Phillip Mills and how he built a global empire by making exercise fun

Thursday, 23 June 2022

Phillip Mills represented New Zealand in hurdles at the Commonwealth Games in 1974 and 1978.

A future in the fitness industry seemed inevitable for Phillip Mills.

When Mills was growing up, his family home in Dickens St, Grey Lynn, Auckland, doubled as a gym for Olympic weightlifters like Don Oliver, and he remembers looking down over the bank to watch Kiwi Olympic athletics champion Peter Snell race Kenyan Olympian Kip Keino in Grey Lynn Park.

By his early teens and with demand for the family gym increasing, his parents, Les and Colleen Mills, who had represented New Zealand in the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, opened The Les Mills World of Fitness in Victoria St, Auckland. It was so small that it only had one set of changing rooms so men and women had to work out on alternate days.

His parents employed talented coaches across many sports including track and field, gymnastics, weightlifting and martial arts, who inspired the young Mills.

Les Mills World of Fitness moved into this building in Auckland's Victoria St in 1979, and it remains their flagship gym.

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“What hooked me and created my passion for working in gyms was working with those inspirational people,” the 67-year-old says.

While they wanted to train the best athletes in the world, they also wanted to change and improve the lives of everyday people, he says.

On a four-year sports scholarship to UCLA in the United States, Mills, who represented New Zealand in two Commonwealth Games, discovered group exercise to music in an early aerobics class in a high school hall in Los Angeles.

Phillip Mills saw the potential of group exercise to music when he was in the US on a four-year sports scholarship.

“I had always had an interest in making exercise fun,” he says. “That was an ‘aha’ moment.”

Mills had links with the music industry, having managed rock band Hello Sailor when they were in LA through a connection with his sister Donna Mills, also a Commonwealth Games representative, and was struck by their stage presence.

“That was inspirational to see how charismatic they were on stage, and what a buzz that gave people and I thought, OK, how can we take that into fitness,” he says.

When he returned to New Zealand, Mills sought out theatre and dance specialists to help teach fitness instructors how to project themselves on stage, interpret music, create experiences, and communicate with big groups of people.

The aerobics-style Jazzergetics and Jazzercise fitness classes he helped create became a huge success.

Jackie Mills is a specialist in nutritional medicine, an obstetrician and a GP, as well as a former national gymnast and aerobics champion.

The Les Mills business was on a roll, licensing its fitness classes to other clubs in New Zealand and expanding to Australia. The company listed in 1984 and was later bought by an investment company, but one month after the takeover the 1987 stock market crash wiped out the new owners.

Phillip and his wife Jackie Mills, a former national gymnast and aerobics champion who met through the gym, took back control of the firm, taking on millions in debt and selling its Australian assets to keep afloat.

Responding to demand for more athletic classes, the creative duo developed the BodyPump programme, which uses weights, and it became the single biggest branded exercise programme in the world.

The gym chain now has more than 50,000 members in 12 clubs around the country and its global arm Les Mills International has 130,000 accredited instructors delivering Les Mills fitness classes every week in 21,000 gyms across 110 countries.

But it faced tough times during the Covid-19 pandemic with the closure of gyms around the world.

To ensure its survival, the company brought in its first external investor , with ACC taking an 18.8% stake in Les Mills International. Mills says he is open to taking on other big international investors to help the brand grow internationally, but says the family would like to continue to maintain control.

The couple’s children Diana Mills and Les Jr now have senior roles in the company and are helping drive its current refresh for a younger generation. It’s something the company undertakes about every 10 years to keep fresh and relevant.

Jackie Mills, a former GP and now Les Mills chief creative officer, is overseeing the changes which includes the development of its gym of the future in the Danish capital Copenhagen.

The 62-year-old says it will be an innovation and community hub to appeal to the younger generation. With more time spent online, this group is looking for a place to come together to work out, strengthening both their physical and mental health, something that has grown in awareness since Covid.

Les Mills is up against some big global competitors include online fitness companies like Peloton and Apple Fitness Plus and rival exercise classes such as Zumba.

Phillip Mills sees online subscriptions as the company’s big opportunity for growth. In 2020, the company’s OnDemand app was voted the best at-home workout in the annual USA Today Reader’s Choice Awards.

Mills estimates the company spends $100 million a year to create content for its classes.

The company has relationships with every music company in the world and its choreography team listens to about 2000 songs to pick a dozen tunes. New classes are trialled up to 50 times before filming, and the company taps its best teachers from around the world to train for a perfect performance captured by as many as 15 cameras on sets that could be in nature, or at large global conventions with thousands of people.

It’s a slick machine when compared with rivals whose teachers may make up a new class when they come in every day and film with one or two cameras, and a far cry from the early days of Les Mills when teachers were taught from written diagrams on paper notes.

Mills says the company wants to become the Disney of fitness movies. He estimates Les Mills is currently the fifth or sixth biggest in the world for online subscriptions.

“That’s our big opportunity,” he says. “We’re going hard after that to break into that top three and hopefully take the number one spot at some stage and win the gold medal.”

- Les, Phillip and Jackie Mills are among this year’s laureates to the NZ Business Hall of Fame. The award celebrates the achievements of New Zealand business leaders who have made a significant contribution to the social and economic development of the country.

The awards were set up by The Young Enterprise Trust, a charity that seeks to inspire students and support business education in schools.