Jane Lucas – BJ’s Health & Fitness Centres Ltd
Jane started her career as a farmer’s wife teaching a few local ladies aerobics in the country. Thirteen years later she’s recognised as a successful businesswoman, owning and operating three health & fitness centres in the Nelson / Marlborough region.
Back in 1987 when I first started, it was quite hard for women to achieve their goals in business. I came from a small farming community and was happily married to a farmer. I was quite content. Life was good. I didn’t have any burning desire to do anything different. I certainly didn’t wake up one morning thinking ‘my goodness, there must be more to life than this’. I had three young children, one of which was still at home. I kept busy, we did a lot of entertaining and I belonged to many small community groups and always ended up on various committees. It’s interesting, once you’re a mother your organisational skills are honed towards working things out and fitting everything in. Life was always so busy. I think women have an advantage in that respect, we tend to have very good organisational skills, even more so once you have children.
I did a lot of social things. I also used to play badminton. One day at the club someone approached me from Nelson and asked me if I’d be interested in teaching aerobics. At home I discussed it with my husband to see how he felt about it. He laughed and said I was far too old. Of course that was like red rag to a bull! Away I went to do the training and I started teaching aerobics.
It was great. I was feeling really good because I was getting fitter and shedding kilos. I started teaching in Nelson and then got the job of running the aerobics at the YMCA in Richmond. I was the only instructor and had a very small group of ladies who really enjoyed my classes. It was very social and we’d often have a coffee afterwards. We had quite a few problems there, though, with the manager forgetting to open the centre for us, or the mats would be locked away in a different place. I seemed to be constantly apologizing. My customers were very loyal but it was embarrassing. And, to make matters worse, just across the road was the local, very well patronised ‘Jazzercise’ class. I’d walk back to the carpark after the class with my half a dozen ladies, and look into this room chock-a-block full of leotard clad women. (Little was I to know then that within three years I would take over the Les Mills Jazzercise franchise when the hall based classes found it difficult to compete with a gym offering everything.)
My ladies were very loyal and one day one of them said to me, ‘why don’t you find a place of your own, so we don’t keep having these problems here?’ In my stupid naive way I thought ‘yeah, that’s a great idea’. I found an upstairs area that had a beautiful sprung timber floor, perfect for aerobics. The building was 100 years old. I contacted the landlord but there was a problem, he already ahd someone interested. The other guy wanted to open a gym, so he thought we might be able to share the area and the lease. So we did. Brian arrived with his gym equipment and I arrived with my aerobics ladies. I was in business!
Brian wasn’t into advertising and marketing but I really needed to get the word out. As it was Brian’s gym and Jane’s aerobics studio, I came up with BJ’s. The arrangement with Brian worked for a while until my classed started getting bigger and I needed all 50% of my space for a couple of hours a day. There was tension and I started getting concerned that this partnership of lease was not going to work. I made a mental note never to go into partnership again. It all came to a head when Brian had a disagreement with the landlord and was asked to leave. I was left with the whole area, which was great, but also the whole lease to pay and a husband who was wondering why I wasn’t home, which wasn’t so great. I’d told him it was just going to be a part time thing, but all of a sudden I had financial commitments and I was going to have to work a lot harder to meet them. I had to really think about how I was going to make it pay.
Excerpt from Jane Lucas’s story
Go Girl Go! – Real Stories of New Zealand Women in Business
By Jacqui Thomas
Published 2001, JT Publishing Ltd
