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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1406705
C 72 BCBUSINESS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 b y M I C H A E L M c C U L L O U G H Curtis Christopherson remembers calling a meeting with his senior staff on Sunday, March 15, 2020. The World Health Organization had declared the global COVID-19 pandemic the previous Wednesday, and the B.C. government had issued a public health order closing, among other things, gyms and personal fitness sessions. "Human interaction is obviously what we do," says Christopherson, president and CEO of Innovative Fitness, a chain of 12 personal training studios in B.C. and Toronto. And now it was forbidden. If the lockdown lasted more than a few weeks, the management team realized, the company would lose employees, clients and the community it had painstak- ingly built up over the years. But what if it tried, at least in the interim, to offer personal training to members using two-way video calls, in their homes? "Virtual training didn't exist before COVID," Christopherson says. Sure, you could join digital fitness classes with Peloton, Tonal or Mirror, but they weren't personalized and didn't have the accountability that working with a personal trainer does. Innovative Fit- ness decided to go all-in. The company continued paying employees for two weeks, during which it trained them in using digital tools. It evaluated trainers' homes to ensure suitability for offering a professional training session. It hired a web developer, SaaSberry Innovation Laboratories of Coquitlam, to design its own video streaming platform. Though the whole exercise was a work in progress, a funny thing happened. Seventy THE BEST CATASTROPHE THAT EVER HAPPENED TO US COV ID-19 F L AT T ENED T HE BUSINESS MODEL OF M A N Y A SM A L L A ND MIDSIZE COMPA N Y. BU T SOME B.C. EN T REPRENEURS FOUND OP P OR T UNIT Y IN T HE CRISIS. NOW T H AT T HE ECONOM Y IS REOPENING, T HE Y'RE NOT GOING BACK TO BUSINESS AS USUA L