The MyGym Story Continued… Start, Stop, Start, Stop…
The first official day of trading for MyGym was the 29th of August 2020. Thanks to our pre-sale event, we had good numbers of people turning up to train on the first weekend - the rumours had already spread that there was a new gym in Stockport, so the membership numbers climbed pretty well.
There was still the present threat of Covid - daily news updates on death tolls, cases etc still existed. Conversations about Covid, restrictions on movement and the like were commonplace. We needed alcohol gels around the gym, showers were out of bounds and we had to keep tabs on people who were using the building. The gym doors were open, the airflow was maximised and the cleaning non-stop.
That was the climate of the day.
In the early days of opening we were finding our feet, battling with various delays…
Our broadband was delayed by two whole weeks! It meant we were running our membership software across a dodgy 4G connection, which made signing people up fun.
We still hadn’t had much of our equipment delivered, so although it wasn’t a massive problem (we didn’t have many members), it did mean that we were on the phone a lot, finding out what was going on and when we could expect important gym equipment to arrive.
Our direct debit handling software people made a mistake on our set up, so we were delayed for a whole month getting our first payments - a not insignificant amount of money either, especially to a start up!
Despite these issues, we managed to work our way through things. We established our working practices, how we do things, where stuff goes etc. We got used to what a day, week, month etc looked like at the gym. When the bins are collected, when deliveries come, what are busy and quite times looked like, when the best times to do certain jobs were.
There was there never ending paperwork and set up of things too. The alarms, the electronic payment gateways, the supplier accounts, the bin collections, the snag list of the building and everything else.
The days were long, but who said setting up a business was easy?!
When we look back at those early images, it’s hilarious to see how bare the gym was - no weightlifting platforms, no gun rack for the barebells, no monkey bars, no plyo boxes…
Compared to nowadays where we have a huge amount of equipment, it seems like a world apart. I suppose that’s growth though - you don’t appreciate it as it’s happening, you just look back a while later and see how far you’ve come!
Popularity was growing… but closure was on its way
We were relentless on social media in the early days - we had to be. We had posts going up, people were talking and the reputation of the place was growing. We had people visiting from all over the town, ex-colleagues from the industry were popping by an the signups were growing daily. We were doing well, celebrating every new milestone hit (we were measuring them in 10s back then!).
We worked our way through our first month, ending the month in a nice position. We weren’t exactly flying, but we ended the month ahead of where we expected to be, which was a nice return.
There was only one issue… the Covid thing wasn’t going away. We kept hearing rumours about another lockdown. Whilst there was no obvious threat to the gym (gyms weren’t in the lists of places threatened with closure), it wouldn’t go away. We were a month into opening a business that cost a lot of money - we had to start making something back. We were doing everything we could - alcohol gels all over the place, keeping doors open to promote lots of air flow, disinfectant sprays everywhere etc.
It didn’t really matter though - the decision would be made by the government, not us.
Finally, the news we were dreading was delivered - we could have to close for a month in November. I can’t remember the details, but it was along the lines of ‘in order to protect Christmas, we had to go into lockdown for November’. From the 1st of November, we weren’t allowed to be open. All of those members we’d worked so hard to sign up… all of that revenue… halted. Right when we needed it most!
Once the immediate panic subsided, we then had to think things through. How much cash did we have in the bank? What was our burn rate? What could we save? How could we run?
Our first move was to send an email out to our members, telling them that we’d freeze all of their direct debit payments immediately. The response was incredible…
At the time we had around 120 members. Having sent the email out, we had 110 people come back and tell us to keep their payments running - we couldn’t believe it. Out of 120 members, 110 wanted to keep paying us. That was remarkable and it kept us going. It literally saved MyGym. Without that, we could have been facing the need to borrow money and end up going down a rabbit hole of problems.
We had a month we needed to close for. That gave us a chance to get on top of things and re-open.
During the lockdown, we had a few additional items make their way to us, so the gym started to fill up a little more. Our monkey bars were installed. Stockport Spartans had more of their equipment moved over and the additional bits such as mats and more plates arrived. We were starting to look more like the gym we wanted to be.
December came around, the gym opened up and away we went. A quick ‘post-lockdown’ offer helped to us rebuild lost numbers, and we started to get off our knees. We were still in a stick situation, but we were growing.
December is typically a very quiet month in the fitness industry. Members have other distractions, there are parties to go to, kids are off school, people are going to start in January’ etc. It’s not a great month to re-open, but it’s better than being closed. We saw out the month with a great bit of luck… the cable machine we were expecting in April (Covid delay) was delivered on the 21st of December, which was a nice bonus just before Christmas.
But there was another problem to come…
Lockdown 3 - the Final Boss
We were told that there’d be another lockdown from the 30the December. It was a real kick in the nuts for a few reasons…
We’d just been locked down. Any momentum we’d gained, we’d lose straight away.
It was open-ended. We didn’t know when we’d be allowed to open again.
Some of our members had generously paid for us even when we were closed - that was OK when it was for a month. Would they be willing to do that whilst we were closed indefinitely?
January is historically the biggest month in fitness - we were about to lose the biggest growth market possibility we had, just when we needed it most.
It was right back to where we were. Same email to the members (there was 150 of them now) - similar response. The 110 kept paying. Thankfully, they’d been amazing. The majority continued to pay us, but we weren’t sure for how long. The lights went off, the doors were closed, the shutters went down and the business we’d worked so hard on was hanging in the balance.
We’d gone from realising a dream to closing it within 4 months…