Franchise Talk

Carving A Niche In Fitness Equipment Repair

June 16th, 2009 | Author: Jack

Ann Walton curved her shoulders around the back of the weathered exercise bike, her eyes scanning the metallic shield around the gears.

“So when we hear that grinding sound, that’s the chain?” asked the director of the St. John Siegfried Health Club.

With a nod, Michael Peabody showed her where to inject the silicon lubricant. With 32 exercise bikes in the three-story midtown Tulsa complex, each used up to five times a day, he suggested those bikes needed maintenance once a month.

His firm Hollywood Fitness Repair provides that service, and tracks each time its six-man crew works on any piece in St. John’s fitness-equipment inventory – just as Hollywood does for 1,900 other clients across Oklahoma and northwest Arkansas.

“I tell people what we do and people stop and look at me and say, ‘What? You mean you can make money doing that?’” said co-owner Phyllis Peabody. Then she smiled. “Oh yeah! You can make money!”

Even in a down economy.

One month away from completing its first three years under their ownership, the Tulsa company has grown from $3,500 first-month revenue to total 2008 sales of $228,000, up 78 percent from prior-year results.

“I think we’re going to do half a million, or come awfully darn close to it,” she said of 2009. Read more.