If you’re a gym owner struggling with hiring, training or retention, I have something you might not want to hear: None of that is really about staffing.
Here’s the pattern I see everywhere: A gym owner posts that they want an “A-player,” then offers a few classes at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. for $25 a session, plus an unpaid Saturday staff meeting. Then they wonder why only C-players apply.
A-players don’t take split shifts for $25 an hour. If a candidate has a family and another job, your gym will always be their fourth priority. The fix is to offer better opportunities.
The Salary Cap
In their book “Simple Numbers,” Greg Crabtree and Beverly Blair Harzog compare a business’s staffing budget to an NFL salary cap. Every team gets the same amount of money, and a GM’s job is to buy the most talent that fits inside it.
Your gym works the same way. Take your revenue, pull out 20% for profit first, then subtract every non-payroll expense: rent, software, mentorship, T-shirts, paper towels, all of it. What’s left is your salary cap. That’s the bucket every coach, including you, gets paid from.
Say your gym does $500,000 a year. Profit at 20% is $100,000. Non-payroll expenses run $200,000. That leaves $200,000 as your salary cap.
Grow revenue by 20% to $600,000, and your profit rises to $120,000 to hold that same margin. Say non-payroll expenses creep up to $220,000. Your salary cap just grew to $260,000.
Growing revenue is the only lever that grows your salary cap. And a bigger salary cap is how you stop hiring $25-an-hour part-timers and start hiring, and keeping, A-players.
Why the Old Onboarding Model Caps Your Growth
For a decade, Two-Brain has recommended on-ramp, or onboarding programs: four to six PT sessions before a new client moves into group class. It’s still a solid retention practice. But the market has shifted hard since COVID, and pure group-training models have taken a beating. We’ve watched plenty of boutique and group-only gyms go under.
In the old model, a prospect comes in, you sell them an onboarding package (roughly $400 for four to six PT sessions), then they transition into unlimited group at about $175 a month. Over nine months, that client is worth around $1,800.
The problem: You’re selling two different things. You get someone excited about personal training, they build momentum over a few sessions, and then you rip that away and drop them into a group class where they start over.
The Coaching-First Fix
The best gyms in Two-Brain have flipped the model. Instead of selling PT, then group, they sell themselves as the client’s coach: someone who owns that person’s outcome, builds a custom plan and runs personal training and group classes concurrently, for as long as the client stays.
One coach manages the relationship, meets with the client weekly, and prescribes which classes to attend based on the person’s goals, injuries and schedule. PT and group aren’t separate products anymore. They’re just tools the coach uses.
That shift changes the pitch from “buy some sessions, then go to group” to “you’re buying me as your coach.” And it changes the economics: instead of $175 a month after on-ramp, you’re charging PT-plus-group rates on an ongoing basis, often $400 a month or more.
If a client truly can’t sustain that, check in at week four and week 12 and step them down to a group membership if needed. Your old best-case outcome becomes the worst case. Run the same nine-month math and you go from $1,800 per client to $3,600-plus. That’s double, from the same lead flow and the same close rate.
Darren Thornton: $9,000 a Month to Seven Figures
Darren Thornton started his gym doing $9,000 a month in revenue, running a group-only model with two part-time coaches. When COVID shut his gym down for 12 months, he leaned into personal training and discovered the one-on-one connection drove better results for members.
When he reopened, he fully committed to the hybrid model: Every membership includes personal training, often once a week, alongside group classes.
That one decision took his gym from $9,000 a month to more than $1 million a year in revenue for three straight years. His coaching staff grew from two part-timers to seven, with a starting salary of $60,000 a year plus benefits.
Darren later became a Two-Brain mentor and even left his gym for 10 weeks to travel in a van. It kept running without him and had grown by the time he got back. That’s not the point of the story, but it tells you something about what systems and a strong staff can do.
The Math Behind the Career
We recommend coaches earn four-ninths of the revenue they generate, about 44%.
At a $100 personal training rate, that’s $44 in coach pay per session. Give a coach 25 clients doing one weekly session each, and you’re looking at nearly $60,000 a year, more than the average gym owner takes home, according to our State of the Industry data.
Charging closer to $70 for a 45-minute session still works: coach pay lands around $30 a session, and 30 sessions a week over a year comes to roughly $48,000, a real, livable salary.
Every 20 to 30 new members on this model, following that math, justifies hiring another full-time coach. As your revenue grows, so does your salary cap, and the cycle feeds itself.
Real Careers Attract Real Talent
Darren isn’t an outlier. Two-Brain mentor Dan Purington has a coach who paid for a house entirely from income earned at Dan’s gym. Mentor Matt Michaud has had a coach buy a house the same way, with full-time income, no side hustle required.
When you can offer a $60,000 salary with benefits, you’re not just recruiting better talent in your local market. You start attracting other gym owners who realize they can make more coaching for you than running their own business, without dealing with payroll or a landlord.
That’s the real fix for staffing problems: not a better job ad, not a bigger hiring budget, but a business model that makes the job worth having.
If you’re dealing with staff turnover, can’t afford to hire a trainer, or just feel stuck figuring out what to fix first, book a call with our team.
We’ve mentored more than 3,000 gym owners, and you don’t have to figure it out alone.
