The business of better running with the founders of One Track Club

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1:23Laura Fletcher:Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. On today's programme, we're getting into our stride with a couple who turned a free community running club into a fast-growing business.

1:40Anthony Fletcher:Running was a real release for me and also gave me so much confidence. When you set your mind on a goal and you achieve it and cross that finish line, it's just phenomenal. Knowing that there was a better way to train, I really wanted to get that out there.

1:55Laura Fletcher:This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

2:07Laura Fletcher:You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Husband and wife team Anthony and Laura Fletcher are the co-founders of OneTrack Club, a running club combining specialised coaching with technology to help runners perform at their best. Prior to launching the business during the pandemic, Anthony had headed up running at Equinox, while Laura built an impressive career as a fashion industry exec. Together, they've managed to grow the brand whilst raising a young family. They've stopped by Midori House to discuss building a business as a couple, how new technologies can support coaching without replacing the human touch, and what it really takes to help the busiest people achieve their goals.

2:45Laura Fletcher:Anthony, or Fletch as he goes by, began by telling me how it all started. I don't think there was one exact moment that kind of led to it being created. it was actually a very long convoluted journey a sequence of events that kind of led to it where when I was 14 I was diagnosed with cancer and I was a sporting protege in some fashion I was playing tennis my hopes of Wimbledon taken away from me from surgery so I stopped playing tennis therefore my coach was like yeah just why you just help out and get coaching so the introduction to my next level of sport was actually helping others to do their thing at 14 it kind of helps to form your sort of opinions on things right so off the back of that skip forward 20 years i'm going through personal training qualifications and so on so forth i think it's worth mentioning i'm also dyslexic so my brain kind of works in a particular way that i think actually helps with this picture and so fast forward into that i started lecturing on the sort of mechanics of the body and how do we then correct and give people information that's going to help them get from a to b and then eventually on to c or z and it just happened to be that their runners had the most questions and where i felt there was a lot of misinformation or peer-to-peer communications rather than necessarily expert-led and off the back of that just started helping some people and then they started inviting their friends down they started inviting their friends down and we had like 60 people come down to a track session we were booked a month in advance and then it's kind of when me and my wife actually started to get we got together and she had the fabulous idea of collecting everyone's emails which i was not doing marketing person um and then literally a year after that so that was that was five years of me basically as a passion project me doing it for free i was working in the luxury health clubs around london Many of them sort of have the clientele in that probably you are listening into now.

4:43Laura Fletcher:But it was just a great vibe. And then all of a sudden the lockdown came along. And so as a family, we had one child already and we had another one on the way. We sat down and said some very choice four-letter words as to what was going to happen next. And we decided to turn the Run Club into a business. because we'd had quite a few people message me being like, oh, what did you do at track on Tuesday? Just send it to me and I'll do it. Right, right. Okay. And I was like, oh, people want to train this but not be there. I was like, I wonder if they could dial in at the same time and kind of do it with us.

5:21Laura Fletcher:And this was like before the days of Zoom and was like socially acceptable. Like Skype was as close as we got to it and everyone just really didn't use it that much. So as soon as the lockdown hit, pretty much four days later, we created a website. We created a class schedule. And off the back of that, we tested the technology using Google Meet. And we ran off there over the next five years, 2000 virtual running classes. And we said to the community, look, we don't want anything for free. This is not a pity party. This is a business. And if you're up for it, let me know. and we had a moment last night thinking about all the the little um cha-chings on the ipad people by purchasing things we're like oh it's happening it's happening so it's a series of events well it's great it's a series of events but there still is that it does sound like almost a singular moment when suddenly the pieces do do gel together which is often the story and tell me about that laura in terms of your approach you said you know that's the sort of the marketeer seat maybe sees the world a little bit differently had you always had in your mind And in lots of your other work for all sorts of premium brands and so forth, I actually would quite like to have a bash at doing something where, you know, I'm the stakeholder.

6:32Laura Fletcher:Do you think that was in the back of your mind or was it more opportunistic almost?

