Gym Owner Musings - Installment #10

I've kicked up my reading habits in 2018, resulting in a whole bunch of newly highlighted concepts and ideas. Here's a look at three quick hitters that recently caught my eye, and how they apply to running our gym here in Massachusetts:

1. From the Book Traction, by Gino Wickman

"Your hiring success ratio will increase if you evaluate applicants' core values before their skill."

I have a confession to make: Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you what college my employee John O'Neil attended. Honestly...no idea.

When John's name was first thrown into our candidate pool, my first reaction was not to pull up his resume or cover letter. Instead, I connected with the people who coached alongside him as he interned at our Florida facility in 2014. I sent text messages to mutual friends in the fitness industry to get their take on John. And I focused on connecting with people who could speak to his character.

Universally, the responses looked like this:

• "He's a great person."
• "He's as loyal a guy as you'll ever find."
• "No one outworked him during his time with us."

You notice that none of these responses mentioned John's undergraduate GPA or the names of his high-profile clients at recent jobs? 

It didn't take long to recognize that we were considering a candidate who was even better known for his integrity and work ethic than for his skill-set (which is exceptional, by the way). We hired John for his core values first, and it is working out just fine for us.

2. From The Book Crushing It, by Gary Vaynerchuk

"An entrepreneur's lust needs to be counterbalanced with a manager's prudence and discipline."

This quote reminded me of the lesson in The E-Myth that in order for your business to survive, you need to cover the roles of the manager, the entrepreneur, and the technician. All too often I see gym co-founders go into business sharing two of the components outlined here, and completely miss the boat on the third. If you're considering going into business with a friend or a colleague, make sure to ask yourself if you've covered all three bases.

Thankfully, my business partner Eric and I touch on all three, conveniently overlapping on the "entrepreneur" piece. We have had more than one occasion in the past where Eric's "entrepreneurial lust" was counterbalanced by my tendency to say we should pump the breaks.

Thankfully, both pieces are important. Without his creativity, we likely never would have made the strides we did, but it was also my prudence that probably kept us from stretching ourselves a little thin with too many objectives.

3. From the Book Hug Your Customers, by Jack Mitchell

"Training is for dogs. Education is for people."

We're constantly modifying our approach to delivering a valuable internship experience here at Cressey Sports Performance, and have made some big changes in the past month as we prepare for our summer interns. Instead of thinking of our internship as a program meant to cultivate our next hire, we're embracing the mentality that we are a talent supplier for the industry as a whole. 

Our objective is to churn out exceptional coaches, so our internship program needs to be more about experiential learning and structured education than it is about properly executing our singular business model. Interns who are being educated instead of trained to be cogs in a system will reflect better upon our brand when they move on, and still prove to be employable here at CSP should we choose to go that route.

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Marketing With Integrity - A Long-Term Competitive Advantage

My fellow gym owner Chris Merritt offered to share a guest post on my site this week, and it couldn't have come at a better time. We're into day three of no power at the Dupuis Household thanks to heavy wet snow in our area, and I'm not exactly swimming in free time to write. For now, I am thrilled to share this piece discussing the long term implications of employing dishonest marketing tactics in your fitness business. Enjoy!

In the book “How to Be A Great Boss,” by Gino Wickman and René Boer, the authors introduce a discipline from Todd Sachse of Sachse Construction called the “10, 10, 10 Rule.”

“… the first 10 represents the first ten minutes after making a decision.  Emotion usually drives your initial reaction.  How do you feel about the idea? Are you happy, sad?  The second 10 represents the first 10 months regarding a decision, which he considers short term.  You usually ask yourself, how much money am I going to make this year?  What resources do I need and what will they cost me?  The third 10 represents the first ten years after a decision.  Now you’re asking yourself, how will it affect my reputation, relationships, community, and family?”

I don’t know about you, my fellow fitness business owners, but I think we could all benefit from running our decisions through the 10, 10, 10 Rule, especially when it comes to our marketing. 

I’ve been seeing these Facebook ads lately—and based on the number of people using them, I’m sure you have too—and they’re all the same, literally.  They’re pushing a 6-week challenge that uses the exact same landing page, they’re advertising it as free (shocker: it’s not), and oh, by the way, “this is your last day to register!” 

Then, once people register, they’re told all spaces are taken, manipulating them to feel like they lost the opportunity.  All of this so that the business can reach out and save the day soon after, letting them know that a spot just happened to open! 

