Fitness entrepreneur and green campaigner Phillip Mills is firm when asked if either of his children will take over his role as Les Mills International managing director when he steps down.
“I have to be absolutely clear we are a meritocracy. And the people who are best to run the business will be the people who run the business,” he says.
Mr Mills and his wife Jackie own 76.55% of the global fitness franchise company and 91.88% of the Les Mills New Zealand holding company which has 12 gyms nationally.
Latest estimates on the combined value of the fitness group is $280-300 million, putting the value of Phillip and Jackie Mills’ shares at $220-240m. The couple lease a Herne Bay house valued at $11.25m, with the ultimate owner of the property being fellow Rich Lister and near neighbour Adrian Burr.
The family affair
It all started when Phillip Mill’s sporty parents, Les and Colleen Mills, opened a gym in Auckland in 1968.
At this year’s 50th year celebrations Mr Mills said when he started out in the business cleaning the locker rooms after school he was constantly mixing with sportspeople who had a passion for fitness. “That was contagious. I picked up the bug early and I retain that passion.”
He shares that bug with his immediate family. His wife, Jackie Mills, was a doctor for 25 years before becoming the international company’s creative director, responsible for overseeing the exercise-to-music classes licensed to 20,000 gyms globally and sold directly to consumers online.
Their 31-year old daughter Diana Archer Mills is creative director for its most popular fitness programmes, including BodyPump, and creator of its trendy barre classes. She’s also becoming one of the world’s top celebrity presenters on video and in person at conventions, which is a niche arm of the business.
Diana’s husband, Gandalf Archer (aka ‘G’) has worked for Les Mills for many years and is programme director for its BodyJam classes and is one of the world’s top two celebrity dance fitness instructors.
The Mills’ 29-year-old son, Les Mills junior, who avoids publicity, is responsible for the creative planning behind the revamp of Les Mills New Zealand’s Auckland central gym over the next couple of years. The total redevelopment of the three sites it sits on (valued at $28.3m collectively) could top $100m over the next decade. Les Mills is also co-creator of the international company’s new immersive cycling class The Trip, with immersive cycling studios being expanded beyond the Newmarket gym to three more in the group.
Succession planning
Mr Mills says he didn’t expected working with his children would be anywhere near as good as it has been.
“For us, it has been a remarkable thing. They have come in and both of them have renewed and refreshed the business in so many ways.”
That doesn’t mean they will be ready to run the company once he steps back though, he says.
“I would expect they will have senior roles going into the future and obviously they will wind up owning the majority of it one day. But the family is clear the person who replaces me as managing director or chief executive – that won’t be them. There will be one or two chief executives after me before they would even consider wanting to look at the role.”
Jackie Mills’ role model is Klaus Obermeyer, the German-born American who founded ski clothing company Sport Obermeyer in 1947 and continued to ski and visit his Aspen office daily while in his late 90s.
“But we don’t want to be in the way. It’s likely in a couple of years’ time we will step back a bit and be working just part-time in the business rather than the 16 hours a day we put in now,” Mr Mills says.
The first stage of that was hiring Clive Ormerod this year, previously with Spark, in the chief marketing officer role that until now Mr Mills had combined with his managing director role.
Green campaigner
Mr Mills’ other big passion is saving the environment. He says the family doesn’t live extravagantly and believes in giving back, though he prefers not to talk about that publicly because Mr Mills really hates “greenwashing.”
The family’s biggest philanthropic effort in recent years has been pouring millions of dollars into Pure Advantage, the not-for-profit group he founded. Its mission is to spark national debate on long-term economic and environmental benefits to New Zealand from green growth, after commissioning two lots of research by London-based Vivid Economics to identify the country’s best opportunities.
Climate change is the defining issue of our age, he says.
“If we don’t get it right, then it is a very bad future scenario and I don’t think people realise quite how quickly it is coming at us.”
He still thinks Pure Advantage has a job to do although the Labour-led Coalition government has proved more receptive to its message than the previous National one.
While he’s positive about the government’s massive tree planting plans, Mr Mills says the single biggest thing that would help combat climate change is organic farming and soil sequestration.
“We are experts in grass farming, in non-industrial farming, and we have a huge potential to have a real high-quality, premium value-add dairy industry that does much better than what we will ever do out of the conventional.”
Les Mills has a goal to become a billion-dollar company by 2020 but Mr Mills says “it’s much more important that we fix the world right now than we make a bunch of profit. There is so much environmental risk.”
“Low-carbon industry and tech will be the two sectors that will drive the 21st century economy – it’s just smart business, it’s just smart economic strategy.”