Gary Heavin Is On a Mission From God

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Curves gyms can be found in mini-malls and on country roads, in urban centers and suburban shopping plazas. Walk into a typical club, pass an appointment desk, and you'll see a dozen workout machines arranged in a circle. The machines use hydraulic resistance instead of stacked weights, so the faster you work, the heavier the resistance. The idea is to work fast enough to elevate your heart rate into the training zone. Every 30 seconds, the fast-paced music that pumps through the club's sound system is interrupted by a voice that instructs "change stations now." You move from a resistance machine to a "recovery station," where you are encouraged to "move lively" to keep your heart rate elevated. Walk, jog in place, or do a little dance, as most do. In the center of the circuit, a Curves employee encourages and motivates. Gym members--ranging in age from teenagers to septuagenarians--chat about their lives, their kids, their upcoming vacations. There are no mirrors and no men. Go around the circuit twice, and you're done. It takes just 30 minutes. Membership starts at $29 a month.

It's hard not to take Heavin seriously when he says that his goal for Curves is to become "the McDonald's of fitness." Already, there is one Curves for every two McDonald's in the United States.

Circuit training, of course, has been around for decades. But Curves is very much unlike most fully loaded gyms with their banks of cardio machines, schedules of aerobics classes, personal trainers, spa services, juice bars, and other assorted bells and whistles. Indeed, the idea for Curves emerged from Heavin's experience running a traditional gym--and then running it into the ground.

As a child growing up in the mid-1960s, Heavin dreamed of becoming a doctor. After graduating from Sam Houston High School in Arlington, Texas, Heavin worked a variety of odd jobs--a roughneck on oil rigs, longshoreman, waiter, truck driver--while taking premed classes in colleges. His dream ended around the same time he ran out of money to continue his studies. Fortunately, his brother David had a proposal: Would Gary like to manage a fitness center he was planning to purchase in Houston? With little to lose, Heavin went for it.

He was 20 years old and knew nothing about business, and the first year of running the gym was often terrifying. Heavin struggled to find money to pay the gym's electricity bill and often spent his nights on the floor of the facility's daycare center. But in the process, he learned a few things about himself. First, he loved the fitness business. Plus, he was a good salesperson, particularly when it came to dealing with women. He soon limited the gym's membership to women only and named it Women's World of Fitness.

Within a year, the club was doing well enough that the brothers decided to open another location. Over the next six years, they opened another six more throughout south Texas. "By the time I was 26, I had a $1 million financial statement," says Heavin. By the time he was 30, Women's World of Fitness had 14 locations and 50,000 members. Heavin got a pilot's license and flew himself from location to location, keeping an eye on his growing empire. Then things started to fall apart.

In retrospect, the problems were simple. "I let my overhead increase beyond the capacity of the market," Heavin says. Women's World of Fitness clubs were big, which meant high rents. They also offered swimming pools, tanning beds, and kids' programs. Such costly amenities require a large membership base, but aside from Houston, the gyms were mostly in smaller towns. Desperate to bring in more money, Heavin decided to open his clubs to men. "It was logical, but it destroyed my women's business," he says. Indeed, it didn't take long for female customers to grow uncomfortable with the meat-market aspect of a coed gym and drift away. As the business faltered, Heavin's managers grew restless. "I spent all my time flying from club to club trying to keep people disciplined and motivated," Heavin says.

In 1986, about three years after opening its 14th location, Women's World of Fitness was bankrupt. Heavin lost his house, his airplane, and his cars, and was some $5 million dollars in debt. His wife divorced him. Heavin lacked the money to pay alimony and in short order went from being a jet-setting entrepreneur to just another broke guy serving a three-month term in Cameron County Jail in Brownsville. As often happens when people hit bottom, Heavin turned to the Bible for solace. He described the moment he became born again during a 2003 interview on Pat Robertson's The 700 Club. "I finally got on my knees and said, 'God, I lived the first half of my life by my will, and it's a mess. I'm going to turn the rest of my life over to you." His religious beliefs gave him a new way to look at his mistakes--not as failures, but as mere bumps on the road leading to the Lord's larger plan for Gary Heavin.

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