The best lessons about customer behaviour rarely come from the places you expect them. In this episode of Escape Your Limits, Matthew Januszek speaks with Peter Marks — the man behind The Deltic Group — and discovers that there are more parallels between the nightlife industry and the fitness industry than most people in either sector would guess.

Peter has spent decades studying his market, his audience, and his customers with a rigour that most businesses aspire to and few achieve. This conversation is about recognising patterns, embracing change, and understanding that some of the most effective strategies in a digital world are grounded in principles that predate the internet by decades.

About Peter Marks

Peter Marks leads The Deltic Group, one of the most significant operators in the UK's leisure and nightlife industry. Through decades of hands-on experience, extensive research, and genuine curiosity about what drives consumer behaviour, he has developed a depth of market understanding that is rare in any sector.

His approach is characterised by two things: pattern recognition and a willingness to embrace change. Peter has watched the leisure industry transform around him and has consistently found ways to adapt without losing what made his venues work in the first place. That combination — reading patterns and responding intelligently — is what gives his perspective value far beyond the nightlife world.

What makes this episode genuinely surprising is the degree to which Peter's insights translate directly to fitness. The core challenges — acquiring and retaining customers, creating experiences that generate loyalty, understanding what people actually want as opposed to what they say they want — are identical across both industries. Peter addresses all of them with the specificity that only comes from decades of direct experience.

What Peter Marks and Matthew Januszek Talked About

• Pattern recognition is one of the most valuable skills any operator can develop — the ability to spot what is changing, what is cycling back, and what is genuinely new is the basis for decisions that hold up over time.
• Old-school approaches to customer experience — personal service, atmosphere, genuine hospitality — remain effective in a digital world precisely because they are scarce; the internet has not replaced the need for them, it has made them more differentiated.
• Understanding your market requires more than data — it requires feedback loops, genuine curiosity about what customers feel, and the willingness to act on what you learn even when it is uncomfortable.
• The parallels between nightlife and fitness are instructive: both industries sell an experience, both depend on repeat visits, both live or die on the emotional connection they create with their customers.
• Standing out in a crowded market is not primarily a digital marketing challenge — it is a product and experience challenge; digital channels amplify what is already working, they do not compensate for what is not.
• Consumer culture is always shifting, but the underlying motivations — belonging, identity, status, wellbeing — are stable; businesses that anchor their offer to those motivations will outlast the ones chasing surface-level trends.
• Embracing change is not the same as chasing novelty; Peter's approach to evolution in his business is grounded in understanding what his customers value before deciding what to change.

Why This Conversation Matters

Matthew Januszek has spent his career thinking about what makes a fitness facility a place people want to return to — which is, at its core, the same question Peter Marks has been answering in the nightlife industry for decades. The parallels Peter draws between the two sectors reframe familiar challenges in a way that is genuinely useful: if you understand why people choose one nightclub over another, you understand something important about why they choose one gym over another.

For Matthew's work with Escape Fitness USA and the LIFTS Podcast alongside Mohammed Iqbal of SweatWorks, this kind of cross-industry thinking is exactly the raw material that drives better decisions. The fitness industry does not have a monopoly on insights about customer loyalty, experience design, and community building — and conversations like this one are a reminder of how much is available to learn from people who have been solving adjacent problems in adjacent spaces.

▶  Watch the full episode on YouTube

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