July 14, 2025 • 14 mins
Stop wearing every hat in your gym. It’s time to move from coach to owner.
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper shares the exact steps gym owners can take to reclaim their time, take regular vacations and build businesses that run on systems.
He walks you through the process of “climbing the value ladder,” aka buying back your time:
- Identify the roles you fill.
- Calculate the replacement cost for each role.
- Write step-by-step instructions for each role.
- Delegate roles from lowest to highest value.
- Take time off to test the system.
- Identify problems and upgrade instructions so they're perfect.
Coop also explains how to coach and evaluate staff and why gym owners often mistake poor systems for “people problems.”
Tune in for the full playbook, then apply it and put it to the test by finally taking some time off.
Links
Gym Owners United
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0:48 - The steps to take time off
2:57 - How Coop climbed the value ladder
4:26 - Get the systems out of your head
8:45 - Activate your staff
11:52 - Is it a people or process problem?
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
How much time you taking off this year?
This is Run a Profitable Gym.
I'm Chris Cooper, the founder ofTwo Brain Business, and today
I'm going to tell you how totake time off, why you should,
and how to force yourself.
I was asked this question, soUncle Chris, how much vacation
time you get this year?
I had a family barbecue lastweekend, and my relationship
(00:22):
with taking time off can only bedescribed as, well, it's
complicated, and everyentrepreneur can relate.
In theory, you have unlimitedtime off, right?
You're the boss, and everybodythinks you can just take a day
off whenever you feel like Butin practice, you're the boss and
you have the worst boss in theworld, so you probably don't
take any vacations or time off.
(00:43):
As the owner of our gyms, nobodygives us time off, nobody gives
us permission, and nobodyenforces a two-week or
three-week break when we'reburned out.
So here's how we coach gymowners to take time off and kind
of force them at Two Brain.
So first, we break down all ofthe roles in your business.
Think of these as the hats thatyou wear, like cleaner or or
(01:05):
billing or group coach orpersonal trainer or sales or
marketing.
These are all separate hats thatyou put on and take off when you
switch roles.
Now, I want you to write theseroles, list them out on a blank
sheet of paper.
I've got a graphic here on thevideo if you're watching on
YouTube.
Now, beside each one of theseroles, write your replacement
value, how much you'd have topay somebody else to take that
(01:27):
job off your hands.
So, for example, a cleanershould make around minimum wage,
so you write$20 next to thecleaner role on your sheet.
And if you're not sure, you canjust check using a service like
Glassdoor.
Somebody who does the billing orthe social media should be paid
slightly higher, like$25 anhour.
Now what you want to do, onceyou've got a dollars figure next
(01:49):
to each roll on your list, isrank those rolls from high to
low replacement value.
And then you're gonna put thetop at the sheet, the lowest
cost replacement value first.
So the cleaner role, forexample, might be the top of
your list, followed by admin orsocial media after that.
The first thing that you wannado is replace yourself in the
least expensive role.
(02:11):
So for example, you hire acleaner, and while they're
cleaning, you use that time todo marketing or you reinvest it
in a higher value role that's onyour list.
So if you're paying somebody$20an hour to clean, while you earn
$70 for a personal trainingappointment, That's a huge win.
You might have heard peoplerefer to this as buying back
your time.
This is what it means.
(02:32):
We call it the value ladderbecause you're constantly
climbing a ladder of value andmaking your time worth more and
more and more.
You have to take it one rung ata time and sometimes that takes
time.
And then in a few months, youreplace yourself in the second
least expensive role and so on.
And this means that your time isgetting more valuable, but
(02:52):
you're still working just asmuch.
You're just substituting highervalue tasks for lower value
tasks.
That's all.
So the next step is how you taketime off.
I want to pause here and tellyou a story so that you can see
how this works.
When I was working with my firstmentor, Dennis Turcotte, he
said, Chris, you need to hire acleaner.
I said, I can't even afford topay myself.
How am I going to pay a cleaner?
(03:12):
And he said, here's what you'regoing to do?
You're going to hire thecleaner.
The cleaner will come in atnight, nine o'clock when you're
usually the one mopping thefloor.
And while they are mopping, youare going to send an email to
your list.
advertising or offering aprepaid session of personal
training appointments.
And I said, okay, we'll try it.
So I hired this guy named Seanon a three month contract.
