Warwickshire rewards business expands into new offices after attracting major investment

An innovative, Warwickshire-based customer rewards business, which recently closed a multi-million-dollar funding round, has expanded into bigger offices.

Endurance Zone (EZ) with a variety of organisations in the sports, fitness, and health sector – from household UK names such as British Cycling, Fitness First and Great Run Company through to US giants such as the events operator Active Network.

EZ offers its own tailored platform to its clients who can use it to offer a whole host of rewards to their customers, including discounts on everything from fitness watches to sportswear.

The company was established by former rugby player and recruiter Dave Birch around six years ago and went to market in 2021. It is growing rapidly and now employs 25 staff at offices in Leamington Spa, Belgium and the USA.

The Leamington team is based within one of the coolest business locations in the town – 1 Mill Street – which features office space, hot desk facilities, a podcast studio and a café bar.

Endurance Zone has just taken a further space there to house its sales and marketing team after attracting the investment to help it to grow more quickly.

A big chunk of the funding has been secured through a contact at 1 Mill Street and Dave said it will be a game-changer for the business.

He said: “The idea for the business came to me six or seven years ago when I was in a hospital bed recovering from a serious back injury through playing rugby.

“I was looking at becoming a member of a major sports organisation in the UK thinking it would offer some amazing customer rewards for being part of it. The truth is, it was offering very little and the more I looked into it, the more I could see there was a real opportunity.

“I went away, built a platform and built a community of more than 160,000 members offering some of the best customer rewards you can get, especially when it comes to health and fitness. I took it to British Cycling and they could see the value and came on board.

“We’ve since signed up a whole host of companies and organisations, including teams in the NFL, the NHL, Basketball England, and Fitness First. We white label the platform so, to their community, it looks like they are running it direct. We’re now engaging with more than 150 million users globally and can safely say we are the largest sports rewards business on the planet, working with more than 450 brands.

“We love it here at 1 Mill Street. It’s got an amazing vibe – a great atmosphere among the businesses based here and those who come in for hot-desking. It’s a real community.

“A great example of that is when I was looking to secure our latest round of investment, I went out to the USA and to some of the biggest investment houses and couldn’t find the right partner.

“I got chatting to Nigel Shanahan, who runs 1 Mill Street, and he introduced me to a contact based here and they’ve gone on to put invest heavily into the business. I’d been all over the world and found what I was looking for upstairs in this building!

“With that investment, we can scale up again – it’s a real game-changer for the business.”

Entrepreneur Nigel Shanahan launched 1 Mill Street in November 2020 as a melting pot for like-minded businesspeople.

It has proved to be a huge success and is a permanent home to many businesses and a temporary one for others.

Nigel said: “It’s great to see Endurance Zone growing and it’s the perfect example of why we always believed there was a need for a place like 1 Mill Street.

“It’s about more than just the space available or the speed of the broadband. Of course, those factors are important but we’ve brought people together and, in this case, it has had a genuine and profound impact on the business’s ability to grow.”