I cannot speak about all Lifetime Fitness', only the one I worked at in Columbus, as I have heard that each club has it's own culture, for better or worse...Although the gap closes with the newer clubs that were opened at similar times....
In Columbus, as of today they are down to roughly 11 trainers. They had roughly 25 trainers back in 2006 and early 2007. The numbers speak for themselves, turnover is high. In contrast, the Dublin location (suburb just outside of Columbus) has around 30 trainers. They are growing and booming, and I've heard they have a very positive environment there, as opposed to Columbus. And the clientele there has a higher income per household. However they just opened late last year, while Columbus has been open since 1999...so Dublin has had the benefit of seeing all the mistakes Columbus made, and then cleaning them up and tweaking the culture...They then instilled their new and improved culture on their brand new hires. They didn't really allow any transfers from Columbus to Dublin with the exception of 1 assistant manager. This way, it could be all new babies with no negative knowledge coming over from a Columbus trainer.
Also, like many clubs, Life Time Fitness takes 50% of your earnings per session. So you could potentially make more on you own, but then again you'd have to deal with your own lead generation and deal with the high failure rate of small businesses.
