The Algorithm Owes You NOTHING

A social media exercise…

Pull up that one social media post you published a while back that absolutely killed it. I’m talking about the one that had so much engagement that it instantly became the benchmark against which all future content you publish will be measured.

You’re lying if you claim not to instantly know the one — in fact, I’ll bet it’s currently pinned to the top of your profile.

Here’s an example of one that played especially well on Twitter and IG for me

Now I want you to recreate it.

I’m talking either word-for-word, or with the minor tweaks that you wish you could have made in hindsight…a clean slate do-over.

Go post it again.

• This time for a (presumably) bigger audience

• This time with the aesthetic and wording upgrades it deserves

• This time with an improved caption and better hashtags

And this time, unfortunately, to the most current iteration of the Instagram algorithm.

(crickets)

It tanked comparatively, didn’t it?

It reached less accounts, generated less profile views, and drove significantly less shares.

What the hell, man?

This is especially frustrating because more people have voluntarily decided to follow your account during the months or years since you initially posted this exact thought. The message isn’t 60% less informative or relevant today, is it?

Can you do something about it? Should you?

Three Things to Remember:

1. Control What You Can

Building a business that is dependent upon perpetual status quo on a social platform that you do not own is as dumb as pouring a cement foundation for your home on top of the most active fault line on the planet. If you don’t control the distribution, you don’t control the reach of your message.

Build an email list. Establish relationships in real life. Build your own algorithm.

Most importantly, stop angrily screaming into the sky about Zuckerberg and Musk ruining your business – nobody cares.

2. You Are Not Your Content

One of the most dangerous things you can do is to attach your self-worth to the level of engagement your social media efforts are generating. Sure, some of your content might be subpar in comparison to your best stuff, but that doesn’t mean the people consuming it are sitting at home thinking you’re a loser.

“You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when challenged.”

-       Ed Catmull, Co-Founder of Pixar

You’d care a whole lot less about what other people think of you and your Instagram posts if you were to learn how infrequently they actually think of you, period.

In that sense, maybe Zuck & The Gang are doing you a favor?

Kidding, sort of.

3. Change is Inevitable

Do you think the market cares that you don’t like being on video? How about the fact that you think you’re too old for TikTok? What about your aversion to embracing ChatGPT?

Nobody cares that “you’re old school” and that you wouldn’t be caught dead shooting short-form vertical video in your office. Nobody asked if you found Vaynerchuk and Hormozi to be obnoxious attention whores, but you keep telling us these things anyway. 

When I started my gym in 2007, I didn’t have a “how I always did it.”

I had a recently acquired MBA, access to some interesting new platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, and a willingness to integrate a little bit of each with the intention of building.

While it remained off my radar at the time, I’m certain there were several local gym owners who were pissed seeing us capture a massive chunk of the local market by employing these “silly” internet gadgets.

You know what we thought of them?

We thought they were the gym owner equivalent to the grumpy old man sitting on his porch yelling “get off my lawn.”

If you’re one of the self-declared old-school fellows who has made a commitment to never stoop to the lows of promoting your business the way all of the newest faces in the industry are doing so, you’re making that declaration from a rocking chair on the porch, and you don’t even know it.

Technical Skills Are Rarely the Differentiator

Zero.

That’s how many times I’ve decided not to hire a personable and ambitious intern in my business because that individual wasn’t an exceptional technician. 

I don’t care much about identifying a world-class technician during the hiring process, as I’ve seen time and again with 300+ interns that those components of the role can be taught. 

Here’s a look at a few of the important things I can’t effectively teach during a structured internship or onboarding curriculum: 

• I can’t create self-awareness 

• I can’t turn an introvert into an extrovert with a series of thoughtful staff in-services 

• I can’t firm up a handshake and improve eye contact habits in a way that will carry forward into the client experience if that piece of the puzzle isn’t instinctually reflexive for the employee

If I want to put together an industry-leading team, my best bet is to assemble a collection of unique and inspired personalities, because technical skills and booksmarts alone will never result in a defensible position in my market. A beautifully blended staff of fascinating and cohesive human beings delivering a memorable service, however, is an impossible to replicate competitive weapon.

On Publishing Your Prices...

There wasn’t a day in business school when we discussed whether or not it was appropriate for us to list our prices on the internet.

You know why?

Because there isn’t a right or wrong answer that applies to every business.

We’ve chosen not to publish our prices since opening Cressey Sports Performance in 2007. Back then, we started knowing we’d be the price-leader in a market that was new to us.

Situated in a community full of commercial gyms, our thinking was that the locals wouldn’t immediately understand our unique business model and would quickly jump to inaccurate conclusions about who we are and what we do if they had nothing but a dollar figure to evaluate us by.

The Thing About Pricing Strategy…

I know that my pricing strategy tells a story, and I am better at introducing that story than an inanimate page on my website will ever be.

When you list all of your prices on the Internet you miss an opportunity to articulate differentiators while holding the undivided attention of the consumer. The pricing page on your website makes a simple declaration: 

These are our prices — take it or leave it. 

Is that a sure fire way to put yourself in a position to counter the concerns of a potential client?

No...it most certainly is not.

If you want to convey expertise in advance of outlining a premium pricing model, the least you can do is to get a lead on the phone or into your office.

A disclaimer…

There’s one reason for withholding pricing information that I can’t get behind, and that is so that you can reserve the right to manipulate fees based on perceived spending capacity. This approach is both difficult to scale thanks to the complexities surrounding extracting that information, and is setting you up for challenging conversations if and when word gets around that your prices are “flexible.”

The price is the price is the price, and there should be no exceptions.

The Territorial Employer

With endless content creation and business development tools at our fingertips, it’s easy to find the motivation to “start your own thing” online. After all, many of us want a side hustle, or even better, a blissful life of self-employment. 

The underappreciated thing about the online fitness industry, however, is that the most successful online entrepreneurs begin with the foundational experience of extensive in-person instruction. These are the people who know that you can’t skip the step of honing your face-to-face coaching craft before demanding trust on the internet if you expect to have any measurable level of success.

Coaches need to get their reps in, and this typically takes place while working inside of someone else’s gym. If you’re one of those motivated young coaches, keep in mind that aspiration is a renewable resource, and experience is a cumulative resource. 

What Should I Do?

If I were you, I’d head out into the world in search of an employer that encourages me to replenish the former by developing a personal brand while simultaneously accumulating the latter as a contributing coach in his operation. 

If you run into a potential employer who says team members aren’t allowed to maintain a fitness blog or weekly newsletter, walk away.

If you find one who says that hosting a podcast is off limits, walk away.

If they tell you that all of the content you create during the period of time that you are working for them becomes the intellectual property of the business, forget walking...run away.

Someday you’re going to move on from that operation, and the last thing you’ll need at that point is to be handcuffed by the shortsighted and territorial policies of a threatened small business owner.

Lending the Keys to the “We” Bus

Why does my business exist? 

What’s our vision? 

How do we do things around here?

We occasionally hit the pause button on the weekly continuing education staff meeting and instead revisit our vision and values. What I’ve come to learn in well over a decade of business ownership is that self-awareness isn’t always a gift that is guaranteed to the people establishing the direction our business is headed.

More specifically, “who we think we are” doesn’t always jive with “who our clients believe us to be.”

What Does the Client Think? 

Knowing this to be the case, we afford ourselves the opportunity to course-correct from time to time by inviting a longtime client to join the discussion. We plug them into the middle of a staff meeting, encourage them to contribute as they feel necessary, and watch where the conversation takes us.

When our business is firing on all cylinders, and we’re delivering the client experience we strive toward, the client in question takes a liberty that warms my business owner's soul... 

They start using the word “we” when talking about our business.

"We pay attention to detail around here."

"We make every client feel like the most important person in the room." 

Again, these are the client’s words, not my own. 

“We” is the unofficial temperature check on my gym culture thermometer. “We” is music to my ears when spoken by someone who isn’t collecting a paycheck from my operation. “We” means we’ve given a client the keys to talk about our operation like they own it. 

