Building the foundation for future growth

Project: Preparing Fitness World’s Swiss operations for acquisition

In 2018, the Danish fitness operator Fitness World acquired basefit.ch, the second largest and fastest growing fitness operator in Switzerland with 33 clubs, more than 67,000 members and approximately 300 employees.

Implement Consulting Group was brought on to assist in the post-merger reorganisation of basefit.ch to prepare for future growth in line with strategic objectives. The engagement included a transformation of the finance function, improvement of HR processes and a range of initiatives to improve customer service. The aim was to establish an organisation that was able to handle growth efficiently through a clear organisational setup, well-defined processes, aligned roles and responsibilities and effective IT tools.

In collaboration with the management team, a new organisational foundation was designed and implemented over a period of 10 months focusing on the following areas:

• Organisational consolidation of customer service and HR functions to the headquarters in Switzerland.
• Establishing a new finance organisation and designing and implementing new finance processes, including month-end procedures.
• New IT landscape: ERP (Microsoft Business Central), POS (LS Retail), salary system (SwissSalary) and IFRS 16 lease system (Soft4Leasing).
• Robotics (RPA) implementation for process improvements.
• Microsoft Power BI implementation to provide business performance insights.
• Conversion from Swiss GAAP to IFRS, including balance sheet clean-up.
• Preparing like-for-like numbers for the sales process.
  
  
  

Impact: Preparing Fitness World for acquisition

By building a solid foundation for the business support functions at basefit.ch, the organisation was able to visualise the operational and financial performance of their fitness centres. This new insight led to substantial savings through optimised staff planning and organisational consolidation of support functions.

Furthermore, utilisation of improved analytics through Power BI and RPA solutions supporting the finance processes provided cost savings and improved data quality as well as faster and better business insights.
The organisational optimisation of basefit.ch and Swiss operations improved the M&A process when private equity-backed PureGym acquired Fitness World, including basefit.ch, at the end of 2019. The acquisition included more than 230 gyms with an excess of 600,000 members.