One That Worked
With such buying tips in mind, consider the Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based health-club chain Life Time Fitness as an instructive case study for how to successfully deal with software companies. In late 1999, Life Time decided it could expand its fifteen-club national market by creating a Member Management System, an application for bill payments, customer demographics, field reports, and a one-second member check-in. Initially, Life Time planned to buy an off-the-shelf application to tie the clubs together—but none existed.
Thus began a quest for the right architecture, which wound up costing $25 million in total IT expenditures (including salaried employees) over the last four years. The company decided to build its own platform, and initially chose Microsoft and IIS to handle the architecture. They considered using Web Forms, which Microsoft then supported as an add-on to its e-commerce server. But just as development began, the company's IT executives heard that Microsoft was pulling all support.
"It's basically the same thing you hear with Microsoft all the time: 'OK, this is the technology,' and they push, push, push it and then, 'Oh, by the way, that's not really how we do this. We're pulling the support, and please migrate to this new approach.' At that point Microsoft was really starting to leave a sour taste in everyone's mouth," recalls Gary Lien, Life Time's systems architect. "Microsoft has always chosen its own destiny without really getting input from anybody else. They've always tried to force technology at people as opposed to figuring out what people really want."
At that point, Life Time considered "some esoteric product/application/server/whatever" as an alternative, but didn't want to be locked into one all-encompassing vendor contract—especially if a smaller vendor were to go out of business. So the company chose to make Java 2 Enterprise Edition tools the foundation of its Web services platform. The company also links member records via BEA WebLogic server and SOAP interfaces, along with an ASP online scheduling system.
The Member Management System has worked perfectly, helping Life Time expand to twenty-eight fitness clubs and pump its employee roster from four thousand to five thousand over the last few years. This has come, obviously, when the rest of the economy is reeling from the dot-com crash. So rather than make like California and submit to the whims of a software company, Life Time turned solid buying decisions into growth, and growth into consumer power.
"Life Time Fitness, as a whole, did not contract at all in the last three years—and has continued to grow just as aggressively. So the demand and importance for IT systems has not abated," says Wesley Bertch, the club's director of information systems. "Sure, some vendors have not survived the last three years and we've seen a lot of consolidation. But if anything, it's caused consumers like us to be that much more cautious that a vendor demonstrates viability."
Steve Knopper of Denver has contributed to Rolling Stone, Spin, Esquire, Yahoo Internet Life, and many other publications.