6:36Anthony Fletcher:I think a bit of both. I think before I met Fletch, so about 10 years ago, had just started running. I'd gone through what a lot of people go through now in my kind of mid to late 20s not having a clue what I was doing and going from training for a 5k to a marathon within about a year stumbling over the finish line of that marathon completely broken in a lot of pain and then learning after meeting Anthony that and Fletch um as we call him that there was a lot of stuff that I just didn't know. And that was my kind of mini moment, really. Running had done so much for me in terms of my mental health, working in really busy, intense industries such as fashion.

7:19Anthony Fletcher:And I worked in travel for a little while as well for really wonderful brands, but in quite high-pressured environments. So running was a real release for me and also gave me so much confidence. You know, once you set your mind on achieving a goal and you achieve it and cross that finish line, it's just phenomenal. In my mind, knowing that there was a better way to train and all of the things I just hadn't done the first time around, I really wanted to get that out there. So that was the kind of opportunity was I just happened to fall in love with somebody that is an expert in this space. And so a lot of what I've been trying to build, I mean, in the early years, I refer to building for you.

7:59Anthony Fletcher:It was about building it as a it's been a labor of love for me, really, to get Fletch out to the world. to go okay how can we take fletch's brain and enable more people to benefit from this knowledge and obviously not just fletch but as we expand a multidisciplinary team more people you're looking

8:17Laura Fletcher:at me like you want to say something i do because i think laura is in such an incredible mind i don't want to say because she's my wife but she's also entrepreneur curious and that she was always in house but you did you're going to start a cream brand at one point with a friend and you're kind of going down that route so you're looking to branch out into something you're right I mean I was

8:36Anthony Fletcher:eternally frustrated and I worked for founders actually my whole career so when I was back I cut my teeth at matches worked for Tom and Ruth directly after working my way up to the shop floor when I graduated it was the recession so there were no jobs going in publishing or advertising which is what I thought I would do having an English degree so I ended up in retail really loved fashion. I worked for founders there and then went on to work for founders again at Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But I was always so frustrated. I felt like I was in a box constantly and I'd have ideas and I'd be told that's not your remit, you know, put that idea to that team.

9:15Anthony Fletcher:And I'd be constantly, I think I would have been really irritating, just too much energy, too much excitement, getting up in other departments' faces, constantly telling them how to do their jobs. and I think I was destined to do my own thing honestly it comes with its own challenges but having the freedom to explore and test where the ceiling is going to be and where the boundaries are going to be just keeps me alive I love it let's talk a little bit then about one track the

9:44Laura Fletcher:model kind of where it is today that's the origin that's the opportunity and the need if you like what's the usp because it you know there are some products that offer some elements of this they don't seem as personal which is maybe a bit of a usp but what do you see as your professional advantage fletching what is the differentiator that means there is only one one track we come imagine a sort of a running club and a formula one team had a baby that's that's basically how we describe it in that it's the community aspect of everything the in-person services the care and the personalization piece but also the technology and how do we drive data in the right direction around somebody's goal so obviously with a formula one that's one or two drivers in the same way it's with a runner no one can run for you but we can do it with you and that's kind of how we present it and you'd be right there's other things out there that do aspects of what we do but the problem is no one's bringing it together and that's where the human is so much more infinitely complex than just a training plan or here's here's how to phone roll or you should stretch more here's a program to stretch more yeah but for who when and how often and all these other things have to be contextualized and how from a kind of structural point of view do you help to institutionalize the personalization because i guess lots of assumptions you might make in many businesses are about degrees of standardization.

11:17Laura Fletcher:So much of this is very personal. Is that harder as an administrator and an organizer and having to think about the parameters of what you can actually do? Again, that is the USP, but it must make your job more difficult, presumably to a degree. I guess the more personal the offer is, the harder it is for a team to make sure that you're delivering on all those undertakings, right?