Further, I’ve been seeing the dude that’s pushing the system all over my own Facebook, every time I log on, advertising his services by showing success story after success story.

And here’s the thing—I believe that they’re legit.  I truly believe these people are having massive success with his systems.  In fact, I know some people that are using it, and they are having massive “success” in the form of tons of leads and so-so retention—which, with the volume the ads bring in, is great for their bottom line.

But if we run this approach through the 10, 10, 10 Rule, how do we think this is going to pan out in the long run?

I get the first two 10’s.  These business owners desperately want to increase their bottom line, and they buy into this marketing program on emotion.  Within those first 10 minutes, sure there’s probably some “holy crap, what did I just do?” going on based on the investment in the system, but there’s also hope and excitement. 

10 months into this thing, their numbers are way up—and that’s where many of them are now.

But it’s a new system, and there is no long-term proof.

10 years?  Based purely on the amount of manipulation involved in the marketing tactic—even with the people who stay on and enjoy these gyms—there’s still the fact that they were lied to in the beginning, and they know it.  Worse, there are all those ones that not only know it but didn’t sign on for more after the challenge—or worse yet, walked out the door as soon as they realized it was a bait and switch. 

You don’t have 10 years.  In my opinion, it’s not going to take even close to that amount of time for the word to spread, and your reputation to be tanked.

I really hope it works out for these gym owners’ sake, but my gut says it won’t. 

When does the well dry up?  When does your reputation for being deceitful precede you?  Time will tell.

And here’s the kicker—the owner of this marketing company opened a gym just down the road from our facility in 2016.  At the time, no one else was running ads like these, so we took notice.  To be honest, I was impressed, even nervous and worried about how it would impact our own business.

Well, his gym didn’t last long, and it was GREAT for our business while it did.  The place so quickly earned a negative reputation that it became the talk of everyone coming over to join up with us.  The gym has been gone since about November of 2016 (estimated), but I can still pull their reviews on Yelp and Google—one of which was written by his former employee:

At the end of the day, I’m just a small business owner playing the long game.  I don’t see a place for manipulative advertising in our business, regardless of how much money it will bring in the long run. 

My aim is, and always has been, to provide value in multiple forms and put the needs of our clients first.  And through that approach, our gym has grown month after month, year after year, for coming up on 7 strong.

As Jay Abraham says in “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got,”

“The more value you give others, the more value you generate.  Not only for your clients but for yourself.  The more contributions you make to the richness of the lives of your clients, the more bonded you will be to them and they to you.  And the more successful you will become.

The focus of your concern should state to the client, in essense, “You matter.  Your well-being is important to me.””

At the end of the night, when you lay your head on the pillow, you shouldn’t have to rationalize your actions in order to sleep soundly.

Play the long game, take care of your people like family, and deliver a phenomenal product. 

About the Author:

Chris Merritt is the co-founder of Beyond Strength Performance, a strength and conditioning facility located in Northern Virginia. He is also a co-founder of the Strength Faction, an online community that focuses on providing fitness professionals with the support, education, and experience they need to transform their lives and careers.

Collect More Effective Testimonials

Social proof is imperative if you are looking to drive leads toward your fitness business. Of the many types of social proof you could accumulate, few are more powerful than a good old-fashioned client testimonial.

Your potential customers want to envision their own success in your space before making a commitment to working with you, and hearing from people like themselves in this context will often give them the nudge they need to make the investment. Fortunately, asking for a testimonial is easy, and often interpreted as a compliment by the client.

Potential Responses

There are two types of responses we typically receive when requesting a complimentary quote for our website or social media content:

1. Absolutely! I’ll get you something ASAP!

2. Really? Me? I’m not very good with stuff like this. What would you want me to say?

First things first, you should never attempt to redirect those who offer the first response. Ride the momentum of their positivity, and thank them profusely for their efforts. Their enthusiasm and can-do attitude regarding the request will only be soured if you attempt to dictate their approach to the process right from the start.

In my experience, the clients who fall into the latter category far outweigh the former. Don’t ever abandon this population as a result of their hesitation. You made this request of them for a reason, and can extract some golden material with just a little bit of direction.

