photo: myzone
HCM people
I’d love Myzone to be the go-to data collector of physical activity evidence for the world
Dave Wright Founder and CEO Myzone How did it all start? My membership marketing company, CFM, had been attracting millions of new members for health club operators, but half of these were leaving every year and I wanted to find a way of supporting our clients to keep members in their clubs for longer. There were loads of issues to tackle. The industry was rewarding fitness instead of effort, there was a lack of accountability among members, competition from external consumer fitness products and operators had challenges sustaining motivation among members. There was also no club gamification, a lack of trainer connection with members and ultimately, no sense of tribe. What solution did you see? As a gym operator myself (Wright had 11 clubs on two continents operating under the Feelgood Fitness and Voyage Fitness brands and served over 20,000 members), I’d always used heart rate monitors, but 14
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in 2009 I started thinking about how tech could be advanced to solve the retention issues we’d identified. I believed a system that allowed the wireless transfer of data stored on a heart rate monitor could revolutionise the gym experience, enabling members to use the monitors both in and outside of a club, with the data being automatically uploaded when they returned to the gym. We set about creating the product – we called it Myzone and outsourced the development to a manufacturing company while starting to create a buzz about it in the fitness industry. We were so excited about the potential of Myzone that we invested too early in advertising and marketing and pre-sold the system to a number of large operators. Unfortunately, the manufacturing company we were working with believed we were trying to achieve the impossible, and the product they made didn’t live up to the hype we’d created. We had to keep recalling the products and eventually, it