They are to lead the RSG Group into the future: Hagen Wingertszahn (left) and Jobst Müller-Trimbusch. picture alliance / Eventpress | Event Press Radke / RSG Group / Collage: Dominik Schmitt (Business Insider)
At the end of 2022, Rainer Schaller died in a plane crash. He was managing director, founder and owner of the RSG Group, which includes the fitness studio chain McFit.
The company was inherited by his brother and father. Hagen Wingertszahn and Jobst Müller-Trimbusch took over the management. Business Insider spoke to the new bosses.
In an interview, Müller-Trimbusch says of Rainer Schaller: “Rainer would have liked to reinvent himself personally and would have liked to prove that he was much more than ‘just’ a successful entrepreneur”.
Difficult times lie behind the RSG Group, the fitness empire that includes the McFit chain. In October last year, Rainer Schaller had an accident in a small plane off the coast of Costa Rica.
Schaller was the founder, managing director and sole owner of the RSG Group. The multimillion-dollar conglomerate, which now owns 19 brands, was left without leadership and without a creative mind.
Rainer Schaller was considered a creative free spirit in the fitness industry. picture alliance
And that at a time when things were going badly for the first time, also financially. The corona pandemic had ended the profit years. For comparison: the group generated more than 20 million euros annually from 2016 to 2019. Then the studios had to close. In 2020, the company reported a loss of almost 30 million euros. In 2021 it was around 42 million euros.
At the same time, the group also ventured into expanding into the USA. To do this, she bought the legendary fitness studio chain Gold’s Gym, where bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger trained in the 1970s.
The RSG Group now has to overcome all these hurdles without Rainer Schaller, who has led the group since it was founded in the 1990s. After his death, his brother and father inherited the company. Both have little to do with fitness. His brother Gerd Schaller, for example, is a conductor.
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That is why the two heirs set up a new management team at the RSG Group just a few weeks after Rainer Schaller’s death. Hagen Wingertszahn and Jobst Müller-Trimbusch have been running the company as dual managers since December last year.
Business Insider spoke to the new McFit bosses. Read the full interview with the McFit bosses here.
“We want to question one or the other”
BI: Mr. Wingertszahn, Mr. Müller-Trimbusch, you have been managing directors of the RSG Group for a little over six months. Do you actually have a gym in the office?