FIT TO LEAD
How CEO Sophie Lawler Turned Total Fitness Gyms Around with Transformational Leadership
"PLP is a gift to deliver and you're offering people a choice to go on a journey of personal development"
Sophie Lawler
In this interview, Sophie looks back on what she’s achieved so far, what has yet to be done and the importance of connecting people, encouraging authentic engagement and nurturing trust to achieve exemplary outcomes.
Having worked its way through four CEOs inside of a year, Total Fitness needed somebody who could stick things out and get results. Along came Sophie Lawler. Uncertain as to whether she could make a real impact, when so many before her had failed, she decided to take a different route.
Instead of focusing on the fiscal output she decided to focus on human input. With the support and guidance of The Living Leader, its philosophy closely aligned with her own, Sophie set about turning Total Fitness around by getting staff, at all levels, to begin taking real ownership, and making better decisions.
HOW DID YOUR TOTAL FITNESS TURNAROUND MISSION BEGIN?
I'd only been in the role of CEO at Total Fitness for a couple of months and I was interviewing for a new chairman—somebody from outside the sector. That’s when I met Paul Stobart, a Master Trainer at The Living Leader. I thought he was perfect for the role and he accepted the position.
I gave him a robust debrief, highlighting the challenges at Total Fitness which were that I had an over-managed organisation with a culture of telling and pushing that was seriously holding the organisation back.
I also said that nobody had the courage to take full ownership and make their own decisions. When I explained my personal values, and what I wanted to achieve, Paul immediately said: “You need to speak with Penny Ferguson”, who is the founder of The Living Leader.
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN YOU MET PENNY?
I was, like, wow! I hadn’t expected to meet somebody whose outlook aligned so precisely with my own, but everything Penny told me was in keeping with what I believed. She said that, to turn Total Fitness around, the key thing to do was invest in the people. This was something I already believed deeply, even before I’d met Penny.
I knew that driving real transformation meant starting with the company’s 650 employees. Obviously you need some level of capital investment, but you also need to pinpoint those areas where you’re losing money.
Putting headcount back adds to both the top and bottom lines. I knew that if I didn’t deal with the people first the business was going nowhere. Key to achieving this was finding a leadership development programme that resonated with my own personal philosophy. Meeting Penny and finding out about the Living Leader through Paul was therefore timely, and I embarked on the Personal Leadership programme (PLP).
WHAT DID YOU DISCOVER WHEN YOU STARTED THE PLP?
I found out very quickly that the alignment was even more attuned than I’d expected. I believe everybody has the capacity to be a leader, not just the CEO or leadership team, and the philosophy of the PLP was in harmony with this. As I went through the programme my belief that the qualities of leadership are available to everybody was articulated and reinforced in every module.
HOW DID YOU IMPLEMENT THE THINGS YOU LEARNED ON THE PROGRAMME?
One of my top priorities was to encourage take-up of the ideas in the modules and the PLP ethos throughout Total Fitness. I wanted to achieve clearer, more committed decision making, more empowerment, and real development of people across the company, and so I immediately put my senior team on the course.
Next, I put all of the general and leadership managers through the PLP, so a cohort of about 30 people who worked closely with Peter and Angus, two of The Living Leader’s external trainers.
Then, in January—the craziest time of year for gyms—all of those guys began to put into use what they’d learned. We had started on our new leadership journey, and the results, as I’ll explain, were phenomenal.
Alongside Stewart Aylott, one of our regional managers, I next studied as a Master Trainer for the leadership programme and we started rolling the programme out internally, targeting specific groups within the team. In the first nine months, I’ve personally delivered three programmes with eight members attending each three day course. Stewart has delivered his second full programme so things are moving at pace. The next step is to take all of the departmental heads through the PLP.
Each of the 17 clubs has five or six heads ranging in age from 20-35. Currently, this is the least engaged group, and they’re crying out for the sort of personal development we can now give them. Between Stuart and I, we’re going to put these people through the programme as quickly as we can to help improve ownership and engagement and achieve the desired changes in attitudes, culture, and outcomes we want.
WHY DO YOU THINK DOING THESE THINGS IS PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT FOR TOTAL FITNESS RIGHT NOW?
We’ve had serious disengagement, which leads to chronic churn and customer attrition, and that’s bad for business. To give you some idea, just one of our clubs needs 6,000 members to make it economically viable. We’re in a highly competitive industry that’s also strategically challenging, so you really need to work on the basics first.
Because the clubs are the engine room of the business, you need committed and enthusiastic individuals who are engaged with the customers, which keeps the customers returning. The existing culture of pushing people and telling them what to do needed ushering toward one where people make good decisions, take full ownership, and support one another in an environment of trust.
Paul Stobart really echoed my thoughts when he said: ‘It starts with your people, then your customers, then your money. In that order. When I began as CEO, the Clubland employees and members were totally disengaged, and guess what? The cash was flowing out of the door!
HOW BAD WAS IT AT TOTAL FITNESS WHEN YOU JOINED AS CEO?