Try This

The next time someone asks you what an optimal quote would look like, ask them to answer these four questions:

1. Was there a frustrating problem that inspired you to get in touch?

2. What led you to believe we may be the optimal gym to help?

3. Was there a specific moment you began to notice training results?

4. How has your life improved as a result of the time you’ve spent with us?

Here’s an example of a testimonial from a client who visited CSP for a short-term consultation and has since been executing our programming in a distance-based format. He worked off of these four questions and came back with the following:

"I spent years guessing my way through the process of strength training prior to discovering Cressey Sports Performance. Thankfully, a friend of mine recently shared a CSP exercise tutorial on Facebook that caught my attention. I was thrilled to finally find a gym that was as interested in sharing “the why” behind their exercise selection as they were to demonstrate “the how.” I now have a better understanding of the importance of proper warm ups in advance of each training session, and a newfound desire to get my work in at the gym."

That quote will drive more business my way than a generic: “These guys are the best. I’d recommend them to anyone!”

If you can present a story about training at your gym that is easily relatable, you’ll soon be headed in the right direction.

My Landlord Understands the Long Game

Do you have a favorite parable that guides your professional decision-making?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, a parable is a brief story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. My favorite is The Go-Giver. I’ve read it three times in the past 24 months. Every time I open this book I stumble upon a new nugget of useful perspective that I can apply immediately in the way I operate Cressey Sports Performance.

This weekend I took it for another spin, and found myself sliding a highlighter across the following suggestion:

“Make your win about the other person. Go after what he wants. Forget win-win.”

— Bob Burg

Our landlord at CSP understands how and when to apply this mentality in order to win. Back in the summer of 2010 we approached him about the idea of taking over about 1,000 square feet of vacant office space just next door to our unit. Creating a doorway that would allow access to both spaces was quick and painless. The problem, however, was twofold.

First, we were only about half way through an existing lease, and would need to tear up our existing agreement and renegotiate the terms moving forward. No problem, he said.

The second issue was more of a potential sticking point. Our old office space would need to be demolished, and we weren’t excited about the prospect of paying for all of the demo and cleanup since we felt that we would eventually vacate a space that was improved by our suggested modifications.

We cautiously approached the negotiation table, not looking forward to battling over who owes what.

I’ll take care of it, he said. My treat. How quickly do you want it done?

We hadn’t even had the opportunity to haggle, and he had already relented. You’d think that he just buried the cost in the terms of our renegotiated deal, but we actually ended up paying the exact same monthly figure moving forward under the terms of our renegotiated agreement. We’d added square footage, had some structural modifications made free of charge, and simply extended our existing agreement by an additional two years.

Why did we get so lucky?

A few years later, over a cup of coffee, he mentioned why he was so flexible at that moment in time. He explained that when he finds a tenant who pays rent on time and creates minimal headaches, he always applies a long-term vision to the relationship. He knew that he was going to attempt to slide us into the 15,000+ square foot space down the hall long before we hit the end of our recently renegotiated deal. Winning an argument over a project that would cost him a couple thousand dollars at that moment in 2010 wasn’t going to help him in any way when it came time to propose that we take the risk of expanding.

Our landlord made the strategic decision to put our needs ahead of his own on that day. Our business was allowed to grow thanks to manageable overhead figures because he chose to forget about the win-win. He’s since collected well over a half-million dollars worth of rent from us, and we’re still around to talk about it. 

I wonder if he ever read The Go-Giver?

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Deliver More Than a Training Experience

Maybe it’s time to slow down your never-ending search for ways to incrementally change your business and instead simply focus on making it easier to do business with you.

I’m not necessarily talking about implementation of fancy systems or cutting-edge technology. I’m talking about simplifying someone’s life each time they walk through your doors.

Small gestures Matter

This past Sunday, as my wife and I were laboring our way through the grocery store produce section and past the bakery with two young kids in tow, a nice gentleman in an apron stepped out from behind the counter and approached us:

“Would you mind if I gave these two handsome young men a cookie?”

Collin didn’t need to be asked twice if he wanted a baked snack, and Owen has never said no to anything edible.

It was just a couple of cookies. Maybe $0.50 of actual goods gifted. But the gesture brought far more value to us than that. Anyone who’s attempted to work their way through a lengthy grocery list with two kids on a busy Sunday afternoon knows that a successful trip typically involves less than two meltdowns, complete avoidance of cleanup scenarios involving a mop, and minimal screaming.

Once those cookies were in-hand, it was smooth sailing for mom and dad.

