The Coach You Can’t Fire (And 4 More Gym Problems, Solved)
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Big Tom and I did something different this week. Instead of picking a topic, we took the questions straight from my SPF group. Five of them. All the same problems I hear every week on deep dives and coaching calls.
We start with pricing, because Mike Williams from Florida asked how often you should actually raise your rates. That turned into the bigger conversation about why gym owners refuse to do it. I just spent an hour on this with a gym owner from New Hampshire who was dead set against raising prices on current members. His reason had nothing to do with his business. It was that he did not want people to be upset with him while he was standing on the floor with them.
Then we get into the question four or five guys asked in different words: I have 13 employees, 12 of them are great, and one is making my life hell. I walk through the four people issues, and the one that is most common in our industry is the high performer everybody loves who is quietly poisoning your team.
From there it goes into when to hire your next trainer, how to build a scoreboard with only four numbers on it, and how to tell the difference between being busy and actually moving your business forward.
I also tell the story about the email I got two weeks ago. My dad’s municipal bond firm folded in the late 1980s. Forty years later, 40 to 60 people are still getting together for a reunion. Both of my parents who owned that company are dead and they are still doing it. That email made me take a hard look at the culture I have built, and I did not love what I saw.
5 Key Takeaways
- Your value judgment on price is irrelevant. Vanessa drove 45 minutes and paid $444 for our daughter’s first birthday cake. To me that makes no sense. To her it made perfect sense, and hers was the only opinion that mattered. The gym owner who will not raise his rates is pricing his gym out of his own wallet instead of his customer’s. One caveat: if you are sitting at 12% attrition, fix your churn before you touch price. You will make a bad problem much worse.
- There is no single right frequency on price increases. Two schools of thought. Cut deep and cut rarely, which is what we just did at GFP with a $50 per month increase, roughly 12%, and we will not do that again next year. Or build a smaller automatic bump into the membership agreement so every October it climbs 3% to 5%. Pick one. Just stop doing nothing while your rent and your payroll go up around you.
- When you have one problem employee out of 13, all your mental energy goes to that one person and the other 12 get taken for granted. Run them through the four people issues first. Right person right seat means invest harder in them, not ignore them. Right person wrong seat means find them a different spot. Wrong person right seat is the one that eats gyms alive, the coach the clients love who is a cancer behind the scenes. Do not fire that person on a Tuesday and watch your business implode. Fire him in your head today and build a 30, 60, and 90 day plan to absorb the damage before he actually walks. And the number one leadership tool you can own is a mirror.
- Stop waiting until you have enough clients to justify a hire. Bring on a part time trainer at $25 an hour, hand over 10 sessions a week, and that costs you about $1,000 a month. What you just bought is 40 hours of your own time. For most of you, three new customers covers that entire investment, and you only have to get those three once. You have 11 more months after that. If you cannot find three customers with 40 hours, the hire was never the problem.
- Your scoreboard only needs four numbers. Leads, consults or trials, new members, and attrition. Every one of them needs a weekly goal, because without a goal you are just reporting what happened and you have no idea whether you won. When a number is off track, ask one question. Why did this happen? Block 30 minutes, write the answer down, and commit to one action step. Not a full rebuild. One step, then check next week whether you actually did it.
Click Here to get a custom local marketing plan for your gym, completely free: https://www.vincegabriele.com/helpmemarket
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