“We” means we’ve officially built ourselves more of a tribe than a roster of clients.

Accumulating Bosses

I can’t wait to open my own gym so that I can stop working for the man and finally start making my own schedule... 

My boss is an impatient idiot who has no idea how undervalued I am around here…

If I had my own operation I’d free myself of these problems and start focusing on just the stuff that I enjoy…

Any (or all) of these sound like something that’s run through your head?

Well guess what…

The moment you open that hypothetical business, and you move on from the life of reporting to a boss, your new job is to accumulate paying clients. 

Want to know the funny thing about those paying clients?

Every single one of them becomes your new boss the minute you swipe their credit card. If you’re especially good at building your business, you’ll get the pleasure of having hundreds of these micro bosses.

If one cranky manager was the impetus for jumping ship to “work for yourself,” can you imagine how fun dozens upon dozens of them will be to satisfy?

You think they don’t have strong opinions on what time you should open the gym? Or how late you should be expected to keep it open? Or how much you should be charging for them to be there? Or who you should hire to join your team? Or what temperature you should keep the space at? Or what music you should play?

No matter how you go about earning your living, you’re going to have to answer to someone. 

Be careful what you wish for.

3 Reasons Why I Choose to Treat PT Clients in the Midst of a Busy Gym

This week I have a guest post for you from CSP’s on-site Physical Therapist and owner of Move Strong Physical Therapy, Andrew Millett. Time after time I have found myself asking Andrew why he chooses to run his operation in the midst of a chaotic CSP training environment, and he decided to put his reasoning into a blog format. Enjoy!

I began training at Cressey Sports Performances as a client in 2008.  I was 5 months post-op from my 2nd ACL reconstruction and had recently moved home after graduating PT school. I was desperately in need of a place to train, and thankfully my college roommate said: “You’re like 15 minutes from Cressey’s, go there.”

The rest is history.

Not so fast... 

I’d been reading the content of Eric Cressey and Tony Gentilcore during grad school, but had minimal knowledge of their facility. I kicked off the relationship with an informational visit that took place on October 4th, 2008.

After just minutes in the gym, I knew I needed to sign up. There was something about being inside of CP (Cressey Performance at the time, now Cressey Sports Performance) that drove me literally and figuratively to train there.

My mother periodically asked me why I would drive 30+ minutes (some athletes drive 3+ hours to train), and the best I could do was to say that the people and environment simply aren’t replicated elsewhere.

Christian Wonders always improves Andrew’s work environment when in the building.

I’ve been a regular at CSP since 2008. During that time, I got married, had two kids, bought a home, and now own my own performance physical therapy business, Move Strong Physical Therapy, inside of the current CSP Massachusetts location. The PT business I speak of is unique in that I deliberately choose not to treat in your prototypical PT setting. Instead of quiet office space, I choose the controlled chaos of a busy gym as my “treatment room,” of sorts.

Here are three reasons why I choose to take this approach:

1. Logistics

From a logistical standpoint, you can’t beat our set up. Being 10 feet from a trap bar deadlift platform and a squat rack isn’t seen too often in a physical therapy clinic. Whether our clients want to get back to pitching 95+mph, to being able to lift more weight, or to perform their respective sport at the highest level, it wouldn’t make sense to be located far from all of the equipment we needed.

When I first started our business, we (Eric, Pete and I) bounced around a few ideas of where we wanted to be situated.  We discussed a potential build-out that would involve renovating part of the existing CSP space, but at the end of the day, “in the middle of the action” was where I knew we needed to be.  

I’m pleased to say that we have access to 12,000+ square feet of gym space, equipped with everything we need to take care of our athletes and clients. Additionally, our location is within a few feet from the door where all CSP clients transition from office entryway to the training floor. This allows us to see 100% of the faces coming through the door to train. Whether it be an athlete who we currently work with, or a healthy CSP athletes who could one day be a client, this setting allows us to be an easily accessible resource for both the training staff, and the training clients who may have a question for us.

Being constrained to a room with walls, a ceiling, and a door wouldn’t allow for this level of immediate exposure.  

2. The Psychological Impact of Being Injured and Around Other Athletes

While I don’t know of a specific research study or funded endeavor that looks at the psychological impact of rehabbing inside of a facility while surrounded by high-level athletes, I can say with certainty that positive vibes come from it.

Most PT clinics offer a quiet environment that looks and feels like an office. While there is nothing wrong with this, I have different goals for my own treatment environment. Suffering a major injury that requires surgical intervention or having a “wear and tear” type of setback can be demoralizing to anyone, especially an athlete.  I myself endured two ACL reconstructions/medial meniscus repairs and one “full” meniscectomy, so I understand the grind.

The impact of being around other athletes working hard, lifting weights, and performing high-level athletic movements is awesome.  When you are injured and struggling to perform even basic day-to-day tasks, looking out onto the training floor to see your future self doing those same movements one day can be both motivating and inspiring. 

As physical therapists, we are seen as treating physical, orthopedic sports injuries, but I’d be remiss not to address the impact an injury has on an athlete’s psyche.  We make sure to address this 1:1 with an athlete, but being on a training floor with other athletes can only help the overall recovery process.

Andrew and John O’Neil nailing the background coaching position…

3. The Chaos

Why do I choose to to treat out in the chaos?  

There is just something about it…something that you can’t describe until you experience it. It would be similar to attending your favorite band’s concert and experiencing it firsthand versus someone else going and telling you about it.

There are countless inspiring moments when I can remember the music being loud, the weights clanging, and the athletes working hard. I feed off the energy in the air and the infectious environment.  

A Rising Tide Lifts All Ships

The environment that Move Strong PT operates in is like nothing I have ever seen, and has proven to be a great differentiator in our model. 

It isn’t uncommon for a client or parent to mention the invigorating yet somewhat overwhelming atmosphere they unexpectedly walk into. I’m always the first to say that it may look disorganized, but it is a “controlled chaos”.  Every coach is working hard to make sure each athlete gets the attention they need, every physical therapist is working with their client to coach them up and guide them back to their respective field or court to get back to playing.

I may have to raise my voice a little louder than usual, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. I feel spoiled having countless pieces of equipment, getting to listen to great music throughout the day, and getting to work with motivated athletes who want to get back to playing and competing as soon as possible.  I am grateful everyday to be able to “work” in such a great environment.

About the Author: Andrew Millett is a practicing physical therapist in the field of orthopedic and sports medicine physical therapy.  He helps to bridge the gap between physical therapy and strength and conditioning.  By evaluating and treating his clients using multiple lenses, such as the Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA), etc., the main goal for all of his clients are for them to move and feel better and to keep their body functioning at highest levels. You can find additional details on his Move Strong PT operation here.

52 Blogs and Newsletters in 52 Weeks, and the Lessons Learned Along the Way

Until this year, I could count the number of successful resolutions I’ve employed on one finger. That first success was building the habit of drinking 20oz of water the moment I wake up, and I’ve been doing so 365 days a year for roughly a decade now.

My second successful resolution was more of a promise to myself, and if I’m being entirely honest, I’m not sure I believed I’d pull it off when I decided to take a shot. It was right around this time last year that I resolved to write a blog and publish a newsletter during every week of 2019.

I did it. This blog marks 52 weeks of showing up as promised.

On top of the weekly blog posts, I managed to crank out 52 of my “Friday 4” newsletters, including weekly reminders that I’d published new material, and 208 articles that I found particularly useful in charting the course of my own business. I’m not feeling ambitious enough to bother counting the words, but I’d imagine this means that I churned out somewhere between 40-50,000 words of content..

Some of it was pretty solid, some of it was unremarkable, and all of it was worth the effort.

With 2020 now within my line of sight, I’d like to share the most important takeaways I’ve gleaned from making 2019 my year of consistent content creation. If you’re considering chasing a similar dream in the coming year, I’d encourage you to take these five lessons into consideration:

1. Under-promising and over-delivering will help you maintain sanity.

If you want to give yourself some real anxiety, go ahead and declare to the world that you’re going to hit a content output goal and make it an aggressive one.

