Awarding Top Performers

In 1995, Moffat put together a Top 50 club list in which people nominated clubs that they thought were the biggest companies in the industry. However, the next year, Moffat changed the list to the Top 100 clubs, and rankings were determined by the revenue reported by club owners, which is still the way the Top 100 list is devised today.

“The Top 100 was an interesting way to enable our readers to benchmark their operations against the bigger clubs,” Moffat says. “We certainly started to see the disparities between the big clubs and the little guys.”

The first year that they had club operators submit their financials, Loyle and Moffat say they weren't sure they'd find enough clubs that earned $1 million or more in revenue, which was the cutoff for the list. They did find enough club operators, but finding the last 25 took a lot of digging, Moffat says.

In 1997, Moffat started the Distinguished Businesswoman's Awards.

“The club industry was evolving,” Moffat says. “We started to notice that there were more and more women who were really taking a leadership position in the business, and we decided to come up with the Businesswoman's Award.”

By recognizing and publicizing the accomplishments of these women, the magazine was able to break down the image of the industry as a male-dominated industry. The awards also showed that the industry was welcoming to women, which might move more women to enter the industry, he says.

“These were people who should have been recognized whether they were men or women. They were smart, talented business people,” Moffat says.

Having Some Fun

Just a year later, Cardinal Business Media sold the magazine and trade show to Intertec Publishing, which is now Penton Media, the current owner of the magazine. Morgan stayed with Cardinal, but Moffat moved with the magazine to Intertec and became publisher, hiring Vince Zinno as editor. Zinno left after one year, replaced by Jerry Janda.

Many trade magazines can be dry, so when Janda came on board as editor in 1998, he decided that the fitness industry was fun and exciting, so he could inject more personality in the magazine, he says.

“I tried to have some humor in there,” he says. “You don't generally find that in a trade magazine. I tried to do some playful things with the design, too.”

Janda and Moffat started including columns at the front of the magazine written by leaders in the industry.

“We got people to write things about marketing, sales and stuff like that,” Janda says. “It gave the magazine more of a voice that way.”

Janda and Moffat continued publishing the supplements that Morgan and Moffat had started. Janda also did a year-long series in 1999 on the war on obesity. While Janda was editor, the magazine also covered issues such as retention and customer service and trends such as Tai Bo, yoga, Pilates and Spinning, which was in its infancy. As Curves continued its explosion, the magazine also covered the emergence of express and women-only clubs and the nonprofit vs. for-profit issue.

In 1999, the magazine launched its Web site, although the content was limited at that time, Janda says.

Janda also restarted the editorial advisory board, which had existed previously but had not often been publicized. Janda enlisted Rick Caro of Management Vision; Julia Wheatley, who ran a women-only club and was one of the winners of the Distinguished Businesswoman's Awards; Steven Schwartz of TCA; Stephen Roma of WOW! Workout World; Casey Conrad of Communications Consultants; Jill Kinney of Club One; and Doug Ribley of Akron General.

Big Changes

In 2001, Moffat left the publication and was replaced by Barry LeCerf as publisher. Janda soon followed Moffat, and John Agoglia stepped into the editor-in-chief role in 2002. These two began perhaps the biggest transformation of the magazine at a time when competition between the trade publications was fierce, and advertising dollars were drying up.

“The mission and focus was always educating and helping smaller club operators do their business,” Agoglia says. “The articles were written more for mom-and-pops, not the big guys as much. It was geared toward how to do their business better for the smaller operators because they know the fitness side but struggle with the business side.”

Agoglia says that the how-to focus was a good one, but two other magazines followed the same model.

“While we felt we still did the best job, it was still a case of how many times can they read about how to budget from all of [the industry trade magazines]?” Agoglia says. What didn't exist in the industry was a publication that talked about what was influencing the daily business — the news.

With the growth of the Internet, the magazine staff could not only cover the news in all the fitness markets easier, but the staff also could use the Internet and online technology to bring the news to readers more often than monthly. Agoglia launched an e-newsletter to land in readers' in-boxes three times a month.

“With the Internet, we could be more timely,” Agoglia says, adding that readers could get their news on the Web site immediately and then get follow-up and analysis on that story later in the magazine.

For those reasons, LeCerf and Agoglia refocused the magazine in 2004 to a news and analysis publication. With the change in the focus of the magazine also came a broadening of the readership to encompass government/military facilities and university rec centers in addition to for-profits, nonprofits, hotel facilities, corporate centers and medical wellness centers. LeCerf and Agoglia changed the name of the magazine to reflect that broader market.

Prior to this big change, LeCerf and Agoglia had made a few other changes. In 2003, the two created two awards for the industry: the Lifetime Achievement Award (which replaced the Distinguished Businesswoman's Awards) and the Best of the Best Awards.

“The industry was starting to mature,” Agoglia says. “There are a lot of great people who did a lot of great stuff in the industry and weren't getting recognition. We thought it'd be a great way to acknowledge them.”

The two chose Joe Weider of Weider Publishing as the first Lifetime Achievement recipient because he was an industry icon and he had done a lot to promote fitness and the industry, Agoglia says.

“He took fitness out of the strong man world. It was him and Joe Gold who were the beginning guys,” Agoglia says. “He had built an empire off of promoting people being fit. The hope was that not only were we honoring someone who deserved it, but someone who would add honor and legitimacy to [the award].”

The Best of the Best Award was a way to acknowledge others in the industry for ideas and innovations in programming that set their clubs apart from others.

“I don't know that there is enough recognition of the good things that people are doing in the industry,” Agoglia says.

That's one reason Agoglia did a Fitness Across America series in which the editors traveled to clubs around the country for a week and reported on what was happening at these clubs.

“It was about those little stories that no one knows about that are going on every day,” Agoglia says. “Who is this little club in Texas or New Orleans that no one really knows about? What's it like there that day?”

Agoglia says that LeCerf and he cared about producing a good product.

“If we hadn't branched out and done cool stuff like that, I don't know if the magazine would still be here,” he says. “We had to do some things outside the box that other magazines weren't doing.”

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.