Between late July and mid August, three of the largest listed operators in fitness reported the figure this industry treats as its truth serum. Life Time posted comparable centre revenue growth of 9.1 percent. Planet Fitness posted same club sales growth of 1.7 percent. Xponential posted North America same store sales of negative 6.8 percent.
Lined up that way it reads like a league table, and it is routinely read as one. It is not. Notice that even the names are different, and the differences run all the way down. Each company is measuring a different thing on a different base, and each one says so plainly in its own release.
Three companies, three measuring instruments
Planet Fitness measures same club sales “based solely upon monthly dues billed to members,” across clubs open and billing for longer than twelve months. Monthly dues only. Annual fees, and everything a member spends once inside the club, sit outside the number. Life Time’s comparable centre revenue does the opposite, reflecting both membership dues and enrolment fees and in-centre revenue, which in the second quarter were 597.2 million dollars and 240.2 million dollars, a split of 71.3 to 28.7. A rise in personal training utilisation lifts Life Time’s metric. The identical rise could not lift Planet Fitness’s.
Xponential measures something different again, “solely upon monthly sales as derived through the designated point-of-sale system,” and adds an eligibility screen neither of the others uses. A studio’s months count only if it “has generated at least 13 months of consecutive positive sales and opened at least 13 calendar months ago.” The release never defines what positive sales means, and that gap matters, because a floor set at zero revenue and a floor set at year over year growth would produce very different comparable bases. Against whichever base the rule produces, the result was still negative 6.8 percent.
Comp is a category, not a measurement. The number after the percentage sign does not carry the same economic content from one company to the next.
The operator move
None of this is concealment. Every definition quoted here was published voluntarily, in the company’s own release, and each is a reasonable fit for the business underneath it. A franchisor tracking royalty economics should measure dues. An operator selling training should measure the whole box. The failure happens downstream, when three percentages get lined up as though they answered the same question.
So define your own comp before somebody else defines it for you. Decide whether you count dues or total revenue, whether a frozen member is still a member, and how long a location has to be open to qualify. Publish that definition beside the number every time you use it, and hold it through the quarters when a looser one would flatter you. When your lender asks on Monday how you compare to Planet Fitness, which definition are you using, and can you say it out loud?