🍞 Sweat Equity

Foluso Ogunwale's route into fitness was not a straight line. He spent two years as an accountant in his father's supermarket chain, then joined Skye Bank in 2007. That same year, a close friend lost a brother to diabetes and heart disease. Ogunwale went looking for a gym and found the ₦700,000 problem: the few decent facilities in Lagos were priced as luxuries, not as preventative health.

He did not act on it immediately. He started a side business selling phones, laptops and accessories, left the bank in 2013 to run it full time, and only in 2015 dusted off the gym idea.

The first i-Fitness was tiny and fully bootstrapped. When Ogunwale went to the banks, they did not take him seriously; fitness was a young industry, and lenders could not see why anyone would put money into a gym. For more than a year, the company had to prove the concept on its own cash.

The first outside money arrived in February 2017, in the form of a microfinance loan at around 3.8% a month. That is roughly 56% a year once it compounds (*interest charged on interest*). The company took the loan anyway, used it to add three branches, and by the end of 2017 had four gyms. Suddenly the banks were more interested. More manageable debt from banks then helped the chain to double to eight branches

In 2019, i-Fitness took its first institutional investor. CardinalStone Capital Advisers, the private equity arm of the Lagos-based CardinalStone group, bought a 65% stake through its first fund. At the time, the business had fewer than 3,000 members, about 50 staff and five gyms, all along the Lekki axis. It was the fund’s first deal. 

And the timing couldn’t have been worse.  The round closed about ten weeks before Covid-19 arrived. Globally, gyms were one of the first places to go and last places to be reopened. Lagos shut its gyms in March 2020, and they stayed shut until the state government allowed them to reopen on 19 September 2020, at a maximum of 33% occupancy with constant disinfection of equipment. For a business whose only product is a room full of people literally sweating near each other, that was close to a worst-case scenario. The real worst-case scenario would have been not closing the round before COVID.

Both sides have been candid that the company lost a significant amount of money in that period. Yet CardinalStone partner Yomi Jemibewon says the business went on to beat its growth and impact objectives 12 months ahead of schedule. 

Beyond capital, CardinalStone upgraded its systems, governance, and ESG standards, the plumbing a bigger buyer would later need to see. Ogunwale, for his part, has said his biggest lesson was people. In early 2020, the company flew in trainers from Europe for two weeks to train its staff to be personal trainers, and he has said that if they had done it sooner, they would have been much further ahead. With no other chains in Nigeria to poach staff from, i-Fitness had to train every personal trainer in-house.

i-Fitness sells one thing: access to a room full of equipment, close to where you live or work, for relatively low monthly fees.
Here is how the money comes in:

Memberships. Monthly, quarterly or annual, and every plan includes access to all branches nationwide. Prices are tiered by city. In 2026, members in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt paid ₦40,000 a month.

Joining and annual fees. New members paid a one-off joining fee of ₦18,896 in 2024, and since 2023 everyone pays a once-a-year club due, which started at ₦14,350.

Personal training. Charged on top of membership. The company says it has more than 500 certified trainers.

Corporate and insurance channels. Employers buy plans for staff, and health insurers such as Bastion Health offer i-Fitness discounts as a member benefit.

The academy. The i-Fitness Academy trains and certifies fitness professionals in partnership with the US-based National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM).

In addition, its  location strategy is down to  a precise formula. The company wants at least one gym wherever 25,000 people live within a 5km radius, and it screens sites for traffic, density and access roads. The reasoning is simple: after two hours in traffic, nobody wants to change clothes and drive another two hours to work out. Convenience and proximity become its competitive advantage. But this is something that only works financially at scale. 

That is also why the all-branch membership matters. A member in Yaba who works in Ikeja and visits family in Festac can use three different gyms on one membership. Each new branch makes the product better for every existing member, not just for the people who live next door. It is a network, not a collection of shops.

