My name is Chris Beech and I am the owner of HITZone Congleton.

I would say perhaps one of the biggest worries to anyone looking to open a studio, is yes they might want to do it, but will it work? That’s the big question that I asked. What we’ve found is that with the support and the marketing strategy that HITZone Global provides, that we’re already 100% ahead of where we should have been, which obviously we are delighted with.

After being open just over a month, a month and a day, we had twice as many members as we were expecting to get at that point, and we had already broken even at that point – so we were absolutely thrilled with the results. We still get lots of enquiries coming in regularly, and that is to do with the targeted marketing that HITZone Global helps you with, it has proven really successful.

My background previously was playing professional football, then I got into banking and did that for a few years. Then I moved into recruitment but found that I wasn’t enjoying myself so looked into franchising. I contacted a couple of franchises and got away down the road with them, but realised it was just financially not viable. I went back to the drawing board, found HITZone Global and looked at their model. It was financially affordable, but interestingly was also reaching out to a different marketplace – helping everyday people get back into fitness, rather than trying to attract super fit people and that really appealed to me.

I think if anybody, no matter what walk of life they are in at the moment, are looking to change what they want to do. They would be able to do this, as long as they have the enthusiasm and the desire to help people. You will have all the support that HITZone Global provides. They have a very clear plan, a very clear structure providing the steps you should take. And also, there is a hell of a lot of support there from the other studios in terms of encouragement or even practical tips of what they found useful while they were opening up.

It sounds cheesy, and owners from the other studios said it to me at first, “you will be changing peoples’ lives”. That has quickly proven to be true. We have had people coming in saying they have lost 9-10lbs and they’ve only been here a couple of weeks. Telling me that they’ve never exercised before, were scared of exercising, but now they look forward to coming into the studio to exercise. So, you know, there is a feel-good factor that is difficult to explain until you get involved with it, but yeah, I find it amazing.