The Alaska Club: helping people help others--and themselves.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Corporate 100 - Services of Alaska Club

Innovate. Motivate. Celebrate. Those three things are key to making the Alaska Club a success, and it's a combination that has earned the company respect among those in its field.

The Alaska Club is the state's largest fitness center conglomerate, with sixteen clubs operating in the state, about 950 full and part-time employees, and "tens of thousands" of members, according to Alaska Club President Robert Brewster.

The fitness club was Alaska-owned as a limited partnership for twenty-one years. It sold in 2007 to Lincolnshire Management, which operated the club for seven years. The club last year sold to San Francisco-based PCG (Partnership Capital Growth), a private equity firm that focuses on healthy foods and healthy lifestyles. PCG is part of investment banking and asset management firm, Piper Jaffray.

Brewster is chairman of the Board of Directors for the 2014-2015 International Health, Racquets, and Sportsclub Association, a trade association serving the global health club and fitness industry. The group states that it has more than ten thousand members in seventy-six countries. Its board is elected from and by its membership. It's the second time in fifteen years a representative of the Alaska Club has chaired the International Health, Racquets, and Sportsclub Association board, Brewster says.

A Courageous Start

The Alaska Club got its start in 1986 when, at the beginning of Alaska's first big post-pipeline oil price decline, Anchorage real estate professional Andrew Eker and former Alaska Pacific Bank president Tom Behan, leading a group of fifty investors, bought the Alaska Teamsters' former recreation center in east Anchorage.

"Literally two days after they closed the sale, the price of oil plunged," says Brewster.

But Eker and Behan soldiered on, a fact that Brewster attributes to the two founders' strong business acumen. They also placed an emphasis on membership, especially family memberships, and made it a point to hire people who were passionate about fitness.

"They were able to shepherd it through some very difficult early years," Brewster says.

Brewster, who had previously run the Hotel Captain Cook private fitness club, joined the Alaska Club team in 1988 as assistant general manager.

"There was no general manager," he says, laughing.

The club was still at just one location, he says. But in the mid-1990s it launched a rapid expansion effort. "In one year, we added five clubs," he says.

Most of those were acquisitions: the...