The FitTech Club Podcast

"Longevity market is a gold rush" - Jeff Zwiefel - Executive Director - Life Time Fitness, MIORA

• FitTech Club • Season 2 • Episode 7

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🔥 What's in this episode?

GLP-1 drugs have 10% adoption in the US with users 3x more likely to exercise - this is how Lifetime Fitness is capturing a $6.7 billion total addressable market through their MIORA longevity clinics. In this episode, Jeffrey Zwiefel, Executive Director of MIORA Longevity and Performance, reveals how integrating medical-grade wellness services can generate $3 million EBITDA per location while dramatically increasing member retention. Discover how they're achieving membership satisfaction rates of 95% through personalized health optimization that extends far beyond traditional fitness.

🎤 About our guest:

Jeffrey G. Zwiefel is the Executive Director of MIORA Longevity and Performance at Lifetime Fitness, with 170+ athletic clubs across the United States and Canada serving over 1.5 million access members. During his remarkable 26-year tenure, he has helped grow the company from 7 clubs to 180 locations, scaling revenue from $137 million to over $2.3 billion. Under his leadership, Lifetime has transformed from a fitness-centered business to a comprehensive healthy lifestyle ecosystem with record-low monthly attrition rates of just 2%.

🎯 What you'll learn

[02:09] How Lifetime evolved from a narrow fitness vertical to a multi-generational "healthy way of life company" serving members from "90 days to 90 years old"

[05:51] The complete MIORA longevity program structure including metabolic code assessments, personalized health plans, and subscription model at $299/month

[14:08] Unit economics of longevity clinics generating $250,000 monthly revenue per location with 30-36% margins and $3 million annual EBITDA

[17:08] Three key challenges in launching a longevity business: creating a seamless customer journey, optimizing pricing for accessibility, and finding the right practitioners

[23:55] How GLP-1 medications represent a $6.7 billion opportunity for fitness businesses when combined with comprehensive lifestyle programming

[30:19] Why even younger generations (26+) are increasingly seeking biohacking and longevity services for anxiety, sleep disorders, and sexual function optimization

📌 Links & resources

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Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Natalia Karbasova, founder and CEO of the FitTech Club, a global business club for founders and executives in the fitness and consumer health tech industries. In this episode, we explore the exciting intersection of fitness and longevity services with someone who has seen it all. Jeffrey Zweifel, executive director at Lifetime Fitness, reveals how they've expanded from just seven clubs to over 180 locations during his remarkable 26-year journey with the company. You'll discover surprising insights about the longevity market, including how people using weight loss medications are three times more likely to exercise and why even 26-year-olds are now seeking health optimization services. So, without further ado, let's dive right in.

Speaker 2:

All right, so we're live now. I'm Natalia Kabasova, the founder of the FitTech Club, and I'm pretty happy and excited to have Jeff Zwiefel, the person that has changed lots of longevity stuff at Lifetime Fitness, at our podcast today About the company. Lifetime Fitness was founded in 1992. Back then, you have 170 athletic clubs across the United States and Canada the States and Canada. You guys offered different stuff, from swimming pools to spas, to cafes, to athletic facilities and obviously now also longevity clinic. You went public in 2021 with a valuation of 3.6 billion dollars. You joined Lifetime back in 1998, which pretty much makes it 26 years of tenure. You now serve as Executive Director of Miura Longevity and Performance and you are the person to go to for medical wellness market and longevity expansion. So, jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 3:

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm excited to talk about what experiences we've had at Lifetime and within Miura.

