Blog

Yesterday, I wrote, What IS Excellence?  and promised to follow up with a specific example of measuring excellence in the gym business. Below, you’ll find a sample Coach Evaluation Form from UpCoach. This isn’t a simple “scale of 1 to 10”, but part of a larger conversation. The first part of the conversation with your coach should be: “What’s your perfect day?” Then follow with, “If you could coach one thing all day, what would it be?” Finally, help the coach draw a road map from their perfect coaching day to where they are NOW. That’s where the evaluation comes in: it’s a snapshot of their starting line. Quarterly Evaluation Form UpCoach Coach Evaluation The first two are followed by a “Coaching Inventory” and then a specific assessment of the coaches’ strengths and weaknesses in weightlifting, gymnastics, endurance etc. It’s important to understand that Professionalism, Group Management, and Attitude all come before specific knowledge. These are GENERAL skills, which are more important than SPECIFIC skills. Specific skills can be taught over a weekend; general skills take years (maybe a lifetime) to develop. The traditional 1-10 scale is less relevant for general skills, because a coach can sit at a 7/10 in “Presence” forever, and be satisfied. It’s better to rate them as “Excellent”, “Good” or “Satisfactory” because these subjective skills don’t easily lend themselves to objective measurement. The key question: why be anything LESS than excellent? Usually, a coach is less than excellent simply because they don’t have a clear picture of excellence. Their idea of “excellent” is different from your own, and probably for good reason: you’ve been coaching longer, you’ve seen REAL excellence, and you know what clients expect. They don’t. The first sheet clearly spells out the expectations associated with an excellent coach. The second sheet is a simple ratings scale. Use it for followup evaluations if you like. But always make sure you’ve clearly defined “excellence” ...

Last night, CrossFit’s EOD (Email of the Day) mentioned our local mentorship project: the TwoBrain Workshop.   After noticing that many of my seed clients at Catalyst are entrepreneurs, I started offering little seminars to them: Facebook Marketing, Affinity Marketing, and other burning topics.   Since many of the first lessons I shared in Two-Brain Business were taken from books and mentors in the non-fitness realm, it was easy to apply the lessons from my books to other local entrepreneurs. In fact, I was having SO much fun that I bought a 7800sqft building, and opened a coworking space, boardroom, and incubator offices. (www.twobrain.com/workshops)   And then something amazing happened.   The local entrepreneurs who come in for coffee, or to use coworking space, or to use our boardroom invariably ask about CrossFit. We’re not just leading CrossFit owners to real entrepreneurship; we’re leading entrepreneurs to CrossFit. That’s a million-watt win.   In fact, we’ve shut off all other marketing at the gym and now just focus on talking to people who come into the Workshop for coffee.   Many of them rent the boardroom for meetings…and ask us to build a short workout into their day! Some, seeking to lease office space, are requesting a gym membership quote as part of their lease. It’s crazy.   But here’s my favorite part:   Years ago, I realized that CrossFit gym owners have to learn good business practices MUCH faster than most other business owners. Because of the low barrier to entry, it’s very easy to open a CrossFit gym…and very hard to keep one open. That means thousands of people have jumped into entrepreneurship with very little preparation, and then SCRAMBLE to learn things as fast as possible. This isn’t the way it’s usually done. CrossFit gym owners are also faster learners for other reasons: we have good networks; we all have to start from scratch, without guidance; and our ...

We teach Affinity Marketing, which is the overarching practice of focusing on your best clients, and making new connections through the “Help First” strategy. That means we don’t usually focus on lead generation or social media advertising, because there are WAY too many easier opportunities to get new clients. People who find your brand online are usually unqualified “cold” leads who are nowhere near ready to sign up for a long-term service. They might not be able to afford a premium service like CrossFit. They might live too far away, or be too busy, or prefer to do Barre in the basement. But sometimes, we DO tell gym owners to run a six-week challenge. We’re a mentorship practice, so we don’t have to stick to a script. Sometimes a gym simply needs some new faces. Sometimes the owner needs a short-term win, even if it’s not a good long-term strategy. And sometimes an owner would simply not worry about their marketing. Tommy Hackenbruck shared his six-week challenge (the New-You Challenge) on our podcast nearly two years ago. Many of the others are copies, so I’ll use NYC as an example. Here’s how to do it best, what to avoid, and what to focus on: First, your focus should be on the long tail. Online challenges are often good at generating leads. Most of these are cold leads–they’re uneducated, unqualified, but curious. It’s hard to convert them to long-term clients, in my experience. But the real value of the challenge is to start a conversation, not convert cold leads into sales. If a person clicks through the ad, reads the landing page, fills in the form…and then suddenly goes dark, it doesn’t mean they’re disinterested. It doesn’t mean they’re scared. It just means they can’t sign up right now. They might not see how your service can solve their problem. They might not yet know they HAVE a problem. Their credit ...