The build

From idea to open
in nine months

Momentum Health + Fitness is 1800sqm in Charmhaven, NSW — strength floor, group fitness, boxing, recovery and a crèche. It started as an empty shed.

4

Months designing, sourcing and planning

Layout, equipment specification and supplier selection, before anything was built.

Planning
5

Months building

Including a 430sqm mezzanine — columns, beams and load paths, from scratch.

Build
2nd

Trading month — profitable

Most gyms take a year or more to get there. Momentum did it in two months.

Open

The shed

What we took on was a warehouse. Not a gym with tired equipment, not a site with good bones — a shed. Concrete slab, brick and steel. Everything you see in the finished photos had to be put there.

The empty warehouse before Momentum Health + Fitness was built, Charmhaven NSW
Bare slab, brick wall, and a forklift carrying the steel that became the mezzanine.

430sqm of mezzanine

1800sqm on one level was not the building we needed, so we added 430sqm of mezzanine. That is a structural job rather than a fit-out job — columns, beams and load paths, planned before anything else could be positioned around them.

430sqm steel mezzanine frame erected inside the Momentum Health + Fitness warehouse
The mezzanine frame, before decking. Everything above this line is 430sqm that did not exist.

Sourcing the equipment

Fitting out a gym means spending multiple six figures, sometimes into the millions, on equipment chosen from listings that all look identical, from companies you cannot verify, shipped from the other side of the world. Every operator doing it for the first time asks the same questions: who actually manufactures this, what happens when a weld fails in year two, and which of these companies will still exist then.

Answering that properly took a research project. It became GymFactories — a free, public directory of manufacturers with the verification evidence attached, and a plain list of what could not be confirmed. It exists because the research was useful to anyone fitting out a gym, not just to us.

Momentum Health + Fitness during fit-out, flooring down and equipment being placed
Flooring down, equipment landing, tools still out.
Opening day queue outside Momentum Health + Fitness, Charmhaven NSW
Opening day, Charmhaven.

Nine months from an empty shed to opening, and profitable in the second trading month. Momentum is still where every idea gets tested before anyone else sees it — including the software that became Zalio. If you want the short version of who I am and what I work on, that is here. If you have a gym and something in it is broken, start here.