From One Anytime Fitness Club to Two

"Hardest transition for me was moving from one club to two clubs."

In his session at the Mastermind Gym Solutions Fall Summit, Brett Livingstone, a multi-club owner of the year, shared a sentiment that resonates with every ambitious gym owner. The leap from one location to two is not just a doubling of your business; it’s a fundamental shift in your role as a leader.

"At the first club, I was chief cook and bottle washer," Brett says. "I signed up everybody. I fixed the toilet. I dealt with cancellations. I dealt with everything in the club. I probably knew three quarters of ‘em. I probably signed up three quarters of them, and so every day was a little bit like a family reunion. As I came in, I was really a driver of culture."

This is the reality for most single-club owners. You are the heart and soul of your business. You are the culture. But what happens when you have to be in two places at once?

"Now I have to split myself up a bit," Brett explains. "And I’ve gotta send 70% of myself over here and 30% of myself over here while still trying to maintain that culture, right?"

This is the crux of the challenge. You can’t be in two places at once, and you can’t clone yourself. So how do you scale your culture? How do you ensure that the magic of your first club is replicated in your second, third, and fourth?

Find Your "Dennis"

For Brett, the answer was finding his "Dennis."

"Everybody needs a dentist," he says. "I’ve got one. If you don’t have one, find one. And Dennis came along at the right time. I could not afford him. I could not afford him so much that I took my salary completely down to zero. And he was the first person I paid six figures to just to come on board with this. And I could absolutely not afford it in any, in any way, shape or form."

This is a powerful lesson for any owner who is feeling stuck. You can’t do it all yourself. You have to find people you trust, and you have to be willing to invest in them, even if it means making a personal sacrifice in the short term.

"You guys have heard the work, you know, working on your business in the business instead of on the, on the business instead of in the business," Brett says. "He truly allowed me to do that, and it really allowed us to set ourselves free. We were in alignment, you know, uh, with how we treat people and how we should manage the business. And our goals were in alignment, such that I was able to trust him to take over those daily operations and establish the cultures within the clubs. I could not have done that without Dennis. Okay? So find your dentist, right? And if you do nothing more than, than do that with what I’m gonna talk about today, then, then you’ll be above the rest."

Building Systems at Scale

Once you have your key person in place, the next step is to build systems that empower your entire team.

"We have something within our clubs once somebody gets through our training, you know, established, which is, could be up to 30 or 60 days depending on how part-time or full-time they are," Brett explains. "But once they are on board and kind of customer facing, every single one of them down to the most junior member has the ability to make any financial decision in any customer related decision. Right there on the spot."

This is a radical level of trust, but it’s essential for scaling. You can’t be the bottleneck in your own business. You have to empower your team to make decisions, even if they get it wrong sometimes.

"Do they get things wrong? Of course they do," Brett says. "Do we beat them up for it? Of course not. We just course correct afterwards and we just talk to ‘em about it a little bit. But having that ability to have them out making those decisions for us, frees us up to do things that are more important."

The North Star of Customer Experience

With a trusted team in place, you can then focus on the most important aspect of your business: the customer experience.

"We do instill in everybody this concept of having a North star," Brett says. "And typically that might be how you treat people or maybe a direction for the company, that type of thing. But what we do, we focus on more, is how do we make the customers feel? How do we make a member feel, feel people will say that. You’ll forget what they say, but you won’t forget how they make you feel."

This is the foundation of a scalable culture. It’s not about a rigid set of rules; it’s about a shared understanding of how you want your members to feel at every stage of their journey.

In our next post, we’ll dive deeper into the practical tactics Brett uses to create a world-class customer experience and drive sustainable growth.