Name: How to Reopen: Making sure you’re safe at the gym
Uploaded: 2020-05-19
Duration: 4 min 39 s
Description: Crunch Fitness CEO Jim Rowley explains.

How to Reopen: Making sure you’re safe at the gym

Features

I think the challenges for reopening a gym is just understanding what the conditions are going to be. Are they going to follow the CDC and White House guidelines, which really talking about sanitation and social distancing? Are there going to be different? State requirements are gonna be different. Local requirements. And how do you prepare for that? So that you're ready when you get the green light I crunch. We've been building a 40 page readiness plan both for our own clubs and our franchise network. That includes social distancing, uh, sanitation, disinfection, um, changing our classes, changing our protocols with personal training. Um, even changing the way you check in. We're working on automation that allows us to count members as they come in and count members as they leave. We built a grid system on our fitness exercise floor. So when you register via the app, you have a number. When you come into the group class, you go to that number and it's gridded out showing 60 separation between you and the next member. And I think this will go beyond kind of reopening. I think that there will be a new kind of operating best practices in the gyms, and the member is going to have to adhere to, which ensures that you you wipe down your equipment, you sanitize your equipment. You ensure that your hands are clean. You don't touch your face. You maintain some level of social distancing. Look, high fives happened in the gyms for a long time, right? I don't know if high fives come back to the gym or God, but I think there's also social behaviors that will go beyond the gym walls, right? So how do we interact in public is going to translate to how we interact in the gym. I think there will be an abundance of caution. Uh, look, I'm a former Marine and the Marine Corps history. We learned that, you know, while brave and courageous to be the first wave to storm the beachhead. Unfortunately, the losses are usually greater than 50% right? So I don't know that our franchisees want to storm the beach head and they really they want to ensure that there's a safe environment for the team members and the members. The last thing we want to have happened is to go in prematurely, not be prepared and then we have a rebound and we don't want to be the cause of any of them. Both Our anticipation is not that 100% of the members come back on day one, and we already know that 100% of the clubs will not open on Day one, so there'll be a phased approach to return to work status. The other thing that's interesting is, if you look at a lot of the data, it really supports a healthy lifestyle and exercise regime. Good nutritional habits. Those are things that can help stave off virus. So we're encouraged by that. We also think there's a lot of pent up demand. People have been put into their their small universe for the better part of the last six weeks and so forth. And they need an outlet. Mhm. The long term impact is going to be this this lack of revenues. So, um, at crunch we close effectively on March 17th, For the majority of our units, uh, we continue to pay our employees through the end of March despite the fact that we were closed. We've also carried on paying their their portion of their health benefits, Uh, during furlough. It was unfortunate, but I had to furlough nearly 3000 employees, effective April 1st. But we still maintained our office space. We've got our executive team. We've all taken a 20% pay reduction during this period. And, uh, what I'm concerned about is that if this continues into June and July and there's no back to work, um, the eventuality is there's a lot of gyms aren't going to be able to survive without money. And I think this is the thing, especially for crunch. I mean, we were too big to qualify for a lot of the loans that were provided via the S P A and the government, but we were too small to matter as well. So we've been caught in this point where, um, there are no loans. There are no grants. There's nothing that were eligible for. So we're having to survive on just, you know, what we did in preparation in terms of our cash flows are balance sheets and so forth, and that's made it very difficult