(03:34):
And this was, it felt like a bigfinancial risk, even though back
then minimum wage was maybeabout$12.50 an hour in Canada.
So I'm paying Sean$12.50 an hourand he's over there mopping.
And I'm sitting here at mycomputer and I'm writing this
email and I'm like, I don't knowwhat to write.
And finally, at the end of thehour, I'm like, hey, if you're
interested, we now sell 10 and20 packs of personal training.
(03:55):
send.
Now keep in mind, this is like2009.
I didn't know that you should beselling personal training on
memberships and I didn't offer adiscount, thank goodness, but I
sent it out to my entire clientlist.
By morning, somebody had agreedand said, I'll pay next time I'm
in.
I made$500 in that hour and paidSean 12.
That's how you climb the valueladder.
(04:15):
You trade low value roles forhigher value roles.
You stop doing the things thatdon't produce revenue for your
gym and you start doing thethings that do.
That's what climbing the valueladder But you've heard Dan
Martell refer to this as buyingback your time, for example.
Now, every time you delegate oneof these roles, you have to
clearly map out a set ofinstructions for your
(04:35):
replacement.
These should be so simple that a12-year-old could follow them
and so complete that there areno gaps.
When you hire a cleaner, yougive them a cleaning checklist
to follow every single day.
When you hire somebody to do thebilling, you give them
step-by-step instructions sosimple that a 12-year-old could
follow them, complete withpictures and video.
Here's a screenshot of what mybilling software looks like.
(04:58):
Here's a video of me pullingthat revenue metric out of
Wattify or whatever it is.
This means that you're not gonnaskip steps.
Every time you make one of theseinstructions, you create a
system and your business is thesum of your systems.
I'm gonna say that again.
Your business is the sum of thesystems that you create and get
out of your head.
(05:18):
It is not the sum of yourknowledge.
It's not the sum of yourcreativity.
Your business rises on yourmarketing, but it falls to the
level of your systems.
Here's an example of making it12-year-old simple.
After working with Sean, thecleaner for a couple of months,
I was really getting intothings.
And, you know, one day when hewas in there cleaning, I said,
okay, I've got an hour.
(05:39):
I've done my marketing.
I'm going to wait around forSean.
I'm going to run out and grab mygroceries.
You know, it's nine 30 at night.
So I run down the street.
I grab my groceries.
I come back.
It's 10 o'clock.
He's sitting on a chair in thelobby, looking like this,
looking sad, hand on the mop,mop in the bucket.
Sean, what's wrong?
Well, we're out of soap.
(06:00):
Okay.
I forgot to put that in thechecklist.
Here's what to do if we're outof soap.
And so I added that to thechecklist.
It got better, et cetera.
But if I hadn't gone away, Iwouldn't have been there to
solve Sean's problem.
The problem wouldn't havearisen.
I wouldn't have identified itand I wouldn't have fixed the
system.
That's key.
The key is that you need to goaway.
You need to let the systems run,see where they break and then
(06:20):
come back and fix them.
Okay.
That's an important lesson.
I'm going to be coming back tothat in a moment.
The first time you write asystem, you might feel like, oh,
it's perfect, but you don't knowthat it's actually actually
good.
until you test it.
And the way that you test asystem in your business is that
you take time off.
So we tell gym owners in TwoBrain to take four days off
after they've systemized theirbusiness and built a playbook.
(06:43):
And that means they can't texttheir business.
They can't email with their gym.
They do give their cell numberto one person for emergencies
only.
And then they take four daysoff.
And after four days, they returnto the gym and they check up on
things.
And they find the gaps in thesystem.
Like, whoops, I forgot to tellthe cleaner how to get more
soap.
And then they fix those gaps fornext time.
(07:03):
They update their systems andthey improve their business.
And eventually there are no gapsleft.
But the first time you systemizeanything in your business, it's
not going to be perfect.
The only way that you make itperfect is by taking time away
and testing it and then fixingit when you get back.
Now, after a couple of monthsworking with Two Brain, we tell
every gym owner to take a weekoff.
And eventually they schedule aweek off every quarter to
(07:25):
recharge and fall in love withtheir gym again.
A lot of people get burned outbecause they're just with their
gym every single day, everysingle second, and they're
thinking about it all the time.
You need some time away.
You need some distance.