Speaker 2:

Amazing, jeff. Let's dive right into it. 26 years of tenure stunning number. So how has the business shifted in all those decades?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a really great question because, as you can appreciate, there's been a massive amount of evolution and transformation that's happened within our business and I think if we hadn't, you know, we wouldn't be around anymore. Let's be real about it, particularly as we reflect on some of the challenges of the recession of 2008, 2009, and, of course, covid of 2020. So, yeah, it's been a privilege for me to be able to be in the 40 years, four decades, of the health, fitness and wellness industry, with 25 of, as you say, 26 of those years within Lifetime HealthAway, a life company, and serving as the president and COO of that company. When I started with Lifetime, we had seven clubs, all located in Minnesota, and grew to 180 clubs now. So, as you said, our enterprise revenue when I started was about 137 million US dollars. You know today it's well over $2.3 billion of revenue. We now have about 42,000, 43,000 members, as we call them employees, and we've always been about transformation and continuing to reinvent ourselves, always been about transformation and continuing to reinvent ourselves and, fortunately, our founder is an amazing entrepreneur that has always looked to kind of make ourselves obsolete and over the last couple of decades, I think, the most significant transformation to address your question very directly has been our continued desire and migration away from the very isolated and narrow vertical of focus on fitness to lifestyle, and that's why, a number of years ago, we dropped the name fitness and went with just lifetime name fitness. And went with just Lifetime, the Healthy Way of Life company, because our objective has been to be a multi-generational membership base of 90 days to 90 years old and you know, our offering basically puts it in a league of its own.

Speaker 3:

When you think about the Healthy Way of Life spectrum, you can think about luxury fitness clubs, of course, but you also got to think about the healthy way of life spectrum. You can think about luxury fitness clubs, of course, but you also got to think about digital and boutique and nutrition and spa and education and country clubs and resorts and wellness offerings and wellness living. So our ecosystem is extremely broad. We have our own events division. We have our foundation that's philanthropic, that's focused on kids and school lunches. We have our Life Cafe business, which is healthy eating. We have tennis, we have our spas, we have swim, we have kids, we have personal training and then, you know, we have Pickleball. We're the largest provider of Pickleball in the US, with almost 800 dedicated courts. And then, you know, as of recent, we've launched this Miura performance and longevity business. That, you know, is just a natural extension of who we are and the core of what our members are looking for. So I'll pause and allow you to get a question in.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, jeff. That's very kind of you. My question is actually what's the most important project right now that you're working on?

Speaker 3:

longevity and performance business and how Lifetime will successfully scale this initiative Because we've been working diligently now for a year and a half on perfecting the model. We're a large organization now with about 1.5 million access members and another 1.5 million digital members of Lifetime ecosystem and everything that we do has got to now be, I think, accretive, certainly additive to the customer experience of Lifetime. And so, when you think about our member, we looked at the Miura business and this longevity business that says Lifetime has such a unique right to win. You know we've got 17.2 million square feet of real estate under roof within our clubs. We have significant underutilized real estate today that we can quickly redeploy and convert to alternative use. We got the 1.5 million members with household income of $157,000. That's up 30% since 2019. We're going to have a record utilization of our clubs of 112 million visits per year.

Speaker 3:

So it's amazing opportunity and these members are highly educated, they're committed and interested in investing in their own health and wellness and they're also interested in all the biohacks right of red light and cryotherapy and intradsonas and peptides and hormone therapy and peptides and hormone therapy. So they're extremely well-educated already pursuing these services outside of our four walls today. So we want to be that convenient one-stop shop destination for our customers. So I'm working on Miura, but I'm also working on a new vertical called Lifetime Health, which largely is Lifetime's complete offering of assessments health assessments and supplementation nutritional supplements and healthy eating. So those are the two things that I'm really focused on.

Speaker 2:

MIORA aims to provide preventive care, health optimization. What have you learned so far in the last two years since launch? What was the most important learning for you?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's a great another great question, right? So there's been so many fabulous learnings, but I would say one of the key things that we need to understand, as you know well that this longevity market is like a gold rush. We have so many people coming to the table with various offerings and product configurations and ultimately, the consumer is left really trying to figure out what's legitimate versus who are the really bad actors and the snake oil salesmen, and so at Lifetime, we've always said, if we're going to do something, we're going to do it right or not at all, and that's what I've loved and what's kept me here. So the first thing has been the integration of this new program into the ecosystem of our personal training, our MediSpa, our live spas, our cafes, our recovery and our stretching.

