Venture Concept No. 2

The Opportunity: My target market would be people in small towns or low population areas that want to workout but have no serious gym near them. Only about 20% of Americans get the daily recommended amount of activity. The #1 excuse for not working out is lack of time. This could be alleviated if we could get gyms that are closer to people therefore, being more convenient and taking less time to drive to and from. The way this need is being filled now is in small fitness centers that a lot of these towns have. I do not think that people are loyal to these types of facilities and getting them to switch to a better equipped gym should not be hard. The other thing is some people are just not getting this need met at all by not going to a gym. I feel that this opportunity is huge. The area I grew up in, north west Florida, is littered with small towns and rural areas that would benefit from having a good gym.

The Innovation:

• Convenient locations
• Roll up doors/Skylights
• Educational website linked to memberships
• No big cardio equipment
• Pricing

*My gyms would be smaller but look at how this gym utilizes natural light

The Venture Concept: The basic concept in one sentence is this: A small gym in every small town. I developed this concept by seeing how Dollar General and Family Dollar compete with places like Wal-Mart and Target and that is that they put small stores in convenient locations and people are willing to pay a litter more in exchange for not having to drive to one of the bigger chain stores.  As I said in the opening portion the main reason this is a need that could be met is that there just are not these types of facilities available for people to use. To make it cost efficient to attack such a small market we would have to keep the cost of operating the gym as low as possible. Therefore all of my gyms would be big warehouse garage style buildings with roll up doors and huge skylights. This would keep the cost of utilities as low as possible. We would also not have big treadmills or ellipticals in my gyms. This also keeps the operations cost low. Buying and running power to those big cardio machines cost a lot of money and they also cost a lot for maintenance and they need maintenance often. By keeping those cost down we could translate that into lower membership costs. Over the past few years we have seen Planet Fitness become huge because the membership costs are so low. The other innovation would be a easy to use website that would be free with the memberships but also available to anyone who doesn't go to one our gyms with a subscription fee.. This website would have some tutorials on basic methods of training. Teaching people ways to train would help draw in some of the customers that would turn away due to the lack of cardio equipment. This website could also have other subscriptions for training guides or diets plans. By opening our website up to people other than members it could bring in more money and alleviate some the pressure of getting members. If I am going after small markets to be profitable I need to capture a huge percentage of that market but if I can get website subscriptions from people from anywhere around the world then that could be an effective revenue stream.

I did not change anything about my concept because the feedback was positive except some people still want to say I need to have treadmills and ellipticals. As I explained those pieces of equipment cost a lot to buy and cost a lot to maintain because they break a lot so I would keep those out of my gym using the website I talked about to post videos on better, more efficient forms of cardio.