Again, a little bit of complementary product costed this business some money, but far less than the value of products I will be purchasing during future visits that are all but ensured to take place thanks to the success of this most recent one.

are you Simplifying Life for Clients today?

This simple and inexpensive gesture by a grocery store employee made my life easier. It isn't difficult to create similarly convenient experiences for clients at your gym.

Do you have a comfortable lounge for parents of your athletes to wait in as their children are training in your gym, or are you sending them back to their cars with a mandate that they return in 90-minutes?

Have you provided a Wi-Fi connection for the mom who cut out of work early to provide transportation but still needs to clear a few emails out of the account before signing off for the day?

How about a desk or two for high school athletes to get some homework done before stepping into the gym to take care of the training that is appropriately situated behind academic objectives on their priority list?

Are you modifying your hours to make Sunday sessions available during a popular sports season? It may be the only time youth athletes can escape their packed sports schedules to get a lift in, and they'd probably like to maintain the hard-earned progress they achieved during the off-season.

Deliver more than just a fitness system

If you want to just get by, call it quits at preparing an adequate training philosophy and system through which it can be delivered.

If your objective is to make life easier for your clients, you need to look beyond just the mechanics of fitness instruction. Think about the many ways you can simplify their lives. Make the time they have tied up in trips to your space more efficient.

And don’t forget: If all else fails, learn from the guy in the apron, and hand out a few cookies.

Shake Up Your Approach to Hiring Coaches

So you’ve opened your own gym... 

It’s been exhausting. It’s been rewarding. It’s been all that you hoped for and more.

You’ve worked hard to establish a strong culture. Your high-energy training environment is on point. And, most importantly, your clients have an appreciation for the importance of executing programming your way.

Business is finally good enough to justify making a first (or second) hire, and everything seems to be headed in the right direction. Life is good.

Proceed with caution

If you’re a one-man operation that is ready to add a new coaching personality to the training floor, there is little room for error. A bad hire can negatively impact the chemistry you’ve worked hard to establish with your regulars. It can also convolute the overall training philosophy of your business if you’re not careful.

We employ a comprehensive internship program at Cressey Sports Performance which allows us to appropriately screen potential hires to ensure that we find the right fit both philosophically and culturally. This is unfortunately a luxury that isn’t available to most gym owners, meaning that there’s always a chance you’ll bring on a new team member who appears great on paper and in an interview format, but ends up delivering a training experience to your clients that is different from what you anticipated.

Looking professional is the easy part.

It's easy to draft up a decent cover letter. Showing up for an interview dressed professionally isn’t difficult. Preparing to answer a generic question regarding your primary influences in the fitness industry is a breeze.

A little bit of preparation and foresight on the part of a candidate is all it takes to lull you into believing that you’ve found someone who is on the same page as you. What you can’t easily confirm in this environment, however, is exactly how this person is going to handle himself in a busy gym.

Here's an idea..

The next time you're on the cusp of making a hire, instead of staying on script with standardized interview protocols, throw your candidate a curveball and invite him in for an off-hours training session with you. Tell him you just want to get a lift in and talk shop.

There’s no better way to gain an understanding of someone’s approach to fitness than by seeing how he handles himself in the gym during his own time. Is he diligent about his warm up? Is he clearly executing a structured plan, or just winging it based on the available equipment in the moment? Is he tidying up equipment and re-racking weights as he goes, or is he content with operating in a messy gym?

Outside of the execution of the training session, how did he handle himself socially in between sets? There’s plenty of down-time during a typical training session, and social skills are either highlighted or exposed in this type of informal interview scenario. Can you afford to employ someone who couldn’t engage you in small talk in between sets?

I once had an employee whose first rule for evaluating interns for future employment was to ask himself: “Did he participate in staff lift during his time with us?”

As far as he was concerned, the answer “no” was a non-starter. This continues to be an unwritten rule that we apply today as we evaluate coaching talent.

Bad hires can happen from time to time, but they don’t need to be the result of mismatched training approaches. Give the “staff lift interview” a shot the next time you are getting close to making a hire. This should dramatically reduce the likelihood that you find yourself back to the drawing board in search of candidates weeks or months later.

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Community, Saying Yes, and Business Success

Today I bring you a guest post from my good friend, Todd Bumgardner. He came through with great content at the perfect time, as I spent my day shoveling snow and wrestling with my two little guys who were home from school thanks to the weather. Enjoy!

