Todd Logan (left) and Marc Onigman founded Club Industry magazine in 1984 after seeing the need for a national publication for operators of for-profit, nonprofit, corporate and hotel fitness facilities. The franchise now includes a print and digital magazine, a Web site with a blog, two trade shows and an e-newsletter.
Photo courtesy of Todd Logan

However, the second-year show was considerably bigger than the first. Buoyed by their success with the national trade show, the duo developed two regional shows — Club Industry East in New York in 1989 and Club Industry West in Anaheim, CA, in 1990. The shows alternated for two years, but Club Industry West wasn't profitable enough, so Logan and Onigman ditched it and continued their regional efforts with the more profitable Club Industry East.

“My expertise in running the show and their expertise in knowing the industry — that's what made it successful,” Ravis says about the Club Industry shows.

As part of the trade show, Logan and Onigman honored people in the industry with a Hall of Fame award, starting in 1986. They also profiled the six winners in the magazine. The first winners were Dedman; LaLanne; Sorensen; Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper, founder of the Cooper Aerobics Center; Dale Dibble, co-owner of Cedardale Health Club; and Vic Tanny, founder of Tanny Health Center.

Although Logan and Onigman kept their hands in the editorial side of the business, they were increasingly involved in the trade show and advertising side, so in 1986, they hired Craig Waters as editor while retaining their editor-in-chief and executive editor titles. Waters stayed for just more than a year before moving to IHRSA's publication. The two didn't replace Waters right away, waiting until 1989 to promote Dan Tobin from special contributor to editorial director. When he left in 1990, they promoted Margie Markarian, who had been Club Industry-plus editor, to editorial director.

Also in 1990, Logan and Onigman noticed a growing sports medicine market, which was part of the rehabilitation field. Always looking for an opportunity to grow, they created a magazine, Rehabilitation Today, for that market. Unfortunately, the magazine had a strong competitor in that field, and the publication only lasted until 1994.

A New Beginning

The end of Rehabilitation Today came just two years after Onigman left the publication in 1992 and a year after Logan received and accepted an offer from Cardinal Business Media to purchase the magazine and trade shows. Wanting to move from Boston back to his hometown of Chicago for family reasons, Logan said good-bye to the publication he founded.

After the sale, Tom Morgan came on board as publisher, Terry Moffat became editor-in-chief and Zari Stahl became trade show director. By this time, the magazine had grown its circulation from 15,000 to 30,000, encompassing all the areas of fitness, but mostly for-profit.

Morgan and Moffat focused on how to bring in other areas of the market, too. They began publishing fitness supplements, some of which focused on specific topics, such as cross training or the senior market. One focused on the U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Exercise, which was released in the mid-1990s.

“We did a special supplement to inform and educate the industry about the report, its contents and possible implications,” says Donna Loyle, managing editor at the time.

As part of that supplement, the magazine published a two-page fold-over pamphlet about the report so club owners could offer them to their members. The pamphlet could be cut out and photocopied. Club owners could also request a bundle of 200 pamphlets.

“We moved about 60,000 of those things. The response was really significant,” Moffat says.

Other supplements focused on specific areas of the fitness business, including hotels, fire departments, corporate fitness centers and apartment complexes. The magazine partnered with trade associations and trade magazines within industries related to the supplement topic and sent overruns of the supplement to the members of that group.

“We realized that a lot of what was happening in the commercial fitness industry was in other industries that Club Industry magazine didn't reach,” Moffat says. “We were able to create nice sections, and we sold the advertising to our advertisers. The benefit was two-fold: the potential market and the customers were being told that building a fitness center and buying equipment was a good thing to do, and the people who did that were getting exposure to these markets.”

The magazine continued to cover industry news, but it carried more feature content on trends and how-to articles, Morgan says. Some of those trends included the rise of senior and medical fitness and the implications of that on the industry, for-profit vs. nonprofit clubs, and the push by some clubs to offer kids' fitness programs.

The how-to articles focused on sales, marketing, retention and operations.

“We were always trying to focus on a how-to approach as best we could,” Moffat says, noting that many of the operators in the business were small operators with one or two clubs. “We certainly wanted to identify trends and opportunities for people, but at the same time provide how-to information on how to take advantage of those trends.”

Consolidations during 1996 made it difficult to continue to grow the magazine's revenue and the supplements, even though the revenue on the event side was able to grow, Morgan says.

“It was a good magazine,” Morgan says. “The problem that I had was that the industry itself wasn't big enough to handle or allow us to execute on all the ideas we had. You had to go to the consumer side to do that.”

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