Ideas come in waves for me. Sometimes the dry periods are especially discouraging, while others feature weeks where I feel like I have three blogs in the tank. I made a 2019 habit of putting my content surplus on hold for future weeks when times were good, and it eventually helped me to keep the streak alive during holiday weeks and especially busy times at Cressey Sports Performance.

This habit is especially important if you’re just launching a blog, podcast, or newsletter now. You’re going to come out of the gates in a full sprint thinking that idea generation is easy because the first five posts poured right out of you. This steady stream of wisdom is going to come to a screeching halt sooner rather than later if you don’t pace yourself, so hit the brakes and make a habit of establishing manageable expectations with your audience.

52 weeks in the books of successfully rolling out the metaphorical typewriter

2. You don’t HAVE to announce every new post.

There were a handful of weeks where I finished a blog that I wasn’t 100% thrilled with.

Sometimes I second-guessed the primary takeaway, while others I felt like I could have done a better job of firming up my argument. Those were the weeks where I thought to myself: No one is going to like this, and then they won’t trust me next week when I ask them to come back and trust my words.

And then I had a realization: Very few people were sitting at their computers refreshing their browser each week waiting to hear what I was going to say.

In fact, there may not be a single person out there who fit this description. With this in mind, there was no shame in publishing and choosing not to venture over to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to declare “NEW BLOG.” This happened twice this past year. Each week I hit the publish button, kept a promise I’d made to myself, and let the uncertainty slip away. On each occasion, to my surprise, the article in question made the weekly PTDC List of “best fitness articles,” so I’m obviously not a fantastic judge of content quality.

I’ll never tell you which weeks they were, but you’re more than welcome to take on the task of deciding which pieces qualified as numbers 51 and 52 in the content scrap heap of 2019. Hopefully you find some especially impactful good stuff along the way if you do accept the challenge.

3. Analytics off-set lack of engagement on social.

Some weeks I fired off a newsletter and didn’t receive a single response, while others would generate 15 or 20 unexpected emails in return. The same thing would periodically happen with blog posts I’d invested ample time and energy into creating. Thankfully, I could always take comfort in the analytics and see that I was still hitting my targeted 40% newsletter open rate just about every week of the year, and also confirm that traffic was in fact being driven to my website.

While Facebook likes, retweets, and social media comments are always nice indicator of content quality, the reality is that sometimes you’re going to feel like your best effort resulted in the sounds of crickets chirping. Those are the moments where your actual website and newsletter analytics will keep you moving forward and reminded you that there are still people out there clicking on links.

The numbers don’t lie…trust them.

4. Chase small victories.

On January 1st of 2019 I put four boxes on the side of my Evernote to-do list. Each of them signified a Friday that would take place during that month. My objective was simple: Just have enough self-respect to finish what you started for the first month of the year, Pete.

Every Friday afternoon at 12:01pm after my newsletter officially went out, I’d check the box as complete, and enjoy a moment of success.

Showing up with four blogs and newsletters in four weeks really wasn’t that big of a deal, and I walked away with a small win. On February 1st I added the necessary boxes that would take me through the end of Q1. That felt a little ambitious, but nothing like adding 48 more empty boxes would have.

Q1 came and went with weekly successes, so I maintained my to-do list check-box habit through Q2. Once I hit 26 weeks of output, the finish line started to seem a little more reachable.

I then started telling the people around me that I was chasing a goal, and a handful of them stayed on my case when I was complaining about lacking time or the ideas necessary to churn out a blog each week. Public accountability mattered, but I chose not to use it as a tool until I’d knocked out the first 50% of my goal.

Here I am hitting publish for a 52nd blog of the year, realizing that chunking my overarching goal into manageable smaller wins made all the difference. I’d have quit quickly if I had decided to mark off one of fifty-two empty boxes on January 4th, 2019. Instead, I slapped a check mark on one of four, and felt like I’d made significant progress toward something I valued.

Whatever big-picture goals you choose to set for yourself, make sure there are measurable achievements you can document for yourself along the way.

5. If You show up consistently for your audience, they’ll show up for you.

Somewhere around the mid-point of this past year I began to see an up-tick in unsolicited reading suggestions.

• Hey Pete - Just read this article and thought it might be a fit for your newsletter.

• Hey Pete - This one has your weekly list written all over it.

• Hey Pete - Not sure if you’re looking for suggestions, but this feels like a Friday-4 article.

There eventually came weeks where, if I wanted, I could have sourced 100% of my newsletter content from my own inbox thanks to engaged readers. This was NEVER the case back when I was knocking out inconsistent emails and failing to keep my promise to show up each week.

There were a few years there where I probably should have changed the title of the effort to my “Every Second or Third Friday 4.” Thankfully I changed this habit in 2019, and my consistency actually resulted in these readers making the content curation process consistently easier.

So, what’s in store for 2020?

I’ve got to be honest…banging out a blog each week this past year has been a challenge, and one that I’m not thinking I’ll replicate in 2020. The newsletter, on the other hand, is a refreshing habit that forces me to be continuously learning.

With this in mind, I intend to maintain my newsletter habit moving forward, scale back on my blogging frequency by as much as 75%, and thoroughly explore the idea of introducing a podcast in its place.

Regardless of the direction I take content creation in the year to come, I want to sincerely thank you for bothering to consume any of it to date. I hope that you have found something that has made your life in the fitness industry even the slightest bit easier along the way.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, make sure to say hello on Instagram or Twitter, and subscribe to my newsletter here.

3 Types of Networks Every Gym Owner Needs

Owning a gym (or just about any business) can occasionally feel like I’m alone on an island. While I have employees around me at all hours of the day most days of the week, I’m still the only business owner on-site for as many as seven months of the year. 

There was a time when my business partner Eric sat two offices away on a year-round basis, giving me an outlet through which I could vent or brainstorm, but with him now spending the bulk of his time at our second location in Florida I‘ve had to relinquish that privilege. 

So, what’s a gym owner to do?

My best solution to date has been to build out a comprehensive and engaged network.

In my world, there are three different, yet equally important networks to consider. Here’s a look at all three, along with my rationale for maintaining each:

I’m on board with the cliche “your network is your net worth.”

First, fellow gym owners.

“I like talking to you, haha, you make me feel better. I feel like very few people get it and share this same experience, we need to hang more.”

This is a text message (hence the lack of attention to grammar) I received earlier this week from an accomplished gym owner. We were firing back and forth a steady stream of thoughts relating to structuring employee compensation packages, long-term business development, and more. He wasn’t necessarily looking for advice so much as he was looking for an empathetic ear.

All of us need to have an outlet to discuss problems that are unique to gym ownership, as few outside of this competitive space can appreciate the unexpected headaches that come with balancing athlete and parent expectations while simultaneously building a team that often features contributors coming from varying of stages in life.

If you haven’t done so already, extend an offer to the local gym owner who you don’t see as an existential threat to your operation to grab a cup of coffee and chat. You will likely find that your troubles are not as specific to your own situation as you might think.   

Second, a “challenge network.”

I first came across the term “challenge network” just a week or two ago while listening to this fascinating podcast interview Tim Ferriss did with well-known author and college professor, Adam Grant. During their conversation Grant mentioned that he makes a habit of surrounding himself with people who are unafraid to call him on his bullshit, for lack of a better term.

As I thought about my own professional situation, I quickly came to realize that I also employ a fairly strong-willed challenge network, and I mean that in the best way possible. 

My business partner and I routinely punch holes in each other’s ideas long before dollars are sunk into ambitious projects, my Director of Performance here in MA never hesitates to tell me when a decision I’m about to make from a management or leadership standpoint will be poorly received by the rest of the team, and my wife is sure as hell going to tell me I’m dead wrong when outlining my stance on difficult issues relating to my business while at the dinner table.

I’m surrounded by people who call me on my bullshit, which is why I rarely make unfixable mistakes. If you also own a gym, you need this type of network in your world.

