Equinox reviews

-high turnover rates, Within your first few months of employment expect to see people come in and out. This is due to the high stress and high expectations put on the workers. The company takes a "churn and burn" mentality with it's employees. The company hopes to employ career trainer however most trainers have "5 year shelf life". The vast majority do not make it past the first year. The company is always hiring due to it's high turnover. -Antiquated sales and marketing techniques, in the last 5 years the sales and marketing of the company has not changed. Trainers are required to do "special events" (to showcase skills), do cold calling from call lists, and prospect leads off the floor. While these means of marketing are effective, the company hasn't developed new methodologies to penetrating its memberbase, and sales training is not prioritized in trainer education. The downfall of most trainers is the inability to close. -long hours, to be successful as a trainer you will have to work 8-12 hours a day 5-7 days a week. Management will encourage you to spend your days at the club. More than 70% of those hours will be unpaid. Equinox likes to call unpaid labor, "building your business". -The goal of training is to become full time which is a session goal per month, be aware that in most clubs less than half of the trainers meet the full time monthly session requirement. Good financial compensation occurs once a trainer attains Full Time Equivalent status every month. -Low Pay initially, you start at minimum wage and only make money once you start training, this is determined by your sales closing percentage. Managers determine who the leads go to by the trainers ability to close. If you can't close, be ready for part time minimum wage and long unpaid hours for the long haul. (assuming they don't terminate you for lack of performance, this is determined by your management staff). -Close out, as a manager or member of the sales staff, you will be required to work 12 hours a day for the last four days of the month. You will lose your days off as well as holidays if they fall on those "close out days". There is no overtime compensation if you are on salary. -Managers are bonused on the departments final sales and sessions goals (based off percentage to monthly sales goal). These goals are very lofty but attainable. You will often have to work on your days off to accomplish these goals. When looking at your monthly dollar per hour, the bonus compensation doesn't match the workload -Hard to take time off, as a full time trainer, if you don't produce sessions you don't get paid, no vacation is allotted, if you go on vacation (assuming your manager approves) you do so unpaid. As a manager you never get two days off in a row. For example you will get Thurs/sat or Friday/Sun. Leaving town for a weekend is near impossible and your counterpart will have to come in to help cover you. -Antiquated and ineffective advertising outside of the LA and NY area. The company has little to no brand recognition outside of LA and NY, this is due to the sexually explicit fashion based advertising. This lack of diversity and creativity in marketing penetration is compensated for by the management and staff at the club level to drive sales. The end result is long hours for staff members at the local level to build the brand recognition. -Equinox's sole solution to the majority of it's problems is manpower. When Equinox has a metric that needs to be adjusted, a sales number to be attained, or a problem to be fixed. It always tackles it with manpower. This results in a overworked staff. -Aggressive expansion policies, Every year Equinox opens 1-5 new clubs nation wide (typically in the LA or NY markets, aka more clubs or subsidiary companies, blink fitness, pure yoga etc). These aggressive expansion goals lead to a higher sales budget at the club level. Every year in Jan when the sales goals are determined, they grow exponentially every year.

- The company is, at the top, run by a calculator (private equity / real estate holdings company) and, sadly, the higher up you climb in the corporation, the farther it gets from feeling 'human'. Very sad. - Equinox believes in rewarding strong performance. Yes. Your reward for a strong month is a bigger goal the next month. This is so '90s in its thinking it's absurd. Life is a wave, not a perpetual growth model. - The company motto of "It's not fitness, it's life" applies only to member$$$. The company motto for employees could be something more along the lines of, "It's not a healthy life, it's free fitness." - The pay structure for trainers is, as mentioned above, a death march. They will throw numbers in your face when you are in the interview (and on-boarding) of 6-figure sums you can make as a trainer, and you absolutely can.. if you're willing to work yourself into such an unhealthy work-life 'balance' that you can't help but feel like a complete hypocrite for not practicing at all the very thing you're trying to preach to your clients. - Playing the long-game at Equinox is not advised. Unless you are planning to climb/scratch/claw your way up their Corporate ladder. If you are a trainer, do not plan to stay much longer than 3 years. - The way Eqx teaches you to sell training to clients is, to put it mildly, quite toxic. Dated, used-car-salesman tactics and turning prospecting clients into a pure 'numbers game' rather than teaching their employees to sell by using their inspiration.. to sell by taking that thing-that-drew-them-to-training-in-the-first-place and offering some of that light to a potential client. And yes, sales is a numbers game to some extent, but it's not the *only* ingredient. Some practical discernment when choosing a prospect in the club can go a long way. (i.e. "I'm running intervals on the treadmill with headphones on and I'm not looking at you when you walk by. No. I don't want to talk to you right now about training. And I don't care that your boss, the training manager, just told you to get out there and book 3 Equifits in the next 15 minutes. And I already have 6 towels. Thanks.") - As mentioned above, in the almost-10-years I worked there, I never had a single strongly-positive interaction with a member of Corporate. And here's the thing: Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, on the club level, Equinox is a revolving door of employees. Very few people stay longer than 18 months. So I can understand why Corporate doesn't engage every employee.. a lot of them won't be there long enough for their energy output to be justified. But there are two problems now: (1) The fact that your company is a revolving door is a problem. This problem has been around for a while now. Do you intend to fix it or..? (2) I wasn't one of those employees. I was there for a long time, saying hello and being polite (making an effort to engage), all while diligently training my clients and, ultimately, helping the company and that very corporate employee be more successful. At what point do you begin engaging your employees? Or do you just.. not? Important note at this point: I am writing this from a perspective of 'openness'.. not negativity or resentment. As I'm reading all this, I'm seeing how negatively it could be sounding, and I'm not sure what to do about it because all I'm doing is expressing what it was like to work there. I'm not one of those employees that needs hand-holding or appreciation. On the contrary, I like doing my own thing. As I mentioned up in the Pros, that was even one of the bright spots to me is that management did leave me alone for the most part. This was more something I simply couldn't-help-but-notice when, after several *years* in a row of seeing the same Corporate employees, looking them in the eye, greeting them by name and saying, "Hey {insert name here} it's nice to see you," the only response was some variation of an eyebrow raise, chin nod, or, every once in a while, "Hey." Again, I get that for the first few months. Equinox is a huge company. I really do get it. But after years of seeing the same person? Just seems to me like you would *want* to engage with the employees who are sticking around. Like you would want to reinforce that.