Now, if you're the boss, thatmeans you don't have a boss.
So there's nobody giving youpermission or forcing you to
take time off.
And you know that you should,but there's always something
(07:48):
that seems urgent, right?
So you take your laptop onvacation with you, or you're
constantly checking your phoneover the dinner with friends.
And if you view the time away asa test though, you're way more
likely to do it.
At least that's my secret.
I also like to tell my team thatI'm taking a think week because
that's what Steve Jobs used todo.
But I'm actually during thatweek riding my bike.
(08:09):
I'm reading and I'm thinking.
I'm just not checking Slack andI'm not taking meetings and I'm
not answering emails.
That to me is a vacation, eventhough I am kind of thinking
about work.
So when my nephew asked me thisquestion this year, I said, oh,
I'm taking a week off at thestart of every month.
And I was happy to say it.
Three years ago, I would havemade a joke like, ah, my boss is
(08:29):
a jerk.
I never get time.
So in case you need me to sayit, you need time away from your
gym.
You have to rekindle the passionthat you have with your gym, and
that means a break from eachother.
Your gym also needs time awayfrom you.
Here's your permission.
I'm giving you permission.
go away.
Treat it as a test.
Now, I want to talk about how toactivate your staff.
(08:52):
So you've got your gym to apoint where you've got systems
and it's running on systems.
It can run consistently withoutyou.
That doesn't mean that it'sgoing to grow without you.
It can just like maintain for alittle while.
And when you open the gym,somebody might have told you
that just be a good coach andthe rest will take care of
itself, right?
Well, bad news.
The rest is your business.
(09:13):
That's 90% of your job now as agym owner.
Being a good coach is necessary,but insufficient to run a good
business.
And Possibly the worst part?
None of us realized that wewould have to manage other
people, but we do.
So here's how to do itsuccessfully.
If you really want to grow yourgym, you have to manage people
to complete the systems thatyou've put in place so that you
(09:34):
can focus on growth.
So the first step is to tellthem exactly what you want them
to do.
So earlier I said that you haveto write your systems so that a
12-year-old could understandthem.
Not because your staff isuneducated or dumb, but because
this will force you to thinkthrough the gaps in
understanding.
If you don't tell somebody howto mix the soap in the mop
bucket or where to get moresoap, they will do it
(09:55):
differently than you will.
They might do it wrong.
And if you don't tell themexactly what time to start
class, they might start it lateor start it early.
So write your systems, which wesometimes call SOPs, as if
you're writing them for yourpre-teen nephew.
Don't skip any steps becausenobody can read your mind.
Nobody can think their waythrough the gaps.
(10:15):
It's not a matter of commonsense.
That doesn't exist.
You have to write these outplainly.
Step two is to Coach your staffthrough your system at least
once.
You know how you coach yourclients through your workouts?
You have to coach your staffthrough their jobs.
And they might need morecoaching in the beginning, and
they still need regularevaluations and form correction
over time.
This isn't hand-holding.
(10:36):
It's coaching, and it's yourjob.
The third step is to have themschedule the time to do the job.
Now, this is easy for simplejobs like cleaning, like show up
at 9, heat up the water, etc.
But it's less easy for jobs likelead nurture, where staff can be
kind of on and kind of off 24hours a day.
So I teach my staff to makeappointments with themselves to
(10:56):
do the work.
My higher level staff, like mygeneral manager, has a golden
hour practice, just like I do,where he starts his day doing
one thing to grow the gym everysingle day.
We determine his list for thegolden hour at the start of
every month.
He executes every day.
And I know there's somebody outthere working to actually grow
my gym every single day, insteadof just scrolling Instagram,
(11:18):
putting in time and punching theclock.
The fourth step is to evaluatethem quarterly.
Everything degrades over time.
A quarterly career roadmapmeeting can realign each staff
person on what they want, how toget it, and how they're doing so
far.
These are coaching meetings.
Just as you do goal reviews foryour clients, you need to do
career roadmap meetings for yourcoaches.
(11:40):
Now, you can read all theleadership books about eating
the frogs and doing the hardthings and starting with why and
turning the battleship aroundand making your bet, but
repeating these basics over andover will get you 90% of the way
to a well-run gym with minimalfrustration.
