City Fitness has five premium locations across Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a sixth location currently being built. They pride themselves on operating Philadelphia’s most well-maintained health clubs, providing excellent customer service, and using the most cutting-edge fitness technology and programming to help their members achieve their goals. Ken Davies, CEO of City Fitness, goal is to achieve perfection in each one of his clubs and provide an elite experience and brand that no other facility offers. Davies and City Fitness are extremely community focused and strive to help Philadelphia become the fittest city in the United States.
Davies faced several challenges in the early years with City Fitness. Being a new brand with major construction delays, membership started slower than expected when he opened. He faced problems with his equipment provider through design flaws and poor servicing in turn causing a high level of break downs and extremely long down time. Timing didn’t help either, as Davies was opening his first club, the recession of 2008-2010 hit. Even with facing bankruptcy, Davies was determined to make his business a success. To battle the slow pre-sale and economic down turn, he adopted a low-cost strategy to drive up membership numbers quickly. Even in doing so, he also knew that he ultimately wanted to continue to provide his exercisers a high level of service, cleanliness, programing and equipment. As the company stabilized, he was able to start raising monthly dues to a level to support the core values that City Fitness was built on.
Davies partnered with Bill Shotwell, Senior Key Account Manager for Precor, with the goal of further enhancing his brand, services, and replaced all of his equipment at his clubs and most recently fully equipped his newest location in Fishtown, PA (24,000 square feet). Together they selected Precor networked Experience Series 880 Line of cardio, Spinner Rally indoor cycle bikes, Discovery Series Selectorized, Benches & Racks, and Plate Loaded lines, Assault AirBikes, and FTS Glide to be installed. Davies chose to network his cardio equipment to offer his exercisers a high-quality entertainment personalized viewing experience on every piece of cardio equipment and to help differentiate his clubs from other non-networked clubs throughout Philadelphia.
Since stabilizing his first club, introducing new ones, enhancing his brand and partnering with Precor, City Fitness has increased their profitability and has gross revenues of $7.5 million and over 100 employees. Having Precor equipment installed in all of his locations has made a huge impact on our member experience and service response time, which has improved to a 24-48 hour turnaround time, states Davies. He also adds that having Precor equipment has directly impacted City Fitness’s membership retention numbers.
Since 75% of City Fitness members are millennials, updating their equipment to Precor has had a positive impact with their members. Prior to the update, City Fitness would have four to five maintenance issues a day. Now they only have compliments on their equipment. Davies and the entire City Fitness family are thrilled to work with Precor and have proved to be the perfect partner when opening new locations. Hear Ken’s own words about what partnering with Precor has done for his business here:
