of offices so I get lots of membership enquires and we select our members. They have to fit together.

Brown: We've had to change our approach in terms of becoming far more proactive with membership subscription. The business model in Dubai changed three years ago when the first commercial health club opened offering choice and flexibility, because previous to that most memberships were based on annual subscription, where it was a set fee and money up front.

At the end of the day it's all about membership subscription; without that you don't have the secondary spend for PT, for group exercise classes, for F&B or for spa, so it's in a club's interest to maximise its footfall.

We still operate an annual membership subscription but we've taken a more proactive approach setting up different payment methods to make it easier for people, number one to leverage more from existing members of the club in terms of them giving referrals. It takes a lot for a first-time user to go to a club so we're in the business of generating leads to maximise the number of people that we can present our product to.

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