Speaker 2:

How exactly does this work?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, Let me take you through it in the high-level way, right? So we got you know eight pillars of the business, if you will. We've got a metabolic code it's called and the metabolic code is really the initial start of the program. It's really where we'll get this metabolic profile, which involves in-house phlebotomy, the comprehensive blood work and the metabolic code questionnaire, and creates this personalized report. So we'll do this report. It's about, you know, $400 for you to get a hundred biomarkers for us collected it and then you'll sit down with our medical provider and do a one hour review. We'll create an action plan. We'll determine what medications, what hormones, what peptides, what supplements, what IVs. We'll connect you to our registered dietitian for a one-hour review and they will create a nutrition, lifestyle and exercise plan along with our personal trainer, and then we will continue to manage your program.

Speaker 3:

You will subscribe to a monthly membership. That's a $299 a month membership on top of your club membership. That's where you get program-specific exercise programming, You'll get a virtual trainer, you get nutrition and lifestyle programming, you get hormone optimization, you get the access to the innovative peptides and then you get a retest in three to six months and you get the RD and medical check-in as well. So in this metabolic code, we're breaking your blood work up into five different segments to really prioritize one simple thing how far are you away from optimal health? So we're going to look at things like adrenal, thyroid, pancreas. We're going to look at gut, immune, brain. Now we're going to diagnose and look at cardiovascular, pulmonary and neuromuscular. We're going to look at liver, lymph and kidney and estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. Obviously, and without looking at really deeply what's going on, we won't know what kind of program design that's best for you. So, within Miura, what we've done is made a really, I think, elegant and well put together program that's also affordable to the masses. So you got metabolic code.

Speaker 2:

At least in the United States. Yeah, go ahead At least in the United States, absolutely.

Speaker 3:

Yes, just in the United States today, we've launched and piloted in a downtown location in Minneapolis and now we're in the process of launching in our club a new club that we're offering in Chicago, illinois. We'll go to Florida market, we'll go to the Texas market next and the California market and we'll use this as a hub and spoke within our markets. In other words, in Minnesota we've got 22 clubs and all of our members within the market can come to this location. For Miura Chicago, we've got over 100,000 members within the 12 clubs that we offer in the Chicago market. So again, we've been able to do two key things Validate the customer journey is tremendous and impeccable, getting great retention and great customer satisfaction scores.

Speaker 3:

Two, we had as a public-held company, as you mentioned, we've been public twice, just to be clear, 2004 and 2021 in our history. Thanks for clarifying practitioner right, because, as you know, whether it be the MD that we're working with, the PA, or the NPs nurse practitioner, those medical professionals are so important to our success and do they have the right mindset in this business, right.

Speaker 2:

Jeff, what I want to hear is how big is the overlap with existing gym members and Miura members and what's the unit economics of that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, another great question, right, Because what's going to happen here and what is the penetration look like? We've done, as you can appreciate, plenty of modeling as we built out the unit economic model and the forecast of this business. Much like and I think it will resemble a similar model as personal training. You know I ran personal training at Lifetime early in my career. That business has grown tremendously for us and has been rapid growth post-COVID. You know we're at $30 million a month of that business right now and it throws off probably about a 30-point margin for us, so it's a second largest revenue generating business for our company. The unit economic model for Miura, we believe, is somewhere around the average of $250,000 per location per month US dollars, of course, at somewhere between a 30 and 36 point margin. We think it's probably a $3 million per location EBITDA business for us, right?

Speaker 2:

On an annual basis.