When I started, the company had a net promoter score* (NPS) of minus 13. That’s pretty shocking. Over 50% of the 650 employees had been working for less than 12 months, and that includes the ones at the Centre where the retention rate was high, so the actual figure across the 17 gyms is probably even higher. The churn in the Clubland role was just ridiculous. Member NPS was through the floor and as a result, the membership had been in long term decline, losing over 10,000 members in a year. We had to fix that to survive. Strategic objective number one was, therefore, to get people really connecting and engaging, and to increase employee retention.
HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT FIXING THINGS?
There was so much embedded performance potential in the business; I knew we could unlock it if I followed my own instincts and philosophy, and put into action the things I learned through The Living Leader.
I stated the case that to our equity investors that, if I can get my employee net promoter score back to zero, it would give me a certain number of heads back, and a 30% greater efficiency. I also demonstrated, in quantifiable terms, why the business didn’t need capital investment as much as it needed people investment. I demonstrated that the lack of people investment was costing the business £4.5million a year, money we could get back if we spent more time implementing the programme to build and develop people’s leadership qualities.
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HOW DID YOU COMBINE YOUR OWN PERSONAL ETHOS WITH THOSE OF THE PLP?
Firstly, my personal leadership philosophy is oriented around about three things:
Authenticity, Courage and Ownership.
Being authentic and bringing your whole self to work each day is vital as it generates trust in the workplace. And trust is foundational, because if you don’t trust the people around you, you're not going to challenge anything and you won’t take full ownership.
So...authenticity generates trust and encourages the taking of ownership. And it takes courage to be authentic—it’s a bit like a flywheel. If I’m being authentic and I bring my whole self to work, I’m generally going to make much more responsible decisions, and I’m going to own those decisions.
When I discovered PLP, although The Living Leader uses different terminology, the principles are very much the same. For example, trust is a foundational tenet in the PLP. And ownership aligns with responsibility, which is another foundational principle of the programme.
The other key thing about PLP fundamental to me was the way in which it articulated exactly what my business needed—to take ownership! And that really is the key element I bring everything back to. Also that the business needs to find a balance or equilibrium, which is exactly what the programme is about.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRAIN THE PLP TO TEAM MEMBERS WITH LITTLE KNOWLEDGE OF THE PROGRAMME?
When I train this to people who have been embedded in our previously disengaged culture, and they start to see the shift, light bulbs begin popping off in their heads. They realise, with clarity, that Total Fitness had abdicated ownership in favour of process, and was in a downward spiral because of it. Recognising this problem for the first time as well as the part they’ve played in creating that poor culture, has been a massive revelation for people at every level of the company—a real turning point.
When, for example, on day three of the in-house programme I engage them in the training on responsibility, and their choice of behaviour, plus the session on core values, many employees are simply bowled over.
What’s also great is that the programme brings up points of humour. When I’m training, comedy moments of self-awareness, particularly in the communicating styles task, crop up all over the place. Other emotions, too!
When people become cognisant of their own behaviours at work, when they see themselves through the prysm of PLP and the training they get, they laugh, they cry—strong feelings spill out. Then people do courageous things outside of work, like end toxic relationships, or head in positive new directions, and tell me about it in their feedback. But the best part from a business point of view is that, when all of the emotions have settled down and everybody goes back to work, we get to see how effective the training is through improved results.
WHAT SORT OF POSITIVE RESULTS HAVE COME ABOUT AS A RESULT OF THE PLP TRAINING?
Before PLP, with a bit of listening, a lot of self belief and positive momentum, and just getting stuff done, the NPS increased to 8%, so a 23% swing, which was great. But when we did the work on purpose and values and then introduced the leadership philosophy with the PLP programme attached, it accelerated everything. By the time December came around, and I’d started PLP, the NPS went up to 17%. Right now, our target is to get it to 23%, which is the industry benchmark. If we manage to do that in a year, it would be a swing of 36% which would be phenomenal. The way things are going, I’m convinced we’ll achieve that.
Today, the membership base is at 95,000. We headed back into positive growth in January 2019 and we delivered the first six months worth of growth targets within the first two months in February. We're now about 2,000 members ahead of where we should be, and hitting our membership target for October already, so well ahead of plan in terms of the top line revenue for the business.
Being able to demonstrate to our equity shareholders that I’m adding headcount all the time without adding any costs to the business—well that’s precisely the sort of thing they love to hear!
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NOW THAT YOU’VE GOT SOME REAL MOMENTUM, WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE?
It’s early days, but the improvements are noticeable. I can only take eight people at a time through the programme, but my expectation is that those eight will start on a new journey, inspire eight more people and take those along with them until we approach something like critical mass. I’ve been getting great feedback from the employees I teach on the programme, and I send that feedback through to The Living Leader.
When you go through the PLP you get to shine a light on all of the great things about yourself that you weren’t aware of or didn’t know existed. It’s a doorway that leads to a better relationship with other people through an improved relationship with yourself—all of which contributes to ensuring you take full ownership and responsibility and become a magnetic, inspirational, and courageous leader.
PLP is a gift to deliver and you're offering people a choice to go on a journey of personal development. You’re giving them all of this awareness, demonstrating some amazingly insightful frameworks so they can think about and explore their own development. It’s super empowering and great for morale and growth.
*From Wikipedia: Net Promoter or Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm's customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and is claimed to be correlated with revenue growth.