11:38Anthony Fletcher:A hundred percent. The messaging and the comms has been the bane of my life, actually. and we've gone round the houses of describing ourselves as you know the most complex things and then recently come back to saying actually we're a run club just a bit extra you know internally obviously and now externally so the what we and because it is so complex there's the human component the technology the workouts the one-to-one coaching it's all merged together and you do get elements of that in a run club but it's that plus you know the real expert 360 guidance but what we're trying to build more than anything is not just somewhere you want to go and train it's a club like feel and so that's where we come back to run club and from a logistical standpoint yes I think we're very lucky that we've got over the initial painful years of it just being Fletch and I trying to manage the customer care inbox and each individual that we're training as well as trying to nurture the community that turn up to group workouts that maybe can't access the one-to-one coaching just yet in their lives because obviously it comes with a higher price tag but we care about them deeply and we still want to be on the track they you know educate them and give them as much love as we can.

13:06Anthony Fletcher:So yeah, the challenge really has been how do we make sure that we are giving that personal touch at scale? And I remember the first deck that we pulled together during the pandemic when some of the runners in our community that worked in the finance space said, are you going to look to do something with this? And we just had a second baby at that point. So we were just trying to survive day to day.

13:30Laura Fletcher:Just want to sleep right now.

13:31Anthony Fletcher:Yeah. And it was really buzzy and exciting. We sent over a deck to them and it was dreadful. I don't even look at it now.

13:39Laura Fletcher:We should definitely look back at it.

13:42Anthony Fletcher:I remember...

13:43Laura Fletcher:I don't know if fun's the right word. Instructive, maybe, yeah.

13:46Anthony Fletcher:We got slated, really. I think someone sent you screenshots of the feedback from somebody else and we were just like, oh. However, there was one line I do remember in there and it was about personalisation at scale And that was one of the things that they ripped us for was that is impossible. You cannot do that. I still believe we can. You know, we're not anti-AI at all. I think we are very much that coaching and training for something is best done with experts. and also because there's so much that goes into coaching that is beyond the plan. It's about the emotional empathy and picking up on various things that are going on in that person's life that we can adapt to and help them overcome.

14:38Anthony Fletcher:AI can help with data points and help inform our coaches as we expand so that they're not doing as much digging through the weeds. Fletcher's done some really insane stuff. He's also been building from a tech perspective. He's essentially taught himself to code and built insane.

14:57Laura Fletcher:In all that spare time that he must have. I know. Well, it's funny because I was going to ask about AI specifically because I suppose lots of businesses that are operating in services talk about the transformational impact. And even in hospitality brands, you mentioned travel, you know, say, look, personalization is critical if you're running a hotels group. And actually, AI is a game changer because we can deliver personal service at scale. but I guess and sort of picking up on exactly what you're saying Laura Fletch the key is being very evangelical about the idea of AI as a tool labor saver driver economies but I guess you've got to be very intentional about keeping the the human trust it can't just be you obviously as a business scales but it will only ever be a tool in the toolkit it's not foundationally part of the direction of the business right correct a human first approach for sure so to back up what we're saying that the personalization at scale piece is also part of what we call the mdt so it's the multidisciplinary team that we've created where there's an snc coach which looks after the snc there's the sort of technical coach looks after the running training plan and the ongoing supervision of that data the physio the dietician everyone has their job spec and their roles and they just get brought in for certain bits when they're needed and because all the data is centralized that means they have to reduce all the admin time of catching up on all the transcripts that were ever created is like no there's the training plan there's the energy expenditure you now can craft that food diary or whatever you want to do so that's kind of how we minimize the admin side of things and then with that with the use of modern technologies we just reduce that time even further by spotting trends in the data and thinking about how for example pace and heart rate drift over a long session can link into durability.

16:41Laura Fletcher:How do we then look at building durability? So data spotting and trend analysis, great for a machine to do. Then we can get to the human bit and say like, how's your kids? How are you sleeping? Oh man, I've had like three hours sleep past three days. Well, no wonder you're like, you're bad. But actually your Garmin said you've had eight hours. Oh yeah, it didn't work. So accuracy, spot checking, making sure the wearables are also accurate comes from a vocal conversation um quick aside and again i've often asked sort of founding teams or family teams on this program about this isn't it the case that a family business the way you guys do it is completely insane um you're obviously having fun and i love how you talked about one and others skills and qualities but isn't the truism you know don't work with whatever it is children animals or family members running a business hard enough young family is hard enough and yet it seems to be working out could it have worked any other way laura or is that part of the magic foundational underpinnings of the endeavor because we got married through all this process i think we