Speaker 3:

Yes, on an annual basis. Yes, per location yes. So when you think about the subscription, the blood work, the medical services, the supplementation, all these things do amazing things. One, they create connective tissue with the client that you've never seen before. Right. Issue with the client that you've never seen before. Right, because when customers find a trusted and respected, results-driven sort of resource like that, they're never going to leave you and it becomes a really powerful ancillary revenue stream for lifetime and operating done right when you build these tools into the ecosystem. So I think that's something I just wanted to make sure I articulate clearly.

Speaker 2:

Right, jeff, maybe I missed this, but how big is the overlap between the traditional gym members and longevity members?

Speaker 3:

Well, I think you know we don't know fully yet in our ecosystem we're still obviously testing and validating that Projected it can be somewhere between 9% and 15% of our membership segment easily. That has the discretionary income and in the short term will have the tremendous amount of desire to engage in a program like this. So it's a massive opportunity. I think it can be a $300-$400 million annual business for us, a top-line revenue business, fairly rapidly.

Speaker 2:

What were the biggest challenges when you were starting this kind of business? Maybe just name top three.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the top three was perfecting an elegant and seamless customer journey from end to end, you know, and not getting it too complicated, because there's so many tempting elements to throw into the mix of longevity right now that are sexy and interesting, right.

Speaker 3:

So keeping it, you know, very legitimately, science and research based, but also having enough sort of appeal and attraction to it and not making it too burdensome for the client. Secondly, for us, making sure that the pricing and the margins work. In other words, what's the most appropriate retail price that allows us to democratize this program and bring as many potential lifetime customers into the fold as we possibly can and still result in the necessary highly productive margins that are creative to the lifetime portfolio, that are creative to the lifetime portfolio. Third one is finding the right practitioners. You have practitioners that are newbies on one end of the continuum, that really don't know shit, and then you have, on the other end of the continuum, practitioners that are set in their ways and they're not ready and not flexible to adapt to new findings in the longevity category. So it's finding that right mix that's so important. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. And since you're speaking about democratizing access to longevity and healthy lifespan, do you think this model can work outside of the United States and Canada, Like compared to Germany? Almost 300 euros or bucks is mostly half of the insurance that you pay, like to say roughly, which covers kind of everything. So the healthcare model is very different in other parts of the world. How can Miura model apply to that? The world.

Speaker 3:

How can Mayor Imola apply to that? Yeah Well, I'll first say that you know I don't have a tremendously sound, knowledgeable perspective because, as you articulated and you know, the lifetime portfolio has really been focused in the US and Canada. But I believe that a program of this nature is such a natural program for any consumer worldwide, because they're looking for optimal health. They're not looking for how to just get back to neutral or a break-fix model or a disease model, like our traditional healthcare system is. There's a place for that and a need for that and that's not what we're doing with Miura.

Speaker 3:

But I do think consumers want to look better, they want to feel better, they want to perform better and when you think about the statistics of the average American living 14 years of their life in chronic poor health, it just really puts an exclamation point on the importance of lifespan versus. You know the fact that we're getting people to live longer in lifespan, but we're really not getting this health span that really people are craving. So I think it's a no-brainer for anybody all over the world, because I also think that the bad part about longevity it's brought with this idea that it's only for the rich and the famous and people that have a billionaires or something behind their name, and what we're trying to do is bring this to the mainstream and make it affordable to the average person, and I think this program does it.

Speaker 2:

How do you measure success? How do you know you're really increasing the health?

Speaker 3:

then Well, by moving the critical blood biomarkers, by moving the lipid levels in a meaningful way, by moving the biomarkers like homeocysteine, like cortisol, like the hormone levels, by moving apolipoprotein B, by ensuring that these things are moving and then comparing that to how the individual is feeling, how they're functioning. Are they sleeping better? How's their sex life? Are they recovering, functioning? Are they sleeping better? How's their sex life? Are they recovering better? Are they eating better? And then, ultimately, how is their life being lived in a day-to-day basis? So those are the things that we're really looking at and measuring on an ongoing basis. The health outcomes is going to be the ultimate.

