Fit to Print Volume 25 Issue 1 March 2016 | Page 6

S t a f f Pe r s p e c t i v e

interview by Paul Smith

Cath’s Other Hats
Maintenance, Done Right

A

sk members to name the first person who
comes to mind when they think of Fitness
Incentive and most will answer “Cor”
without hesitation. Ask them to name the
second person and the likely answer is…”Cathy.”
Cathy Peacock has been a fixture at FI since its
very earliest days. It's fair to say that she is
among the people who have made the greatest
contributions to the success of Fitness Incentive.
She has worn many hats over the years and
performed many functions: instructor, desk
manager, cleaning lady, purchasing agent,
customer service rep, and now, perhaps in her
greatest yet perhaps most under-appreciated
role, maintenance manager. Like umpiring, it's
one of those jobs that if you do it well, no one
notices you. With a largely incomplete and preconceived notion of what maintenance
management entails in terms of responsibilities, I
recently spoke to Cathy about her “Fitness
Incentive life” and, in particular, this most
recent incarnation of it.

PS: Talk a little about those early days
and meeting Cor for the first time.
CP: Six months after she opened her oneroom studio at 6 Grove Place, I went in
and met Cor. It didn't take long at all. In
fact, it was probably right then that I
was hooked. I'm sure I took every single
one of her classes. Eventually, I would go
back to school to train as a massage
therapist, but I continued to spend a
great deal of time with Cor at the
'studio', as we called it then, and started
working at the Front Desk. Fitness
Incentive in those days was literally one
aerobics room, one bathroom, and a
room in the rear that began as a
changing room and would become the
nursery. As I spent more time with Cor, I
quickly realized that she was doing
everything herself, and I mean
everything: teaching, keeping the books,
working the desk, cleaning and
maintaining the space, and I started
helping her. Vacuuming, polishing the
glass…there was no one to replace light
bulbs. We did it. And for me, what I
found was that I liked this
aspect—maintaining the space. These
simpler and more general maintenancerelated activities rapidly grew to include
other tasks. An example would be like
when Cor bought a vacuum cleaner that
needed assembly; I volunteered for that.
It turned out—probably to everyone's
surprise, including my own—that I liked

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these jobs. I liked this stuff! I still like
this stuff. I just didn't know at the time
that, A) I could be good at it, and B) it
could (and eventually would) become
part of what I'd do as an employee.
PS: Is there a formal job title attached
to these maintenance tasks?
CP: Maintenance Manager. It started
out being a job that a lot of desk staff
contributed to, a job that many people
had “here and there.” Many of these
were part-timers who were only at FI a
couple of days a week. But here's the
thing about maintenance: maintenance

“You hear from people
who were once members
somewhere else:
“Everything's always
broken, everything's
always a mess.”
Not at Fitness Incentive.
Not if I have anything to
say—or do—about it.”
Cathy Peacock

is something you've got to be “on”
every single day. There are “fires to be
put out”—not big ones, but still,
“fires”—and if you don't address them
in a timely way, you can't keep up.
Things can get out of hand very
quickly. Something breaks down and
stays broken for an unacceptably long
time.
I think that in the beginning, Ken
himself was getting reports of the
breakdowns from the desk and
following up. He had the connections
to the reps he'd bought the equipment
from. But as Fitness Incentive grew, it
just became too much for an owner to
oversee these tasks along with every
other facet that, as an owner, you
must be involved in. The best
approach, he thought, was for
maintenance to be assigned to
Spring 2016 FIT to Print

Maintenance “Man”: Cathy Peacock

someone who was at the gym every day.
And I was. When he asked if I was
interested, I was, to be honest, a little
nervous. This was because, having
observed the girls who'd participated
before and witnessed how they
responded to the work, it seemed
overwhelming. But they weren't here
enough to really keep on top of
everything every single day.
PS: The sense I'm starting to get is that
this job is much more involved than
simply placing a service call when a
treadmill stops working.
CP: When Fitness Incentive was on Main
Street, Cor and I weren't just
maintenance men. We weren't just
aerobics instructors, or cleaning staff, or
desk workers. We were everything. It was
on Main Street that Fitness Incentive
started to grow from an aerobics studio
into a gym. We started to accumulate
equipment: Schwinn Airdyne bikes,
treadmills. In fact, my first ever repair
was a Schwinn Airdyne. There was
something going on with the computer
screen. Members had been really getting
into the equipment, and it was down. We
didn't have companies like GymSource or
our current contacts like Gary at Precor,
who can schedule and dispatch service
technicians. So I called Schwinn, and
they talked me through the repair.
“Unplug, remove the cover, check this,
disconnect that and re-set…” I fixed that
bike that day. And I absolutely loved it! I
loved solving the problem and bringing a

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