Building a fitness brand in a market that has never seen the equipment before is a different challenge from opening another club in a saturated city. In this episode of Escape Your Limits, Matthew Januszek sits down with Eric Levine — a man who has done both, and built hundreds of clubs doing it — for a conversation about branding, empathy, and what really drives growth across cultures.

Eric Levine's four-decade career in fitness has taken him from early roles he would have done for free because of his love for the industry to growing some of the largest and most successful club networks in Asia and beyond. His perspective on what makes fitness businesses work — and what makes them fail — is grounded in the kind of direct experience that no business school can replicate.

About Eric Levine

Eric Levine is one of the genuine pioneers of the fitness industry in Asia. Over four decades, his career has evolved from a passionate entry into a business he loved into a global track record of building and growing hundreds of clubs across multiple countries. Few people in the industry have operated across as many cultural contexts with as much consistency of result.

Among his most significant contributions is his early work with California Fitness, which he helped establish as a leading brand in Asian markets. His approach to that challenge — understanding local motivations, inspiring confidence in unfamiliar equipment and programming, and visualising success before the infrastructure existed to support it — became a blueprint for how Western fitness concepts could be adapted without losing their core integrity.

What sets Eric apart is not just the scale of what he has built but the empathy with which he has built it. His method begins with a genuine effort to understand members, customers, and clients — to discover what is truly a priority in a given culture before assuming that what works at home will work abroad. That curiosity has driven impressive results across enormously diverse markets.

What Eric Levine and Matthew Januszek Talked About

• Empathy is a business strategy, not just a personal virtue. Eric's career success across multiple cultures is rooted in his genuine effort to understand what motivates people in each specific market before trying to sell them anything.
• Visualisation is a leadership tool. Eric used it in the early days of California Fitness to maintain conviction in a venture that few others believed in — and that clarity of vision is what allowed him to hold the course long enough to prove the model.
• Cultural differences in fitness motivation are real and significant. What drives membership in one market — status, community, performance, aesthetics — may not be the primary driver in another, and misreading that dynamic is expensive.
• Inspiring confidence in unfamiliar equipment or programming requires patience and a deep respect for where the member is starting from. Eric's approach to new markets always began with meeting people where they were, not where he wanted them to be.
• Support within professional teams mirrors support within family environments. Eric's emphasis on internal team dynamics reflects a belief that the relationships inside a business are as important as the relationships it builds with members.
• The difference between traditional American club models and the cultural approach in Asia is not just operational — it is philosophical. Understanding that difference is a prerequisite for success in international fitness markets.
• A career built on genuine passion for fitness creates a different kind of professional than one built purely on financial ambition. Eric's willingness to work for free early in his career signals the depth of commitment that eventually produced exceptional results.

Why This Conversation Matters

Matthew Januszek's work expanding Escape Fitness USA into new markets asks many of the same questions Eric Levine has been answering for forty years: how do you adapt a strong fitness concept to a new context without diluting what makes it work? How do you inspire confidence in operators and members who have never seen your approach before? Eric's track record across Asia is one of the most detailed case studies available for anyone wrestling with those questions.

Through the LIFTS Podcast and his ongoing conversations with fitness industry leaders, Matthew consistently surfaces the kind of earned wisdom that does not show up in whitepapers. Eric Levine's four decades offer exactly that — a practitioner's view of what branding, empathy, and persistence actually produce when applied with discipline over time.

▶  Watch the full episode on YouTube

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