Lastly, the fitness outsiders.

If there is one single opportunity for growth and innovation that I see in our industry that stands head and shoulders above the rest, it would have to be making a habit of stepping well outside of the fitness space to identify trends and ideas. As currently constituted, our industry is made up of a well-intentioned collection of people who read the same handful of books, attend the same handful of seminars, and listen to the same handful of gurus.

This is a problem, as we’re effectively commoditizing our service offerings by creating a never-ending series of cloned fitness businesses. As a result, consumers bounce around comparing prices instead of authenticity and skill.

This is exactly why I publish a newsletter each week specifically featuring my four favorite recent pieces of content from well outside of the fitness space. I spend my week scrolling the feed of the Harvard Business Review, Ad Week, Business Insider, and more in search of novel concepts that are readily applicable to the day-to-day operation of my business, and then I pass it along to my list. (check out the newsletter archive here and if it seems to be your speed, feel free to sign up on the left side of the page)

I also take this habit offline and apply it to my day-to-day interpersonal habits. I’ve assembled a network of entrepreneurs who I immediately default to in times of confusion in my efforts to run a gym, and nine times out of ten they see things I’ve failed to identify for myself. 

This past summer I rounded up this eclectic collection of friends and got us all together for dinner and a live recording of the Masters of Scale Podcast in Boston. There were entrepreneurs from the consumer goods space, insurance, personal finance, software tech, and fitness (myself and Eric). We ate, we drank, and we discussed each other’s challenges and recent victories. While the fitness space may have been a topic of conversation for a portion of the night, it was likely for the benefit of the other owner/operators at the table who were also looking for ideas from outside of their own field.

Long story short, it’s okay to identify as “the fitness guy” as a business owner, but it’s probably not a great idea to socialize exclusively with people who also fit that description. There’s a big world of business lessons out there waiting to be learned from people who don’t have the slightest interest in the cost of a new power rack.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, make sure to say hello on Instagram or Twitter, and subscribe to my newsletter here.

Trusting the New Coach - A Challenging Conversation With Clients

Most gyms start with a single coach. That’s one person establishing meaningful relationships built on trust with every client who walks through the doors. The intimacy of the small training space and the one-on-one relationship is wonderful as it relates to delivering an authentic experience, but eventually we all want to generate more business, drive more revenue, and climb.

It’s at that point in time that the one-man model begins to feel unsustainable. There isn’t enough time in the day to respond to all of the emails, return all of the voicemails, and take care of all of the paying clients…so what do you do?

Something’s gotta give, and that usually means carving out payroll dollars to bring on coach number two.

This post, however, isn’t about how much cashflow you need in order to add that coach (it depends), whether to make a full or part-time hire, or the merits of employees versus independent contractors. Instead, today’s post touches on the ongoing challenge of convincing existing clients to trust the new guy.

They deserve to be skeptical. After all, they signed up to train specifically with you in the first place, so why should they be expected to embrace a change of course without any push-back?

Here’s a look at my three suggested methods for tackling this problem:

1. Put your ego aside and aim to be second best.

Whether you believe it to be true or not, what’s the harm in telling your clients that you hired the new guy because he’s a better coach than you are? Do you think that they’ll suddenly think less of both of you and quit training at your gym? Your goal should always be to build employees who are, in fact, better coaches than you. There are no rewards for being the business owner who also happens to be the best technician in your space.

The time is now to start building a rockstar team, and that starts with telling the people around you that you’ve identified their new favorite coach and begin positioning him as a better option than yourself.

2. Don’t just talk about it…be about it.

If you really want to send a message to your regulars that they can trust the new guy, show them yourself. Ask coach number two to take you through an assessment and design your training material. Then I want you to actually execute the programming to a T, and quickly realize that you are seeing results because we all need a coach, coaches included.

You think clients are going to second-guess the new guy if they learn that you’ve put your own training needs in his hands and ask that they do as well?

Don’t just ask that people trust the new guy, show them how to do it.

3. Make him the expert.

If you’re like most gym owners these days, you make a habit of creating informational content that both demonstrates your expertise, and educates your audience. This means you’re in the habit of standing in front of a camera demonstrating proper technique, publishing the occasional tutorial instagram post, or writing up an information-packed blog.

Why not keep the message the same, but change the voice delivering it?

From this moment forward, at least for the foreseeable future, I want you to fade into the background and let your newest hire be the face of your social media content. You can micromanage the message all you want, so long as the person delivering it is the one who you’re trying to position as worthy of your clients’ trust.

You’re not parting ways with your expert reputation…

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 12+ years working alongside Eric Cressey, our business’s namesake, it is that no matter who is doing great work on his behalf, he is perceived to have a hand in it. You don’t have to worry about someone else stealing your shine if and when that new employee is in fact a rockstar. In fact, you’ll be assumed to be a driving force behind that performance.

There is a downside, however, and that is that you’ve got to own their failures as well. This being said, you’re going to do that whether you successfully position the new guy as a winner in the minds of your clients, or allow him to be perceived as an inferior option relegated to only new clients moving forward. Either way, it’s on you.

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Two Things Happen Every Time You Bash Planet Fitness

The Lunk Alarm…

If you read my blog consistently, you’re likely someone who has bemoaned this Planet Fitness positioning strategy both publicly and privately. If for some reason you are unaware of their marketing efforts, this massive chain of commercial gyms has gone to great lengths to demonize the people that we private sector facility owners typically aspire to put in our own gyms -- the lifters who want to gain strength by “picking things up and putting them down.”

I understand your distaste for this approach to marketing. I can relate to your frustration when clients return from business trips complaining that they were asked not to follow your programming as designed because deadlifting is strictly forbidden. I get it.

Here’s the thing…

Every time you publicly declare Planet Fitness (or similar big box gyms) to be evil or wreckless in the way they glorify their “judgement-free” training space, you hurt your business and the industry as a whole just a tiny bit more. 

Most gyms, yours likely included, cater primarily to the general fitness community. As such, you dream of filling your gym with the soccer moms who watch television on their couch after putting their kids to bed.

Just so you know, these people find it nearly impossible to avoid the advertising efforts of the fitness behemoth that is Planet Fitness. In fact, according to Yahoo Finance, this publicly traded company has a shade under $220M in cash on-hand at this moment, which goes a long way toward crafting their desired narrative about the fitness industry as a whole.

Like it or not, the biggest advertising spenders in the fitness industry are naturally perceived to be the voice of the industry as a whole. As a result, many people see Planet Fitness as the typical representation of what maintaining a gym habit looks like, and your business is simply an expensive alternative to consider.

With this in mind, two undesirable things happen every time you choose to vent about this topic:

1. When you position Planet Fitness as the villain in your potential customer’s story, you position the fitness industry as a whole as villainous in nature because of your insistence upon introducing confusion and fear to the narrative. No bueno.

2. You’ve just made your customers feel unintelligent because of their prior purchasing decisions. I say this because most of the people you are looking to sell to have at one point or another paid for a commercial gym membership in their lives (myself included). Your aggressive stance on Planet Fitness and similar commercial gym memberships just made the person standing in front of you feel like a part of the problem. Nice work.

Collin’s thoughts on the advice to come.

Shift your approach…

Here’s what I’m going to tell you...and you may find it to be just as frustrating as my five year old son Collin does every time I send it his way: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

The correct response to any inquiries relating to considered fitness alternatives is as follows:

I’m a proponent of any physical activity that gets people moving and improves their quality of life. If Planet Fitness is your jam, I strongly encourage you to keep on paying for your membership and keep on showing up to get your work in.

Once you’ve pivoted away from negativity, you’ll likely find salesmanship to be considerably less exhausting.

One last thing:

I stumbled upon this blog topic when listening to this fantastic interview with Dr. JJ Peterson. I strongly recommend you check it out if you’re interested in hearing the message delivered in a more coherent and thoughtful manner!

