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Crunch Fitness first opened its doors in 1989 in a basement studio in New York City’s Greenwich Village as “a welcoming place for a diverse group of people to get fit,” according to its website.
In its early years, the gym garnered attention with high-energy workout shows on cable TV and DVDs, quickly building a reputation as a hip fitness hub—further cemented when it became the first “big box” gym to offer pole dancing fitness classes. Mentions on hit shows like Sex and the City and MTV’s The Real World marked its place in pop culture and helped establish its 28 clubs across Manhattan, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as, in Rowley’s words, “part of the lexicon.”
But by 2009, Crunch was “broken” and bankrupt. The brand filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May of 2009, after it suffered as a result of a decline in membership and overpriced and long-term lease agreements.
That’s when Crunch’s current CEO, Marine-turned businessman Jim Rowley, got a call from David Roberts and Brent Leffel, senior executives at private equity firm Angelo Gordon (now TPG Angelo Gordon).
At the time, Rowley was CEO of New Evolution Ventures, a private equity firm that he had co-founded with Mark Mastrov, the founder of 24 Hour Fitness. Mastrov and Rowley had left 24 Hour Fitness the year previously to start New Evolution Ventures, but that phone call from Angelo Gordon put the two men on a path back into the operations side of fitness—specifically on a flight to New York to evaluate Crunch.
Ultimately, Rowley saw a lot of promise on that trip.
“Crunch has always been much bigger than its digital footprint. It had this brand resonance that was crazy, it was electric,” Rowley says. “Why? Because everybody in the fitness business was really vanilla.”
Rowley, also a co-founder of UFC Gym, described the fitness industry as “a sea of sameness—the same style boxes with the same equipment, just with different logos on the outside.” Crunch, he says, stood out for its irreverence, cheekiness and marketing—from the colors in the gym to its class offerings. “It had a sense of fun where so many other gym brands were boring,” Rowley says.
After a three-day evaluation, it was that combination of cultural relevance and edginess that led Rowley and Mastrov to buy the company out of bankruptcy, take the reins as its new CEO that year, and quickly introduce a franchise model by 2010.
“We lost money our first year. We lost money our second year, but by the third year, we had broken even. By then, I knew I was on to something, and after that it was, it was off and running,” he says. “Now, it’s a multibillion dollar business.”
Crunch now has more than 500 gyms worldwide, and earlier this year, the company announced a strategic investment from Leonard Green & Partners, which acquired an estimated $1.5 billion majority stake in the brand from TPG Growth.
It’s been a wild ride, Rowley admits. The Covid-19 pandemic, for one, represents one of the company’s most challenging periods under Rowley’s tenure: “If there was any fear in the trajectory it was during Covid,” he says.
But Rowley says eight years on a combat tour during the Persian Gulf War with the U.S. Marines taught him that part of mission strategy is all about preparation, like creating an “emergency action plan,” or EAP.
“Obviously, we didn’t have an EAP for Covid, because nobody knew what that would be like,” Rowley recalled, so he gathered his executive team and “dusted off” Crunch’s former EAP which included how to deal with catastrophes from natural disasters to active shooters, and reworked it to include a 30-page manual for its franchise owners and operators on how to deal with a pandemic.
Building a detailed plan to withstand an unprecedented pandemic wasn’t limited to health and cleaning procedures alone, he says; it also included how to treat your team and your customers, and a blueprint for what would come after the shutdown ended. That meant gathering senior leadership to ask the tough questions: “How do we want to reemerge from this? How do we want to reinvent? How do we want to fix what’s broken? What should we really take the time to focus on?”
Building that blueprint is how the brand decided to launch Crunch+ (formerly Crunch Live), its online fitness platform.
While other gyms faced mass closures and a severe decline in membership, Crunch made the decision to stop billing its customers and offered them access to its new and improved digital workout platform, Crunch+, for free. The result: Crunch kept its members engaged and its community alive while seeing a 5.6 percent increase in membership during Covid, a period during which many other brands lost members.
While Rowley says “blue” states took 12 to 15 months to reopen after the initial shutdown in March, “red” states, which had a higher concentration of franchise operations, reopened in just six to eight weeks after initial shutdowns. Not only did those gyms get back up and running sooner than most, but they actually grew in both membership and club count, marking the start of a significant second wind in company growth–one that ultimately led to Crunch securing a spot at No. 4,022 on the 2025 Inc. 5000.
Crunch’s core philosophy of “No Judgments” paired with a member-centered experience and a strong team of professionals, has allowed the brand to stand the test of time. “You gotta shuck a lot of oysters to find a pearl,” Rowley says about assembling a great team. But once you find the right people, he adds, success isn’t found in an office or a spreadsheet —the “answers are in the gyms.” As he puts it, “I’ve had businesses all over the world, but there’s something unique about this that really gets into your bloodstream, it gets into your soul.”
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Victoria Salves
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