On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the company,eFitness CEO Łukasz Balicki gave an interview to the Branża Fitness portal, summarizing these 10 past years.
Hello, what’s occurring at eFitness?
Hello. I could say “unfortunately all is a bit too good”. Of course, I’m joking, really and seriously, we have a lot of work coming our way involving our existing customers, not to mention new ones and we are loving every minute of it.
Haha, great response! Why do you think you’re so busy?
In my opinion, the level of service will always be of paramount importance.
It is thanks to our dedication to providing great service that we have ongoing and continuous demand. It also comes down to meeting the needs of the operator. We understand that for most clubs safety is arguably the most important area, followed by product innovation, and that’s what eFitness is incredibly good at.
I’m guessing in a moment you will probably ask about marketing, so I will answer in advance – yes, we do our fair share of ‘marketing’, but we don’t rely on buzzwords and fabricated visions to showcase who we are, instead, real data and measurable statistics talk, so in that case, we demonstrate very clearly who we are and what we offer.
You’ve been on the market for 10 years, we are actually reaching the end of your jubilee year *CONGRATULATIONS*. In retrospect, has much changed?
Oh yes! Every year we see lots of change. I remember when we initially began, the first Android and Chrome browser had just appeared, and Apple added a unique video recording function to the iPhone 3 and 4!
But if we talk about what hasn’t changed for a second, for us, during all these years the most important term for us was always the word retention, (which, by no surprise is extremely popular in the fitness industry today). For us, retention means taking care of relationships on many levels and managing all the pros and cons that come with it. That has remained consistent throughout.
So how do you ensure your ‘retention’ is where you want it to be?
It’s very much two-fold. First of all, I have always tried and will continue to try to encourage all the employees at eFitness to love what they do. I want them to come to work with a smile on their faces filled with joy. Alongside looking after our own staff members, it’s vital we also take care of our clients, naturally this tends to happen when we take care of our staff.
But yes, in terms of our clients, we work with operators each every day and we will always face many challenges. Conversation is important and how we approach various issues remains key for us. Personally, I am proud of these last 10 years. Going from having a handful of clubs using the system to what we have become today is truly amazing, I remember at the beginning we went to a club in Wroclaw with an apple pie sheet, today we are a leader in our part of Europe.
Haha, have you still got the apple pie sheet?
Somewhere, I’m sure!
So, how did you celebrate your company’s successes in this jubilee year? Did you treat anyone to apple pie?
Haha, not quite. Acknowledging growth is very important for us. We really like company trips and meetings in sports climates, as it kind of optimises and embodies the industry we work in (fitness). This year we had over 10 company events which included skiing, Single Track bike riding, kayaking, and our own conference or a trip to a Tropical Island near Berlin. The latter helped us to learn Gantner’s access control technology in large scale from a client’s perspective, which is a great example of combining such activity with a purpose.
But yes, overall, the team at eFitness likes to spend time together, and not just sit in front of the computer screens all year round.
That sounds wonderful, or wunderbar, should I say? What next in terms of staff development?
For us, it’s important that development is approached responsibly. You can’t quickly hire another 50 people and expect the organization to be more effective right away. Yes, we’re constantly growing, currently, we have over 70 members staff but we need to evolve with care. People, teams and collaborations are not just numbers to us.
Our plan for next year is to acquire a new office and to build new teams who are assigned with special tasks.
What about your foreign strategy, any offices abroad opening up?
A wise man once said, “we don’t want to pour a watering can all over the world”.
We are in 11 countries as things stand but at the same time we believe that a lot of tasks and challenges are close to our borders. It’s not quite as fruitful for us at this moment in time to extend our logistics to the limit by operating in a whole host of new cultures and time zones? We have lots of opportunities to develop within our existing regions, so we don’t need to explore too many other continents and countries just yet.
You’ve been on the market for a long time, maybe you know the answer to the question, who exactly is the leader of Poland?
