What does it take to turn a single gym in Auckland into a global fitness movement that reaches millions of people every week? In this episode of Escape Your Limits, Matthew Januszek sits down with Phillip Mills, Executive Director of Les Mills, to explore more than five decades of building one of the most influential brands in the fitness industry.
The conversation is candid and wide-ranging — from the philosophy that has driven Les Mills since the beginning, to the role technology now plays in expanding fitness access, to what the rise of digital is really doing to the club industry. If you care about the future of fitness at scale, this one is essential listening.
About Phillip Mills
Phillip Mills leads Les Mills, a family-owned and operated company that has grown from a single gym in Auckland, New Zealand, into the world's largest group fitness provider. Over more than 50 years, the business has built a network of more than 140,000 trained instructors delivering programs to millions of members each week across the globe.
The guiding philosophy behind everything Les Mills does is straightforward: make people fall in love with fitness. Phillip has spent decades translating that philosophy into life-changing fitness experiences at scale, investing in instructor training, programming quality, and — more recently — technology as a vehicle for reaching people who might never walk through a gym door.
In this episode, he opens up about harnessing technology to expand the market, navigating the setbacks and failures that come with running a business at global scale, and how the accelerating shift to digital fitness is reshaping what a club's role looks like in the years ahead.
What Phillip Mills and Matthew Januszek Talked About
- A single founding philosophy — 'make people fall in love with fitness' — can serve as a durable strategic compass for more than 50 years if the leadership team never loses sight of it.
- Building a network of 140,000 trained instructors is less a staffing decision than a brand decision; every instructor who delivers a Les Mills class is a direct expression of the company's standard and reputation.
- Technology doesn't replace the in-club experience — it expands the addressable market by reaching people who weren't being reached at all, which grows the industry rather than cannibalising it.
- Setbacks and failures are not exceptions in a long-running business; Phillip treats them as inevitable inputs that sharpen judgment and resilience when leaders are willing to be honest about what went wrong.
- Digital fitness is shifting the club industry's centre of gravity, but clubs that understand their unique value — community, coaching, accountability — can use digital as a complement rather than a threat.
- Family ownership creates a different decision-making timeline than institutional ownership; Les Mills has been able to invest with a generational horizon rather than a quarterly one.
- The gap between delivering a fitness class and delivering a life-changing fitness experience is real and significant — and closing that gap at scale requires relentless attention to instructor quality and programming design.
Why This Conversation Matters
Matthew Januszek has spent his career thinking about how to get more people moving and how to build fitness businesses that last. The story of Les Mills — 50-plus years, one founding philosophy, millions of weekly participants — is exactly the kind of long-arc case study that surfaces the principles worth carrying forward. Scale without soul doesn't hold. Phillip Mills proves that the inverse is possible.
That perspective informs Matthew's current work with Escape Fitness USA and the LIFTS Podcast, where he and co-host Mohammed Iqbal of SweatWorks explore what it actually takes to build and grow fitness businesses in a changing landscape. Understanding how the world's largest group fitness provider thinks about technology, digital, and the future of the club is directly relevant to every operator, investor, and innovator paying attention to where the industry is heading.
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube
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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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