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The Useless Metric That Tells You Nothing About the Health of Your Gym

Anyone who opened a gym 10+ years ago, built a huge following, and continues to kill it today might tell you that he could do it again from scratch in current market conditions. He’d either be lying to you, or just blissfully unaware of the reality that what got him here likely wouldn’t be as effective as it once was.

I don’t believe that we (Cressey Sports Performance) would fail if we tried to start again, but I am certain that our goals and objectives would need to shift. I think we’d kill it locally if starting from scratch today, but I am also aware of how difficult it would be to create a national presence and brand awareness the same way we did in the past.

What changed?

In short, everything changed.

Here’s a little peek at how the landscape has shifted since we opened the doors on CSP on July 13th of 2007:

• Twitter became “a thing.” In fact, the platform emerged less than a year before we opened, and didn’t hit a point of critical mass until well into our early stages of business.

• Facebook introduced the newsfeed, rolled out “business pages,” created their own advertising platform, and bought a tiny little operation called Instagram.

• Speaking of which, Instagram actually started as a platform called Bourbon at a time when we were just about to sign our third lease at CSP.

• Roughly 100 gyms (a guess, but likely a safe one) opened up shop within an hour of our facility.

• Baseball players almost universally discovered strength and conditioning to be a competitive advantage, and have since watched it morph into a standardized component of their off-season that is expected of anyone who hopes to compete at a higher level (this was anything but the case when we began).

• Gurus, influencers, and masterminds flooded the internet offering short-cuts to building the perfect fitness business operation. Some of these service providers are worth their weight in gold, while most others are pitching gym solutions without having ever owned or operated a gym. Go figure.

Like I said, everything has changed, and that is why I believe we’d struggle if trying to recreate “the magic.”.

CSP’s inception pre-dates many of these icons…

We had a wonderful little thing called first-mover advantage when we decided to chase the baseball niche, and there really can only be one (or a small handful) of first-movers in any given space. I also know better than to think our experience is enough to jump into a hyper-competitive market today and simply roll out the same approach that got us here.

Why am I telling you this?

I’m sharing because many of the gym owners I engage with want to employ social media audience size as a metric that somehow indicates their self-worth. The idea that achieving a national following or micro-influencer status is the key to success is a joke when the business in question isn’t set up in a way that allows for monetization of a large following.

For example, the personal training gym you own doesn’t need tens of thousands of Instagram followers in order to fill a one-on-one studio with a capacity for 40-60 sessions per week...it needs 30+ engaged audience members who are buying in to what you are selling.

There are two important realities to keep in mind as you compare your online presence to the big operation with the huge following: 

1. A small local service business doesn’t extract much additional value (outside of a little bit of social proof) from adding followers from outside of their market. 

2. The gyms with the largest followings have often been in the game for as long as a decade and enjoy the natural momentum of growth that comes with having a big list. Plus, they’re probably chasing the big follower counts so that they can drive attendance at live events, fill masterminds, and sell the occasional digital product.

How many of you are losing sleep because you can’t get your mentorship, seminar series, or digital product up and running? That’s right -- almost none. This is likely because you know better than to concern yourself with any of these things until you’ve got a viable and sustainable training product, which isn’t built on impressing people scrolling the Instagram feed three time zones away.

You might need to hear this — we could not recreate the current size or reach of our audience at CSP at the same pace if starting today thanks to the recent massive influx of operations looking to do that very thing. As one of my recent consulting clients recently vented to me: “It’s incredibly difficult to find my voice on social media when everyone else seems to be shouting at the top of their lungs at the same time.”

If you want to stress about something, let it be retention, employee satisfaction, or any handful of other factors that impact your ability to put bodies in the gym today. The problem of not having the ability to swipe up on your Instagram stories isn’t what’s holding you back...you can trust me on this.

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Great Coaches are Hard to Find, and it's Partially Your Fault

There are three emails in my inbox right this moment from gym owners looking for assistance in making a hire. Week after week, I get essentially the same request: Would you mind putting me in touch with any recent CSP intern alums who may be interested in a job opportunity? We need a great coach.

I love receiving this request, as it increases the likelihood I can do right by a current or former intern and repay the favor in the form of helping to secure a quality coaching role. This being said, rarely, if ever at all, do interns bite on the opportunities that I drop into our CSP Intern alumni networking page on Facebook.

Why is this, you ask?

It’s quite simple, really — people aren’t all that excited to hop on a plane and relocate their lives for part-time roles that “may” turn into full-time employment at some point down the road. 

Can you blame them?

You see, at least 9 out of 10 opportunities that roll into my inbox come in the form of part-time roles “to start.” In the rare occurrence that I do come across a salaried position with a full-time job description, engagement shoots through the roof.

In fact, just last week I sent a full-time job description for a role in Colorado to four former interns, none of which live inside of a two-hour flight radius of the opportunity. Two politely declined thanks to satisfaction in their current roles, two asked to be connected with the employer, and at least one of them has a flight booked to interview in-person in the coming weeks.

People will make moves for concrete job opportunities. They will not, however, trust a gym owner they don’t know when told “we’re about to blow up and when we do we’ll get you to full-time.”

If you’re one of the many gym owners out there lamenting the challenges of finding great people, but will not entertain the idea of taking on a full-time coach, the battle you are fighting will continue to rage on for the indefinite future.

Ask yourself this: Why do I expect a talented coach to take a huge risk on me if I’m not willing to take a sizable risk on him?

I get it, this is expensive.

I’m not oblivious to the fact that adding a full-time coach is both expensive and anxiety-inducing for many gym owners. However, I rarely find that those same gym owners are extracting maximum efficiencies from themselves and their existing teams at the moment that they decide to add bodies to the coaching staff. Instead, they look at adding additional part-time coaches to a model that already employs one or more part-time coaches.

I reached out to my friend and fellow gym owner, Doug Spurling, to get his two cents because he has an “only full-time hires” policy at his gym. He shared several compelling reasons for this unofficial policy:

“We talk as an industry about building culture. Well our culture starts with our team. There’s something to be said for a full-time team member who’s here for the mission, excited to make a career out of this, and not treating the job as a side gig they fit in when they can. We’ve had tremendous success employing almost exclusively full-time because I’m able to drive a true team approach, hold them to higher standards, and it becomes much easier to deliver an exceptional product on the day-to-day basis. The communication is better, there’s true team work, and we collectively drive culture by being our authentic selves. My goal is to create an environment where coaches can create a career, buy homes, start families, and hopefully one day retire from.”

Strong community and team vibe up at Spurling Fitness

It probably wont blow your mind to learn that Doug runs a wildly successful gym. What may surprise you, however, is to learn that he does so out of a small suburban community in the state of Maine. We’re not talking about a sprawling metropolis here.

If you want to employ fully engaged and productive coaches, you should be looking to make 100% of your part-time employees full-time before adding additional staff. If you have a part-time coach on your staff, and are looking to add another, what you really have is a single full-time role waiting to be filled.

Your clients crave consistency in the faces they see in the gym every day, and the best way to meet that expectation is to deliver one “whole” coach as opposed to two “half” ones. It might suck to hear this, but your current part-time guy likely either needs to jump to a full-time role, or jump ship entirely to make room for someone who wants to be all-in.

Apologies for the rant, but I want both to line up better opportunities for my people moving forward, and to see you build the team you dream of as quickly as possible. 

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Boost Lead Conversion by Making the Distinction Between Top-Down & Bottom-Up Selling

Canned sales pitches will kill your lead conversion numbers if you operate a gym in the performance training space. Sure, structure matters, but not when it comes at the expense of relevance to client wants and needs.

Let me explain…

We have a relatively specific client avatar here at Cressey Sports Performance - MA (CSP) as it relates to our core clientele: the 14-22 year old baseball player. While we’re known on the internet for accommodating professional athletes, the reality is that less than 15% of our clients fall outside of this aforementioned age range and background.

Here’s the interesting thing about these young amateur athletes…they only occasionally reach out on their own to inquire about our services. In fact, by my count, there can be as many as four different types of people who will reach out on behalf of a youth athlete. 

