Steven Groves is the CIO of GoodLife Fitness, the largest fitness provider in Canada (and the fifth-largest fitness provider in the world). In addition to this role, Steve also spent more than 11 years on the Board of Directors of London Bridge Child Care Services, recognized throughout North America as a leader in the area of non-profit early childhood education. He was recently recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 20 Social CIOs.
1) If you had a magic wand and could improve a way technology is being misused in health clubs today, what would it be and why?
I think at this point, my perception is that we are not focused enough on a holistic view of the member beyond the four walls of our own clubs. I do not think we are necessarily misusing technology. Rather, the focus has been too much on technology that can be used exclusively to advance our clubs’ agenda, which is different than looking at technology for the betterment of our members — whether or not they choose to do some of their activities inside of our clubs or outside of our clubs.
When some of the first wearables came into our industry, things like the bodybugg — back whenever that was — bodybugg was intend to be worn predominantly outside of the club. Ironically, many probably took it off to work out because it was clunky. It seems to me as though — we as an industry —are not really focused enough on the overall outcomes that our members are looking for. We could be better at helping them with the selection of the right technology to get the results they’re paying us for. The truth is this technology is not necessarily going to be specifically aligned with improving what is happening within the four walls of our club.
2) There is a growing acknowledgement in our industry that we need to be better at catering to a wider spectrum of consumer types, e.g. age groups, aspiration types, gender differences, etc. This is in contrast to prescribing a “one size fits all”offering. How have you seen technology most amply and effectively applied to help support this effort?
One example is ResMed. They are a medical company. My understanding is they are one of the largest manufacturers of CPAP devices. They have also created bedside devices. Being the experts in sleep, they have created this bedside device that uses sonar-style technology, and the device passively monitors your sleep activity. Previous versions of sleep monitoring devices were either uncomfortable or [the new ones] do not work that well. So what ResMed did is devised this device that sits there and it monitors your sleep: it monitors your breathing, it monitors the temperature of the room, it monitors sound levels in the room … it can basically see your body in the dark. The signal from the device is bouncing off the water in your body and can pass through everything else, so it can actually see right through your blankets, any material you might have on top of you. I could not believe how accurate this thing is … from your phone you get this wave pattern that is reflective of exactly your breathing pattern.
So ResMed, having such a massive data set that they have collected about how people sleep, by their claim, can accurately predict when you’re in light sleep, when you’re in deep sleep, when you’re in REM sleep, when you’re actually awake. And then the device picks up on a whole bunch of other pieces of information around the environment that you are sleeping in. So there’s the noise level, and room temperature, and maybe one or two more data points. From a personalization standpoint, coming back to your question, what I found was most interesting is that after it learned about your sleep patterns for a week, it starts to get prescriptive. It asks you an eight-question survey each day. How much caffeine did you have today? How much alcohol did you have today? Etc. Then it starts to prescribe ways to improve.For instance, it started creating for me — clearly, very unique to my own personal situation — it was the first true prescription that I have seen that was catering to my own personal unique needs. This is circumventing the spectrum all together; this is catered to the individual.
3) What can United States club operators learn from our Neighbors to the North? Where are areas of difference that Canadian clubs get right and the United Statesmaybe could do better?
It may be a naïve perspective, because honestly I do not spend a lot of time within U.S. club operations, but my sense is that U.S. operators have the luxury of having so many other competitors and peers within the country — in other words, the sheer number of clubs is massive — that I don’t think U.S. operators necessarily feel the need to look outside of the Americas, or let’s say North America even, for ideas and new ways of doing things. I get a sense that your market is very insulated in that way.
Whereas in Canada, we are small — especially here at GoodLife — we do not really have any peers in the country. The second-largest club chain in the country is also ours, Fit4Less. What we do, and I think we do quite well, is work with a lot of club operators globally. We have really benefited from some of the learnings that we have gathered from people in Europe and Asia — in particular Australia.
This may be an unfair assessment — a naïve assessment. However, I get the sense the U.S. market is a bit of an echo chamber.There is a lot that we can learn from other operators from the East, and from others in the West. I get the sense in the United States there is a feeling that you do not need to necessarily go outside your country’s boundaries for ideas. If true, that is limiting.
4) Discourse about data “interoperability”in the health club industry has almost boiled over, and the concept of data interoperability means different things to different operators and CIOs. What does it mean to you and why (or why not) is interoperability in our industry important?
I want to deal with technology I can plugin to a system and have it functionally do what I want. I like the software IFTTT. I think in the case of IFTTT, they call this type of flow “channels.” I want to be able to take hardware and software — ranging for IoT and SaaS platforms — and feel confident anything that will be useful to the clubs and/or our members can be channeled, plugging into a workflow management system I control.
I want the same easeI use IFTTT to get my Nest thermostat to report that my living room is over 80 degrees through a text message sent to my mobile phone — I want this ease of integration with the technology I use to run our clubs.
So when people say to me, “What does interoperabilitymean to you?” I use that as an example just to get them thinking about it. If a new member rides a piece of Life Fitness cardio equipment — they jump on one of our bikes — and it is the first time that they’ve been on that bike, and they’ve tapped their RFID to acknowledge they’re on the bike (so we know it’s them) I want to be able to have that trigger fire an event somewhere. For example, the trigger goes to a CRM platform that fires off a quick email giving them tips on that particular piece of equipment, and how they should be using it properly and safely … a simple recipe to enhance the member experience.
If I can start to get you to understand IFTTT, then I can start talking to you about and Enterprise Services Bus, and the integration of APIs, and having an open API architecture. So many of the APIs in our industry do not expose even 30 percent of the features and functionality of the actual UX of the system. This is frustrating, because I do not always want to have to use the UX of the platform that we purchase, and in many cases we as technology experts arrogantly think we can do better, and so we really want to write something ourselves. The current state of affairs is limiting. We end up having to write our own APIs in a lot of cases, just to create an abstraction layer. Salesforce and Amazon Web Services built their products with an API integration strategy top of mind, then theyadded the UX/UI layer. The fact that much of the technology in our industry was built the opposite way just shows a level of immaturity that our industry still has.
5) In your opinion, what is your favorite underappreciated and/or unknown health club technological addition? An uncommon product or service that almost always results in a significant return on investment for the club that adopts it.
ShapeLog is intriguing for me in this regard. I found out about ShapeLog through the Fitness Industry Technology Council podcast that Josh Trent does. I had never heard of it before, and quite frankly I have not heard of anybody else talk about it since. It is a fairly simple technology in that it is a device that you mount on the cable of selector equipment — the pulley equipment that we all have in our clubs — and what it does is it is able to measure the tension that’s being applied to the cable as the weight is being lifted off by the user.
It’s able to measure the tension, and from that it is able to calculate how much weight you’re lifting. Which in and of itself is kind of cool, then wirelessly they can send that information, so that it displays on your device. They are effectively able to record your workout. The part that really intrigued me was the fact that how you and I lift weight is unique to each of us, and apparently is almost as unique as our own fingerprints. What this product is doing is capturing 100 pieces of data per second — I believe that is the number they had given us in the demo — through native accelerometers and tension monitoring. The device creates a unique pattern of my lifting and lowering of the weight and stores this information in its database. Now, the next time I sit down and I do my next set of reps, it knows that that was me, and so it is actually able to track my workouts without me having to go up and log in, or tap an RFID chip onto the equipment. It eliminates a set in the identification process, making the ability to track less invasive and more passive.