Anytime I meet a gym owner whoblames those millennials or
(12:00):
their uninvested staff or theirunmotivated staff, and they want
to add some kind of incentiveprogram to get them to do their
basic job, I ask if they'redoing these four things.
And 90% of the time, the gymowner has a process problem that
will be solved with these foursteps.
The other 10% of the time, theyactually do have a people
problem, but they'll never knowwhen until they fix their
(12:21):
processes.
Bad processes break goodemployees.
I'll say that again.
Bad processes break goodemployees.
Good employees do not fix badprocess problems.
There are no unicorns out therethat you're going to hire and
they'll come in and fix yourbusiness for you.
If you don't systemize yourbusiness properly, you will not
(12:43):
only fire quickly and hirequickly, but you'll burn out the
good people really quickly andeventually be left with no
staff.
Now, at the start of thispodcast, I said that being a
good coach is necessary, butinsufficient to run a good
business.
You probably didn't want to hearthat.
I sure didn't.
You know, back in 2008, when Ifinally realized it, we all wish
that just being the best at ourjob would make us financially
(13:05):
stable.
And that can be true.
But when you open a gym, yourjob is no longer coach.
Now it's owner.
If you want to be financiallystable, You have to be good at
the owner job.
Want proof?
Well, there are close to 9,000micro gyms that close by going
out of business every singleyear.
Most of those are owned by goodcoaches.
(13:27):
Some of them are owned by greatcoaches, better coaches than you
and better coaches than me.
All of those people opened a gymout of passion.
They prayed on it.
They asked for help.
They took loans from their mom.
They listened to every podcast.
They read every book that youdid.
They are not dumber than youare.
And they are not lazier than Iam.
They simply believe the storythat being a good coach would
(13:50):
somehow make their businesssuccessful.
My mission is to save you fromthat lie, whether it's being
told to you by yourcertification body, by your
affiliate provider, or byyourself.
You have to understand that youneed to be good at business to
have a good business.
And part of being a good gymowner means managing people
(14:11):
effectively.
That means systemizing things Itmeans coaching people on how to
do them.
It means evaluating themregularly and never assuming
that people are the problemfirst.
Always fix the process first.
Hope this podcast helps.
I hope you're out there helpingpeople and you're continuing to
do that for the next 20 years.
(14:32):
My gym turns 20 in September.
It took me three years to learnthe lessons that I have shared
today.
It cost me hundreds of thousandsof dollars to learn them and fix
the problems.
I'm giving them to you for freebecause I don't want you to go
through the same pain that Idid.
If you want to chat more aboutthis or talk to me in person, go
to gymownersunited.com.
That's our free group for gymowners that I wish had existed
(14:53):
20 years ago when I founded mygym.
How much time you taking off this year?
This is Run a Profitable Gym.
I'm Chris Cooper, the founder ofTwo Brain Business, and today
I'm going to tell you how totake time off, why you should,
and how to force yourself.
I was asked this question, soUncle Chris, how much vacation
time you get this year?
I had a family barbecue lastweekend, and my relationship
(00:22):
with taking time off can only bedescribed as, well, it's
complicated, and everyentrepreneur can relate.
In theory, you have unlimitedtime off, right?
You're the boss, and everybodythinks you can just take a day
off whenever you feel like Butin practice, you're the boss and
you have the worst boss in theworld, so you probably don't
take any vacations or time off.
(00:43):
As the owner of our gyms, nobodygives us time off, nobody gives
us permission, and nobodyenforces a two-week or
three-week break when we'reburned out.
So here's how we coach gymowners to take time off and kind
of force them at Two Brain.
So first, we break down all ofthe roles in your business.
Think of these as the hats thatyou wear, like cleaner or or
(01:05):
billing or group coach orpersonal trainer or sales or
marketing.
These are all separate hats thatyou put on and take off when you
switch roles.
Now, I want you to write theseroles, list them out on a blank
sheet of paper.
I've got a graphic here on thevideo if you're watching on
YouTube.
Now, beside each one of theseroles, write your replacement
value, how much you'd have topay somebody else to take that
(01:27):
job off your hands.
So, for example, a cleanershould make around minimum wage,
so you write$20 next to thecleaner role on your sheet.
And if you're not sure, you canjust check using a service like
Glassdoor.
Somebody who does the billing orthe social media should be paid
slightly higher, like$25 anhour.
