North west health club Total Fitness has bought personal training organisation Pro-Fit following a five-year partnership between the two companies.
The acquisition will see the company, which operates 17 health clubs across the north of England and Wales, take on 150 self-employed personal trainers, providing it with an opportunity to develop its personal training offering, it said.
Jasvir Sanghera, Total Fitness CFO, said: “In order to keep up with demand from our growing member base and in line with current fitness trends, personal training is set to be a key area for our growth plans in 2020.
“This acquisition now puts us in an ideal position to focus on the product and deliver our all-encompassing fitness offering to our ever-increasing member base.
“We’ve been wanting to enhance our personal training offering for some time now and having worked with this particular community of trainers for five years we trust them to deliver a top notch service on our gym floors.”
The acquisition follows a period of turnaround for the company, in which a decade-long decline in membership has been reversed, largely attributed to the appointment of Sophie Lawler as chief executive and Mr Sanghera in June 2018.
The company also doubled its EBITDA figures with a year-on-year increase from £1m to £2.2m.
Ms Lawler said: “We’ve spent the last year reclaiming our purpose as a health club and working to put the fitness offering back into the heart of the business.
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“To now be working even closer with this team of highly experienced personal trainers to strengthen our product offering is the perfect end to a fantastically productive year.
“The acquisition brings new levels of possibility to our 100,000 members and we’re confident that this development will help to get larger numbers of people onto the gym floor and give them even more reason to keep coming back and getting fitter.”
Total Fitness said it hoped the acquisition will help support its “ambitious” growth plans in 2020.