From Setback to Success: How Ellen Latham Built Orangetheory into a Global Fitness Empire

At age 40 Ellen Latham was fired. She was a single parent of a 9-year-old boy and just wanted to crawl under the covers and hide. But her father, who was a high school football coach, reminded her of something called momentum shifting, a coaching term. When your team is losing, rather than yes and be angry about all that is going wrong, focus on what the team does well. His other advice, “Focus on what you have now and build off of that.” 

Ellen had a certification in Pilates and was a really good fitness instructor. She had been teaching for decades. She started a small class at a local gym and stared working with clients in her spare bedroom which led to her up opening a studio. But Ellen realized her clients who were doing Pilates and spin classes weren’t getting the fat burning metabolic work they needed to achieve the results they wanted. 

For months, Ellen worked to create an ultimate workout for her clients and based it on science. She wanted her clients to get their heart rate over 84% for 12 minutes. She added the TRX straps and dumbbells to work inside and outside muscles. The class took off, there were waitlists and people bribing the front desk to get in. A friend’s husband who was in franchising said to her, “This is crazy, there should be one of these studios on every comer.”

Ellen thought that idea was ridiculous, she felt she didn’t have the tools to franchise her studio. But once the seed was planted, she started to seriously consider it. She called her friend back and the process began. Orangetheory was born in 2010. It’s a circuit workout that gets your heart rate up over 85% by the end of the class. Ellen actually says rather than be the next fitness craze, “Let me solve a problem.” And she did.

By 2023, Orangetheory had grown to more than 1300 studios, 1 million members and is in 23 countries. The goal of the company was to double over the next year. Ellen saw a problem that needed to be solved and create a process to do that for a large group of people. 

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What is the process that I can make better?