When you opened a gym, someone might have told you to “just be a good coach” and the rest would take care of itself.
Right?
Well, bad news: “The rest” is your business. And that’s 90 percent of your job now.
Being a good coach is necessary but insufficient for running a good business.
And (possibly) the worst part? None of us realized that we’d have to manage other people. But we do.
Here’s how to do it successfully.
Step 1
Tell them exactly what they have to do.
In the previous post in this series, I said that you must set up and document your systems in such a way that a 12-year-old could understand the instructions. Not because your staff is uneducated or dumb but because this will force you to think through the gaps in understanding.
If you don’t tell someone how to mix the soap in the mop bucket, they’ll do it differently. They might do it wrong. If you don’t tell them exactly what time to start class, they might start it late or early.
Write your systems (sometimes called standard operating procedures or SOPs) as if you’re writing them for your preteen nephew. Skip no steps. No one can read your mind.
Step 2
Coach them through it at least once.
You know how you coach clients through their workouts? You must coach your staff through their jobs.
They need more coaching in the beginning but will still need regular evaluations and correction over time.
This isn’t “hand holding”—it’s coaching. And it’s your job.
Step 3
Have them schedule the time to do the job.
This is easy for simple jobs such as cleaning: “Show up at 9, heat up the water,” and so on. It’s less easy for jobs such as lead nurture, where staff can be “kinda on, kinda off” 24 hours a day.
I teach my staff to make appointments with themselves to do the work. My higher-level staff members (like a GM) have a Golden Hour practice, just like I do. My GM starts every single day by doing one thing to grow the gym.
We determine his list at the start of each month, he executes daily, and I know someone is working to actually grow my gym every day instead of scrolling Instagram and just clocking his hours.
Step 4
Evaluate quarterly.
Everything degrades over time. A quarterly Career Roadmap meeting can realign each staff person and clarify what they want, how to get it and how they’re doing so far.
These are coaching meetings. Just as you do Goal Review Sessions for your clients, you need to do Career Roadmap meetings for your coaches.
The Basics—on Repeat
You can read all the leadership books about eating the frogs and doing the hard things and starting with why, but repeating these basics over and over will get you 90 percent of the way to a well-run gym with minimal frustration.
Any time I meet a gym owner who blames “the millennials” or their “uninvested staff,” I ask if they’re doing these four things. Nine times out of 10, they have a “process problem” that will be solved with these four steps.
The other 10 percent of the time, they actually have a “people problem”—but they’ll never know until they fix their processes.
At the start of this post, I said that being a good coach is necessary but insufficient for running a good business. You probably didn’t want to hear that—I sure didn’t.
We all wish that just being “the best” at our jobs would make us financially stable.
But when you open a gym, your job is no longer “coach.” It’s “owner.” If you want to be financially stable, you have to be good at the owner job.
Want proof? Close to 9,000 gyms go out of business every year. Most are owned by good coaches. Some are owned by great coaches.
All those people opened gyms out of passion, prayed every night, listened to every podcast and read every book. They’re not dumber than you are; they weren’t lazy.
They simply believed the story that being a good coach would somehow make their businesses successful.
My mission is to save you from that lie.