“Screw it. Let’s do it.”

That’s the text that Kirk Adams sent to PJ Strebel when he said yes to teaching a golf-training seminar at PJ’s gym in New Hampshire—verbatim.

PJ wanted to expand his reach locally into the golf market, and he knew he wanted to challenge himself to a public speaking event in 2017. Even though New England seasons aren’t the most welcoming to golfers, there are still a lot of them that live in and around Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where PJ trains his clients at Seacoast Sports Club.

Kirk, the handsome devil that he is, is the Director of Fitness at New York Golf and Body in Manhattan. It’s essentially a golf country club perched above the NYC streets, and Kirk spends a lot of time there helping golfers make their bodies strong and resilient enough to improve performance and stay healthy out on the course.

(Before we go on, PJ is also handsome. He’s also bald, which earns him some extra points with me.)

Both of the guys had been in Strength Faction for a while, using the resources to grow themselves and their businesses, and had chatted on QnAs and in our open forum. Then, at a Strength Faction event that we co-hosted with the CFSC, Kirk and PJ actually met in person for the first time—and it’s like they were already good buddies with old battle stories that they could tell about each other.

So, when PJ wanted to get in front of golfers, and grow his golf business, he knew that he had someone he could count on in Kirk. PJ knew that Kirk knows his shit and he knows what kind of human being is—that’s the value of being connected to other great people in a great community.

At first, Kirk was reluctant. He wasn’t sure if he’d do it. A little imposter syndrome crept in and got him thinking about all of the barriers to entry that would hold him back. He’d have to do a lot of work to prep. He’d have to take the bus to New Hampshire. But with PJ’s support, the support of his Strength Faction family, and a little mustering of gumption, Kirk said screw it and did it.

During a webinar we recently held, PJ and Kirk talked about the experience of putting their project together. Kirk said that he wasn’t sure what he was going to do for the presentation, or how he was going to get it all done, but that he decided to say yes to a great opportunity and then sort everything else out. It was a good move, Kirk.

Now, PJ has an audience with golfers in his area and Kirk’s done even more to position himself as a golf-training expert—which he most certainly is. And they’ve both gained the confidence that comes from putting themselves out there, taking a swing at something, and making it happen.

So, as you’re looking into 2018 and deciding to make this a great year for your life and business, surround yourself with a community of people that you know will have your back and will also be ripe with talent, skills, and ideas that can help you grow yourself and your business. And, if a big opportunity comes up that may not totally be part of your plan, say yes and then figure out how to make it work.

Enrollment for the Spring ’18 Strength Faction semester closes on January 5th. To learn more and to enroll click the link below.

Click Here for Spring ’18 Strength Faction Enrollment

Why We Don't Employ Designated "Program Designers"

I've been asked a number of times recently why we don't have employees whose role is exclusively to design programming for our athletes. The assumption is that we would increase operational efficiencies by doing so, and also free up our coaches to do what they do best - coach. I don't disagree with this mentality, but I also don't think it is an optimal approach for our business at Cressey Sports Performance.

The systems we employ need less and less tinkering over time as our business matures. When it comes to delivering individualized training materials to our athletes, we realize that at this point in time it is not necessarily the machine that is in need of servicing, but instead the experience. Part of the experience of training at CSP is knowing that there is a coach on the training floor who not only knows how to instruct the material that has been designed for you, but also knows exactly why each exercise was integrated into your programming. 

There is a certain level of nuance that can only be appreciated by a coach who is in the room for a movement screening or postural analysis. Additionally, an off-the-training-floor programming specialist can't possibly have the instinct to integrate a necessary exercise modification because they aren't "in the trenches" observing the unexpected challenge that a high school athlete had while executing his front squat or reverse lunge during his last month of training.

The volume of variables to consider when delivering truly individualized programming in a performance training setting exceeds the capabilities of someone who sits in an office in front of exercise templates cranking out generic material. Much like radiologists have been known to read X-rays more accurately when they have seen the patient's photo, coaches prepare the best programming scenarios for their athletes when they have stood alongside them in the gym observing how they handle the material and cues that have been thrown their way in the past. 

I am at peace with foregoing a little bit of supposed operational efficiency if it increases the likelihood that our athletes are being put in the best position possible to succeed. For now, my team will continue on with their multi-tasking.

