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Creating happier, healthier workplaces through a multilateral focus on fitness

Tony Frick is the president and CEO of GlobalFit, a health and wellness technology company based in Philadelphia, PA. Since 1992, GlobalFit has worked with fitness companies and insurers to promote healthy, happy, and productive workforces. Today, in addition to its network of over 9000 gyms and studios, the company offers numerous, tech-powered fitness solutions, including GlobalFit Rewards, which uses rewards to incentivize employees to participate in healthy activities, and WalkMyMind, a holistic program centered on the connection between physical, mental, and emotional health. GlobalFit’s mobile app, GlobalFit Anywhere, is scheduled to launch later this year.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Can you walk us through your distribution model? What incentivizes employers to adopt the platform, and how does a consumer access what GlobalFit has to offer?

TONY FRICK: All of our products are distributed to consumers through their insurer or their employer. Insurance companies and employers are so focused on products like this for a variety of different reasons. First and foremost, fit and healthy employees have higher levels of engagement, they’re more productive, they have lower rates of absenteeism. Today, in order to attract and retain top-tier talent in such a competitive marketplace for employees, it’s not enough that you just have a 401K plan, or you have some insurance for your employees; today’s employees are looking for ways that you are investing in their health and their development, and GlobalFit facilitates that on behalf of a number of employers.

If you look at The Honest Company, that’s one of our clients out in California, it’s a 90%-plus engagement in that platform. It’s a young contemporary work force and this is another way for them to engage with their employees.

For insurers, it’s a whole different calculus. Over the long term, activity can reduce the instance of chronic preventable disease. This is diabetes, heart disease, some forms of cancer. It’s been proven that if you engage in certain number of steps a day, you go to the gym a certain amount of times, your chances of developing heart disease later in life are a lot less than they would be if you are less active.

Q. What about your other products?

A. Gym Network 360 is still one of the nation’s leading gym and studio marketplaces. Participants gain access to best in class discounts to 9000 gyms and studios throughout the country. Over 4,000 corporations and most major insurers offer this as a benefit, and over 70 million people have access to this platform. This is very much a foundational platform for GlobalFit. It reduces the financial burden of accessing a studio or a gym.

And then we built on top of that GlobalFit Rewards. GlobalFit Rewards is a product that ties into your wearable device, tracks your activity, tracks your gym visits, and as you hit certain wellness milestones, we administer reimbursements on behalf of your insurer or your employer. Last year, we paid out almost $5 million in rewards simply for people living fit and healthy lifestyles.

Q. Tell us about your team. Is fitness a big part of all of your employees’ lives?

A. We have a very diverse team: healthcare industry veterans, technologists, product innovators. Our SVP of product, Erin Markowski, is indicative of a lot of the young talent on our team. She’s very forward thinking. She doesn’t feel that these problems in wellness can’t be solved. What’s interesting is you put her and a number of folks in a room for a few hours, and the ideas that percolate up are creative and interesting and really address some of the challenges in our space. We’re not going to build every one of those, but a lot of the ideas that we have in the pipeline that we will be bringing to market didn’t come from my office or didn't necessarily come from our management team, but came from us encouraging our staff to try to fix problems that they encounter in their everyday wellness and healthcare journey. Those are the products that we are building. Frankly, they solve problems for our employee base, which is very diverse: from CrossFit enthusiasts to yoga enthusiasts, to the folks whose sole activity is going for a walk. When we have that lens and perspective in our organization, we’re not just building millennial-oriented solutions, we’re not just building senior-oriented solutions; we’re building solutions that identify needs and solve problems across all demographics of the market.

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