BC Business
Work out at work | BCBusiness
To be more successful, work out while you work. If Mad Men has you inspired to reinstate boozy power lunches and after-work whiskeys with clients, you may wish to reconsider. These days it’s less about how many scotches you can pound and more about how many pounds you can lift as gyms become the new place to conduct business.
If Mad Men has you inspired to reinstate boozy power lunches and after-work whiskeys with clients, you may wish to reconsider. These days it’s less about how many scotches you can pound and more about how many pounds you can lift as gyms become the new place to conduct business.
Perhaps you’ve heard hideous portmanteau words to describe this trend – “sweat-working” comes to mind. And let’s all promise never to say, “Earn while you burn.” But the concept of working while working out is gaining traction and the people doing it claim it puts them in a position to do better business and gain more clients than those who don’t. A study conducted in 2009 by the Carnegie Faculty at Leeds Metropolitan University suggests there is truth in such claims: it found that people’s performance at work improves on days they exercise.
Mark Virgin, principal at Stevens Virgin law firm in Vancouver, says that both his professional network and business has grown since he began doing CrossFit at boutique gym Studeo55 in downtown Vancouver. “I’ve benefited from meeting people whose expertise I utilized and I’ve gained client connections as well,” he says.
According to Nathan Mellalieu, owner of Studeo55, which creates custom corporate packages for companies, if you trade cocktails for CrossFit you’ll still get a hangover, but you’ll like it. “We’re not a traditional gym where it’s everybody in silos going to the gym at lunch then coming back. There’s a big hangover effect culturally because of how we do it. We pitch clients residual value in terms of the corporate swagger or culture you get back, which is people working out together and talking about the mutual suffering they do at the gym.”
Mellalieu’s clients also hold meetings in the gym’s state-of-the-art boardroom. “Our most active clients will have meetings at the gym after a workout and invite non-members there to meet them,” he says.
Maybe the long walk on the golf course has been a business meeting standard for eons, but the goal now is to get your heart rate up alongside your bottom line. In 2003, Port Moody city councillor and dental practice administrator Zoë Royer spent an 18-hour day with a celebrated dental practice management guru. They met at 6 a.m., she shadowed him for five hours and then he turned to her and said, “Now we walk.” The pair set off at a rapid pace, all the while debriefing what she had learned that morning. “The conversation transformed as we picked up our pace; it became supercharged, über-focused, unleashing all kinds of creative ideas,” recalls Royer. “At his office they did this every day.”
Royer has since incorporated a power walk into every workday. “It has been transformational in the way I do business,” she says. “When a resident or an individual aspiring to a career in politics asks to meet me, I often suggest we walk and talk. While sedentary conversations can ramble on, there is a natural start and end time – the length of the trail – and the conversations are energized and solution-oriented.”
The gym (or yoga class, or hiking trail) is also a no-brainer destination for building camaraderie among peers. “It forges stronger relationships with people you work with because you can’t help but gain a greater respect for them in a different context,” says Virgin.
Shannon Bosa Yacoub, co-proprietor of Glowbal Restaurant Group, agrees. “It really shows someone’s nature. You see what a person’s made of when you exercise with them. You see who brings it and has that fierce, competitive nature, and who doesn’t. You’re pretty exposed so the character shows.”
Maybe interviews at the gym will be next.