Of course as with other successful businesses, HealthMark has plans of action in place to counter the aforementioned concerns.  Competition with The Dakota Team will be challenging, but back-up plans are in place to face those challenges.  Although The Dakota Team has excellent market recognition among high-profile markets, they do not have a strong presence among the middle to upper middle class corporate-affiliated clientele.  If Dakota does make some inroads, HealthMark, because of its low overhead, would be able to reduce its price to be more competitive than Dakota.

Corporations will probably not strive to hire their own in-house personal trainers.  This would just add more overhead expenses in a time when many corporations are working hard to pare back their expenses and move to outsourcing non-core business services.  If a few corporations did begin to make this move, corporations would not be able to easily replicate HealthMark’s unique integrated approach.  In addition, HealthMark has an educational/sales blitz program targeted at key decision makers at the local corporations to preempt them from moving to an in-house training format.  This educational blitz involves detailed cost/benefit analysis which proves that using HealthMark is more cost effective and easier from a managerial standpoint.

If fitness center chains attempted to enter the corporate site market, HealthMark would put into place its formulated back-up plan for this possibility.  This back-up plan has as one of its actions an aggressively accelerated marketing/sales blitz program targeted at the key corporate contacts, and focusing on the quality, certification, and personalized approach embodied by the HealthMark philosophy.  This plan, in concert with the other back-up plans stressing the preferences of corporate customers (which HealthMark knows better than the competition because of surveys and close interaction with the corporate decision makers) would limit the chain centers ability to successfully penetrate this market.