Speaker 2:

Right and just improving the quality of life. How do the KPIs that you use for measuring members in the clinic differ to those in the gym business?

Speaker 3:

Great question and a lot of similarities right In that, as you can appreciate, in the gym business we're looking at member acquisition, we're looking at member retention and attrition and churn. Those are obviously the inflow and outflows are the fundamentals of a club business. But we're also looking at net promoter score. I mean at Lifetime, we have had attrition annualized attrition as high as 45% in 2009, right during the Great Recession. This year we're down at an all-time low attrition rate at around 2% per month and that's unheard of.

Speaker 3:

And we don't do contracts. It's very important to understand that. We don't have annual agreements. These are month-to-month agreements, just like we do with Miura. Our customer experience scores used to be an NPS net promoter score was around 34. We're in the mid-50s now as a company. Again, we measure this within Miura, measure this within Miora. Our member satisfaction is at 95% in Miora and our churn rate is extremely low. So we're measuring new member acquisition, we're measuring retention, or member satisfaction, and then we're measuring share of wallet in terms of ancillary revenue is just like we do in the club business, with additional blood work, additional assessments, additional nutritional supplements that the customers buy, right? Good question.

Speaker 2:

Right Got you, jeff. Let's move on a bit into the industry. Let's zoom out here. Into the industry, let's zoom out here. So one of the things that you're doing at Miura is also the GLP-1 treatments. I know there's huge talk about that in the industry. Some players see this as a threat, some see that as an opportunity to jump on the health and medical train. What's your take on GLP for the fitness industry specifically?

Speaker 3:

That's a great question and a hot topic. I think it's maybe one of the most relevant trends in the health and fitness and wellness industry right now, because it's obviously at $111 billion revenue category, with 10% of the US population using some form of GLP-1. One in eight are using a GLP-1 right now, and so when I first started looking at this part of the category and being in the business so long, I was extremely skeptical, like all quick fix, magic bullet weight loss drugs we've seen through our careers, until I really started digging into the research and the science behind it and I found that this is a remarkable drug that, when done right, can have just amazing implications in terms of transforming our society and the health of our general public. Right, we must look at different ways of solving this problem because, as you well know, in the US particularly, what we've been doing isn't working, and the fact that this drug and the research that I worked with also at the Harrison Company showed is that Americans' consumers are three times more likely to exercise when using a GLP-1, 71% versus 36% that are not, and that simple premise is the underlying reason why I know that we're going to see customers coming into the clubs and the gyms and boutiques that we would never see before, because they feel more comfortable coming into the club. Their prediction, again at the Harrison Company, was that this will provide a $6.7 billion to the health club industry. You know total addressable mark, and so there are a number of factors there, beyond just the hope factor. There's the fact that the health club operators can now become a trusted and reputable source to provide the necessary holistic and comprehensive components to a GLP-1 program. That's necessary, let's face it. These drugs are becoming everywhere.

Speaker 3:

At the Super Bowl in the US, many of us saw a 60-second spot by him and hers. It started out fabulous, helping portray the current realities that we're faced with the obesity epidemic with, you know, 70% of Americans being overweight or obese. But we can dispense this product for 199 bucks or whatever, and you can be on your way and it will serve as your magic bullet. It will serve as your magic bullet. That's the part that I have, as a professional in the industry, a significant problem with, because I believe you first need a tremendous amount of understanding of what's going on in the blood chemistry and the biology of the body. With a comprehensive blood work. You need to understand the benchmark there. These biomarkers are extremely important to understand a number of these factors, to understand how this drug is going to work in concert with all your other chemistry.

