EHFA held its first Executive Leadership Forum in July 2009. The meeting was held in Santpoort in the Netherlands, and it was the first in a series that continued in later years; the fourth forum was held in Barcelona in June 2011.
The association's own account of 2009 recorded a two-day meeting that brought together the chief executives of seventeen leading European operators, run with support from Deloitte. The purpose was not to work through the detail of any one company but to give the people who ran the largest businesses a place to think about the industry as a whole and about where its future growth would come from.
The forum sat in the same calendar as the European Fitness Forum and the National Associations Forum, and its audience was the narrowest of the three. The association's case for common qualifications was made to operators as much as to governments: it was operators who decided whether to ask for a recognised qualification when they recruited, and whether to pay for training that met it. The Standards Council and the Technical Experts Group could settle what a qualification required; they could not settle whether the largest employers would adopt it. See events and from the president.