Stories from the Covid-19 Front Lines: CEO Q&A with Susan Boresow of Title Boxing Club
Name: Susan Boresow
President: President
Brand: Title Boxing Club (a Franworth company)
Segment: Fitness, health
Units: 185
Locations: 34 states, Mexico, Dominican Republic
How has Covid-19 affected your brand?
The biggest impact to our brand has been that all of our clubs are closed. This has made our corporate office and franchisees more nimble in adjusting to any situation. This has also challenged us to work in different ways and use new technology and forms of communication. For example, we have jumped on Zoom, YouTube, Skype, and Facebook to work more collaboratively and continue to provide the best hour of people’s day through workouts and fitness tips. We’ve also taken this time to upgrade our system standards on in-studio cleaning and social distancing based on government guidelines, which will be a long-term impact.
What are you doing to help your franchisees through this?
We were ready and prepared for this in 2019 when we launched “Title On Demand” a subscription-based service that provides access to hundreds of Title Boxing Club classes online. To keep members engaged, we’ve funded subscriptions for the service through May 31. Also, from a financial standpoint, we’ve reduced royalty percentages and worked with our POS provider to reduce costs for our franchisees. Our operations team has been working hand in hand with franchisees creating cash flow projection templates to help guide the franchisees for their reopenings. Additionally, since early March, our support center has been extremely proactive in our communication efforts with franchisees and in sharing best practices for temporarily closing a club, how to communicate with members, social media tips, and more. We’ve also recently launched a “Title Fights for Nurses” campaign where our franchisees will be able to give back to local heroes. We put out a call for nominations on our national social media platforms and, with the help of the corporate office, franchisees can surprise deserving nurses with care packages.
How are you supporting your corporate employees?
Our corporate staff is now all working from home, but still staying busy. When this started, we divided our staff into five teams: Engagement (member, sta, and franchisee); Revenue (sales and marketing); Grand Opening (all logistics upon re-grand opening like cleaning, regulations); Franchise Growth; and Digital (Title On Demand and live streaming). This helped people get creative and be cross-functional while focusing on the changing needs of the business. People are wearing more hats than ever before, so we are finding different skill sets and gifts in people that we didn’t know about before, which has been exciting for us. We are staying connected and highly engaged through Slack and are working to maintain our company culture of teamwork and support. When we were all in the office together, we would ring a boxing bell when big milestones or accomplishments were met. We are continuing this vital element of our positive culture through Slack.
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