That list includes but is not limited to: parents, advisors (agents who one day hope to see an athlete sign a professional contract so that they can start getting paid), high school or summer league coaches, and even the occasional strength coach who is willing to acknowledge that he knows what he doesn’t know and is willing to ask for some assistance.

Delivering the same sales language to five different types of people would convert a considerably lower volume of business as personalizing the approach would, right? So, how do you adjust moving forward?

The idea of having as many as five distinctly different sales pitches to design and deliver might be daunting, and it thankfully isn’t necessary. Instead, all you really need is to appreciate the distinction between top-down and bottom-up selling.

What the hell does that mean, you ask?

In a top-down selling scenario, it is your job to appeal to the decision maker. This means that if the parent is the one holding the credit card, he’s situated at “the top of the organization.” As mentioned earlier, parents are often more drawn to the aspects of our service offering that will reduce the likelihood that they end up sitting in front of an ortho discussing surgical options, so I lean heavily on injury prevention and responsible coaching.

This is the visual parents are trying to avoid…

In a bottom-up selling scenario, my job is to convince the end user (the athlete) that he needs our services so bad that he feels compelled to go home and bully his dad into spending with us. In a sense, my bottom up sales strategy is about putting the athlete in a position to go home and do some top-down selling of his own on my behalf.

As you can tell by this point, the biggest difference between the two is the motivating factors driving the sale.

So long as you’re able to identify whether you’re specifically pitching the decision maker or the end user, you should be capable of crafting the right selling approach. Just don’t make the mistake of pitching them both the same way if you have dreams of closing business on nearly every lead.

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10 Assumptions You Should Stop Making About Your Clients

We all do it…

Every day of the week we make assumptions about our clients’ needs, their attitudes in the gym, and their training goals. If you aspire to make and keep your valued clients happy moving forward, you can start by kicking these ten habits:

1. Stop assuming clients read the welcome packet.

Sure, you pulled together a beautiful collection of answers to frequently asked questions, plugged in some pretty pictures of the space, inserted gloriously detailed staff bios, and outlined how your payment structure works…but nobody read it. If you want to ensure that people get these messages, you’ve got to tell them again and again. And then tell them one more time.

They probably didn’t even read the first page.

2. Stop assuming clients will tell you when they’re annoyed.

Every client handles their own annoyance differently, and I can assure you that vocal complainers are the exception and not the rule. Your problem, which you may not even realize exists, is that nearly every paying client in the gym has something in mind that they’d like to see you improve within your operation, but only a small handful will tell you what that is without being asked. Always ask for feedback.

3. Stop assuming clients care that you had a bad day.

There are a number of coaches out there who treat their clients like therapists between sets. It’s fine (expected, even) if clients bring their stress to you as a coach during down time between sets, as it is a sign that they trust you and value your opinion. It is not fine, however, for you to take that liberty with the time they’ve paid a premium for. The service you provide is typically expected to be the best part of their day.

4. On a similar note…stop assuming every client wants to make small talk.

Just because we want our coaches to possess extroverted tendencies doesn’t mean we demand that they impose their gregarious nature on every person who walks through the door. Some people want to be coached when warranted, and then left alone with their thoughts in between sets. It is perfectly okay to give them their space.

5. Stop assuming elite athletes want to be fenced off from gen-pop clients.

Gym owners in the performance space often conclude (without asking) that their “elite” athletes want to be allotted designated training times and privacy from the boring normal people who don’t exercise for a living. Those owners are typically wrong. It only takes a conversation or two to realize that 99 out of 100 professional athletes are regular people when they step off the playing field. They crave normal social interaction like you or I. Let them engage with the locals.

Don’t build it purely on assumptions…

6. Stop assuming clients perpetually crave facility upgrades.

We’ve upgraded our gym on more than one occasion over the years, and each time I have been surprised to receive push-back from and handful of our most loyal clients. “You guys are going to get too corporate…the bigger you get, the less attention we’ll receive…I don’t want to give up the garage gym feel we already have here.” Make sure you’re investing in improved training space because clients are asking for it, and not because you’re guessing they would if given the chance.

7. Stop assuming gender-matching is imperative in coaching assignments.

We don’t have a whole lot of female coaches or interns who come through our space. With just 8% of our intern applicant pool being female in the past 36 months, shifting this trend is a big challenge. When we do line up a great female coach to contribute, I avoid making the mistake of assuming that they MUST be in the room for every female athlete assessment, and MUST be assigned to one-on-one coaching duties with new female clients during week one. Unless the coach or client specifically requests the pairing, the next coach in line, regardless of gender, is typically the right pick in a setting where every coach on the team will be working with every athlete in some capacity during a their time with us. There’s no need to force the interaction.

8. Stop assuming your longest-tenured, most experienced clients want hand-holding.

Being so experienced with our programming that you don’t need a coach assigned to is a badge of honor that many of our “regulars” proudly wear here at CSP. Sure, our unofficial rule is that every paying client has a staff member assigned to work one-on-one with them during the first week of a new program, but some rules are made to be broken. Make your most loyal clients feel trusted to be self-starters and take comfort in knowing that they’ll approach you if they’re stumped. So long as there’s eyes on them as they begin their new material, everyone will be just fine.

These two may not show up together without being asked.

9. Stop assuming clients will look for ways to bring friends without being asked.

It seems like common sense that people would want to improve their training experience by sharing it with friends, but they rarely take the initiative to make it happen on their own. I’ll bet you often find yourself thinking: “Why don’t any of this kid’s teammates train with us? He loves it here.” Don’t stop there. Walk up to that athlete in the gym and ask him yourself: “You know, Johnny, you’re obviously killing it in the weight room with all of this progress you’ve made in recent months. When are we going to get some of your buddies in to join?” Most of the time you’ll learn that high school kids aren’t all that proactive until you put the idea in their heads.

10. Stop assuming your clients will take offense when you need to raise prices.

There are very few products or services in our lives that do not increase in price over time. This is why you should stop convincing yourself that a reasonable price increase every couple of years will be interpreted as some sort of attack on one’s character. Look your client in the eye, tell them that your cost of delivering an exceptional service has increased over the years, and then exhale as they look you in the eye and say: “I get it. Thank you for giving me a heads up.”

Less Guessing, More Asking

The primary takeaway from this list is that we could all benefit from killing our habit of guessing what is going on in the minds of our clients. Increase your questions asked, decrease your assumptions made, and start enjoying a more satisfied and engaged client base.

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Gym Owner Musings - Installment #18

I’ve recently come to realize that Twitter is my favorite testing ground for new material. When an idea begins to take shape in my head, I take a few moments to articulate it concisely enough to fit within the confines of a single Tweet, and then see how it plays on that social platform. Occasionally I say something that drives higher engagement than normal, and choose to take the thought a few steps further by elaborating here in the blog.

I’ve once again hit that point, meaning it’s time to unload a couple of quick-hitter discussion topics that have been kicking around in my head, my notes app, and on my Twitter feed.

Here’s your October edition of Tweet-fueled Gym Owner Musings:

1. Your gym’s training outcomes might be hindered by your overzealous chase for revenue.

Keeping your gym profitable a logical goal, and this often requires that we compromise on the type of client we service. For example, you might want to be known as the best football combine-prep service provider in your area, but you also need to make payroll next week, so you’re not going to turn away the father of the JV quarterback on principal. Any revenue is good revenue, right?

Not so fast.

The problem I’m seeing again and again in struggling gyms is a willingness to step far outside of one’s scope of practice and make promises that the training model is not prepared to deliver on. More specifically, I am tired of seeing gym owners with personal training certifications delivering their own interpretation of physical therapy in scenarios where they know, deep down, they are overstepping their professional boundaries. Whether you’re in the red or not, there is never a time where it is okay to put your revenue-generation objectives ahead of the best interest of the client in front of you.

This also applies to the gym owners who agree to deliver “individualized strength training” to 8 and 9 year old children while knowing full well that it is unproductive and irresponsible. Showing up with cash in-hand can’t be the only pre-requisite for working with you..

