One in 75 Latin Americans passes through Smart Fit's platform. Founder Edgard Corona on why he built his own aggregator.

Every large gym chain watched corporate benefit platforms take a share of their members and negotiated over the terms. Edgard Corona built his own instead, lost money on it for years, and now holds more than a third of that market in Brazil. He founded Smart Fit in 1996 and built it into the largest fitness operator in Latin America, more than 2,000 clubs across 16 countries, and moved to chairman in March when his son took over as chief executive.

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In this conversation:

• Why the cost of money in Latin America, not strategy, decides how many clubs he owns

• What a low-cost operator has to change before it can open in Morocco

• Why a gym group is buying its own NVIDIA hardware instead of renting compute

• What he thinks every large chain got wrong about aggregators, and what it cost them

• Where the model behind all of this actually came from, and it is not fitness

• What has to be true before a gym chain can call itself a health company

Chapters:

00:00 One in 75 Latin Americans is on the platform

00:27 Who he is and what he is building

01:23 What Smart Fit actually is, and where it goes next

02:38 Why he owns eight in ten clubs instead of franchising

03:24 What travels into a new market and what does not

04:15 Where new concepts get tested before they reach a budget club

04:59 The part of the experience nobody is building yet

05:21 Why a gym chain built its own aggregator

07:09 What it takes to put a rival gym on your platform

08:19 Build or buy, and the cost of capital behind it

09:35 The mistake he thinks the industry made

10:11 The members who had never trained anywhere

11:13 What stops a gym chain becoming a health company

11:52 What he took from Life Time, and the wearable plan

13:55 From fingerprints to face recognition at the door

14:37 Ten years out

15:03 One decision

Links:

• Edgard Corona on LinkedIn
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn

• Tomorrow Health website

• Apply to join FitTech Club

• Zing Coach