Folusho Ogunwale is the CEO and Founder of i-fitness. He is a Serial Entrepreneur who has gathered seven years’ experience in Sales/Marketing and HR with Skye bank Plc (from 2007 to 2013) before commencing his entrepreneurial journey.
Driven by the desire to make fitness truly common and a lot more convenient and fun to engage in, Ogunwale set up i-Fitness, Nigeria’s first fitness chain and platform in 2015. At this time, the fitness culture was almost non-existent. The entrepreneur, who started the platform somewhere in Lekki Phase One on Admiralty Way with little or no funding, managed a three bedroom flat at the time.
Nine years and counting, i-Fitness has grown and expanded with 24 branches across Nigeria, with its latest branch, Gbagada branch which will be launched today. In this interview with IFEOMA OKEKE-KORIEOCHA, Folusho Ogunwale takes us through the journey of how he started the challenges and success stories.
Can you take us through the journey of how you started till date?
It has been a long journey and also a short journey at the same time and the reason why I say this is that we are on a mission to make fitness truly common and make it a lot more convenient and fun. It’s a culture that we are building and you don’t build such lifestyle culture in such a short time. We are going to be 10 years in about six months’ time and I can say for a fact that there is still a long way to go but if you look back, there are also a lot of great milestones that we have achieved. Now the culture of fitness in Lagos especially is very common. It is almost part of the urban lifestyle to have a fitness membership now. It wasn’t like that 10 years ago. And this is what keeps driving us. The fact that we are building a platform that helps you make a lifestyle decision to stay healthy is a big deal and doing that consistently is rewarding because anytime we come into a new area, we are pulling a lot of people. We are helping people build friendships and helping people connect. We are not just serving people from the standpoint of being healthier; we are also serving from the standpoint of helping people connect better which is very important for healthy living. If you choose to walk out in your home by yourself or you choose to come to i-Fitness, the difference is clear because you are doing that with people of like minds and that’s what keeps us going. Year on year, I don’t think we are there yet, we are taking our steps but we are happy doing it.
How did you start?
Starting off was in 2015 which is nine and half years ago and at that time, fitness was nothing close to this. The fitness culture was almost non-existent. What made us start i-Fitness was my personal decision to make fitness truly common. Fitness at that time felt like luxury and very distant. Even if you had the money, you didn’t have a decent place to go to. I lost a friend’s brother around 2007 or 2008. He had high blood pressure and that went very bad and he had renal failure. He battled with diabetes and he was in his 30s. He passed on leaving his wife and two kids and that made my friends and I say we needed to start taking our health very seriously. What would you say is the value of that man’s life to his two children or wife we left behind? And that was what made us start. We started in 2015. Because the culture of fitness was so low, we decided to create the path. Creating the path means that someone needed to show that there is another way to keep healthy and do that having fun. You can build friendship and it can be part of your life. Fitness is a lifestyle decision. You can go to a restaurant because you like the food and you go there once in a while. That is not fitness. Fitness is a thing you do all the time. And so being on top of people’s minds almost on a daily basis is a lot of work. But we enjoyed doing it and we are still here.
When you started, did you have enough funds ?
We started in Lekki Phase One on Admiralty Way with little or no funding. I just exited one of my businesses at the time. Now, that branch is 12 times its starting size. At that time, it was 12 times smaller. It was such a small place. It was about 150 square meters. It was like a three bedroom flat. We didn’t even have the money to buy brand new fitness equipment so we went to a Gym at the time in VI and we bought some of their fairly used equipment and that was how we started off. It was actually very small beginnings but because of what we knew that we are building the preferred fitness chain, the vision was there and before we had our first subscriber, we were very sure that this was going to serve many thousands of people. So it didn’t matter much that we didn’t have money at the time. What mattered at that time was we had a vision in front of us. When we started off, it was playing out, it was impressive and that gave us the spur to continue.
Since you started, what have been your major challenges?
It has been a truck load of challenges because when we started, fitness was new, there was no track, and nobody understood what fitness was about. So, funding was tough because even the finance people did not understand it. You move from there to infrastructure issues. For you to have a decent fitness center you must have a big space, you must be able to park over 100 cars. It is very difficult to find those kinds of places where you can park 100 cars at once or even more. You have to have light, have your own transformer. It is almost as if you are building, it is like you own mini estate. So, from funding to infrastructure then you talk about people. We are the first to do this so we don’t have enough skilled manpower that is readily available. If I was building a bank or hospital, I can get as many bankers and doctors I want. But building a fitness chain, we don’t have that ready manpower, so it means that there is a lot that has to go into human capital development. We have to do a lot of training upon training to get our people up to a certain level that is best in class and get them ready to serve.
So, from funding to infrastructure to people, it’s been one thing or the other. Also, the economy is affecting everyone. So as you are battling to make fitness common and affordable, you’re faced with the real challenge of the economy in which case things are very expensive. There is a hyperinflation going on and we are still expanding in the face of that.
You mentioned earlier that i-Fitness will be celebrating its first decade six months from now. So as a leader in the fitness industry, how does i-Fitness stay ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and trends.
It’s a thing that is extremely important. For you to be able to serve, there has got to be a platform. If you don’t have a platform, then you can’t serve. The first thing that comes to mind is that there would be spread. Nigeria is very big and Lagos is also very big. So, even if everyone would not be an i-Fitness member, we want thousands upon thousands of people to be members. So, the first thing is that there must be a good network of locations that is not just about having a good spread but has to be decent, well built, professional and also must meet up with world class and Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) standards. That in itself is something we don’t play with because if we compromise on that, then we are not providing world class services. You are talking about best in class service from professional standards which are fitness trainers. We have equipment that are sourced directly from the original equipment manufacturer. We have our partners abroad that are bringing the best equipment to the nation. That in itself also is a big deal. Because if you have the spread and you don’t have the right machines, then it is a spread that is empty and we don’t want that. On the back of that is people and membership management. Because we are managing a lot of accounts, we have to be on top of our IT game, making sure we have the best of softwares that is able to give us track of our members, track their accounts and track in which case we can manage and be able to serve them. In i-Fitness there is multi-location access. We have just opened this location and many people that are inside are not members from here. You have a very strong IT base to be able to attend to these people. So IT is very key for us. People sign up with their mobile apps, it means you have to integrate on your mobile app. All of those things are there and we keep improving time over time and making sure our services keep improving time over time. So, it is a work in progress.
You’re opening more outlets. Are these outlets spread across Nigeria ?
We will be ending this year 2024 with 25 outlets but the interesting thing is that sometime around Q1 next year, we are opening more locations in Abuja and Port Harcourt. The spread is within those big cities first and later next year, we will go into other cities in Nigeria. By 2026, we are looking to spread into West Africa more. So it’s a lot of work.
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