Now for the costs… 

In most of the world, rent is a monthly bill. In Lagos, landlords can ask for up to five years' rent paid upfront for commercial property. Add the fit-out and imported gym equipment, and each new gym means a large cheque on day one, long before the first member walks in. And because the national grid is the national grid, a gym open from 6 am to 9 pm needs a generator and the diesel to feed it. Remember, a new gym doesn’t always equal new members so the company has to be very careful about how they expand. 

As each new gym costs roughly the same whether 800 or 3,000 people use it, every extra member is close to pure margin. That makes members per gym the metric that matters most.

In a sign of a healthy private market, on  21 February 2024, CardinalStone sold its entire stake to Verod Capital Management and Rand Merchant Bank Nigeria, which advised on the sale, ran a competitive process that ended with Verod as the preferred buyer.

The price was not disclosed. Reported figures ranged from about $6 million to $12 million. CardinalStone has called the higher number incorrect without offering an alternative. What is clear is the scorecard it handed over:

Members: from fewer than 3,000 → more than 26,000 (up about 8.7x)
Gyms: 5 → 21 (up 4.2x)
Staff: about 50 → more than 500 ( up 10x)
Cities: 1 → 4

It was also the first full exit from CardinalStone's first fund. In a market where private equity exits are scarce, the firm presented it as proof that a Nigerian fund could source, scale and sell a local business. 

The buyer was a step up in size. Verod closed its third fund at its $200 million hard cap in January 2020, focused on mid-sized growth companies in English-speaking West Africa. i-Fitness was the sixth investment from that fund, which also put in new capital to diversify the offer and expand across the region. Verod co-founder Danladi Verheijen became chairman.

This is a repeated playbook. PureGym, now one of the biggest gym chains in Europe, followed a similar template. Founder Peter Roberts opened it in 2009 and sold to private equity firm CCMP in 2013. Leonard Green bought the majority in 2017 at a valuation of about $823 million, and KKR later bought in at a valuation of more than $2 billion. Each owner handed the next a bigger, more professional machine. PureGym ended 2025 with 714 gyms and 2.3 million members across Europe and the United States.

The only difference is scale: PureGym's first private equity owner bought a business with dozens of gyms in a market where people already went to the gym. CardinalStone bought five gyms in a market where it first had to sell the idea of going.

Under Verod, the expansion has been steady rather than spectacular. Three branches opened in Lagos between October and December 2024 (Iponri, Purple Mall in Lekki and Ogudu), and Gbagada moved to a site twice the size. A large new branch followed at Ago Palace in 2025, and in April 2026 a flagship at Games Village, Abuja took the count to 30. The company says it now has more than 40,000 active members. 

Verheijen's pitch for what comes next is all about headroom. He has said i-Fitness is already seven times the size of its nearest West African competitor, yet its membership is roughly 1% of 1% of Nigeria's population. He points out that 16% to 18% of Britons and 25% to 30% of Americans use a gym, and says that in theory the business could be a thousand times larger. There is also international expansion on the cards.m, with Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire as the next targets.

The best evidence that this can work outside rich countries comes from Brazil. Smart Fit was founded by Edgard Corona, backed for more than 15 years by private equity firm Pátria, and listed in São Paulo in 2021. Its IPO raised R$2.3 billion (about $440 million at the time), mostly to open more gyms. It has grown through Brazil's own inflation and currency swings to more than 2,000 Smart Fit gyms and about 5.2 million members across Latin America. Pátria sold its last shares in 2026 and says revenue grew about 130-fold while it was invested.

Smart Fit also tells you something about i-Fitness's possible future. In 2025 it opened its first club in Morocco, its first step onto a new continent. A global low-cost chain moving into Africa is either future competition for i-Fitness or may be a future buyer of it.

Now the metric we spoke about earlier. Members per gym. 

i-Fitness: about 40,000 members across 31 gyms, or roughly 1,300 per gym
Smart Fit: about 5.2 million across roughly 2,100 gyms, or about 2,500 per gym
PureGym: 2.3 million across 714 gyms, or about 3,200 per gym

The average PureGym carries about two and a half times as many members as the average i-Fitness. Because the costs of a gym are mostly fixed, closing even part of that gap would do more for i-Fitness's profits than opening another ten branches. The growth story is not just more gyms. It is more members, aka fuller gyms.

