What does it actually take to market a gym in an era when digital attention is fragmented and consumer expectations keep rising? In this episode of Escape Your Limits, Matthew Januszek sits down with Jamie Ward, CEO of Hussle — the UK's largest fitness network — for a candid conversation about what gyms consistently get wrong about marketing, what it takes to raise money for a fit-tech startup, and why a partnership with McDonald's might be one of the smartest moves the industry has seen.
Jamie brings a rare combination of commercial scale and fitness-industry depth to the conversation. With Hussle's 2,000-plus partner health clubs and leisure centres as the backdrop, he walks through the marketplace dynamics that separate brands that grow from those that stagnate — and why the comparison to ClassPass reveals more about the fitness industry's business model than most operators realise.
About Jamie Ward
Jamie Ward leads Hussle as its CEO, overseeing the UK's largest fitness network with more than 2,000 partner health clubs and leisure centres. Under his leadership, Hussle positioned itself as the connective tissue between fitness brands and the broader consumer market — making gym access more flexible and discoverable for people who might never have walked through a gym door on their own.
The partnership with McDonald's through the annual Monopoly promotion is a flagship example of Hussle's approach. By embedding gym access as a prize in a promotion played by more than seven million consumers nationwide, Hussle moved fitness marketing beyond the typical gym-to-gym audience and into the mainstream. Jamie's philosophy is straightforward: reach more people, help them become more active, and meet them where they already are.
His background in the fitness marketplace gives him a sharp perspective on the structural challenges gym operators face — from digital marketing ROI to the comparison with subscription aggregators like ClassPass. For anyone building or scaling in fit-tech, his experience raising capital and navigating the marketplace model makes him a rare and practical voice.
What Jamie Ward and Matthew Januszek Talked About
- Gyms consistently underinvest in digital marketing and lack the analytical infrastructure to measure what their spend is actually producing — fixing that single blind spot can meaningfully shift membership economics.
- Raising money for a fit-tech startup requires founders to articulate network effects clearly; investors want to see how the platform becomes more valuable as more clubs and more consumers join.
- The McDonald's Monopoly partnership demonstrated that fitness brands can expand their addressable audience dramatically by meeting consumers in non-gym contexts rather than waiting for them to seek out a gym.
- The comparison between ClassPass and Hussle reveals two distinct marketplace philosophies: one optimised for the consumer's flexibility, the other designed to drive incremental members to partner clubs without cannibalising their core membership base.
- Gyms have a marketing problem, not a product problem — the experience inside most facilities is solid, but operators struggle to communicate value in a way that converts a curious browser into a paying member.
- Working within a fitness marketplace gives operators access to a demand channel they cannot replicate on their own, reducing the cost of acquiring members who are already motivated to be active.
- The fitness industry's digital marketing returns improve significantly when clubs stop treating every channel as a broadcast tool and start using data to identify which touchpoints actually move a prospect from awareness to action.
Why This Conversation Matters
Matthew Januszek has spent his career studying what separates fitness businesses that scale from those that plateau, and Jamie Ward's conversation lands squarely inside that question. The gym marketing problem Jamie describes is not unique to the UK — it is a global structural issue that Matthew has watched play out across markets, and it is exactly the kind of systemic challenge that the LIFTS Podcast explores with operators and innovators who are building the next generation of fitness businesses.
Through his work with Escape Fitness USA and the LIFTS Podcast alongside Mohammed Iqbal of SweatWorks, Matthew is focused on helping fitness brands compete intelligently in a landscape where consumer attention is harder and more expensive to earn. Jamie's insights on marketplace dynamics, digital ROI, and the power of unlikely brand partnerships give operators a practical framework for thinking about growth — which is precisely the kind of conversation Matthew brings to every episode of Escape Your Limits.
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About Matthew Januszek
Matthew Januszek is the co-founder of Escape Fitness, the functional-training equipment brand he built from a UK startup into a global name supplying many of the world’s leading gyms, studios, and hotel fitness spaces. Following the separation of the UK and US businesses, Matthew’s focus today is Escape Fitness USA and the next chapter of the brand in North America. He hosted more than 300 episodes of the Escape Your Limits podcast and now co-hosts the LIFTS Podcast with SweatWorks founder Mohammed Iqbal, covering the business, science, and technology shaping the fitness industry. Explore more interviews and episodes on MatthewJanuszek.com.
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