Action Stations

In the past 15 years, Action Group has grown from a fitness PR specialist to one of the leisure sector’s leading marketing agencies. WellNation spoke to Dawn Tuckwell and Cheryl Hersey, founders of Action Group, who recently sold the company to their staff via an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT)

How has Action Group grown since its launch as a PR specialist in 2010? When we launched Action PR – as it was called back then – we were fed up with working at large agencies and wanted to offer a better quality, more sustainable service, working with clients we were passionate about. We both came from a fitness background. Dawn had 10 years’ experience in fitness PR and events and had been a director of another agency. Cheryl had a Masters in Communication Management and experience as a fitness journalist and in management roles at health clubs both in the UK and Australia.

Action quickly made a name for itself in the industry after securing well-known brands, including Physical Company, Everyone Active and Power Plate, as retained clients in our first year of trading, and the team grew to service a steady stream of new business. We’ve come a long way since then, but the core mission remains the same – to be thefirst port of call for brands looking for commercial success in the sport, health and wellness space.

Having a sector specialism has always been our strength and we very quickly realised that we could do a better job than the agnostic marketing agencies that our PR clients were using. We bolstered our team, gradually developing our service offering until we became a full-service marketing agency in 2019.

We now offer the widest range of marketing services in the industry, from PR and Comms, to website development, graphic design, branding, large scale photo and video shoots and business consultancy. We even have our own fitness model agency.

What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced when growing the company? Recruitment. We’re still a relatively small agency – through choice. Quality is so important to us and the bigger you get, the harder it is to control that quality. It’s crucial that every member of our team is passionate, determined, brilliant and always firing on all cylinders. This is pretty hard to find! The fl ip side to this, is when we do recruit the right people, they stay for the long term. Over half of our team have been with Action for 5+ years already.

What do you see as the company’s biggest successes so far? We’re pretty proud of our performance during the pandemic. Every single member of our team rallied to the challenge and performed exceptionally. We didn’t furlough anyone, we went ahead with our rebrand to Action Group and had our best financial performance to date!

And could you outline/give an example of something that didn’t work quite as well as you had hoped? Over the years we’ve looked at offering performance marketing/paid media and we’ve recruited with this expertise in mind, but whilst we delivered a few good campaigns it’s never felt perfect and we ultimately decided that this is the one service we won’t offer.

The Action Group leadership team

Dan Pearson Managing Director With a background of delivering strategic comms for large organisations, Dan is responsible for running the business, whilst also leading on strategy and client delivery.

Cheryl Hersey Director Cheryl still sits on Action Group’s board, while also leading the agency’s commercial consultancy and supporting with the marketing strategy and implementation.

Dawn Tuckwell Director of Sales and Director of Action Group Trustees As a board member, ensures the business is run for the benefit of the employees and leads on new business outreach and events.

Which sectors do you now specialise in? Our clients can broadly be split into three areas beginning with operators; from boutique to big box, private to public sector. We’ve produced everything from video content for David Lloyd, to influencer work with Orangetheory and advertising campaigns for Everyone Active to name a few.

We also work with direct to consumer brands, on a sliding scale from simple product placement – we recently launched 1Rebel’s new clothing line – to full scale creative campaigns, such as Fitness First’s Burn Off Your Bills January sale campaign.

Finally, suppliers from equipment to technology to services, we know the market so well that we can offer 360 support aligned with a client’s business goals. Our recent new client wins include Zoom Media, Your Personal Training and Mariana Tek, not forgetting we also built the website for WellNation!

The sector has evolved a lot since 2010 – what would you describe as the most significant changes? When we founded the agency, fitness was very much in the minority and certainly didn’t enjoy the high profile it does today. Action was one of the first agencies to specialise in this sector and seeing the industry change and grow has helped the business lay unshakable foundations.

In the early 2010s journalists were still all powerful, infl uencers didn’t exist, social media was still emerging, and no one used video content. We’ve seen all of this change, adding to our own service offering as we’ve gone along, underpinning everything we do with robust market knowledge and commercial acumen.

The emergence of ‘wellness’ was an important moment for our sector and the way people now think about health as being more than just physical has changed everything. Wellness is now a trillion-dollar industry, bringing huge amounts of innovation with it, but we’ve also seen a lot of startups fail. We’d like to think we are pretty good at backing the winners!

And what about its future - what do you see as the sector’s biggest strengths and opportunities? Gyms, health clubs, leisure centres and sports clubs are wonderful places, but they could be so much more. The gym membership doesn’t just have to offer access to fi tness, it should be a gateway to a wide range of health and wellness needs. Operators have the ultimate captive audience and the power to deliver a bigger, bolder and braver service.

Operators have the ultimate captive audience and the power to deliver a bigger, bolder and braver service

You recently sold the company to Action Group staff via an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT). What was the rationale and what does it mean going forward? There are several reasons behind choosing an Employee Ownership Trust, but fundamentally we had been running the business for almost 14 years and were looking at ways we could step back from day-to-day operations, without diluting the essence of Action Group. A standard trade-sale comes with a lot of uncertainty for the team, as well as an often-tricky earn-out period, and we weren’t comfortable with that.

The EOT allows for a smoother transition of management, where we could reduce our involvement at the right pace. We worked with business advisers Avondale to guide us through the process.

We also felt that the EOT would give the team, particularly those that have been with us for a long time, more of a say in the running of the business with an ongoing platform for their views, ideas and input. We were looking to create a real sense of ownership.

There are no longer any shareholders, so the people to benefit from the profits that the business makes are the employees themselves.

It helps that Action Group has such an engaged group of employees that have lived and breathed its values for so long, the EOT ultimately felt like an evolution of that.

We hope that being an EOT business will also help us to attract even more high calibre talent in the future.