Club together: Jan Spaticchia has brought a family feel to fitness

Walking into an énergie group fitness club with the company’s co-founder and CEO Jan Spaticchia, it’s evident that he has a special connection with every employee. And this was driven home when Channel 4 invited him to appear on Undercover Boss. Whilst Spaticchia aced the initial stages, he eventually received word from the show’s agents that they’d decided to take things in a different direction. After a little probing, énergie discovered that the production company hadn’t been able to find a single employee that didn’t recognise its head honcho by sight. “Most of the staff know me,” Spaticchia smiles. “And Undercover Boss relies on you actually being able to go undercover.”

Even as a child, Spaticchia wasn’t one to want to blend into the crowd. “Very early on I knew I wanted to do my own thing,” he says. “I didn’t want to work for somebody else.” This was largely thanks to the influence of his uncle, whose manufacturing business he would work at during the school holidays. Whilst Spaticchia could have easily just walked into a job with the family business once he finished, he knew he wanted to follow the example his uncle had set. “He was rags to riches; he made it on his own,” says Spaticchia. “That inspired me to want to do something myself, rather than just jump on board with what he created.”

Once he’d finished his A levels, Spaticchia went to technical college and decided to study leisure and recreation. “I’m obviously a reasonably big lad: I was spending a lot of time in the gym,” he says. “So I picked a college course that would allow me to continue doing that.” Whilst he studied, he made ends meet working as a gym supervisor, until his mother drew his attention to a job advert from Fitness for Industry, the company that ran all of the gyms for the Forte Group hotel chain. The ad said the firm was looking for a manager instructor grade six – or MI6. “I remember thinking that I was going to get a gun and end up working for the secret service,” Spaticchia laughs. “Basically, it meant I would be folding towels, cleaning showers, doing laundry and scrubbing scum lines.”

Before long, Spaticchia was living in the Milton Keynes Forte Posthouse and working his way through a six-month training programme. Whilst successful completion of the course typically saw trainees going back out as instructors, Spaticchia aced his final test and leapfrogged into a senior role. “I got offered a management position straight away,” he says. And his career continued to pick up speed: after just seven weeks as a cover manager filling in for other Posthouse managers around the country, Spaticchia was given a chance to cut his teeth setting up a club of his own in Brentwood. “I had my first opportunity to design a club, oversee the fit out and launch it,” he says.

And Spaticchia soon got his first taste of true entrepreneurialism when he was approached by a wealthy club member who wanted him to help set up an independent club. “I thought he was full of shit, if I’m honest,” Spaticchia admits. But the member returned three weeks later, having found a site for the new gym that had been listed in the Domesday Book. “He said it was a beautiful working watermill in Buckingham,” says Spaticchia. “But I went to see it and it was this derelict shack.” Fortunately, this didn’t discourage the young entrepreneur – he set up his own consultancy called Ultimate Health UK, agreed on a fee of £60,000 and, within a year, Bourton Mill was open to the public. “And I got the bug: I just loved setting things up,” he says.

However, the early 1990s recession began to bite not long after, temporarily putting the brakes on demand for new fitness clubs. Ever resourceful, Spaticchia blagged his way into a job lecturing on the health and fitness industry at places like Oxford College of Further Education and Watford College, now West Herts College. “I discovered I was quite good at it: I could really hold an audience,” he said. Before he knew it, Spaticchia had worked his way up to be head of faculty for sports science, leisure and recreation courses at Milton Keynes College. There was only one slight hitch. “Nobody had ever asked me if I’d gotten any A levels or a degree,” he says. “When Milton Keynes eventually got round to asking, they paid for me to do a teaching degree basically out of embarrassment.”