To be honest, when it comes to going undercover for our corporate and commercial espionage cases around Newcastle and Tyne and Wear we’ve thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity it has granted us to go and (in one case) get a hair cut, (in another) have a meal out or (with most) get tours of businesses and premises we would never normally get to see the inside of.
With our latest one though, we had to strap on the ol’ spandex and sweatband and go do high intensity workouts. For an hour. Five times in a week. Physically, it may not have been a pretty sight but the results we achieved definitely were.
Our client contacted us after seeing one of our Facebook posts and realised that one of her mutual friends was someone who had used us in the past. She had started up her own fitness studio in Newcastle and offered bespoke exercise classes, nutrition plans and physiotherapy support to her clients. Of late she had been hearing that one of her staff had been taking her session plans and using them whilst out working for themselves “on the QT” and, worst of all, that they’d been approaching clients at the end of sessions and actively tried to ‘poach them’ to leave our client and come work-out with them at a local gym instead.
We met with our client initially for a free consultation and she said she was losing clients hand over fist as the staff member was offering a much cheaper deal, that she’d confronted them about it but they’d denied it and yet she was hearing the same rumours about them doing it over and over yet could never get definitive proof.
We arranged to attend her studio wearing a hidden camera on a day she would not be there and receive the “standard introduction and induction” from the staff member instead. We then agreed to jump straight into a series of classes, only ever led by this particular staff member and to see how they behaved towards us in terms of professional ethic and poaching of our custom.
Within MINUTES of meeting the staff member in question at our “induction” they were taking us through the questionnaire whilst telling us how much better off we’d be accessing a much wider range of facilities and machines than what our client offered and briefly mentioned that they run some ‘side classes’ at a local well-known gym franchise if we’d be interested.
From there, the “wooing” continued as we attended small-group classes at the fitness studio led by this staff member – who made a point of giving their mobile number out to select individuals at the end of sessions and telling them that they could do a lot more for them one-on-one with “better equipment” etc. We managed to film them doing this twice.
Eventually the employee approached us at just our THIRD session in our FIRST week and explained that they did private one-on-one sessions at a local well-known gym franchise and that they could offer the same as what we were getting with our client “but for about forty quid cheaper a month”. We thanked them, said we’d think about it… and handed our video evidence and supporting report back to our client.
From this we subsequently learnt two very valuable things:
- Judging from the speed and clinical precision with which the employee was dispensed with, you should not mess with a woman’s livelihood.
- Fat men shouldn’t burpee!