What are your greatest assets as a gym owner?
If you said “my equipment” or “my staff,” I understand. Those are valuable.
But your greatest assets are your time and your focus.
These two things are finite, precious and essential for entrepreneurial success.
Here’s how to protect them.
Get Your Gym out of Your Head
I’m not going to give you sexy, inspirational window dressing. It’s easy to tell you to narrow your focus, do the stuff that really matters, be a boss and use the #crushingit hashtag.
Instead, I’ll give you dirt-under-your nails stuff you can use today to protect your time and your focus.
Here’s the secret: If your business is “all in your head,” your time and focus will disappear quickly every day. To preserve your greatest assets, you have to get your business “on paper.” That means you systemize everything, document those systems, assign tasks to people and hold them accountable.
Here’s a simple example: A gym owner is trying to grow the business. She’s in her office trying to figure out how to acquire more clients. A staff member knocks on the door and says, “We’re out of toilet paper.”
The owner loses focus, picks up the phone and spends five minutes on hold before getting to the order desk. Then she spends five minutes trying to find the credit card or account number.
After the order is placed, the owner notices an email from a member: “Can you see if I left my wedding ring at the gym?”
The owner goes to look for the ring and sees a coach eating lunch on the reverse hyper while clients are warming up.
And then a prospective client walks in the front door and starts looking around.
I’ll stop the spiral there—you know how it goes, and you know I’m not exaggerating the situation. This kind of thing happens all the time to entrepreneurs.
Here’s the real problem in the scenario above: The gym owner hasn’t systemized the business, so she must do everything personally. She loses focus by 5:55 a.m. every day, races around frantically for hours and runs out of time to grow the business or just take her kids to the pool.
Imagine if she had a clear, updated staff playbook packed with roles and tasks, checklists and SOPs. Do you think she’d need to order toilet paper? Of course not. The cleaner would have placed the order the week before, when he ran through the supplies checklist and saw the last box was open.
The client success manager would have found the wedding ring and greeted the prospective member at the door, and the lunch-eating coach wouldn’t exist because all coaches would know that meals are eaten before classes, not during. Any coaches who “missed the memo” would have been reminded in quarterly evaluations done by the GM.
And the owner would be in the office finishing off a marketing plan that’s sure to bring in five new clients in the next five days through referrals.
Systemize Your Business!
I won’t try to make systems sexy. They aren’t.
But they are the backbone of every successful gym business.
If you want to run a good business, grow your gym, earn more and get home in time for dinner with the family, systems aren’t optional.
Two-Brain mentors help clients build gym systems fast. I know systemization is tedious, so we’ve streamlined everything with our own systems. We provide exact instructions, templates, done-for-you-resources and accountability so the business gets out of the owner’s head at warp speed.
And then we tell the gym owner what to do next to grow the business.
In the next post in this series, I’ll give you an exact procedure you can use to systemize your business.
To talk about stomping the accelerator and preserving your time and focus, click here.
