Planet Fitness

PF HV Management, Inc. Wins Best Exercise Facility Four Years in a Row

The Planet Fitness® in south Parkersburg, West Virginia, won the 2015 Parkersburg News and Sentinel Readers’ Choice award for Best Exercise Facility for the fourth year in a row! Yet again, the Mid-Ohio Valley location owned by PF HV Management was voted as the top place to work out at by the community members of Parkersburg. The Parkersburg location has won the award every year since opening in November 2011.

The Parkersburg location was also the first Planet Fitness in West Virginia and has since been joined by other clubs in Bridgeport, Barboursville, Cross Lanes and Morgantown. With the new locations opening, franchisees Bob Viani and Sharon Lomasney, decided to reinvest in the Parkersburg location based on what members wanted to see and ensure that all of the existing locations were updated to match the new ones.

“Being voted as the favorite workout facility four years running is truly an honor for PF HV Management. It is even more impressive, as our Mid-Ohio Valley club location has only been opened for four years! We can’t thank the people of Parkersburg enough for their support and are fiercely determined to continue providing the high level of service they have come to admire and expect,” said Lomasney.

The franchise is also a big advocate for the Planet of Triumphs and actively encourages engagement with its users on the social media platform as it is a generator of overall client satisfaction and retention. However, PF HV Management is also aiming to increase its community involvement in the Parkersburg area through various outreach efforts. Despite these efforts, it appears that the community of Parkersburg is already enamored with the club, four years running, with no sign of slowing down.

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Back, L to R: Staff members of the winning gym, Mitchell Van Buren, Gary Williams and Pat Byrd; front, L to R: Jessi Sizemore, Missy Lynch, Donna Crispin, Paula Kirl and Missy DeRose.

 

New Store Openings and Strong Comps Power Planet Fitness Inc’s Earnings Growth

Planet Fitness reported fourth quarter results on March 3. The fitness chain is enjoying strong increases in same-store sales even as it rapidly opens new gyms — a powerful combination that’s fueling healthy growth in revenue and profits.

What happened with Planet Fitness this quarter?
Planet Fitness opened 84 new franchise stores in the fourth quarter, bringing its total store count to 1,124 at the end of 2015. The company also experienced an impressive 6.2% increase in system-wide same-store sales. Together, that helped drive a 10.2% year-over-year rise in total revenue to$105.8 million.

Read more: Fox Business

Fast and Serious: FT ranks the smartest-growing brands

The day Chris Rondeau’s pager quit buzzing, he knew Planet Fitness was on to something. It was the year 2000, and he and brothers Mike and Marc Grondahl had just opened their fourth gym in a small New Hampshire town, in most ways like the three that had come before. They had the same purple and yellow color scheme, the same rock-bottom membership prices to attract first-time gym users instead of workout fanatics, and the same “no gymtimidation” slogan to welcome the masses.

But because the site didn’t have enough space, they had stripped out all the extras in their other gyms, like juice bars and daycare and group fitness classes, and had a hundred pieces of cardio equipment or so and that’s about it.

“I had a pager, and the other stores were paging me every day,” to report the usual day-to-day chaos, Rondeau recalls. “The kid in daycare bit someone. The juice machine was broken.” But from the new gym—nothing. “The fourth store was running like a top. You couldn’t even tell it had opened.”

Read more: Franchise Times