This is a very simple question. You should always answer based on data because that’s all you can be sure of. Market segmentation and specialization of individual solutions are two other factors that ought to be taken into consideration. To give an honest answer, the number one leader in Poland is eFitness, regardless of how you measure it. According to our estimates, eFitness supports approximately 3 times more operators than any other Club Management System or support entity.
However, when we look on a broader scale, we have about 2,500 fitness facilities in Poland and there are about 53,000 fitness facilities in Europe, (according to Deloitte), so we cannot claim we are the number 1 European leader, we can only state that we are a leader of the regions in which we belong.
So in your pursuit of foreign countries, how have you kept your strategy so strong in Poland?
Well, we are constantly strengthening the team for existing customers, we’re always looking to organize meetings, breakfasts, blog, actions with partners such as VISA, and above all we develop the system with new functionalities according to the needs of our Polish clients. Poland is and always will be the most important. I can’t imagine going abroad with a solution that you couldn’t promote in your country, where you started, where people trusted you first.
So can you talk a little more about how you are perceived overseas?
Great question. We are “in the process of achieving” success. As I say we are in 10 countries outside of Poland. We are on the cusp of finalising the implementation of eFitness in to one of the fastest growing fitness fitness clubs in Europe, if you were to look at membership size, the club is in the top three in Germany and in the top five in the continent. However, according to my criteria, for a project to count as successful it must be completed, and fully implemented to a point the client is happy, so only then will I be able to deem it a success.
I see. For some time now we have been observing the increase in the cost for IT services? Where do these rises in costs come from?
This is a very broad issue. At eFitness, we focus on quality that can be seen even in the speed of the system. Microsoft Azure, for example, provides a lot, but also costs a lot. It is worth noting that in the fitness industry we are the only ones to use such a technologically advanced tool, so if we are slightly more expensive than our competitors, it’s reflected in the value we offer.
You mentioned a trip to understand Gantner technology earlier. In the long run, will you be more open to integration with other providers or not?
Yes, I mean we are already a ‘combine harvester’, so to speak. While we’ve managed to create a very advanced solution, integrations are an indispensable part of our business and help us to create really great things when we take on board the knowledge and experience of others. So yes, we are open and technologically ready for complex processes. However, I must admit, dialogue between any two parties is always crucial. There are many topics, questions and challenges, such as the compatibility of objects and architecture. I like to compare it to cars adopting the right brand GPS navigation. It is supposed to work, but does it really? In this sense, we are the car, we have known how to service clients in the fitness industry for 10 years and we do not rest on our laurels, but then it’s up to us to find the right partner, or if we want to stick with the previous analogy, the right GPS navigation system.
Did you ever think to create two versions of the system? One for clubs and one for members.
We have been asked this question many times and the answer remains unchanged. eFitness is one. eFitness is created for fitness clubs. Each functionality has its own purpose, which results directly from real needs. We want to provide every client with as much functionality as possible without restrictions, regardless of the club size and business model.
The introduction of new functionalities in IT takes a long time. You have a large, competent team, how do you manage the efficiency of such processes?
The system is getting bigger. Within the last 10 years, our experience has taught us that the most important thing is not to spoil, only to build. It is not an art to introduce new things that look nice but either do nothing or negatively affect other processes. eFitness is thought out in every detail, I dare say not everything is perfect, but we are still working on even better functioning. For our part, software production is very formalized, we care very much about security and predictability as well as consistency.
Maybe clone the best employees it will be faster?
Haha, yes possibly, but on a serious note, our key personnel is already heavily involved in the training and development of others. We are a strong, supportive team, of which I’m very proud.
Are plans for the future a secret?
Not for us, we have nothing to hide. We just want to keep doing what we do, taking care of system development, streamlining internal procedures and helping our clients develop. We want to be a leader in Europe. However, all goals must be met in accordance with our principles and without any risk to the operation of the system.
eFitness has been operating for 10 years, and over 1000 customers have trusted our system. Being a leader in Poland, we also support fitness clubs in 11 countries of Central Europe. Our team already has 70 people.
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