If you continue to accept business that isn’t properly served by your existing model, you’ll continue to generate undesirable results at best. At worst, you’ll hurt somebody. Do the right thing and point these leads in the direction of a properly-equipped service provider.

You had a full knee replacement two weeks ago? Sure, my personal training can get you back to 100% in a couple of weeks! BRING MONEY.

2. There’s a disconnect between what you think you’re selling and what clients think they’re buying.

If you follow ten gyms on Instagram, I’d guess that five of them routinely advertise the training programs they deliver, the skills of their staff, and the equipment in their gym. These businesses are deaf to the fact that most of their clients don’t see themselves as buying supervised exercise or the tools used to execute it.

Instead, they’re paying for the opportunity to immerse themselves in a positive training environment. They’re paying to feel like a part of something bigger than themselves. They’re paying for your staff to serve as role models for their impressionable children.

So why aren’t we all highlighting these characteristics in our marketing and social media efforts?

The next time you sit down to design copy or visuals for your next Facebook ad, fight the urge to assume what your target audience is looking for and instead walk into the weight room and simply ask your clients what they value most in your professional relationship. I’d imagine there will be some answers that catch you by surprise.

Hopefully you’ll find a way to pivot your approach and take their feedback to heart.

3. Great systems are useless without decent culture.

Nearly every conversation I have with newly encountered consulting clients (gym owners) starts roughly the same way:

I want to replicate your gym’s success…what kind of scheduling software are you guys using? Can I get a copy of your programming template? What kind of power rack do you think I should buy? How should I go about automating my billing? Should I be running weekly payroll? Bi-weekly? Is monthly an option?

All of these questions matter for sure, but do you actually believe them to be the key to my gym’s success? Every single one of them could be sufficiently crowd-sourced with a crafty Facebook post on your personal page.

So what is “the right” question to ask?

Okay, so I also have mentors in my life who run wildly successful gyms. Here’s my favorite question to hit them with:

It seems to me that everyone on your team genuinely likes one-another. What strategies do you employ to ensure such a cohesive team dynamic in your space?

I ask this because I believe culture to outweigh systems by a significant margin. Systems can be fixed, designed, or deployed in as little as a week of research and hard work, but culture takes time to develop and nurture. Chances are that the gym you see as “successful” is similar to yours structurally, but different in the culture that they’ve crafted.

Ask about that topic the next time you grab a cup of coffee with another gym owner and you’re sure to find answers that don’t populate page one of a Google search..

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Is Authenticity Overrated?

You haven’t even read the blog and you feel compelled to argue, right?

Authenticity is something I have come to mandate as a staple within my operation at Cressey Sports Performance. Not even a week ago I published a series of social media posts celebrating the value of authentic personalities populating your training team. The initial Tweet read:

If your employees aren’t having fun, how do you expect your clients to enjoy the training experience? Make sure your coaches know you want/need them to be every bit as ridiculous in the gym as they are when they grab drinks together after work. Authenticity drives retention.

People didn’t disagree. In fact, when I moved the content over to Instagram, the material generated engagement that exceeded 94% of the 500+ posts I have published to date. People are fired up about authenticity.

I’m active on Twitter & Instagram if you’re interested….

So why all the talk about overrating this concept?

My buddy Zach recently attended a digital marketing conference featuring a keynote by Seth Godin. He and I share similar taste in books, podcasts, and the local sandwich shop in our home town, so I knew his takeaways would bring immediate value. He returned with pages of notes, including a quote that he felt compelled to share on social media.

When asked about the constant balancing act of integrating authenticity and creativity into one’s content creation strategy, Seth caught a few people, Zack included, by surprise with his response:

“Authenticity is dramatically overrated. We don’t want authenticity. We want consistency. If Nike opened a hotel we’d know what it would be like. If Hyatt opened a shoe line we’d have no idea what it would be like because Hyatt is mediocre.”

I felt like a complete hypocrite after initially reading this quote. I’d recently gone on record preaching authenticity to fellow gym owners, yet was nodding my head in approval of Godin’s message. What gives?

Upon further reflection, I came to realize one very important thing…

When Seth Godin delivers a keynote to roughly a thousand professionals at a digital marketing summit, he does so under the impression that everyone in the room is involved in an operation that is looking to scale well beyond a single location in a service-based field. His intention was likely not to make a blanket statement that applies to 100% of business owners who may be processing his message.

Screen-grabbed this right off of Zack’s FB page without permission, because I’m a thief like that…

So, I continue to believe that authenticity on the training floor of your gym is everything as you seek success in your operation. We don’t need to argue about that.

This being said, I’m sure more than a few of you would jump at the opportunity to add a second or third gym location to your revenue-generating arsenal, making this message immensely important to your long-term planning.

You see, there is a point of diminishing returns on authenticity in relation to consistency as you begin to operate multiple fitness locations. Somewhere along the line you’ll realize that clients know better than to think you will be able to repeatedly duplicate the sense of humor of your Director of Coaching at your flagship location, and instead just want to know that you’ve systemized the business in a way that allows their experience to look and feel like that which they’ve come to expect walking in.

After all, no one ever talks about the predictably quirky personalities they encounter when approaching the register at a Chipotle, but they for damn sure will tell you that they expect their burrito to taste the same from one franchise location to the next. In the case of these larger operations that we look up to for business development wisdom, consistency trumps authenticity 9 times out of 10.

I’m not telling you to abandon your current approach, but I am telling you that fiercely gripping on to it until the end of time may very well be unsustainable in conjunction with your growth objectives.

So, yes…sometimes authenticity is overrated. Don’t @ me.

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Appreciating the Distinction Between Quitting and Moving On

I used to employ a guy we’ll call James. He never missed a shift, took professionalism and punctuality brutally seriously, and respected his colleagues. He was a Marine, literally.

Over time, James’ life circumstances changed. He started a family, developed new career aspirations, and began stretching himself a little thin in an effort to be everything to everyone. His commute to the gym was over an hour in each direction, and he was expected to open the gym prior to 5:30am multiple times per week. He then mixed in a newborn that was barely sleeping, and he had himself a recipe for disaster.

While he never intentionally allowed his fatigue to be visible to clients or co-workers, his frustrations slowly became palpable. He appeared to need a big change in his routine and professional life.

I made sure he knew I was there to help personally or professionally, to be a sounding board, or to invest in further developing the adult fitness program he was running for me. He never truly accepted or declined my offers. Instead, he repeatedly told me: “I’ve got this, you don’t have to worry about me.”

These guys tend to make for disciplined employees

Eventually it became clear that James was ready to move on to the next step in his career, but for some reason or another, he couldn’t bring himself to admit it to me.

I called him into my office.

James, I love you, man, but I can’t help but find myself wondering if transitioning to an employment scenario that is closer to home and provides a better wage would be the right thing for you. What’s keeping you from making that move?

I’m not a quitter…don’t have it in me to walk away from something I’ve committed to, he explained.

There are a lot of words I could find to describe James, but quitter is most definitely not one of them. In just a few short years, he had expanded his coaching skill set, improved his relationship-building skills and rapport with clients, and proven himself to be a far better than average strength coach. He’d contributed productively to my business for months and years on end.

Did he think I had an expectation that he’d one day retire from my operation after decades of service?

I countered:

James…you have my blessing to walk away from this role with nothing but check marks in the success column. Transitioning to a new opportunity elsewhere isn’t quitting, it’s moving on.

I watched his body language change for the better right in front of me. He accepted my blessing, explaining that he’d work as little or as much as I need him in the weeks to come, but would like to formally conclude his employment with us. James stepped away from our business on great terms, and began to pursue the next big thing in his career. Nobody quit anything.

Walking away doesn’t always equate to quitting.

Gym owners continuously make this mistake

I see this problem again and again amongst gym owners. Underperforming programs are fed more resources, underperforming training philosophies are left untouched, and underperforming operations as a whole are allowed to languish in a perpetual cycle of break-even mediocrity.

