Three members of a New Zealand family lined up to compete in track and field at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch. Phillip Mills, his younger sister Donna, and his mother Colleen were present. That year, his father, Les, the man whose name would later appear on gyms all over the world, had been left off the squad. Beneath the family history is a small, somewhat awkward detail that reveals something about the true level of competition in this household.
Mills didn’t pursue a typical educational path for someone who would go on to manage a multinational fitness company. On a track and field scholarship, he traveled from New Zealand to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he excelled as a hurdler and represented his nation at the 1974 and 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. That same year, he received his philosophy degree. Not business, not sports science. philosophy. It has an almost contrarian quality, and it’s difficult to ignore the extent to which those classrooms influenced his later views on fitness as a cultural force as opposed to merely a commercial product.
When he returned to New Zealand in 1979, he took over the family business his parents had founded in 1968—a gym in Auckland that was still a relatively small enterprise at the time. The business went public in 1984, was taken over following the 1987 stock market crash, and was later repurchased by Mills. Although it doesn’t appear on a transcript, that kind of resilience may be where the true learning took place.
By the early 1980s, Mills had created a music-accompanied exercise format and a licensing model based on training instructors to perform it. More than any particular exercise, that choice is likely what made Les Mills more than just a gym. By 2023, the instructor network had expanded to tens of thousands, and the company’s programs were being used by tens of thousands of clubs worldwide. It’s the kind of scale that’s simple to describe in a sentence but much more difficult to imagine occurring one class at a time, instructor by instructor, in church halls and strip mall gyms.
In their 2007 book Fighting Globesity, Mills and his wife, Dr. Jackie Mills, linked the obesity epidemic in wealthier countries to more general concerns about the planet’s health. It feels more like an extension of whatever he was dealing with back at UCLA than a marketing ploy. He later co-founded Pure Advantage, a business organization in New Zealand that advocates for more environmentally friendly economic practices. He has been a prominent, and occasionally generous, voice in the nation’s climate politics.
New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year in 2004, a lifetime achievement award in 2011, induction into the New Zealand Business Hall of Fame in 2022 alongside his father and wife, and, more recently, the announcement that he will be the first inductee into a Health & Fitness Hall of Fame with a keynote speech scheduled in Amsterdam are just a few examples of the accolades that have accumulated gradually rather than all at once. It doesn’t read like luck. It seems to have been written by someone who researched one topic, created something completely different, and managed to integrate the two.
