Sep 20, 2007 4:21 PM

With almost 20 years of experience in the hotel industry, Tim Miller is at your service with hip, cosmopolitan Crunch Fitness.

Q: Why did you accept the job of CEO of Crunch?

A: The thing that attracted me about this job was that Crunch is such an undeniable brand in the marketplace, and I saw that it was exciting and that it was outside of the box. And I thought that has very much to do with my whole career of sort of doing the same thing in the hotel business. And I thought that it would be interesting to come in and shake it up a bit the way that I’ve done in my past career. The fitness business is so exciting. It’s all about service at the end of the day, and I just think that Crunch is the brand that I wanted to be aligned with.

Q: How does your past work experience in the hospitality industry help you in your CEO role at Crunch?

A: A big part of my career was spent actually working in the brand arena for hotels. So figuring out what made hotels tick and how to make them appealing to the consumer and how to really to create an audience and a fan base. We also spent a lot of time working on loyalty and how to create loyalty programs and environments that were all about irresistible offerings. I feel like Crunch is just right for both of those things. It’s really ready to take the foundation of its brand and to explode it a little bit and see what else is out there and how to fortify it. I also think that in our industry, we really need to start focusing on how to look at the members that are working out with us every day and make sure that they stay working out with us every day.

Q: What do you think about Crunch’s hip, unconventional image?

A: Crunch was devised to be unconventional and really outside the box. I think that we are seeing so much of that in the consumer experience in general. I think what’s happening so much in the consumer world at large is that there are people that now have an understanding for different. Our lives and our consumer lives are not all based upon homogenized offerings. But they’re really based on a point of view, and I think Crunch definitely was founded on a point of view of being different than everyone else and being slightly irreverent and fun. And that’s what we try to do every day. We try to provide an offering that is different and unique but thoughtful and a little provocative.

Q: And not many clubs have been featured in “Sex and the City,” and I read that somewhere, and I remember that scene, but I just didn’t connect the two. But that’s great publicity.

A: We think our clubs are really formed by the members. Our members are fun, young at heart, exciting individuals. They span what I would call a psycho-graphic, more than a demographic. They’re not all 18 and not all 80, but they’re somewhere in between. And they really have a zest for doing things differently. So we program a lot of what we do for people that like to be unique and like to live in their own space. We are sort of famous for our group fitness activity. Well, we cater that group activity to what turns our members on and what excites them. We really try to draw from very current pop references to make it all very topical and at the same time give them a good workout. 

Q: You used the word, not demographic, but what word did you use there?

A: I used the word psycho-graphic because I think they are all sort of held together by a common psychic as opposed to how old they are, how much they spend and what kind of car they drive. I think it’s really all about how they live. 

Q: How do you anticipate Crunch Fitness will change with you as CEO?

A: We’re really going to focus on what makes us special and unique. I think that’s really what our obligation in the marketplace is. Like I said earlier, I think we are really going to focus on the membership experience and what it means to be a member of Crunch and that it’s not just about getting on a treadmill or pressing some free weights. That’s really all about that experience of working out at our club. And working out at Crunch is really being part of a community, and that’s kind of a spot that we can play in very, very easily, and that’s kind of what excites me is providing an experience for members that is unlike anyplace else. That’s really what our focus is going to be about.

Q: What are your key initiatives, and what new service initiatives are you creating at Crunch?

A: Part of what we want to focus is the whole idea of it being more than just a place to work out. So we really want to focus on our activities that we’re doing with members, and we want to focus on social activities that aren’t all about athletics. We want to get into employee mixers and parties, and we want to fortify our juice bar effort and make sure that in the clubs that we have sort of a center of activity and a center of community for our members so they feel like they’re part of something. We also really want to focus on the service piece in our clubs. We really want to focus on not just being different but being incredibly warm and being incredibly welcoming into our clubs. I feel like somewhere along the line in a lot of our industry, that sort of goes out the door, and we are just worried about getting members in, but we really want to focus on making them really happy and part of it all while they are there.

Q: What are you doing to increase member retention?

