A day before his company’s bi-annual conference in Colorado Springs, Evan Hurn — co-owner of Anytime Fitness-Sequim — realized he’d have to make speech.
“That was my first in front of something more than a classroom,” Hurn joked. Instead of a couple of dozen students, the Sequim native delivered some thoughts to 3,000 fellow franchise owners and guests from across the world.
Hurn and co-owner Makayla Payne were awarded the company’s Most Improved Franchise award, with more than 2,500 individual businesses eligible.
“It shows the proof that what we’re doing here is working,” said Hurn, who with Payne, his sister-in-law, took over the business from friends Art and Erin Green in August 2021.
Payne said she and Hurn still look to the Greens — who like Payne and Hurn, are Sequim High graduates — as mentors.
“This gym was already great when we took it over,” Payne said. “We didn’t think we’d see that much growth in a year.”
The tag “most improved” may be misleading, Hurn said, because he and Payne said the business had a strong foundation right from the get-go.
“The fact (Art and Erin) were willing to take a chance on two 20-something-year-olds with not a lot of business experience says a lot,” Hurn said.
“They have changed our lives and our family’s lives. We’re forever grateful to them.”
Staff on ‘same page’
Hurn said one of the keys to success with Anytime Fitness of Sequim is giving plenty of support to the staff.
“We work for them, they work for the members,” he said.
That includes hosting weekly team meetings and one-on-one staff meetings each month to make sure everyone is on the “same page.”
If Anytime Fitness staffers are fulfilled, they will carry that out to the members, he said.
“We ask, ‘What can we do to make your life easier?’,” Hurn said.
The business is going to get a bit more complicated in the next few months, as Sequim’s franchise and other Anytime Fitness gyms across the nation are getting a redesign and renovation.
Hurn said that in years past, such facilities were seen as more of a convenient place to get a workout, but the company is moving more toward a holistic approach to health. For Sequim’s gym, that means knocking down some walls, adding purple “turf” to the facility floors, changing the color scheme and making some other changes.
Hurn said the project is out to bid and he would love to have it done before the year is over, but it’s wait-and-see at this point.
For Hurn in particular, life has been fairly complicated since the business purchase: he got married, bought a house and now has an 8-month-old baby, too.
“It has been a life-changing year,” he said.
With the Anytime Fitness Most Improved Franchise trophy, Hurn said it was healthy to take a “step back” and see how far they’ve come in the past year.
For more information, visit anytimefitness.com/gyms/1959/sequim-wa-98382 or facebook.com/AnytimeFitnessSequim.
Anytime Fitness
Location: 10131 Old Olympic Highway
Hours: Open 24 hours a day
Contact: 360-683-4110
On the web: anytimefitness.com/gyms/1959/sequim-wa-98382, facebook.com/AnytimeFitnessSequim.
