Every so often I go through the Google reviews for Ark Grit. I am not going to pretend some of them do not sting.
The complaints are mostly the same few things. Cockroaches. Water on the floor. Machines that are broken, or broken again, or taking too long to come back. And every now and then someone adds a line along the lines of, if you have money to keep opening new gyms, why can’t you maintain the ones you already have.
I understand the frustration. If I paid for a gym and found a cockroach next to the water cooler I would not be happy either. What gets to me is not the complaint itself, it is the assumption sitting underneath it, that if a problem exists we must not care about it, or that we are letting the old gyms go because we are too busy opening new ones. Most of the time the reality is quite different, and a lot of it happens in places members never see. So I thought I would try and explain how we operate, why some of these problems keep coming back, and why I still think the model is right despite all of it.
Why we take the buildings others turn down
The main reason we can charge $55 a month with no contract is that we are willing to take properties a lot of commercial tenants would walk away from. Many of our gyms are in older HDB estates, quite a few of them in basement bomb shelters, in blocks that have been standing for decades. They are not pretty. Some have awkward layouts or poor ventilation. Some have ageing infrastructure, leaking roofs, water seeping through the walls. Some sit right next to the rubbish collection point.
For most businesses any one of those is a reason to say no. For us it is a reason to look closer, because when fewer tenants want a space the rent is usually more reasonable, and rent is one of the biggest costs a gym carries every single month. Keep the rent down and you can keep the membership down while still putting a decent amount of equipment on the floor.
In a way we take on the headaches of an old building so that members do not have to pay for a newer one. It was a deliberate choice and on the whole I think it has worked out for everyone. It does come with consequences though, and most of the reviews are really about those consequences.
The cockroaches
Take cockroaches. Nobody wants to see one in the middle of a set, and neither do we.
In older HDB blocks the flats have rubbish chutes running down to a common collection point on the ground floor. At all of our basement gyms, that collection point is a few metres from our entrance. So you have a whole block’s household rubbish coming down a chute and piling up right beside the gym. Cockroaches do very well in that kind of place. Most of the time they stay hidden inside the chutes and the structure around them. But when there are renovation works like HIP, or when pest control fumigates the bin centre, we have seen them come out in numbers that are honestly quite astonishing, and they scatter.
Where they go is somewhere dark, sheltered and damp, and a basement gym fits that description better than I would like. We do not serve food, but there are water coolers, toilets, taps and floor drains, and parts of these old buildings are just naturally dim.
We clean, we do pest control, we use repellents, we try to close up the gaps where they hide and keep things dry.
A cockroach in one of our gyms does not automatically mean the gym is dirty or that pest control was skipped. Sometimes the source is literally a few metres outside.
The water on the floor or walls
Water is the other one, mostly when it rains heavily. I do not mean a leaking tap. At some outlets the water comes in through the side walls, and at others it comes up through the basement floor itself. When we looked into it, it came down to groundwater seepage and the building’s ageing waterproofing. A plumber cannot fix that and neither can our maintenance team with a patch. Doing it properly would mean major waterproofing or structural works, and we are tenants, we do not own the building and we cannot just start altering a civil defence shelter because we feel like it.
We have reported it to HDB and the Town Councils and we were told there was nothing practical they would do. They told us we were not bound to stay, and if we found the premises unacceptable we were free to surrender the unit.
That leaves us with a choice. Hundreds of people use it regularly. The gym is running sustainably and the neighbourhood has somewhere affordable to train. Do we close the whole thing because water comes through parts of it during heavy rain, or do we keep it open and manage the affected areas?
Where we can manage it safely, I think keeping the gym open is usually the better answer. Water on the floor is a slip hazard and we treat it as one, it has to be cleared, the area managed, and anything we cannot make safe gets closed off. But an old building that needs extra attention when it rains is a different thing from a building that is unsafe to be in. I would love a dry basement. But between returning the unit because the problem is unfixable vs living with a problem so more people have an affordable gym to train in, I think most members will choose the latter.
The broken machines
Then there are the machines, which on the surface is the simplest complaint of all. It is broken, so why not just fix it.
We do fix them. What people may not realise is how hard some of our machines are used. At $55 a month we have a lot of members, and at peak hours it is normal to see three or four people waiting on a popular machine. One person finishes a set and gets up, the next sits down straight away, the first goes to the back and waits for their turn to come round again. This goes on for hours. Some machines are basically never idle. Compare that with a gym where the same machine sits empty most of the day and you can imagine the difference in wear. Cables fray, bearings go, pulleys wear down, upholstery tears. They are mechanical things after all.
We do work to a turnaround target. A straightforward repair should be done within a week. If the technician has to make a second trip because a part needs to come from our warehouse, two weeks. If the part has to be imported from overseas, three. We keep parts for all our machines in the warehouse, so most repairs fall into the first two. But every so often it is a damage that is reported to us late, something nobody planned for, a latch or a bearing that happens to be a slightly different size from every other one on the machine, or a part that even the factory never expected to wear out so quickly, and it did. Those have to be brought in from overseas, and there is no practical way to keep every possible part for every machine on the shelf all the time.
The end of the year is usually the hardest stretch. That is when schools clear their budgets, so a lot more repair and equipment work comes in, and it is serviced by the same team. Things do take longer in those weeks, and I would rather say that upfront than pretend otherwise.
I get the frustration when the one machine you came for is out. But broken does not mean ignored. Often it has simply been used an enormous amount, and quite often the repair is already in the queue. At the same time I do not want heavy usage to become our excuse. We know how hard the equipment gets used, so the maintenance has to be built around that. We are not claiming to have this all figured out.
