Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM
Interview with Carl Liebert, CEO of 24 Hour Fitness, San Ramon, CA
As former Home Depot executive Carl Liebert makes a home for himself as the new CEO at 24 Hour Fitness, he is moving the chain into new markets on the East Coast, in Asia and into the world of children’s programming.
Q: Yeah, that sounds like a nice option. It’ll be interesting to see if that is implemented in a lot more clubs in the future.Your company is celebrating its 24th anniversary, not generally a milestone year, but considering your company is named 24 Hour Fitness, you are celebrating big this year. Please give us some details about what you have in place for the year to help celebrate the anniversary.
A: I’ll tell you it’s funny. We actually pulled the archives, and when Mark signed the papers and borrowed the money to actually do the deal on the company, it was a day in June. It was really Mark’s idea. This is our 24th year. It’s not about a day; it’s about a year of celebration. We rolled out some of the old T-shirts back into the clubs back when Mark was in charge of the clubs and head of marketing. We had some fun with that.
Our convention, coming up in two weeks, is what I call a quasi training session, learning session and bracketing a unique celebration of what I consider our proud past and our bright future. If I told everything we were going to do at the convention, then it wouldn’t be a surprise for Mark Mastrov, but it’s going to be a very special two-and-a-half days for us. We may bring in a few characters from the past that have helped create this great company. We’re going to share in some of the meetings some of the documents, and we’re going to celebrate what I call this wonderful heritage of 24 years at 24 Hour Fitness.
You know, I started out saying we’ve got to have Kiefer Sutherland and should have this “24” theme and thought that would be fun, but it got a little expensive. But every month we may expose our members and our team members to maybe an additional surprise or two—a roll out or two—and maybe roll out a technology solution and some added enhancements. We’ve got a monthly calendar of the things of where we will be putting in clubs. I don’t want to give all those way, but what we are hoping for is to surprise and delight both our members and team members. And each month we have a little something special to roll out and celebrate it.
My biggest fear is most people celebrate their 25th anniversary so I don’t know what I’m going to do to top the 24th. So you’ve got a lot of pressure on me right now.
Q: Well thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us. I really do appreciate it. I just want to remind our listeners that we will be doing additional podcasts in the future with various executives in the industry. Feel free to let us know who you would be interested in hearing from. Thank you again, Mr. Leibert, for getting together with us. We really do appreciate it.
A: Well, thank you very much, and make sure you stop in when you are out this way.
Q: I definitely will.
A: Thank you.
Q: Great, thank you.
A: Ok, bye.
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Pamela Kufahl
Editor
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