The best steakhouse in town didn’t earn that title because of one thing.
Sure, it might have the best steak. But it’s surely elite in other areas, too: ambience, cleanliness, hospitality, service and so on.
It’s the same deal in a gym. Your operations, marketing, retention and service delivery must be world class if you want to be the best gym in town.
Offering great service in an unprofitable business is a bad plan, and I’ve seen it sink too many gyms. But offering bad service in a well-run gym is also a mistake.
If you’ve got a handle on your business—your gym is stable and profitable and it pays you enough to support your family—you should improve service delivery.
I brought in gym owner and mentor Oskar Johed to describe the benefits of elite coaching and tell you how to start working toward it today.
Rewards for A+ Service Delivery
With partner Karl Solberg, Oskar owns CrossFit Medis and CrossFit Sickla in Sweden, and Oskar is also a longtime member of CrossFit’s Seminar Staff.
Oskar and Karl run great businesses, so they can invest a lot of time in upgrading service delivery. They’ve even created a detailed coach ascension plan to create careers for trainers. You can see that here:
Oskar’s gyms charge more than others nearby, and he says having world-class coaches makes it easy to do that.
“Our prices are far higher than the competitors or the other alternatives,” he said. “Our average revenue per member is $250, $260, and the average CrossFit gym around us, they charge maybe $110, $120. And it’s not because of anything else—like our equipment isn’t better. The only things that we can point to are the confidence that we can charge more and the ability to back it up.
“So I think it’s pretty obvious to say that if you have a product that is superior, it is far easier to do price increases and charge more up front than if you have a product that you may not necessarily trust yourself.”
In the U.S., gym owner and mentor Kenny Markwardt said a skilled coach at his gym generates significant revenue through a specialty program, and Oskar confirmed that great coaches allow an owner to successfully develop premium service packages that boost gross revenue.
Oskar offers semi-private coaching at his gyms, and the program places great demands on trainers. Instead of leading a group through one workout, a semi-private coach implements individualized programs in a group setting. They might coach one client through a deadlift workout while helping another with endurance training, and so on.
The coach circulates among all six clients and makes sure each feels they are getting a large amount of personal attention. Most gyms will cap semi-private training at four people per coach, and even that volume requires great skill. Oskar’s semi-private groups serve six people, which ups the revenue per hour but increases demands on coaches.
“They’re so good that they can handle six individuals with quite varying demographics. They’re doing different stuff in a 50-minute session, and the clients all see the value to pay for that, which is far higher than our group service,” Oskar said.
Delivery of high-value services produces a measurable effect on revenue and average revenue per member, but it can be challenging to measure the effects of great coaching on client results if you don’t use Goal Review Sessions. We recommend gym owners meet with clients every 90 days to review progress, celebrate success and adjust plans to ensure goals are accomplished.
Oskar’s contention is that coach evaluations are an “upstream action” that ensures “downstream success” in these client meetings.
For example, if a coach is trained to become better at identifying and correcting faults in the deadlift, the client will develop more efficient movement patterns that allow more weight to be lifted. Similarly, an experienced coach who knows how to improve aerobic capacity will be able to help a client hit a 5-km PR faster than an untrained coach who guesses with programming.
“If a coach is very effective at teaching, this client is going to progress faster, and thus they’re going to stick around longer and be willing to pay us more money,” Oskar said. “I can evaluate a coach, and I know that it’s likely someone’s going to be getting results faster if they are effective.”
With that in mind, three things are obvious:
1. You must evaluate your coaches.
2. You must have criteria for evaluating coaches (review this video for ideas).
3. You must have a schedule for evaluating coaches. If you don’t plan to evaluate trainers, you won’t.
The Start-Today Plan for Improving Service Delivery
Don’t think you can’t improve your coaching if you don’t develop a complete evaluation system immediately.
If you want a shortcut, just download my sample evaluation form here. You can hit the ground running with that.
But you can move even faster, with a tip from Oskar:
“I think every coach should at least have one thing to work on right now. Like, ‘This is my biggest issue. I want to work on this one thing.’ I think that you should at least check in with each coach to look at their craft once a month. Now that could be a five-minute check.”
You could literally implement this tactic today: Simply check in quickly with each coach and agree on a basic point of focus for the next two to four weeks. It could be keeping whiteboard briefs to no more than three minutes, or it could be using at least one tactile cue in each session, or it could be greeting a client by name at the beginning of every session.
If you start with this simple plan, service delivery will improve. While that’s happening, you can spin up on a full evaluation and development plan.
But take a step toward becoming the best steakhouse in town today:
Grab a coach and use five minutes to give them one thing to work on right now.