So why do members stay, and can i-Fitness keep charging them more?

The stickiness does not come from contracts, which can be cancelled at any time. It comes from four things. The first is proximity: if the gym is on your way home, you keep going. The second is the network: one card, 31 locations. The third is the lack of alternatives, since the nearest chain is a fraction of its size. The fourth is people. The classes, the regulars, and especially the trainers create a social routine that is harder to walk away from than a direct debit. Many trainers build their own followings online, which turns them into recruiters for the gym as well as coaches inside it.

The global chains treat trainers in exactly this way. The UK's Gym Group lets trainers run their own personal training businesses on its gym floors, and its managers have said the arrangement builds loyalty among trainers and lifts member retention. A member with a trainer is a member who renews.

But there is a counter-signal in i-Fitness's own numbers. The company says it has had more than 400,000 members over its life, against about 40,000 active today. Put crudely, nine out of ten people who have ever joined are no longer members. High churn is normal for budget gyms everywhere, and the NEW YEAR NEW ME rush is a global joke for a reason. Still, it means i-Fitness is running hard to stand still, and its marketing machine has to keep refilling the bucket.

On pricing, the answer depends on which currency you count in.

In naira, i-Fitness has shown real pricing power. The entry monthly price went from ₦13,900 in 2021 to ₦19,490 in early 2023 and ₦24,890 by February 2024, a rise of about 79% in three years. On top of that it added a joining fee and the annual club due, which drew public complaints from members at the time. Membership kept growing anyway, from 26,000 at the Verod deal to more than 40,000 now.

In dollars, the picture flips. ₦13,900 in early 2021 was worth something like $30 to $35. ₦24,890 in February 2024 was about $15.50. The dollar value of a membership roughly halved, while the treadmills, racks and spare parts are still bought in dollars. The price rises were chasing the naira, not adding real margin. Now it charges ₦40,000 which is back  to about  $30 

That is the hard ceiling on this business. The constraint on pricing is not competition; it is the Nigerian wallet. Members can only absorb so much when food, fuel and transport are rising too. So the smarter levers are the indirect ones: the annual due, tiered city pricing, premium flagship branches, corporate plans paid by employers, and personal training. Each extracts more revenue from the most committed members without raising the headline price for everyone.

The thesis, in one line: i-Fitness is betting that convenience, not price, is what makes Nigerians join a gym, and that whoever owns the most neighbourhoods owns the market.

However, there are risks that should not be buried.

Promises versus delivery. In 2021, the company said it would have 40 gyms by the end of 2023, 100,000 members by 2024 and a branch in Accra in 2022. In late 2026, it has 31 gyms, about 40,000 members and no Accra branch. Growth has been strong, just slower than the plan.

Capital Intensive: Five years of prepaid rent plus imported equipment makes each new gym expensive, and each wrong location painful to exit.

The dollar problem. Revenue is in naira and equipment is in dollars. Every devaluation makes the next gym and the next refurbishment more expensive. The naira is stable for now, but many businesses have been burnt in the past.

Empty floor space. At about 1,300 members per gym, the boxes are under-filled by global standards. Bigger flagships make that ratio harder, not easier, to fix.

Churn. 90% of everyone who has ever joined has left. Retention, not acquisition, is the battle.

People. The quality of the product is the quality of the trainers, and the company still has to make almost all of them itself. If trainers own the client relationship, they can also take clients with them.

There is also a clock. Verod's third fund closed in January 2020, and private equity funds typically run for about ten years. That points to a sale of i-Fitness somewhere around the end of this decade. The question for that next handover is the same one PureGym and Smart Fit answered: is this a business a much bigger investor, a global chain, or the stock market will want to own?

The ₦700,000 gym that turned Ogunwale away was selling exclusivity. i-Fitness is selling the opposite: a gym on every route home. It has proved Nigerians will pay for that. It has not yet proved they will pay enough, or stay long enough, to fill the boxes.

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