Gym Owner Musings - Installment #9

In this ninth edition of Gym Owner Musings, I will share thoughts ranging from cleaning up your on-boarding processes, to improving the client experience on day one of their time with you.

Here goes…

1 - Spend a week doing a job yourself before hiring to fill the position

My Office Manager moved on from her role this past week, leaving me with a vacancy at the front desk. For the first five years we were in business, I served as the unofficial "face of CSP" greeting clients and handling all things administrative around the gym.

I thought to myself: "I've got this. I'll be back in the groove by the end of my first day back."

What I failed to realize was how dramatically a role can shift as you scale your business over a five-year period. While I helped to mold the general framework of the systems we implement on a daily basis, I don't operate them all myself consistently. Foot traffic is now higher than I remember it, the phone rings more often, and the list of variables to juggle in this position has increased considerably.

As we find ourselves on the cusp of making a final hire to fill this position, I am going to spend a few weeks cleaning up our systems. My primary objective is to prepare an on-boarding scenario where I am introducing material that I am entirely familiar with.

If you own a gym, try not to ask employees to complete tasks that you haven't experienced yourself. With this policy in place, you’ll earn credibility with your team, and have a complete understanding of the responsibilities you are handing off.

2 - Build something memorable into the initial visit

It is easy to fall into the mentality that the magic is created once clients hit the training floor with their first personalized program in-hand, while missing an opportunity to create a memorable experience on day one. If you believe the cliche that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, why are you mechanically working your athlete through an FMS checklist and then pushing her out the door with the expectation that "the fun starts next time?"

It doesn't take much to make a new client feel like you went off-script (in a positive way) during their initial visit. Here at CSP, every time we evaluate a new professional baseball player, we have them finish by signing the "signature wall" in the gym. We'll then put the finishing touches on the experience by tagging the athlete in a tweet welcoming him to the "CSP Family."

In short, make people feel important during their initial visit.

3 - Clients won't fully appreciate a training solution until you help them to appreciate the problem.

A couple of years ago, one of our coaches brought his girlfriend (now wife) in to CSP for an assessment with Tony Gentilcore. Tony worked her through his usual screening process, stopping at one point to ask that she attempt to touch her toes. She gave it a shot, failed to do so, and mentioned that this was something she simply couldn't do.

Tony then pulled out a lacrosse ball and worked her through a few minutes of lower extremity soft tissue work, with particular emphasis on the bottom of her feet. Roughly three minutes after her initial attempt, this CSP newbie was able to touch her toes for the first time in recent memory.

She explains: "From that point forward, I was buying anything Tony had to sell. I thought he was a magician."

Tony didn't have to solve the problem on day one. He could have made a note about poor flexibility on his sheet, committed himself to addressing the issue in his first month of programming, and assume that she would "get it" when he built individualized warmups into her program that would take into consideration flexibility limitations and faulty movement patterns. Thankfully, he didn't.

If you want to create buy-in from your newest clients, you can start by solving manageable problems on day one. "We'll get to that" isn't going to cut it with people who are on the ropes as to whether or not they'll return following their initial screening.

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Build Audience & Influence With 30 Days of Deliberate Social Media Strategy

In the next 30 days, you could dramatically increase the size of your audience, gain a better appreciation of the type of information your followers crave, and increase overall leads and engagement. Before I explain how, you should know that this hypothetical project will be anything but a shortcut.

The Project

On Sunday, October 22nd, I sat in the audience listening intently as Jordan Syatt delivered the final presentation of the day at our 6th annual Cressey Sports Performance Fall Seminar. Having grown an Instagram following of just a couple of thousand on up to more than a quarter of a million in roughly a year, Jordan had earned the right to address a room of nearly 200 fitness professionals on the topic of social media strategy.

During the early stages of his presentation, Jordan mentioned that his employer and mentor, Gary Vaynerchuk, had issued him a challenge during the first handful of weeks that he was working with him: Pick the social media platform (or platforms) of your choice, and commit to three posts per day for a thirty-day period.

I opened the calendar application on my phone as he went into more detail on the challenge and considered what the next thirty days of my life looked like. If I were to start the following morning, I could publish my 90th post right around dinner time on the eve of Thanksgiving. What the hell, I thought...let's do it.

A couple of important notes before I get started:

1. I realize my social media following is anything but huge. A number of my readers have many multiples of my following, so please don't interpret my message as an attempt to position myself as a social guru.

