Pros
- Customer Interaction - Customer Service experience - Potential to develop interdisciplinary skills - Networking -Chance to work with an amazing team You will build unbreakable bonds and friendships with your fellow coworkers and members that will span a lifetime. You will get to see and be a part of affecting members lives for the better and actually feel good about seeing the smile and progress your members make. The team I worked with was unbelievable and are the best at what they do. The owners were engaged and always willing to bend over backwards for their employees and the employees would also do the same. It would be a challenge to find an owner or boss as caring as this franchisee. The annual conference is a great experience, especially at the start and really gets you motivated. The annual conference is an amazing experience that really lets you unwind and appreciate your team and how much this company actually cares about its members. There is a sense of comradery that builds between everyone at conference that everyone needs to experience at least once while working at AF. Chuck and Dave's energy is palpable and it is beyond motivational and helpful to hear them speak.
Cons
- Inconsistent work hours - Expectations too high compared to compensation - Virtually no room for growth unless the owner owns 4-5 clubs. - Lack of Structure - Lack of consistency - Poor Infrastructure - Poor franchise structure - Poor Marketing Working at an Anytime Fitness can be incredibly rewarding at times, yielding a sense of accomplishment in completing goals and the feeling of unrivaled joy of truly changing someone’s life for the better. Unfortunately, in my experience, these positive aspects are all but crushed by the lack of opportunity to grow, unattainable goals, infrastructure problems, lack of transparency, unrealistic time commitments, and lastly a (hopefully) temporary transitional period. There are aspects of this review that I am sure will differ amongst owners, the number of clubs an owner may have, and the level at which your franchise owner wishes to compete within the company’s reward structure. Clubs can fall into reward tiers based on performance metrics that are laughably bad. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Even more so when you are provided a ruler which has no numbers on it and that’s exactly what corporate would give you when asked. Want to know what metrics get considered when viewing your data report? Forget about it. Yet these factors directly affect your positioning in the system. To operate at 100% efficiency this is a management nightmare. Implementing Lean/Six Sigma practices to improve operations is neigh impossible without being able to measure and process data. The feedback system that is sent to frequently visiting members, inactive members, and returning members, is also drastically flawed in its weights which can have a significant impact on certain metrics. The infrastructure provided to staff from the franchise is mediocre at best and can also have a negative impact on a club’s score. Most services are provided by an external party. For example, billing and account management is not handled by the company itself, but a third party. While in theory this makes sense as a company rarely should invest the capital to do these services in house, when you can employ another company that only specializes in billing management for cheaper than you can do it yourself. The problem that occurs here is members who have a negative experience with the billing company, which will in turn rate your club poorly based on an experience that you have no control over and thus dragging your scores down. The software that is used for almost every task is so poorly designed that it almost needs its own review. If design and programming is done in house this should be sourced out to an actual software design company that can provide frequent updates and deliver a properly functioning piece of software. Especially one that is vital to the day to day operations of a business. The time commitments and personal investment that it takes from staff to achieve top tier levels is exhausting. To maintain this, you must personally be invested in all that is Anytime and “Bleed purple”. This is a 12-18 hour workweek at a minimum. Social media maintenance as early as 6am to as late as 10pm to maintain high response times, addressing member concerns, marketing and promoting, etc. You should live and breathe Anytime. The annual conference helps with this, but deteriorated each year I attended. The glow slowly faded and the transition became more apparent. The provided seminars and classes were not as useful for a veteran employee and management. It seemed as if the line between basic training “vitals” and conference became blurred. At the previous conference “2016” the group of H2is’ leading the management panel would do things that were appalling business practice wise and made suggestions that left you wondering why we were wasting our time in the panel. The H2i or manager that was recognized at the conference rewards ceremony stated that its good to “take an hour break and watch Netflix in a back office to unwind.” The speakers for some seminars teeter on the edge of motivational speakers for Multi-level marketing schemes.