The billion-dollar idea I hung up on

01Lived

People say to build a successful business you need passion. In 2004, while I was working as the senior innovation guy at a global financial services company, I had an idea I couldn’t put down. I called it Gym Permit. Fitness had been my world: I had run club sales and marketing in the UK and USA, so I knew how clubs made and lost money. The idea was simple: instead of being locked into a membership at one health club, you held a single permit that let you use a whole network of participating clubs, and each club was paid for each visit it received. The obvious objection is that clubs would be cannibalising their own memberships, and that is exactly what I got. The answer is that clubs sit half-empty most of the day carrying high fixed costs, so a permit visitor costs them almost nothing to serve and brings in revenue that would otherwise not exist. More importantly, the permit reaches the people clubs can never sign: the commitment-shy, the travellers, the people who want variety. It grows the market instead of carving it up. So I tested it: I found a quiet office and called a health club, and after many objections, I sold the club’s owner the Gym Permit concept. It was one of the hardest calls I have ever made. After that the day job got much harder, my passion for Gym Permit steadily declined, so I considered myself not up to the task, and the idea never progressed. But that one experience taught me a great deal. Here is the kicker: eight years later a company was founded in Brazil doing exactly what Gym Permit was designed to do. It was called Gympass; today it’s Wellhub, operating across the world and worth billions.