17:53Anthony Fletcher:made a clear decision to commit to each other for life and therefore any differences we've had with the business we've been forced to work through and I think that has helped us really with the foundation of OneTrack. The early years our communication was dreadful and we had some major challenges there's no sugarcoating it we had a lot of respect for each other but we both had very clear ways we wanted to do things I think we'd both been told in not so many words and in different ways that we needed to stay in our lanes in our previous careers and so we had a lot of baggage coming into a business together didn't we there've been lots of arguments there've been lots of doors slammed for sure the kids have been brought into it on occasion i was going to say

18:43Laura Fletcher:what have we got there budding entrepreneurs or are they actually are they actually part of the

18:46Anthony Fletcher:c-suite i mean i was told this morning i was reprimanded for not wearing a one-track t-shirt so something's rubbing off on them

18:55Laura Fletcher:well if it's any consolation I was told last weekend that I had delivered and I'm doing air quotes a disappointing weekend not bad just disappointing it's not about me hilarious so talk to me about that Fletch because well it's interesting I suppose in another context in a family business you talk about you know legacy and handing down if ripple dissolve I don't know with your kids what 15 years into the future, 10, 15 years, if they were like, we're going to be joining you guys on the journey, or we want to take over, would you love that? Or would you be like, no, don't do it. Go work with someone else.

19:31Laura Fletcher:It's much less stressful. Just to go like slightly reverse up a little bit. I think the key thing in this particular situation is we did not choose to go into business together. We had to. There's a very clear moment where we're like, either we do this, or we've got zero money coming in for the rest of our lives. unsurprocible during the pandemic so i think in that moment we just we had to make it work it wasn't like a moment of like oh there's a plan b available it's like no we have to make this work and as we then start to get traction we're like okay it is working yes bumps in the road and healthy differences of opinion always but that's part of the challenge and you i like that it's a healthy difference of opinion or door slam the same moment a slightly different lens trained on it but um if my kids turn around and said i want to be part of the business i'd be like brilliant you can but it's like any other opportunity if they decided they didn't want to do it anymore be like brilliant what do you want to do i didn't have much guidance when it came to work stuff when i was younger my parents amazing people but uh policemen and a nurse and don't have a huge amount of risk-taking abilities but also i love the idea of a steady eddy kind of job I think it's down to my my granddad's lineage in some ways a bit more of a black sheep in the family oh god do go on yeah um can't on radio uh listeners I'll ask him afterwards yeah yeah all this kind of so I think it's also part of my brain and how it's made up but much more willing to take risks and want to make my own probably similar to what Laura was saying but I'm a bit frustrated about being kept in boxes never actually got into many boxes because I didn't fear of being in them I see that in my middle child a bit more he's much more willing to take risks he'll just jump off like the top of the bouncy castle without any thought of what could happen to him but the older ones are a bit more cautious and so we've already started to identify traits and obviously if they go into these things and start to find avenues I'll fully support them in experimenting with lots because if I hadn't have found fitness I'd have no idea what I'd be doing I haven't had any other career in any other industry I sense you would have probably come out alright somehow let's play a game Let's do a hypothetical case study, and this is going to be a test of how attuned your immediate judgment is on these things when people come to speak to you.

