Some decisions feel really good right now, but they’re going to cost you later—big time.
As entrepreneurs, we think quickly, and because we’re stuck in our own heads, it’s easy to convince ourselves that our ideas are perfect. So we act, and then we suffer the consequences down the line.
You’ve seen this in your clients, right? The long-term goal of losing weight for the wedding is derailed by a week of all-inclusive resort YOLO. But if they would just endure a little short-term pain today, wins will compound for long-term gain.
Gym owners do the exact same thing—sometimes on the advice of a shortsighted, inexperienced business coach.
Here are 12 things that might seem good but actually destroy the health and longevity of your gym business.
1. Lifetime Memberships and Paid-in-Full Discounts
Some gym owners say “I need cash really badly, so I’m going to sell lifetime memberships”—except they don’t run the numbers.
A few years down the road, you’re training them for free. But your service has been upgraded and your pricing is dramatically different. So your losses are increasing.
Paid-in-full—PIF—programs also cause huge revenue problems.
A quick example: A flagship CrossFit affiliate with three locations had a deal where you could pay for 10 months in a row up front and get the last two months of the year for free. This seems like a good idea at the time—cash up front, right?
But a lot of people used the PIF option, and by July the gym was in trouble. In October, it was out of money, so they offered the same discount again. The next year, they were out of money in July.
Don’t offer lifetime memberships or PIF discounts! Short term, you get a big lump of cash that feels pretty good. Long term, these sketchy tactics can actually put you out of business because you run out of money. Instead, set your rates properly, provide value and confidently sell that value.
2. Recurring Discounts
A lot of gyms will confuse discounting with marketing: “If I offer a 15% discount, I will get all the first responders and teachers.”
I’ve done this, so I know we do it because we’re scared of asking for the full dollar value. We don’t have the confidence to sell our service, so we soften the offer.
But here’s the problem: People who get discounts might get excited in the beginning. Three months in, the discount has become the norm. Six months in, that’s just “what they pay.” They forget that they’re getting a discount—but you’re losing $40 per client per month, or almost $500 a year (or much more!).
You have all the same costs, but you’ve given up $480 to somebody who didn’t need it and doesn’t appreciate it anymore. Then, when you remove the discount, they think you’re raising their rates—but you’re actually just bringing them in line with everyone else.
Discounts come right out of profit. If you really want to see the effects, literally take $40 out of your pocket in the sales office and slide it across the table to subsidize someone’s membership. You’d never do it like that—but it has the exact same effect as your “20% off for soldiers” policy.
Are you willing to tell your kid he can’t sign up for football because you’re subsidizing gym memberships personally? Or should you work with a mentor and get comfortable selling your actual value?
3. Hiring Your Friends
This one stings because almost all of us have done it—hiring your friends feels good in the moment, right? You think you’re giving them a winning lottery ticket: “Come work with me! We’ll build something awesome together!”
Short term, it feels like you’re doing something generous. Long term? You blur every boundary. Are you their friend or their boss? When do you give feedback? What happens when they’re not doing well—can you even bring it up? Most gym owners avoid the conversations until resentment builds on both sides. Then you lose the staff person and the friend.
Ninety percent of the people I hired in my early days were friends. Less than 1% of those situations ended with the working relationship and the friendship intact.
Even if you set clear boundaries up front, they’re extremely hard to maintain. It feels awkward because it is awkward.
And here’s the business truth: Hiring friends slows your growth. You’ll put up with poor performance too long because you don’t want to hurt someone you care about. Eventually the blow-up is worse and the relationship is gone.
Do yourself a huge favor: have friends and have staff, not friends who are on staff.
4. Subleasing to Other Trainers
This mistake shows up constantly in early stage gyms: “I need more money—this trainer wants to rent space. It’s $500 a month. That’s found money, right?”
Wrong.
Imagine owning a restaurant and letting a hot-dog vendor wheel his cart down your aisles and sell food to your customers. You’d never allow it. But that’s exactly what subleasing fitness space does.
You took the risk: the lease, the loan, the insurance, the equipment, the marketing, the client acquisition, the reputation. Then you let someone piggyback all of it for a few hundred bucks a month—and they get a high-affinity, prebuilt audience without doing any work.
Flip the script. If you could walk into someone else’s gym, access their clients, charge whatever you want and only pay $500 a month for rent, you’d do it instantly. Most of us would never have opened a gym if that were an option.
Coaching is your primary revenue stream. Do not let someone siphon off coaching revenue inside your walls.
Further, what happens when a subleasing trainer operates below your standards? The client complains to you because the trainer’s brand has become your brand.
Subleasing feels like easy money. In reality, it prevents you from doing the higher-value thing your gym actually exists to do: provide coaching.
5. Running Down Other Gyms
Every insecure, scared, broke gym owner (including me) has fallen into this trap: Someone mentions another gym and your knee-jerk reaction is to trash them. It feels like you’re winning points—like you’re making your client more loyal to you by highlighting someone else’s flaws.
