how old is the magazine you scanned that from ? 15 years?
currently the building is a private residence valued on zillow.com at $2.1 million
When Ken Sprague bought Gold's Gym in 1977 from Sachs and Danitz he paid $75K and that included the building!
When Ken sold the gym 2 years later to Grymkoski and Connors he got $100K.
Pete bought the gym in 1979 from Ken Sprague I think. He sold it in 1999 and it again sold in 2004 I think to the current owners TRT Holdings (they own the Omni Hotel chain among other crap). They have no business owning a gym chain. But hey whatever. They started the franchising around 1982 or 83. I think the first year or two they had 5 franchises. They had over 650 gym in 40 countries when they sold in 1999. The franchise fee in 1989 was $12,500 a year. It is currently over $100,000 for most Gold's Gyms. In 1999 Gold's corporate owned the Venice gym only. Currently there are over 80+ corporate gyms. They are positioning themselves to go public. the more corporate owned gyms they have the more they will be worth. In 1999 Golds was sold for around $67 million I think. They had 650 gym worldwide. When 24 Hour Fitness was sold in 2003 or 2004 they got $1.6 Billion. They had around 300 gyms (mostly in the US) but they are all corporate owned. The numbers may be a penny off or so.
Gold's Gym started licencing their name in 1980, Ed Connors opened the second Gold's Gym at 810 Valencia Street in San Francisco, managed by Jon Loyd and Barry Clothier, but Ed was the owner of Gold's Gym Venice/Enterprises along with Pete and Tim. So I don't really call that a true licensee/franchisee. Actally back then they were not franchises, they only "licensed" the name out. It was $2K per year back then (by comparison when World Gym started their licensing program in 1983 it was only $1K per year, but Gold's had over a hundred locations, World Gym only had 3).
The third Gold's was opened in San Diego a month or two after SF by Paul Edney.
The fourth and final Gold's for 1980 opened in San Jose, again by Ed Connors. Scott Wilson and Steve O'Brien were the managers.
Of course after 1980 the chain expanded exponentially, had a 100 or more locations within a year or two.
I told Ed Connors in 1988 that it was stupid not to own/buy the Hampton Drive building, they certainly could afford it. His response was it was better to "lease". Of course he could have bought the building and "leased" it back.
And for the record, in 1988/89 the licensing fee-they were not franchising then-was $8,500 for the first year and $5,000 for every year after.
