Evgenia Koroleva, founder of ONE LDN, explains how a gym can turn community into repeat business: flexible memberships, a clearly chosen customer, brand partnerships and new revenue from existing space. Practical ideas for founders building health and fitness businesses.
What you'll learn
- How to measure community through attendance, retention and referrals.
- Why ONE LDN chose flexible memberships instead of long-term contracts.
- How knowing your customer helps you choose partnerships and stand out from larger gyms.
- Where to look for additional revenue in the space and audience you already have.
- How Evgenia tests ideas and uses customer demand to evaluate expansion.
Chapters
- 00:00 How to build a thriving gym
- 00:44 Meet Evgenia Koroleva, founder of ONE LDN
- 04:00 Making community a measurable revenue engine
- 07:25 Choosing who your gym is for
- 10:43 Why ONE LDN rejected long-term contracts
- 12:38 Testing pricing, memberships and new ideas
- 14:49 Spotting trends without chasing every fad
- 17:21 Finding new revenue in your existing space
- 20:48 Weighing the cost of recovery facilities
- 22:28 Keeping your offer simple
- 23:09 How partnerships led Nike to ONE LDN
- 26:40 The customer bigger gym brands overlook
- 28:40 Bootstrapping, rebuilding and deciding to expand
- 31:03 Three years of growth and the case for expansion
- 32:03 Choosing locations using customer demand
- 32:57 Founder resilience and celebrating wins
Ideas to take into your business
- Make community measurable. Look at how often customers attend, whether they stay and whether they recommend you. Events and a friendly atmosphere should connect to behaviour you can observe.
- Test the promise your membership makes. ONE LDN's no-contract approach puts the emphasis on giving people reasons to return. Evgenia explains the operating choices behind that model.
- Build partnerships around a specific audience. The episode traces how earlier partnerships helped lead Nike to ONE LDN. The useful question for a smaller business is which audience it serves particularly well.
- Check the economics before adding facilities. New services can create revenue, but space, operating costs and customer demand matter. Evgenia discusses the trade-offs around recovery facilities and expansion.
About Evgenia Koroleva
After spending the first 7 years of her career in investment banking, working across both UK and Africa, Evgenia left the corporate world in 2016 in pursuit of her passion for entrepreneurship, health and fitness to set up ONE LDN, a leading London gym for the Everyday Athlete.
In 2021, she created and founded The Female Curve (thefemalecurve.com), a female health coaching platform. During COVID, she co-founded Jobs In Fitness
She’s high energy and full of passion. She’s a keen surfer, ultra-runner, skier and wake-surfer and a big fan of outdoorsy adventures.
Links
Portrait credit: ONE LDN / Joel Charley.