Now what you want to do, onceyou've got a dollars figure next
(01:49):
to each roll on your list, isrank those rolls from high to
low replacement value.
And then you're gonna put thetop at the sheet, the lowest
cost replacement value first.
So the cleaner role, forexample, might be the top of
your list, followed by admin orsocial media after that.
The first thing that you wannado is replace yourself in the
least expensive role.
(02:11):
So for example, you hire acleaner, and while they're
cleaning, you use that time todo marketing or you reinvest it
in a higher value role that's onyour list.
So if you're paying somebody$20an hour to clean, while you earn
$70 for a personal trainingappointment, That's a huge win.
You might have heard peoplerefer to this as buying back
your time.
This is what it means.
(02:32):
We call it the value ladderbecause you're constantly
climbing a ladder of value andmaking your time worth more and
more and more.
You have to take it one rung ata time and sometimes that takes
time.
And then in a few months, youreplace yourself in the second
least expensive role and so on.
And this means that your time isgetting more valuable, but
(02:52):
you're still working just asmuch.
You're just substituting highervalue tasks for lower value
tasks.
That's all.
So the next step is how you taketime off.
I want to pause here and tellyou a story so that you can see
how this works.
When I was working with my firstmentor, Dennis Turcotte, he
said, Chris, you need to hire acleaner.
I said, I can't even afford topay myself.
How am I going to pay a cleaner?
(03:12):
And he said, here's what you'regoing to do?
You're going to hire thecleaner.
The cleaner will come in atnight, nine o'clock when you're
usually the one mopping thefloor.
And while they are mopping, youare going to send an email to
your list.
advertising or offering aprepaid session of personal
training appointments.
And I said, okay, we'll try it.
So I hired this guy named Seanon a three month contract.
(03:34):
And this was, it felt like a bigfinancial risk, even though back
then minimum wage was maybeabout$12.50 an hour in Canada.
So I'm paying Sean$12.50 an hourand he's over there mopping.
And I'm sitting here at mycomputer and I'm writing this
email and I'm like, I don't knowwhat to write.
And finally, at the end of thehour, I'm like, hey, if you're
interested, we now sell 10 and20 packs of personal training.
(03:55):
send.
Now keep in mind, this is like2009.
I didn't know that you should beselling personal training on
memberships and I didn't offer adiscount, thank goodness, but I
sent it out to my entire clientlist.
By morning, somebody had agreedand said, I'll pay next time I'm
in.
I made$500 in that hour and paidSean 12.
That's how you climb the valueladder.
(04:15):
You trade low value roles forhigher value roles.
You stop doing the things thatdon't produce revenue for your
gym and you start doing thethings that do.
That's what climbing the valueladder But you've heard Dan
Martell refer to this as buyingback your time, for example.
Now, every time you delegate oneof these roles, you have to
clearly map out a set ofinstructions for your
(04:35):
replacement.
These should be so simple that a12-year-old could follow them
and so complete that there areno gaps.
When you hire a cleaner, yougive them a cleaning checklist
to follow every single day.
When you hire somebody to do thebilling, you give them
step-by-step instructions sosimple that a 12-year-old could
follow them, complete withpictures and video.
Here's a screenshot of what mybilling software looks like.
(04:58):
Here's a video of me pullingthat revenue metric out of
Wattify or whatever it is.
This means that you're not gonnaskip steps.
Every time you make one of theseinstructions, you create a
system and your business is thesum of your systems.
I'm gonna say that again.
Your business is the sum of thesystems that you create and get
out of your head.
(05:18):
It is not the sum of yourknowledge.
It's not the sum of yourcreativity.
Your business rises on yourmarketing, but it falls to the
level of your systems.
Here's an example of making it12-year-old simple.
After working with Sean, thecleaner for a couple of months,
I was really getting intothings.
And, you know, one day when hewas in there cleaning, I said,
okay, I've got an hour.
(05:39):
I've done my marketing.
I'm going to wait around forSean.
I'm going to run out and grab mygroceries.
You know, it's nine 30 at night.
So I run down the street.
I grab my groceries.
I come back.
It's 10 o'clock.
He's sitting on a chair in thelobby, looking like this,
looking sad, hand on the mop,mop in the bucket.
Sean, what's wrong?
Well, we're out of soap.
(06:00):
Okay.
I forgot to put that in thechecklist.