Money for new gyms, but not for repairs?
The line about having money to open new gyms but not to fix machines comes up often enough that I want to answer it properly.
Opening an outlet and maintaining one are different things. A new outlet is capital spending: renovation, equipment, long-term planning. Maintenance is day-to-day operations: servicing, technicians, spare parts. They sit in different budgets and run through different processes, and it is entirely possible for us to be fitting out a new gym while technicians are working on faults at several existing ones that same week. One does not crowd out the other.
As the owner I am responsible for both, and I agree growth should never come at the expense of the members we already have. What frustrates me is the idea that if we can afford new gyms, any unresolved maintenance issue must be management refusing to spend. That is not how it works. Not every problem goes away because you throw money at it. Some need specialised parts that take time to come in. Some depend on a contractor’s schedule. Some, like the water, are not even ours to fix. And sometimes the same problem comes back after we have already dealt with it. Unresolved and ignored are two different things, which I suspect is true of most businesses, not only gyms.
As owners, we take on business expenses, loans and personal sacrifices to open more affordable gyms, even though we can comfortably extract some profits because we believe it is our social mission, and even purpose in life to serve the community by building affordable gyms for more people. By saying you want us to stop opening gyms and only focus on maintaining the existing gyms is to say you do not want other Singaporeans to enjoy the same benefit you currently have.
The members who do not follow the rules
Another complaint we hear a lot is that we do nothing about members who behave badly or ignore the house rules. I understand why it looks that way. There is nobody from our team standing on the floor, so from the outside it can seem like nobody is paying attention.
What people do not see is what happens after a report comes in. When a member tells us about someone and we are able to identify who it is, we reach out to that person directly and talk to them about it. Most of the time that is enough. If it carries on, they get a warning, and after three warnings we ban them.
What we do not have is someone on the floor enforcing the rules as things happen. For that you need a manned gym, and for a 24-hour gym that means a lot more people than most would assume. There are 168 hours in a week, and normal working hours under MOM’s rules are capped at 44 a week, so you need at least four staff just to have one person on the floor at all times. At around $2,500 each, that is $10,000 a month. Spread over a gym of 500 members, that is another $20 on every membership, every month.
So the real question is whether members want to pay $20 more a month so that someone is always there to police the floor, or whether they would accept a certain level of bad behaviour and slower enforcement in return for a cheaper membership. I think most of our members would take the cheaper membership.
Even if the enforcement is half the time, that means $10 more per month per member. Would you be willing to live with the current process, or pay $10 more a month so the trouble makers are booted out faster?
Why not just charge more?
Could we just charge more? We could. Newer buildings, nicer finishes, better amenities, and price it at $65 or $70 or higher. It would not get rid of every complaint, but it would get rid of some of the ones that come with old buildings.
The real question is whether that is the business we want to run. Ten or fifteen dollars more a month is nothing to someone earning comfortably. To someone on a tight budget it matters, fifteen dollars a month is $180 a year. There are a lot of people in Singapore who watch every recurring expense. Students, retirees, young working adults, families with commitments, people who just want to stay healthy without spending more than they have to. Those are the people we want to serve, and my sense is that many of them would rather pay $55 for a functional, reasonably well-equipped gym near home than pay a lot more for something prettier with fewer quirks. That is our read of the market, and it is the segment we chose.
Paying less does not mean putting up with unsafe equipment, poor hygiene or neglect. Those are not extras. But there is a difference between the essentials and the level of polish you would expect from a more expensive place, and every business has to decide where it draws that line. We never set out to build the most luxurious gyms. We set out to make fitness as affordable and accessible as we reasonably can while keeping the business going.
Why we keep doing it this way
I do not want to romanticise any of this. We negotiate hard on rent, we watch our costs, and we try to run efficiently so the business makes money. If it did not, we would not be around to serve anyone, let alone open more gyms. But I do think a business can make money and still do something useful for the people around it. When we take an old, hard-to-lease space, the landlord gets a tenant, we get a site that works for us, and the residents nearby get an affordable gym close to home. Some of those spaces might otherwise sit empty because nobody wanted to deal with them. We were willing to. That does not make us saints, it just means we found value somewhere other people passed over.
People will keep leaving negative reviews, and that is their right. Someone who has just seen a cockroach or found their machine out of order is not thinking about rental economics or groundwater, they just wanted a decent workout, and fair enough. It still bothers me when the review says we do not care, because I know what sits behind it.
The times we raised the same issue with landlords and agencies and were told nothing more could be done. The number of times we have sent a technician back to the same machine. I am only asking for some recognition that not every problem comes from indifference, and not every problem has a simple fix. If something at your gym keeps happening and you feel it has not been dealt with, write to us directly. I cannot promise every issue has a quick or permanent answer, but I do want to know about it.
Our gyms are not for everyone and that is fine. Some people want newer premises, nicer interiors, shorter queues and fewer inconveniences, and there are other operators offering that at different price points. We never set out to convince everybody. What I do not want is to keep pushing prices up in pursuit of something more premium and end up pricing out the very people we started this for.
After years of running gyms I have mostly accepted that you make decisions with the options you actually have, not the ones you wish you had. I would rather none of our gyms had cockroaches. I would rather the basements stayed dry, and every machine was fixed the day it broke.
We took the old buildings anyway, because that is what makes $55 possible, and more than ten thousand people now train at a price that might otherwise have put a gym out of reach, or further away from home, or not operating at hours when people needed them.
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