The first general manager I hired for my gym was a stopgap.
I hired her to do the stuff I hated. I told her she’d get a bonus if revenue went up. She had even less business experience than I did, and I was an absolute beginner.
You can guess how that went.
She ended up building the schedule while I looked over her shoulder. The gym shrank without me there. My “general manager” became an overpaid coach.
That was my fault. I hired a GM before I was ready, and I hired one for the wrong reasons.
I see owners make the same mistake all the time. So below I’ll show you how to know when you’re ready to hire a GM, how to pay that person without guessing, and how to train your GM to run the gym at your standard.
What a GM Actually Does
Here are the most common wrong reasons owners hire a GM:
- They want to hand off a growth problem they haven’t solved themselves.
- They want to promote a great coach or a good friend who has never managed people.
- They don’t like sales or management and want someone else to do it.
- Nobody else in the business can manage people either.
In almost every one of these cases, the new GM has no experience doing the job. They aren’t better at it than the owner. And within a year, the whole thing falls apart.
A general manager’s job is to run your playbook and hold your standard of excellence. That frees you up to do the marketing that grows the gym.
Your GM will not grow the gym for you.
Most owners hire a GM without this clarity, and they hire too early. They give up a big chunk of their own income and hope the gym magically grows after the hire.
It won’t.
Pay Yourself Before You Pay a GM
Think of yourself as the crash-test dummy in your business.
If the gym isn’t paying you well right now, hiring a GM won’t fix that. It just stacks your single biggest expense on top of the problem you already have.
After your own role, the GM is the highest-value, most expensive role in the gym. That means it should be close to the last hire you ever make.
Before you write a job ad, answer these two questions honestly:
- Am I already earning close to $100,000 a year from this gym? In other words, has the gym proven it can pay someone that much?
- Do I have an exact plan for the time a GM will free up? Will I do more sales? Open a second location? Improve my marketing? Something else specific?
If either answer is no, fix that first.
How to Pay a GM Without Guessing
A general manager’s pay is compensation for carrying responsibility around the clock.
When the roof starts leaking at 2 a.m. and the gym is flooding, your GM should be the one calling the plumber and making sure the place is clean before the 6 a.m. class. Reporting the problem to you and going back to bed doesn’t cut it.
You’re paying for flexibility and judgment, so the role is salaried.
In a microgym, the GM earns more than anyone else on staff except the owner. The exact number varies a lot with location and cost of living. Don’t grab a figure from a Facebook group, a forum post or a video from a few years ago.
Open your profit-and-loss statement and calculate what your gym can actually support based on real revenue. Use your real numbers, not your best-case forecast.
Then follow these rules:
- Make it a salary. You’re paying for the role, not the hours.
- Keep it below your own pay. If your GM would make more than you, that’s a sign your pay is too low. Fix your pay. Don’t underpay the GM.
- Leave out commission and profit share. Your GM runs what you’ve already built. They don’t control sales or marketing, so don’t tie their pay to numbers they can’t move.
- Tie any bonus to something they control. Retention is a great one.
Quick sidebar: If you don’t know how to read a P&L, you aren’t ready to hire a GM.
How to Train a GM to Run Your Gym
Training a GM takes a lot more than a weekend orientation. You’re handing over a standard you spent years building, one system at a time.
Here are the five steps to training a GM, in order.
1. Go Through Your Staff Playbook Together
Hand your GM your staff playbook and work through the whole thing with them.
If you don’t have a playbook, you aren’t ready to hire a GM. Their job is to execute on that playbook. Without it, they have nothing to operate from.
2. Give Them Real Time on Your Software
Your GM needs real hands-on time with your gym management system and your full software stack: booking, billing, your CRM, all of it.
Rush this and you’ll pay for it every week afterward.
No matter how friendly your software provider is, if your GM spends one to three hours a week on the phone with support, that’s a massive failure. Those hours should go to execution.
3. Walk Through the Five Audits Together
Audit these five areas of your business with your new GM:
- Client journey
- Operations
- Facility
- Marketing
- Sales
This doubles as training. It’s also your chance to find and fix gaps before you hand over the keys. Think of it as an audit of your own business with a second set of eyes.
4. Get Them a Mentor of Their Own
Set your GM up with a mentor from outside the gym (your mentor or someone else) and hold monthly mentorship calls.
An outside mentor removes your own proximity bias and keeps you from micromanaging.
How I do it: My GM works with a Two-Brain mentor once a month. Then he and I have our own monthly meeting in between those calls. He gets an outside perspective, and I stay connected without hovering.
5. Remember They’re Starting From Zero
Your GM hasn’t paid for the hard lessons you’ve already paid for. Nothing in your brain transfers to them until you teach it.
A GM Rewards You for Work You’ve Already Done
A GM won’t fix a broken gym, and a GM won’t turn your gym into a business that pays you. Your GM will have less experience growing a gym, and less experience as an entrepreneur, than you do.
Hiring a GM is one of the last steps on the ladder of buying back your time and replacing yourself in high-value roles. You’re leaving someone behind to hold the standard while you build the next gym or chase other growth opportunities.
It’s an important step. Don’t take it lightly.
And remember: You can’t delegate growth. Hating sales or management doesn’t mean you can hand those jobs off and walk away from the responsibility.
So ask yourself one question:
Am I hiring a GM because the next step is clear in my mind? Or am I hiring a GM because I hate this step?
If it’s the second one, you aren’t ready yet. That’s OK. Now you know exactly what to fix.
If you want a mentor to help you build the systems, playbook and profit you need before you hire a GM, book a call here.