For some reason, gym owners feel an obligation to see objectives through, while the writing is on that wall that things aren’t working.

I can’t scream this loud enough: It is okay to cut your losses and allocate existing resources toward an endeavor with more potential.

This may mean shutting down your uninspired transformation program.

This may mean pulling the plug on the internship program that was full of good intention from the start, but continues to deliver a neglected curriculum because you’re simply too busy building your business to be great at both.

This could be the moment that you abandon your endless efforts to grow a youth performance program and embrace the fact that you’re a kick-ass personal trainer for adult clients, regardless of your itch to work with athletes.

Whatever the program or project, I’d imagine you know deep down that it isn’t happening. Assuming you’ve learned some valuable lessons from your unsuccessful objectives, you can and should walk away without self identifying as a quitter.

Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better.

That’s entrepreneurship in just six words.

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3 Reasons to Build a Robust Internship Program at Your Gym

Every. Single. One.

That’s the answer to the question: “How many of your coaches are a product of the Cressey Sports Performance internship program?”

While they didn’t all complete internships here in our Massachusetts facility, every coach we employ is a proud alum of our system in either this space, or in our Florida location. I want to help you to understand where and how we draw the most value from these programs so that you can make strides toward doing so yourself in your own gym.

Spoiler alert: The value we extract has nothing to do with keeping payroll costs down. This is about delivering a mutually beneficial product and experience for the intern and the business.

These are the three biggest ways both parties win:

1. We don’t miss on hires.

According to RecruiterBox, making a hire in the service industry will cost you as little as $1,000, and can potentially run its way on up to as much as $5,000. With this in mind, small gyms on tight budgets aren’t in a position to swing and miss consistently on coaching selections. Between the cost of acquisition, and the optics of consistent turnover, we need to do everything we can to vet out our candidates prior to making a big decision of this nature.

Which is where the internship program comes into play…

With the benefit of experiencing anywhere from 300-500 hours of work alongside a CSP intern, we can safely make a call as to whether or not someone is a cultural fit within our operation before extending an offer. I emphasize cultural because 99.9% of the coaches who complete our program walk away with high scores on the competency front, while only a small segment of this population possesses the personality-types we are in need of to round out our team at any given moment in time.

I’m at peace with making the occasional bad intern hire, but cannot accept us missing the mark on evaluating employability by the conclusion of a multi-month program. In the end, our cost of acquisition lies in the cost of delivering a quality internship program to not one, but as many as 20+ interns over the course of a year in which we may only make a single hire. When you look at it that way, taking man-hours into consideration from a training and instruction standpoint, we invest considerably more than $5,000 per hire to ensure that we have a 100% success rate in securing team members who stay with us for a minimum of two years.

2. Curriculum design requires continuous discussion.

As mentioned above, delivering a quality internship experience eats up a great deal of time and resources often not seen by clients or observers outside of our business. One aspect of this resource allocation is taking the time to get the team together and discuss the evolution of our training model to ensure that the message that is being conveyed to interns is in line with where each coach’s head is at from the perspective of programming philosophy.

With a team of 6 full-time strength coaches continuously learning both inside of our gym and outside of it (reading & seminars), it is careless to assume that an internship curriculum from a year ago today is perfect for that which we need in this moment in time. Goals change, philosophies change, and skills change over time. Our approach to coaching up the interns should reflect that.

These discussions can feel tedious over time, but are a necessity to ensure that we don’t end up with six dramatic variations of one model floating around the training floor on a day-to-day basis.

Inside look at a CSP staff programming meeting.

3. New blood on the training floor keeps things fresh.

I’m fond of saying that you can’t install a gym culture that is consistent from one facility or business to the next, and this is because great culture is a moving target. If you want to deliver an authentic training experience to clients, you need to allow for unique personalities to impact the environment in the gym. Here at CSP, the unique personalities I speak of include those that come from our internship program.

Every time we bring a fresh batch of 6 interns to the gym for a new “season,” we plug 6 dramatically different backgrounds, personalities, and areas of interest to the many conversations that take place on the training floor. While I understand why new clients might be turned off by the title “intern,” I can say with certainty that our long-term clients have an appreciation for the skill set and passion required to secure a spot in our internship program. They appreciate the seasonal infusion of new blood in the space, and look forward to seeing the vibe in the gym twist and turn over time, ensuring that the experience in the weight room almost never feels stale.

Instead of fearing change in your staff because clients might be turned off, I’d encourage you to consider how the adjustment might positively impact the overall service experience.

This will take time.

It took our internship program 12+ years to get to where it is today, and it was roughly a half-decade before we realized how important it was to systemize things like the on-boarding and continuing education process. We learned by doing, and you should as well. Just make sure to temper your expectations as it relates to program growth.

Start with the objective of brining in a single intern, and make sure that your intention is to deliver more value to that coach than your business could ever extract from her. If your intent is to create the industry’s next great coach, the field as a whole will improve, and you’ll be the one who gets the first and best shot at hiring that individual following her learning experience with you.

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Turn More Free Consultations Into Paying Clients With This Quick Tip

We don’t offer complimentary initial assessments at my gym. 

I’ve published my rationale for not doing so in the past here. This doesn’t, however, mean that I think less of the businesses who choose to deliver something for free on day one. I realize that there are occasional market forces that dictate the decision (competition), employers who force it upon their personal training team (commercial gyms), and various other factors that come into play.

With this in mind, I want to discuss a strategy you should employ if you find yourself routinely delivering complimentary initial visits to clients who likely do not step into the session with the mindset that they are definitely investing in your services beyond day one.

If I were new to a personal training team there is one thing I would do every single time I introduced a client to my services while working at a gym that guarantees one free consultation as a part of their new membership package...

I’d be deliberate about using what I’d call “aspirational language.”

By aspirational language, I mean that if I know I want to work with someone moving forward, I discuss the future as if it is definitively going to happen. Instead of going through the motions and hoping that my mind-blowing technique instruction seals the deal, I’d consistently say things like:

“I was also intimidated by squats and deadlifts back when I first discovered the weight room. I can’t wait to introduce you to a handful of variations that took me from fearful to excited for lower day during just my first month of consistent training.”

“You really picked this movement up quickly, we’re going to make amazing progress if you continue to be this coachable.”

“I’m excited to introduce you to a variety of training concepts that you’ll be able to take on the road with you during all that work travel you’ve mentioned. Your progress in the coming weeks or months doesn’t need to be limited to only the time you are able to squeeze into your schedule working with me.”

One of the most challenging sales we make at Cressey Sports Performance is transitioning a client from month one to month two, as we do not ask that our clients sign long-term agreements. As a result, we need to keep people engaged with the process while knowing full well that four weeks often isn’t enough to see significant improvements in the weight-room when we’re really just laying the foundation for future success. 

Whether he realizes it or not, our Director of Performance, John O’Neil, is a wizard at escalating athlete commitment beyond month one because of the subtle language he uses. I’ll occasionally overhear him saying to an athlete who has just wrapped up a basic set of deadlifts: 

“Wait till you see what I’ve got lined up for you next month to build off of this material.”

With that single sentence, he’s got them locked in. What’s he cooking up? Can I see the program now? How do I sign up for month two?

If you’re searching for an inspiring executive to learn from, look no further than Kat Cole.

I recently heard Kat Cole, CEO of Focus Brands, say that throughout her career, beginning as early as her teenage years, she made an effort to “make the job bigger than it really is.” She explained that we handle ourselves differently when we genuinely believe the work we do to be impactful. 

In this vein, instead of sheepishly asking a client if they intend to stick with us, John carries himself with an air of confidence that says he’s all but certain that we’re moving forward. He believes his suggested course of action to be impactful and appropriate for the athlete, so he confidently discusses it without an existing formal commitment beyond month one in place.

You can apply this methodology in your consultations, too.

In the end, all I’m really asking you to do is practice optimistic tendencies in the language you use with new clients. If you approach every free trial with the mindset that you’re not likely to close, your body language and tone is going to shut that door in your face for you.

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