Speaker 3:

And then, of course, as we know undeniably, we need to think about the dosage schedule and the titration of this drug. At Neora, for example, we only are going to allow the customer to lose no more than three or four pounds a week, because we know that rapid weight loss does what it intensifies the loss of muscle, of course, and alters the metabolism in a way that doesn't allow someone to maintain that weight loss over time. So we're going to titrate the dosage up of GLP-1s very gradually over six to eight weeks. That does two things it mitigates some of the unhorrible side effects that become prevalent in these drugs, with nausea and diarrhea and constipation, and also helps thwart the loss of lean body mass. We're going to get you to the point where, ultimately, you achieve your desired weight loss and we're going to titrate you back off the drug, Ideally with the other lifestyle behavior, changes of cardiovascular exercise, of high protein intake, of proper hydration and rigorous resistance training, of periodization and body composition testing through a DEXA scan.

Speaker 3:

We're going to make sure that you have a wraparound lifestyle program that you can maintain and then ultimately, hopefully, go off the drug in time. So I think it's a remarkable drug. I think it can have undeniably massive ramifications for our society's overall health, because the implications of kidney disease, heart disease, renal failure, hypertension, in addition to the number of downstream complications ranging from osteoarthritis to sleep apnea to Alzheimer's disease, are going to be far-reaching here, many of them that are largely directly correlated to obesity, of course, and this idea of chronic inflammation that comes with obesity and being overweight and the negative implications of what we call metaflamation and how we can deal with that. That's at the core of so much of what we're doing within Miura longevity and performance.

Speaker 2:

What's Lifetime's biggest future market segment?

Speaker 3:

You know it's a great question because today we are tremendously successful on serving the 90 days to 90 years old Aurora and our rapid growth post-COVID with that senior population that we were somewhat underserving and now we're able to bring them into our clubs during non-prime times and they're able to create these social connections that are so amazing within Pickleball and within our life cafes with coffee clubs and ultimately so many other things. But I would say.

Speaker 3:

You know, we're going to continue to probably effectively serve the Gen Zs and the Gen Alphas effectively as any other generation Because, as we know, they're joining clubs at a larger rate than any other generation. They're naturally seeking wellness now more than ever. They're more health conscious, they're doing more strength training than ever before Obviously the explosion of free weights and Pilates programs that we're double down on and they're using things like alcohol less than other generations. So another indication that their commitment to wellness is starting. We're finding customers as young as 26 starting to get involved in biohacking right. Red light, infrared sauna, cold plunges right. You know they also have problems with anxiety and sleeping disorders and sexual function that they need to have addressed at an early age. So it's not just for people like me that they're in their 60s. It's for people that you know in their late 20s, early 30s, that are starting to think about how are they taking control of their health at an early age.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. We live in a chaotic world and we all need a kind of sense of security. Jeff, what advice would you personally give to a fitness entrepreneur or wellness entrepreneur who wants to move into the medical, wellness and longevity space? Just one piece of advice.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, do your research. Dig deep, you know, get around and understand and get under the hood and evaluate what other people are doing and what they're having success with, and then find out very clearly and define what model is going to be most appropriate connective tissue to your particular operating model. What's the natural connection? Be curious, look around the corner and really make sure you do your research and assess things before you simply try to throw something together and make sure that you're legitimate in terms of being on the leading edge but not doing things that are just a fleeting kind of sexy, kind of offering in the short term.

Speaker 2:

Last question, my favorite one, Looking five to 10 years ahead what trend or technology in your industry excites you most?

Speaker 3:

What trend or technology in your industry excites you most?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, I think what excites me the most is how we're going to be able to take you know personalization, digitalization and AI and really understand on a 360-degree basis what's happening to a customer have the machine learning of predictability of these protocols that we're using whether they be exercise, nutrition or pharmaceutical treatments and have this really high degree of accuracy of understanding these outcomes that I think are really going to dramatically improve the flywheel effect of programs like Miura and the like, and I think that's going to be remarkable. And for the consumer to have these digital dashboards to really understand how they're moving the needle on their health outcomes and feeling better and performing longer and improving health span. I think that's what's going to be most exciting.

Speaker 2:

Jeffrey, thank you so much for this conversation, Really appreciate it.

Speaker 3:

Thank you very much, appreciate the time.