21:48Laura Fletcher:Picture, if you will, a man, let's say in sort of, I'm going to say early middle age. Anyone? I don't know why my colleague Poundy Glass is laughing. Early middle age, but probably looks, you know, looks younger than he is. Go with me on this. Black glasses. Maybe. decent runner when younger and an occasional runner now but has a dream a vainglorious dream that his lifelong ambition to run under three hours for a marathon could be realized even let's say pushing 50 uh at a glance if he's got a good amount of a run up to that what are his prospects what does he need to be thinking about as i said asking for this hypothetical friend so the hypothetical friend if it was in front of me i'll be asking what's your opportunities to train so on a weekly scale how many hours you've got to dedicate to this if it's like two then it's unlikely we're going to be able to drive volume high enough to get to the marathon distance in that particular manner you probably could do the marathon but with that goal being the underlying thing here we would probably have to then sort of negotiate on more time availability or is other things you can sacrifice on are other sports limiting factors that you do other activities so on so forth ultimately it's like where are you starting at so we do some testing so we'll get you into the lab we do your vo2 max lactate threshold which then also looks at running economy and kind of gives us lots of data around your physicality and then we basically look at that and say how much do you think we can move that in relation to now to three months time to six month's time and then we plot the performance graph from there and then it's down to us to help you get there week in week out on the calls you would dial in some virtual runs with us so we can see your heart rate and pace alive and we can talk to you and see how you get yourself to any immediately can you tell can you tell this is so interesting can you tell if someone let's that's a bit ridiculous obviously but if someone's got a quite clear goal can you guys have you got to the point where even as a business or just by gut you can be like this person's going to do this do you think or purely from conversation we can look obviously mindset there's a type a personality that we can read into and go this person's determined they've got a clear understanding of what what's the opposite of that type z that might be like that might be my sorry this hypothetical person's problem um but obviously some people kind of like more nonchalant about the thing i was like oh i want to do my i don't want to do a marathon but i suppose you i'm capable of and some people say no i want sub three and there's kind of nothing else is going to happen and so you can kind of get a read on where they're at and some people we are going to have to push on a bit more and be like actually you're stronger than you think you can do this and other people were like whoa whoa whoa like let's just pull the rain it in a little bit your achilles is

24:33Anthony Fletcher:flared up and we need to we need to rest it i think it's fair to say as well that i because i hear so much about from the coaches i've learned enough without being a coach myself people will also surprise you fletch calls them the x-men and women of the world where he'll just start training them and working on them and all of a sudden there's something going on genetically with them or their physiology where they just start blowing everyone away and you think where on earth has that come from and yes there might have been some activity growing up but actually the reason Wontrake started in the very beginning with one of our really great friends he just started training after being inspired by the Olympics at the time and quickly became an age group team gb triathlete his body was just something else and you do see that and that gets you very excited when you do see that the kid that was in for a vo2 max test the other day whose vo2 max was 78 which is the same as and close to an elite athlete it was like an elite

25:34Laura Fletcher:marathon runners kind of kip chogos is speculated around 83 and this guy's only 14 so how how do people not know they've got those capacities is that almost because you don't know until you push sure until people who know tell you or i think it's maybe one of the problems with school is that we are taught in a particular manner that gets us ready for the next phase of education rather than assessing strengths and weaknesses from an all-round perspective mental physical spiritual whatever you want to look at and so sport is always seen as an activity and probably guided more around play and then off the back of that going to like GCSE and A-level was more like the politics of sport and being involved in a corporation around sport, the working environment of sport, rather than let's do some testing on you.

26:25Laura Fletcher:Like how far can you jump? Let's measure that. Let's track that over the next year, two years and see actually, gee, you've got a really long jump. Maybe we can think about how tall are you? Let's look at the running team. Let's see all those like the sprinting team, let's get you involved in that, or the local running club that we can start to look at. You've got a great aerobic engine. How do we cultivate that piece? I sense some kind of mass scale education structural intervention coming. Maybe that's one for another day. Just really quickly, because the clock is against us. What's most exciting right now?

26:56Laura Fletcher:Let's look through the business lens, Laura, with you first of all. What are you most excited about? Is it the next seemingly insurmountable challenge that you're going to just figure out? Is it something that you've already got in mind? Is it an expansion play? What kind of is top of your list at the moment?

27:13Anthony Fletcher:Well, for the first time in years, we're able to sit back right now and we've been building and building and building for so many years and adding bits and pieces, packaging things up together. And so now we can actually start getting the message out there and we feel really confident about that. So I'm really excited to let more people in to the community. and to help more people with their goals. We do have a plan. You know, our CFO would go nuts if I said we obviously didn't, as would our lovely investors. But for us, we just take one person at a time and we really, really love helping one person at a time.