After a corporate career heading for burnout, Elan Lohmann is making geeks sleek, writes Claire Bisseker
TWO years ago, Elan Lohmann was an overweight chain smoker in a pressured corporate job, propelled by adrenalin and propped up by caffeine and nicotine.
After 12 years in the online media industry in various top management positions — including as the publisher of News24.com and group head of Avusa’s digital division — Mr Lohmann gave it all up to pursue a simpler, healthier lifestyle.
In the process he has spawned a minirevolution using social media that, in time, might even make him a household name.
Mr Lohmann is the founder of Sleekgeek, a support group of 15,000 people united by the desire to practise a healthy lifestyle. Most of the activity happens online but it increasingly extends into the real world, with members planning activities together such organised runs and dinners.
The Sleekgeek website features a stream of stories and photographs of people sharing their personal transformation journeys from slack to sleek. But it is more than that.
“Sleekgeek is like being Jewish,” says Mr Lohmann, “Until you’re in it you can’t appreciate what it is: this amazing community of people connecting with each other. It’s a feel-good and that’s why it’s grown, because people find real value in it.”
The Sleekgeek community is so active that when someone posts a good personal weight loss message they get up to 300 “likes” — that’s a lot of support.
“It was such a wonderful feeling of kinship to discover that there were others, some with as much weight to lose as I did, who were willing to share their difficulties along with their successes,” says one member, Cape Town publicist Brian Berkman, who has lost 70kg.
Mr Lohmann feels the concept has taken off because many people lack support structures in the home or workplace where it is easy to be dismissed as “a health freak” just for trying to make the right lifestyle choices. This is why the Sleekgeek community has zero tolerance for showing disrespect online, though open debate is actively encouraged. The site has grown organically by wordof-mouth. It is currently attracting 1,000 new members a month without a cent having been spent on marketing.
“People think I’m a social media marketing genius but I’m not,” says Mr Lohmann who, in 1999, was one of the first to graduate from Rhodes University’s journalism programme having specialised in online media.
“If you create a product that has real value to people it will take care of itself.”
When Sleekgeek was started there was no master plan. It was just a small, closed Facebook group set up by Mr Lohmann to challenge his closest friends to see who could lose the most weight before embarking on a trip to Zanzibar.
Though he lost an initial 8kg, he did not win the challenge but the Facebook group continued to grow. Before long it had 2,000 members and Mr Lohmann had become so passionate about sharing his personal transformation story — he went on to lose another 10kg — in order to inspire change in others that it had become impossible to focus on his corporate job.
“I loved my career but I loved the idea of getting to the top more. I was chasing that corporate ladder and driven by results,” he says. “I had experienced depression, was under lots of stress and hardly slept. Though I was regarded as someone who handled pressure well, it takes its toll on you.”
Weighing 104kg at the age of 35, with a family history of diabetes and lung cancer, Mr Lohmann had realised that he had to make significant lifestyle changes to safeguard his future health.
Having no wife or children to support lowered the risks of resigning from his job, but it was still a gamble to give up a corporate wage with enough savings to cover just a year’s living costs.
“I’d been sheltered in corporate life for 12 years and had never known what it was like to not earn a salary,” says Mr Lohmann. On the other hand, the marketing, online media and general business skills he had honed in the corporate world had prepared him well for his new venture. As importantly, he was passionately driven by a new goal: to inspire change in the lives of 100,000 people.
“At this pace it will take another nine years,” he laughs when we meet at a Tygervalley coffee shop. He orders green tea to my cappuccino — because “you have to live your brand and practise what you preach”. He has the word “inspire” tattooed inside his left forearm in man-sized letters.
At current growth rates, Sleekgeek will reach 30,000 members by the end of the year. It also has 6,300 Twitter followers and 5,000 people who have signed up for an e-mailed newsletter each week. Last year, 6,200 people signed up for Sleekgeek’s 30-day nutritional reboot challenge and each time he runs an eight-week body transformation challenge, hundreds of members pay the R500 to sign up.
Altogether he claims to have 49,000 contact points a week.
Having built up this community of people committed to health and fitness, he almost laughs when people ask him how the concept makes any money.
“A lot of our members are newly activated consumers who are shifting their behaviour, which means that for the first time they are looking for health related products and services — and I have a relationship of trust with them. In short, I am building up critical mass in a distinct area — how can that not be a huge business opportunity?”
Mr Lohmann is also a partner in the daily meal delivery service Paleomonkey that delivers thousands of gourmet health meals in Cape Town and Johannesburg a month, many of them to Sleekgeek members.
But Sleekgeek is not about pushing a diet or a product. Mr Lohmann is against most nutritional supplements (preferring 100% natural, unprocessed foods) and dismissive of competitors who spend millions punting their health brands or running fitness challenges but neglect to build a true community.
“Others create a relationship between the consumer and their brand. I create relationships between the members themselves, that’s why they’re locked in, because they’re all friends … It’s about far more than just using some sponsor’s product.”
Moreover, he has built his brand from accessible online tools that, for instance, allow him to run a fully functioning online shop for as little as R300 a month.
But Sleekgeek has reached a turning point. Either Lohmann must keep running it as a lifestyle business that just pays the rent or put together a business plan and raise the investment necessary to turn it into a substantial enterprise.
It may even have the potential to become a household name such as WeighLess or Weight Watchers.
“I think it’s going to become huge and I’m going to be forced to accelerate the business side of things,” says Mr Lohmann somewhat wistfully.
“I used to have 450 people reporting to me and I’ve enjoyed not having to manage people, but it’s time to decide. I am at a crossroads.”
By Claire Bisseker
Picture: TREVOR SAMSON
CHANGE: After a career on the corporate treadmill, Elan Lohmann got off to get healthy, and in the process inspired thousands to join him.
Source: Business Day