Here's what to do if we're outof soap.
And so I added that to thechecklist.
It got better, et cetera.
But if I hadn't gone away, Iwouldn't have been there to
solve Sean's problem.
The problem wouldn't havearisen.
I wouldn't have identified itand I wouldn't have fixed the
system.
That's key.
The key is that you need to goaway.
You need to let the systems run,see where they break and then
(06:20):
come back and fix them.
Okay.
That's an important lesson.
I'm going to be coming back tothat in a moment.
The first time you write asystem, you might feel like, oh,
it's perfect, but you don't knowthat it's actually actually
good.
until you test it.
And the way that you test asystem in your business is that
you take time off.
So we tell gym owners in TwoBrain to take four days off
after they've systemized theirbusiness and built a playbook.
(06:43):
And that means they can't texttheir business.
They can't email with their gym.
They do give their cell numberto one person for emergencies
only.
And then they take four daysoff.
And after four days, they returnto the gym and they check up on
things.
And they find the gaps in thesystem.
Like, whoops, I forgot to tellthe cleaner how to get more
soap.
And then they fix those gaps fornext time.
(07:03):
They update their systems andthey improve their business.
And eventually there are no gapsleft.
But the first time you systemizeanything in your business, it's
not going to be perfect.
The only way that you make itperfect is by taking time away
and testing it and then fixingit when you get back.
Now, after a couple of monthsworking with Two Brain, we tell
every gym owner to take a weekoff.
And eventually they schedule aweek off every quarter to
(07:25):
recharge and fall in love withtheir gym again.
A lot of people get burned outbecause they're just with their
gym every single day, everysingle second, and they're
thinking about it all the time.
You need some time away.
You need some distance.
Now, if you're the boss, thatmeans you don't have a boss.
So there's nobody giving youpermission or forcing you to
take time off.
And you know that you should,but there's always something
(07:48):
that seems urgent, right?
So you take your laptop onvacation with you, or you're
constantly checking your phoneover the dinner with friends.
And if you view the time away asa test though, you're way more
likely to do it.
At least that's my secret.
I also like to tell my team thatI'm taking a think week because
that's what Steve Jobs used todo.
But I'm actually during thatweek riding my bike.
(08:09):
I'm reading and I'm thinking.
I'm just not checking Slack andI'm not taking meetings and I'm
not answering emails.
That to me is a vacation, eventhough I am kind of thinking
about work.
So when my nephew asked me thisquestion this year, I said, oh,
I'm taking a week off at thestart of every month.
And I was happy to say it.
Three years ago, I would havemade a joke like, ah, my boss is
(08:29):
a jerk.
I never get time.
So in case you need me to sayit, you need time away from your
gym.
You have to rekindle the passionthat you have with your gym, and
that means a break from eachother.
Your gym also needs time awayfrom you.
Here's your permission.
I'm giving you permission.
go away.
Treat it as a test.
Now, I want to talk about how toactivate your staff.
(08:52):
So you've got your gym to apoint where you've got systems
and it's running on systems.
It can run consistently withoutyou.
That doesn't mean that it'sgoing to grow without you.
It can just like maintain for alittle while.
And when you open the gym,somebody might have told you
that just be a good coach andthe rest will take care of
itself, right?
Well, bad news.
The rest is your business.
(09:13):
That's 90% of your job now as agym owner.
Being a good coach is necessary,but insufficient to run a good
business.
And Possibly the worst part?
None of us realized that wewould have to manage other
people, but we do.
So here's how to do itsuccessfully.
If you really want to grow yourgym, you have to manage people
to complete the systems thatyou've put in place so that you
(09:34):
can focus on growth.
So the first step is to tellthem exactly what you want them
to do.
So earlier I said that you haveto write your systems so that a
12-year-old could understandthem.
Not because your staff isuneducated or dumb, but because
this will force you to thinkthrough the gaps in
understanding.
If you don't tell somebody howto mix the soap in the mop
bucket or where to get moresoap, they will do it
(09:55):
differently than you will.
They might do it wrong.
And if you don't tell themexactly what time to start
class, they might start it lateor start it early.
So write your systems, which wesometimes call SOPs, as if
you're writing them for yourpre-teen nephew.
Don't skip any steps becausenobody can read your mind.
Nobody can think their waythrough the gaps.
(10:15):
It's not a matter of commonsense.
