Business decisions? Go with your gut feel!

Sharing Experience: Dave Courteen, Riverhills

The milestone, which does make me feel very old by the way, came up in conversation at a recent business networking event.

I was asked what one piece of advice I would pass on to someone setting out on their entrepreneurial journey. It’s a challenging question and I considered a number of responses. But in the end, I landed on the fact that when it comes to the really difficult decisions, you should go with your gut.

Like all industries, health club businesses rely on a lot of data. We look at member retention, sales conversion rates, member yield and the average lifetime of a member, as well as a lot of member satisfaction metrics. They are all important and relevant and can play a valuable part in deciding strategy. But data is only one part of the story, and business is so much more than just numbers.

Seeing past the numbers

We acquired Riverhills just as lockdown was coming to an end. It had been closed for eleven of the previous sixteen months, and the data would have suggested it was a risky decision. How many members would return? What would be the impact of the Joe Wicks phenomenon that saw everyone exercising at home? It seemed the demand for Peloton was growing and subscriptions for online fitness activity were too.

Many ‘experts’ were predicting that the traditional gym membership model was dead and that to survive, gyms would have to offer an online fitness service as well as a physical building. A hybrid ‘bricks and clicks’ service was what everyone was told to strive for.

None of the leading banks would lend us any money to buy Riverhills. They didn’t believe our data or projections, and we had to seek alternative funding sources to raise the capital required to buy the business. But, looking back, I never doubted for one moment that we were making the right decision. Despite all the data and research suggesting the contrary, my gut feel was that after nearly a year of being locked up at home, people would be desperate to get back to their health clubs – a community where they had a sense of belonging.

So, of course, looking back now I’m grateful that I trusted my gut on what was a fairly game-changing decision. Riverhills has gone from strength to strength over the last five years, despite some setbacks along the way, and is now a thriving part of the Mosaic business.

Now, it would also be wrong to give the impression that every time I have gone with a gut decision instead of a data decision over the last 40 years, I have got it right. But I am convinced that your gut is a far more reliable and successful decision-making guide than just research and raw numbers on a spreadsheet.

So, let me encourage you to go with your gut too, and, of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention that if you were to be a member of Riverhills, then you would, most likely, have a much leaner gut to go with!

And that can only be a good thing.