Ep 145 - Martin Seibold: How to lead in times of crisis.

The secrets of a humble but passionate path to success.

Martin Seibold is a resilient business leader who has overcome many obstacles in fitness. Today he's overseeing LifeFit Group's six brands, including Fitness First, Barry's Bootcamp, elbgym, Smile X and The Gym Society.

Passionate about the fitness experience and the atmosphere of the gym, in this episode Martin teaches us how to lead in times of crisis, lessons from the rise and fall of one of the biggest fitness brands in Europe, and the highs and lows of reopening after COVID-19.

For more information on the Escape Your Limits podcast visit https://escapefitness.com/podcast

Video – https://youtu.be/BaQfYlW4Lm8

Martin Seibold started out working in the family-owned gym of his parents. The facility was the first member of IHRSA in Germany, bought by Fitness First which took on the staff and achieved incredible growth both nationally and around the world.Martin's passion for fitness had been sparked. He joined as marketing manager and, within six years, the business has expanded to over 90 gyms.

Martin has been living in the UK since 2006 when Fitness First founder, Mike Balfour, asked him to move, following eight years of success with the brand in Germany.

Today, Martin is leading multi-brand strategies and teams around the world in implementing humble growth strategies for the long term success of the LifeFit Group.

The LifeFit Group unites multiple fitness brands from the boutique, high-value-low-price and premium segments under one roof, including Fitness First, Barry's Bootcamp, elbgym, Smile X and The Gym Society. The Group is committed to inspire and support its customers to live their best lives through personal, fun and focused health and fitness experiences.

 

For more information visit www.lifefit-group.com

 

Episode highlights - 

• What lessons Martin has learned as a business leader responsible for incredible expansion, and what he'd change if he could do it again.
• Why looking after people and partners, both internally and externally, is the only way to achieve long-term survival. Expansion isn't the only goal and it's easy to forget how important relationships are to success.
• How you can diversify your offering in the right places to ensure that the customer has exactly what they want in the right location, and ensuring a sustainable business.
• Why you need to assign specific teams to specific responsibilities, and not spread your resource over too many different skillset needs.
• How important it is to take interest in what your teams are doing in order to get the best out of them and support them.
• What merging cultures, strategies and teams together is like in practice when a business is acquired.
• Why buy-outs can be awful for members, leading to a worse service offering in the short term at least, but how it can also be used for good.
• What multi-brand strategies can do to provide flexibility in an offering, and how you can decide which responsibilities are based centrally and which need to be carried out by local teams.
• Why it's important to celebrate mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, but being open and honest, or even laughing about them, means that you can learn from them to ensure that a problem doesn't get bigger.
• How you can manage and forecast in uncertain times, and what benefits there are to ensuring there's trust between operators and investors when it comes to a business model.
• Why this is not the time for cutting percentages here and there, but making substantial changes to how you work and the structure of everything that you do.
• How long will it take to get back to pre-COVID revenue levels after the pandemic passes.

 

Join Matthew Januszek in conversation with Martin Seibold…