A FIRST CLUB IS PURCHASED ON PROJECTIONS. A SECOND IS PURCHASED ON RESULTS.
Every franchise will tell you its model works. Snap Fitness can point to something better than a promise: the people who already own a club keep buying another. If you are weighing up your first, here is what that behaviour tells you.
Nobody buys their second gym on a sales pitch.
A first club is bought on projections, interviews and a measure of trust. A second is bought on results: your own membership numbers, your own payroll, your own returns, watched month after month. A franchisee signing for another territory is the most informed buying decision in franchising.
At Snap Fitness, that decision keeps being made. For three years running, the majority of new territories have been bought by owners who already have a club, and today three out of four clubs in the Australian network sit inside multi-site portfolios. The question worth asking is why.
Start with the man whose job is to sell them.
Gabe Condello leads franchise sales for Snap Fitness in Australia. It’s one thing for the person selling the franchise to recommend it. It is another to watch him back it with his own money, three times over.
“I've spent 12 years looking at the performance of hundreds of clubs,” Condello says. “When it came to my own money, I didn't need to look very far.”
In May, he and his family opened their third club, Snap Fitness Pimpama, alongside their clubs at Ormeau and Sippy Downs. It was cash flow positive from opening.
“This is our third club as a family. We did it because the first two did exactly what they were supposed to do.”
And he is far from the only one. Across the network, owners who started with one club have chosen Snap Fitness over and again, building portfolios of two, five, nine, even sixteen. They are operators who saw their own results and went again, usually for the same two reasons: the model delivered, and Snap Fitness supported them at every step.
There is a third reason, and it is simple scarcity. There are a finite number of Snap Fitness territories in Australia, and once they're sold they're sold. The owner gets exclusive access to that territory, and nobody else can own it. Some new franchisees are so confident in their projections, they're securing multiple territories before their first club has even opened its doors.
So what does all of this mean if you are weighing up your first club?
It means you’re buying the same thing the best-informed buyers in the market keep choosing with their own money. It means the pathway is proven, and it starts exactly where you would start. Every multi-site owner in the network began with a single club and a first-time owner's questions. The difference is only that they got to see the answers from the inside, and liked them enough to go again.
It also changes the conversation you have with the sales team. When most of the people expanding are existing owners, nobody needs to put on the hard sell.
“Buyers ask me every week whether the model really works,” Condello says. “I can walk them through the network numbers, but the most honest answer I've got is what I've done with my own money.”
That question is one you should consider before any business investment; what do current owners do next? For Snap Fitness owners, most of them bought another one.
“Snap's probably one of the best business models we've had,” says Justin Garvie, who operates nine clubs with his wife Wendy and has two more territories secured. “We wouldn't be able to do that expansion without the support we have from Snap.”
Word is getting around. The Global Franchise Awards named Snap Fitness the 2026 Best Fitness Franchise, judged on criteria including franchisee support and long-term franchisee success. That's the view from the outside. The view from the inside has been clear for years: for most Snap Fitness owners, their next big investment is another Snap Fitness.
To find out more about owning your own Snap Fitness 24/7 gym, visit www.snapfitness.com/au/franchise to download the information pack.
THE NUMBERS
More than 60% of new territories go to existing owners
72 of 114 territories settled 2024 to 2026 YTD (63%)
The majority every year, three years running
2024: 67% · 2025: 63% · 2026 YTD: 61%
75% of Australian clubs are held by multi-site owners
8 of the 9 clubs opened in Australia in H1 2026 were opened by existing franchisees
Some buy their next territory before their first club opens
8 incoming franchisees hold 2+ territories pre-opening; one group holds four across NSW