A: This is something that we dealt with all the time in the hotel industry, for sure. When I talk about how similar these industries are, and I get these questions all the time is, “Wow, you went from this one industry to something completely different.” Really, at the end of the day, I don’t think they’re completely different. I think in so many ways they are the same exact thing. In the hotel industry, we focused a lot of time on how to make sure the guests came back and spent time with us every time they were in that city. I really look at membership retention as being the same thing. I really look at membership retention as creating experiences that are just irresistible, and when you create an experience that are irresistible and you’re providing a great product and you have a staff that is welcoming and fun and very inclusive, I think that solves the membership retention piece. I don’t think we are going to reinvent the wheel, but I think we are going to the basics and instead of just focusing on sales and instead of focusing on the things that are all about attracting new members, we really want spend a lot of time keeping the members that we have engaged and happy. I think that that’s what a lot of people forget to do is really fully engage their members because I think that if you are providing a fun, exciting and engaging experience, you won’t want to go someplace else. You’ll want to stay where you are. I think that’s true for so many things in life and certainly true in the gym when we go several times a week and we just want to be engaged in that experience and be stimulated.

Q: From afar, when you viewed the club industry from a distance, how have you viewed that evolution through the years, whether it’s membership demographics, programming, staffing, pricing, the feel of the facilities? What did you think of the club industry?

A: I think it’s fascinating. I’ve been a gym member for 25 years. I’ve been a regular, serious workout guy pretty much all my life. I guess being in something, you slowly watch it evolve. To me, what’s so great about the industry is that it really listens to what its membership wants. Crunch is in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta. We’re in big, booming bustling cities. We tend to cater to people that work really hard. When they’re in the gym, they want to work out really hard and play really hard. And I think that’s what the industry has involved [into], to let people get in and be really very serious about whatever they want to do whether they want to take the most cutting-edge group fitness class, we allow them to do that. If they want to get in and do some personal training and get a very efficient workout with an expert, I think the industry is turning towards that. The interesting thing for me, and one of the things that is sort of profound, is how the industry at large has sort of kept up. What Crunch did early on in its inception was Crunch was innovative, and Crunch led the way. That’s what we really want to focus on going forward. How do we want to continue to be an innovator? How do we want to continue to rethink the model of fitness and shake it up on its head a little bit?

Q: What clubs—you can name them, you don’t have to—were you a part of before? And did you take some of those experiences into this job as well, as a member of a club, a regular member and not a businessman?

A: I was a member of Crunch, which was great. When I was on the road, I always worked out at Crunches because they were in all the cities I went to. So I’ve drawn a lot from that experience. My neighborhood gym in New York was a Gold’s Gym. It’s a great, fantastic gym that I certainly, because I was there every day, learned a lot from. I think that I’m really taking more from my ex-life than I am taking from my gym life because I think that I’m really more interested in doing things unconventionally to the industry than to do what everyone else is doing.

Q: I’m sorry, I think you mentioned something about your past life and your business life, can you repeat that again? I don’t think I could quite hear you there.

A: I’m more interested in drawing from my life as a hotelier and as an entertainer, someone in the entrainment business, than I am really interested in drawing on my gym-going life because I think that that’s going to be the point of differentiation for Crunch, and ultimately that’s what our members are looking for. Like I said, we’re in cities where the average member has several different choices and can choose any one of the clubs out there. We want people to join Crunch because it absolutely is a fit with who they are and what kind of experience they want when they’re looking to work out.

Q: You mention those cities—New York, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami—big cities. What other cities are you targeting, or are you targeting more clubs in those cities?

A: We’re doing both actually. We are definitely looking to expand our presence in the cities where we already are. We feel like some of those markets we’re barely begun to comb. I’ll use Miami as an example. We think there’s a lot more depth in the market in Miami, so we’re looking to pursue some new opportunities there. We’re also looking to, and not just to be in the cities where we already are, but we’re looking at other markets that will allow us to expand the brand, but we want to do it in a way that makes sense. So we want to make sure that the city and the potential members that we go into are indeed symbiotic to what we already have established as a brand. And we want to make sure that we have a real audience and a real membership base for wherever we go. And I don’t think that every city in America lends itself to that outside-the-box Crunch experience. We’re looking all over the map for next steps for us.

Q: It sounds like you’re still focused on big metropolitan cities rather than smaller cities. It could be any example I could throw out there, but it looks like you’ve looking at some more big-time cities.

A: Yeah. I think we’re definitely looking to be in major markets. Absolutely.

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