Long term, you damage your own reputation. No one wants to be around the coach who gossips and belittles. When you run down others, the client thinks, “If this is how they talk about other gym owners, what do they say about me?”
It took years of experience—and success—for me to break out of the scarcity mindset. Today, I host monthly lunches with all the gym owners in town. Collaboration builds everyone up. I know it now, but back then, my negativity hurt me.
Your reputation is built in conversations you don’t hear. Don’t poison them.
6. Trading Memberships for Coaching
This one seems harmless: “Coach one class a week for a free membership.”
Except most gym owners never do the math.
Cash was invented to normalize trade—so you can measure value on both sides. When you trade coaching for a membership, there’s no scoreboard.
If one coach runs four classes a month for a $200 membership, they’re earning $50/hour. Another coach runs eight classes a month for the same benefit: $25/hour. Another coach fills in when someone is sick and gets nothing for it. It’s uneven, unclear and unfair.
And because you think “free membership” costs “nothing,” you often dramatically overpay without realizing it.
Your best coaches notice. They see that weaker performers get the same benefit for far less work. That kills motivation, professionalism and culture.
If you really want to trade, at least calculate the value every month. Otherwise, pay coaches real money and have them buy real memberships. It keeps everything clean, fair and measurable.
7. Training to Be the Best Athlete in the Gym
Many owners secretly believe they must be the fittest person in the room to earn respect.
I believed it, too—powerlifting gym, CrossFit gym, didn’t matter. I trained like my credibility depended on my Fran time.
Short term, it boosts the ego. Long term, it steals time and energy from the actual job: leadership.
Your clients don’t care how fit you are—they care how well you coach and how well you run the business that serves them. And if you’re spending two hours a day training, your priorities are backwards: sport → family → recovery → business as a distant fourth.
Your gym isn’t growing because you’re training like an athlete instead of leading like an owner. Build the business first. Once it runs well, you can train as much as you want.
8. Chasing High-Ticket Sales Without Retention
Right before COVID, everyone was chasing $2,000-up-front “high-ticket” packages.
Gym Launch. New You Challenge. Facebook ad agencies. Gyms were stacking huge sales—and ensuring huge churn.
Clients paid $2,000, looked around and said, “I’m paying this, and those people are paying $120 a month for basically the same thing.” So they left. And gyms ended up on a sales treadmill, constantly replacing clients who churned out faster and faster.
Short-term revenue spike, long-term death spiral. A business built on retention will always beat a business built on one-time revenue.
9. Avoiding Rate Increases
This one is pure fear. You avoid raising rates because it feels uncomfortable right now—but every month you delay, you erode your margin, underpay your staff, underpay yourself and burn out faster.
You tell yourself the timing isn’t right. You’ll wait until January. Or March. Or after the next wave of signups. Meanwhile, expenses rise. Your clients are paying a rate from five years ago. Your business becomes less stable every 30 days.
Raising rates is like doing the last 200-meter sprint in a workout: It’s painful right now, but it produces the rewards you want and deserve.
10. Expanding too Early
Early success tricks people: They open their first gym, see quick growth and think, “I’m good at business—time to open another location.”
Then competition hits. Timing changes. A new trend pulls members away. Reality sets in.
If your first gym can’t consistently pay you $100,000 a year and run without you for at least a week, you don’t have a business yet—you have a job. Expanding too early just duplicates problems and doubles expenses.
And when you start focusing on the new gym, the original “golden goose” dies.
Grow one gym until it’s stable, profitable and independent. Then scale.
11. Trying to Be Everything to Everyone
In the first year, offering everything feels like opportunity: weight-loss challenges, legends classes, kids programs, sports teams—you get a few clients from each.
Long term, it turns into chaos. Thirty programs. Ninety price points. Confused clients. Overwhelmed staff. Burned-out owner.
People don’t buy when they’re confused.
Know your perfect client. Build the program that serves them best. Sell it consistently. Duplicate them again and again.
12. Buying a Failing Gym
This feels like the ultimate shortcut: “Their gym is dying. I’ll buy it, take their 100 members and double my revenue.”
Except you’re buying their mistakes, too: Clients who pay too little, coaches who accept bad culture, programming nobody values, broken or nonexistent systems.
And when you try to address the problems, everything just falls apart. Clients quit. Coaches leave. Culture collapses. Suddenly you’ve tied your first business to a sinking ship.
Some gyms fail for a reason. It’s tough to watch—but you don’t have to poison your existing business by taking on a sick enterprise that needs more help than you can give it.
The Big Picture
All these mistakes produce initial “sugar highs” for your business—they are quick hits that feel good right now but lead to a crash later.
The path to real profit is boring. It’s not full of lottery wins and explosions. It’s all about steady, sustainable growth; air-tight, replicable systems; clear boundaries; real math; and long-term thinking.
If you’re unsure whether something is a short-term dopamine hit or a long-term win, here’s the solution: Book a call with my team. Ask a mentor this question: “This seems like a good idea right now. How will it affect me in five years?”
You don’t have to guess. We’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to. Just skip to the right answer and build a thriving business that lasts for decades.
