Whenever we’re asked why we thought to open a gym, we can’t help drift back to Thailand.
These days it feels like we’ve always owned the Häus – but we took some time out to reflect on how we got here, our first year in business, and our plans for the future. We hope you enjoy our story!
Whilst holidaying in Thailand in early 2015 we quickly fell in love with their way of life, and were besotted with the cute open air gym we trained at each morning. Having both worked in marketing for many years, the idea struck us – we need to leave the desk jobs behind, and be in a gym!
On returning home we discussed how to move forwards with this idea, and realised that personal training was a good fit. In our marketing roles we had always helped people lead a healthy life through nutritional choices, so helping face to face felt like an obvious choice. To that end we decided to get our qualifications and set a 5 year goal of becoming gym owners. We had worked in marketing for a combined 18 years, and were stepping away from the 9-5 mentality with its comfort of a good salary, to something a lot more risky, and quite frankly scary.
“we needed to leave the desk jobs behind, and be in a gym!”
We completed a full time PT qualification course in late 2015, and so began our journey. Well, we took a little time off for Tony to finish competing that year!
Once working as full time trainers we knew we had made the right decision, and business was going well until nature threw a curve ball. The flooding of the gym we worked at put it out of commission for over 2 months, along with our entire household income stream.
Eventually we were back training and our client base expanded quickly along with our knowledge of the gym environment. It wasn’t long before we realised the commercial location we were in did not fit with our mindset, so after only just a year in, the 5 year plan was aggressively accelerated!
In our bid to fully control our destiny we started looking for facilities to buy. At one point we nearly moved half way across the country to take over an existing gym! Fate smiled on us though, and we found a slightly disheveled unit that we quickly realised had to be ours!
Location, location, location.
So we’d found our location – a fairly unremarkable warehouse that had previously been home to a pet food distribution company. Whatever it lacked in beauty, it made up for in location – even though that has been one of our most common questions to date. A mere stone’s throw from our previous commercial gym, why did we choose to move here? Why place ourselves so close to huge competition?
“You’re aware that there are a lot of gyms around Kirkstall, right?”
For us there were 2 reasons – first of which being our intended business model. As PTs’ in a commercial environment we were acutely aware of how trainers were treated, and wanted to offer something more attractive, built from the ground up by PTs. Our goal (which happily we achieved) was to provide an escape plan for our colleagues, and to set ourselves up as a top level PT gymnasium right from day 1.
Secondly – have you ever noticed how all the coffee shops are near each other in town? That’s not a coincidence, there’s market pressure at play. Within a 250m radius of our site there are 2 large commercial gyms, a cross fit gym, a strongman gym, a climbing wall, and a PT studio. We’re surrounded by other fitness offerings, and that is exactly how we like it. Being in a thriving fitness area drives members to the area, and, over time, they will take the best offering – so all we needed to do then was be the best. So, we grabbed the keys and started building the gym of our dreams! Well, almost.
For those of you out there who have already set up a business, you’ll know how painful the coming times were. This is a very abridged list, but to give a rough idea of what is needed to get beyond a pipe dream and to reality, we then had to devote countless hours into, building plans, loan applications, negotiating, equipment sourcing, forecasting, and designing.
Our previous small company background came in very helpful when it came to having a full understanding of what is needed to make a business run, and our ability to work together, rather than against each other, made the entire process as pain free as it could be. All that said, we had MANY scary months ahead, with crazy figures floating around, deadlines we thought unsurpassable, and obstacles that came out of left field.
Having taken the keys to the building back in May, we finally received our planning permission in September, and got to work on pulling a butterfly out of a very scabby looking pupa.
Since we opened we’ve grown, we’ve shrunk, we’ve thrived, we’ve been force closed by the Government… boy it’s been a rollercoaster and a half! These days we stand proud – through grit and determination we went against the odds and managed to achieve more than we could have hoped for. The community that has built at Graft Häus is in our eyes second to none, and our members and Teäm are the life spirit that keeps us feeling special every time we step back and remember we did this, it’s our gym ?