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Looking for Potential in Potential Coaches

By Brian Alexander owner of CrossFit Illumine and TwoBrain Mentor Hiring in the CrossFit world is a bit tricky.  To be an effective Leader and CEO of your gym you have to be able to empower others to Coach classes while you work on your business instead of in it. The ability to see things from a 10,000 foot perspective is critical to develop and implement strategies for long term growth and retention in order to make your business resilient and successful. Most Affiliate Owners don’t have the luxury of having ten candidates to choose from at any given time and what that leaves us with is two choices: 1. Develop our own Coaches internally (Think ATC) 2. Find existing Coaches looking for opportunity I’ve made more mistakes than I care to admit when it comes to hiring. Here is what I have learned to ask myself  when considering hiring a potential Coach to lead within your community and represent your brand. 1.  Can they lead?  I am a firm believer that a person is either a leader or they are not.   Leadership can be developed but it’s takes years of life experience and opportunities.  Picking a “fix-me-upper” candidate in this case can be a crap shoot.  Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t.  Ask yourself this: Would you yourself work for them?  That’s who I want representing my brand, someone I would work for myself. 2.  Can they connect?  Are they able to connect on a personal level with your members?  Are they emotionally involved?  Do they bring the energy needed to make class the best hour of your members day? 3.  Do they represent your culture,  its’ values and mission?  Having a 20 year old fire breather with aspirations of making the CrossFit Games coaching  a 45 year old Mom’s who just wants to move better, live longer and be happier isn’t the best fit.  They are from ...
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Hire Right – A Gamble Worth Making

By Jay Williams, TwoBrain Mentor The biggest loss I have taken in business cost me over $200,000. I hired the wrong person and kept them around too long. Their bad decisions cost me money, members, AND other staff members on top of the salary I was paying. Ugh, that one still burns. My biggest win has been worth $300,000 and counting. My head coach has started new programs, forged local partnerships, trained the younger coaches, and helped generally make my life easier. Hiring… If you get this one thing right, you can increase the size of your business by 10x with just a few good choices. Get it wrong, it can shut you down. No wonder so many gym owners try to avoid playing this game altogether. You fall into the trap of doing everything yourself, trading “services” for membership, or hiring a bunch of part time “hobby coaches”. Nobody can do it as well as you, so why take the chance? Don’t get me wrong, you CAN run a business this way if your perfect day includes making every decision, never taking a vacation, and having a revolving door of employees. But what if you want to see your kids at night? Or open a second business? Or just not be handcuffed to the squat rack? If you want members who are going to stick around for life, you have to find employees who will do the same. We get it, hiring is a gamble, and it IS scary. The good news is, we have made enough bad gambles to have figured a few things out for you. How to find the right people (Internships – Module 18) How to hire them (Staff contracts – Module 12) How to make a career for them so they stick around (Creating careers – Module 14) When you get hiring right, it’s a gamble worth making, and will get you closer to ...
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What's a "Joy Girl"?

Your clients should have a relationship with your brand. Their fitness should not hinge on their relationship with one coach. If your client only attends YOUR classes, that’s a problem. It even has a name: the Icon Problem. Read about it here: The Icon Problem If your client has a “coach for life”, they probably don’t have a “gym for life”. They’ll move with the coach. What happens with the “icon coach” takes a two-week vacation? What if the coach leaves? You’re building fragility into your business. It’s critical for every client to receive the SAME experience from every coach in your gym. Consistency is more important than anything else. And the client experience should be spread across your staff. One of the foundational positions we teach is the “Joy Girl”. In this role, one of your staff spends 2-3 hours per week working on retention. They call clients with “bright spots”. They do Goal Reviews. They call absentees. They follow up with texted videos. It’s a rewarding position for everyone: the Joy Girl, the client and the business. Download the Joy Girl responsibilities sheet here: Joy Girl responsibilities sample When a client hits a PR, they get a call. “Hey Sam! I saw you linked 23 double-unders for the first time this week. We’re so proud of you! What are you going to do next?” This creates the habit of constant micro-goal setting. Our 1:1 clients do this every session with their coach, of course, but the Joy Girl position takes the practice from on person to many. This makes it scalable for group training. When a client is absent, the Joy Girl calls and says, “Hey Sam, last time we spoke, you said one of your goals was to link 50 double-unders. Are you getting closer to that goal?” When a client has been absent for two weeks, a call from the Joy Girl gets them back into ...
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Episode 51: Content Marketing

Content doesn't have to be perfect. Just start publishing.
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Podium Week: Your Complete Guide

Success leads to motivation, not the other way around. When your clients celebrate success, they’re more likely to internalize joy and gratitude. Put them on a podium. This year, we’ll be celebrating Podium Week on December 12-18. It will help our athletes recognize and celebrate their progress. It will help our community see what REALLY goes on at a CrossFit gym. And (I hope) it will help CrossFit gyms flood the internet with positive images of success. Our “Intramural Open” plan has been adopted by hundreds of other gyms. It’s my hope that Podium Week can help gyms as much as the Intramural Open has. Here’s everything you need to get started: 1. Keep your regular programming. Find opportunities for “podiums” within. For example, in “Jackie,” there are at least four opportunities to do something they’ve never done before: 1) row 1000m faster than ever before. 2) Do 50 unbroken thrusters. 3) Do 30 unbroken pullups 4) Finish the workout in a PR time. …and I’m sure you already see MORE opportunities, right? 2. Before the workout, ask each client which podium they’ll aim for. 3. Encourage them to do so. 4. When they hit their mark, write their goal on a small whiteboard and take a creative picture of them holding it up and smiling. Stand them on a plyo box with a small whiteboard listing their PRs and the #podiumweek hashtag. 5. Post on your FB business page AND your personal page. Tag the athlete. Make sure the post is “public” so their friends can see it. You’re probably already taking pictures of your clients during workouts, right? Uploading and tagging them? That’s not new to anyone. But context matters: a sweaty heap of Henrietta on the floor isn’t as appealing as a beaming Henny, standing on a plyo box, holding a banner that reads, “I DID IT!!!” This is also helpful to your gym in other ways: ...
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Sustaining your Business Through Systems

by Ken Andrukow, TwoBrain Mentor Two-Brain Business mentors talk a lot about the importance of systems. While it is easy to understand that good systems create a more efficient delivery of business on many levels, it is often lost as to why and when we create them. All to often we get to a point in our business where we have had a solid core of long standing members and we start to look at ways to increase sales. We add programs but we don’t have the systems in place to effectively deliver them….they fail to launch. We look outside the box to bring new members in and have no system in place for intake. Should the marketing by some miracle work, your retention will be an issue. 15 years ago I asked a big question. How can I improve the lives of those around me through fitness, nutrition and life coaching? I could have jumped in with both feet and started coaching people, made some mistakes, learned and kept on going. But that has never been my style. I wanted to create a set of systems and procedures that would serve the needs of high-level executives in the pursuit of health and wellness. I looked at what it was I was trying to accomplish, make positive change in the lives of those around me that have large, stressful, and not so healthy lives. This has remained my mission statement, in part, to this very day. I began to develop systems that would allow me to seamlessly take on clients and ensure each client would have the same experience when they signed up with me. I would need to develop a system that tracked all kinds of health markers of each client. There would have to be a procedure to find gyms and trainers for when my clients were traveling which they did often. How would Clients communicate with me? ...
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