Juan del Río ran VivaGym for nine years. He joined in 2016, when it had fifteen gyms in Spain. By the time he handed over, on his own count, it was around three hundred clubs across Spain and Portugal.

In this episode he sets out a framework he calls moments of truth: the specific points in a member's life where intervention decides whether they stay. The first visit. The month usage drops. The anniversary nobody notices. The member still paying who stopped coming two weeks ago.

I put it to him that this sounds like a people problem rather than a technology one. He disagrees, and his answer is the clearest case I have heard for why a gym floor needs software.

He also puts a number on what makes a club work, warns that his own segment has taken quantum leaps in pricing, and names the growth he wishes he had not slowed down.

What you will hear:
- What a low-cost club needs before it works, and why 400 members is a dead room
- How he clusters moments of truth so a club of 250 addresses only the fifteen who need it
- Why he refuses to choose between quality and quantity
- Opening versus acquiring, and why he would not trade one for the other
- What broke first between fifteen clubs and three hundred
- Why he replaced the membership system, the CRM and the apps during the pandemic
- The most costly mistake of his tenure

00:00 Speed is the only real competitor
00:24 Nine years, fifteen gyms to three hundred
01:32 What caught his attention in fitness
02:10 What changed in how he runs the business
02:57 Moments of truth, defined
04:12 What you actually do with them
04:44 People problem or technology problem
06:45 Why speed beat every competitor
07:32 The ladder: 100, 300, a million members, a thousand gyms
09:41 Franchise or own the clubs
10:34 What one club needs before it works
11:47 Cost structure and inflation
12:42 Build or buy
13:16 What breaks first at scale
14:16 Quantum leaps in pricing
15:07 Why Spaniards use their gyms more
15:37 Who walks in now
16:22 Health beyond the gym floor
16:59 The mistake he would undo
17:19 What everyone gets wrong
17:34 One piece of advice to an operator
18:18 The back-to-school quarter

Links:

- VivaGym: https://vivagym.es
- Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karbasova/
- Tomorrow Health: https://tomorrow-health.com
- Get episode alerts: https://tomorrow-health.com/#subscribe
- Apply to join FitTech Club: https://fittechclub.com/