I know you: You’re generous.
You put other people ahead of yourself—your clients, your family and even the people who are paid to put you first: your coaches.
It’s not wrong to do so. Your team is critically important to your gym’s success. But it is wrong to undermine the gym’s stability or sacrifice your family’s income by paying coaches too much.
Coaches can have a great career in your box, especially when the relationship is good for everyone. In this series, I’m going to tell you how to build meaningful careers for other people on the platform you’ve built for yourself.
The Path to a Career
Before we get into this, I don’t want you to assume that every great coach is a full-time coach. A great coach can work part time. Read more here: “Gym Management: The Case for Part-Time Coaches.”
Now, here are the steps to building the careers they want:
Step 1
At your quarterly Career Roadmap meeting, ask your coach: “What do you want now?” Ask the coach to tell you about his or her Perfect Day. Ask how your gym can support that Perfect Day. Ask where he or she would like to be in six months.
(If you’re not doing quarterly Career Roadmap meetings, start. We teach you how to do it in our Mentorship Program.)
Step 2
Determine how much the coach needs to earn to reach those goals. Using tools like the Happiness Index (and his or her personal budget), calculate a goal number.
Step 3
Use our Career Roadmap tool (we give it to you in the RampUp program) to work backward from that number. Create opportunities to do personal training, specialty programs, nutrition coaching or more groups. It’s all laid out in our free “Intrapreneurialism 101” guide, which you can download here.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how to identify the best intrapreneurial opportunities that will build income for the coach and revenue for the gym.
Step 4
Determine the starting position. What will the coach need to learn in order to capitalize on this plan? Will he or she need a certification before starting a kids program, for example? Will the coach need to take the Two-Brain Coaching First Degree before he or she can work with 1:1 clients?
Step 5
Measure progress. Perform regular reviews as part of Career Roadmap meetings.
**Step 6**
Give the coach an opportunity to open his or her own business under your brand. After you’ve taught the coach how to be an “intrapreneur,” you can help him or her step outside your protective umbrella and open a gym. Read “Go With Them.”
Communicate and Lead
The key to all of this is asking your coaches, “What do you want now?”
Some might want more money. Some might want more opportunity. Some want consistency; some are willing to take risk in exchange for equity. But no one wants the same thing forever.
The best way to help your coaches build a career is to mentor them to success.
Who’s mentoring you to yours?
