Serving the Teesside Business Community | 23
Team player – Joanne McCue (third left)
with WattFitness colleagues, from left:
Keziah Wright, Si Hunter, Andy Mockler,
Lee Howe and Gloria Lawson.
WATT NEXT?
Dave Byrne talks to the former Mrs Bannatyne about her own fitness empire.
J
oanne McCue is a reluctant
interviewee. When your name has
been dragged through the mud on
social media and in the national
press, courtesy of a messy public
divorce to one of Britain’s most well-known
businessmen, such reservations are easy to
understand.
She was entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne’s
partner – in life and business – for two
decades, during which they amassed a
multi-million pound fortune through a series
of successes that including nursing homes,
child care nurseries and a chain of health
clubs.
Now, four years after a far from amicable
parting of the ways, Joanne is busy reinventing herself, using the expertise she
honed during her years as director of her
former husband’s businesses.
Focused and driven but warm and friendly,
she’s been busy adding to her growing
empire of ‘boutique’ fitness facilities.
But there, she insists, the similarity with
Bannatyne’s ends. Where the chain of
more than 60 health clubs she once helped
run typically feature swish gymnasiums,
swimming pools, spas, saunas and steam
rooms, Joanne’s formula is about highintensity boot camps and rhythm-based
‘sweat fests’ within functional environments
designed to focus individuals purely on the
task at hand.
“I would no sooner open a health club than
a chip shop,” she says in typically forthright
manner. “Everything has its cycle and the
old-style health clubs represent the past.
People are bored with jogging along for hours
on a treadmill, headphones in their ears and
staring at a TV screen. No-one’s talking about
health clubs anymore. Open up any women’s
magazine or fitness publication and it’s all
about boutique fitness.
“Small boutique fitness units like those
we’ve launched are the future of the fitness
industry. Fitness has changed, sports science
has moved on and we’re at the beginning
of a new cycle, a new era, and it couldn’t be
more exciting to be in there at the forefront
of it.”
Having divorced one of the UK’s richest
businessmen, Joanne could easily be
relaxing on a sun-soaked beach, enjoying a
life of luxury on a tropical island hideaway
but she insists she never considered
withdrawing from the work face.
“I could never sit around doing nothing,”
she frowns, with the shake of her head.
“That’s just not me. Speak to my staff and I
think they’d say I never stop. I find none of it
hard work and all of it a pleasure. I’ve never
experienced the same feeling of satisfaction
in any other career. I’m really enjoying what
I’m doing, with a great business partner and
a great team around me.”
Brought up in Norton, the daughter of
a