That doesn't exist.
You have to write these outplainly.
Step two is to Coach your staffthrough your system at least
once.
You know how you coach yourclients through your workouts?
You have to coach your staffthrough their jobs.
And they might need morecoaching in the beginning, and
they still need regularevaluations and form correction
over time.
This isn't hand-holding.
(10:36):
It's coaching, and it's yourjob.
The third step is to have themschedule the time to do the job.
Now, this is easy for simplejobs like cleaning, like show up
at 9, heat up the water, etc.
But it's less easy for jobs likelead nurture, where staff can be
kind of on and kind of off 24hours a day.
So I teach my staff to makeappointments with themselves to
(10:56):
do the work.
My higher level staff, like mygeneral manager, has a golden
hour practice, just like I do,where he starts his day doing
one thing to grow the gym everysingle day.
We determine his list for thegolden hour at the start of
every month.
He executes every day.
And I know there's somebody outthere working to actually grow
my gym every single day, insteadof just scrolling Instagram,
(11:18):
putting in time and punching theclock.
The fourth step is to evaluatethem quarterly.
Everything degrades over time.
A quarterly career roadmapmeeting can realign each staff
person on what they want, how toget it, and how they're doing so
far.
These are coaching meetings.
Just as you do goal reviews foryour clients, you need to do
career roadmap meetings for yourcoaches.
(11:40):
Now, you can read all theleadership books about eating
the frogs and doing the hardthings and starting with why and
turning the battleship aroundand making your bet, but
repeating these basics over andover will get you 90% of the way
to a well-run gym with minimalfrustration.
Anytime I meet a gym owner whoblames those millennials or
(12:00):
their uninvested staff or theirunmotivated staff, and they want
to add some kind of incentiveprogram to get them to do their
basic job, I ask if they'redoing these four things.
And 90% of the time, the gymowner has a process problem that
will be solved with these foursteps.
The other 10% of the time, theyactually do have a people
problem, but they'll never knowwhen until they fix their
(12:21):
processes.
Bad processes break goodemployees.
I'll say that again.
Bad processes break goodemployees.
Good employees do not fix badprocess problems.
There are no unicorns out therethat you're going to hire and
they'll come in and fix yourbusiness for you.
If you don't systemize yourbusiness properly, you will not
(12:43):
only fire quickly and hirequickly, but you'll burn out the
good people really quickly andeventually be left with no
staff.
Now, at the start of thispodcast, I said that being a
good coach is necessary, butinsufficient to run a good
business.
You probably didn't want to hearthat.
I sure didn't.
You know, back in 2008, when Ifinally realized it, we all wish
that just being the best at ourjob would make us financially
(13:05):
stable.
And that can be true.
But when you open a gym, yourjob is no longer coach.
Now it's owner.
If you want to be financiallystable, You have to be good at
the owner job.
Want proof?
Well, there are close to 9,000micro gyms that close by going
out of business every singleyear.
Most of those are owned by goodcoaches.
(13:27):
Some of them are owned by greatcoaches, better coaches than you
and better coaches than me.
All of those people opened a gymout of passion.
They prayed on it.
They asked for help.
They took loans from their mom.
They listened to every podcast.
They read every book that youdid.
They are not dumber than youare.
And they are not lazier than Iam.
They simply believe the storythat being a good coach would
(13:50):
somehow make their businesssuccessful.
My mission is to save you fromthat lie, whether it's being
told to you by yourcertification body, by your
affiliate provider, or byyourself.
You have to understand that youneed to be good at business to
have a good business.
And part of being a good gymowner means managing people
(14:11):
effectively.
That means systemizing things Itmeans coaching people on how to
do them.
It means evaluating themregularly and never assuming
that people are the problemfirst.
Always fix the process first.
Hope this podcast helps.
I hope you're out there helpingpeople and you're continuing to
do that for the next 20 years.
(14:32):
My gym turns 20 in September.
It took me three years to learnthe lessons that I have shared
today.
It cost me hundreds of thousandsof dollars to learn them and fix
the problems.
I'm giving them to you for freebecause I don't want you to go
through the same pain that Idid.
If you want to chat more aboutthis or talk to me in person, go
to gymownersunited.com.
That's our free group for gymowners that I wish had existed
(14:53):
20 years ago when I founded mygym.
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