2. I did not apply this project to the Cressey Sports Performance social media accounts. This was strictly a personal branding endeavor.

How I Attacked It

Moving from an average of roughly three posts per week to three posts per day required a dramatic shift in my creative strategy. I knew that I'd fall flat on my face after a day or two if I didn't systemize my approach to content creation, so I built it into my schedule. I was first introduced to the concept of deliberate practice when I read So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport, and this project ultimately became an exercise in deliberate practice of social media content curation and creation.

The first thing I did was to create a daily checklist to help me track output. What doesn't get tracked, doesn't get done. 

Every evening, as my wife and I sat on the couch watching mindless television, I spent 10-15 minutes scrolling through my own blog archives in search of inspiration. I'd flag specific quotes or posts as a whole, and set them aside to be revisited the following morning. When I arrived to my office the next day, I would begin with a 30-minute period where I would outline my three tweets, and my three Instagram posts for the day. I then created three Instagram post drafts which could be revisited later in the day, and loaded my three prepared tweets to my Evernote application so that I could cut and paste when needed.

My primary objective with this preparation strategy was to eliminate the need to be brainstorming content ideas at a time when I needed my head clear to execute my usual CSP-related tasks.

While I could have used a structured publishing service such as Hootsuite or Buffer, I chose to stick with the resources at my fingertips, and programmed alarms in my phone to remind me that it was time to publish at 10:30am, 2:30pm, and 6:30pm.

Where Am I Going to Find 90 Ideas?

Roughly 90% of the material I shared during this process was recycled content that I'd published in recent years. It didn't take long for me to realize that this was the perfect opportunity to make old content new again. If you've been publishing a blog, creating videos, or churning out other forms of informational content consistently for a year or more, you likely already have all of the information you need to populate 90 posts in the next 30 days.

I've published my fair share of "listicle" posts in the past, so pieces such as 10 Considerations as You Search for the Perfect Gym Location easily served as 10 different Instagram posts. The material was already outlined and written, so this was just a matter of creating a corresponding visual and copying the blog text into the Instagram image description. (Content Creation Tip: If you are looking for an image editing application, I recommend either Canva or Wordswag)

My second content goldmine sat within my Twitter archives. Did you know that you can download every tweet you've ever published in a single excel file? This gave me easy access to more than 1,000 previously published posts that could either be screen-grabbed for an Instagram post, or reformatted into an attractive visual using the image editing applications mentioned above. You can find a step-by-step guide to downloading your archives here.

My third consistent source of content inspiration was my newsletter archive. I have published 72 weekly "Friday Four" newsletters to date. Every Friday I send off an email containing four pieces of content I consumed over the course of the week that will influence my future blog material and challenge me to think differently about how I manage Cressey Sports Performance. My primary objective each week is to share some business-specific information from outside of the world of fitness. Whenever I was in a little bit of a creative rut during this 30-day period, I would dig into these archives and find an article to share along with a memorable quote from the text. (If you're interested in receiving this weekly email, you can access old broadcasts and sign up here)

The Outcome

If you're a fan of vanity metrics, you'll be interested to learn that I increased my Instagram audience by 50% during the month. I also tripled the previous daily pace of adding new Twitter followers. Additionally, I saw massive upticks in impressions, profile visits and mentions according to my Twitter analytics . In the end, I found a great deal more value in building my ability to influence as a result of this process than I did from building the actual size of my following, but that number grew nonetheless.

I was reminded of the importance of repeatedly exposing my audience to my unique area of expertise. The noticeable increase in content output prompted dozens of unsolicited "shout-outs" praising my material, including more than one mention on Facebook, which wasn't even one of the targeted platforms. This kind of social proof can't be purchased; you've got to put in the work to earn it.

The most important lesson I learned during this process is that as your audience grows over time, it is careless to assume that new fans have bothered to discover what lies in your archives. I wrote a number of blogs that I am especially proud of during a time that nearly no one was listening. This 30-day challenge presented an opportunity to bring that material back from the dead. If you've previously published content that you continue to stand behind today, you likely have plenty of new followers who are unaware of it's existence. Pull the "old stuff" out of storage and treat it as evergreen content.

Moving Forward

This experience was both time consuming and rewarding. It will likely be awhile before you see me churn out this volume of material on such a consistent basis, but I can now comfortably commit to a post per day on each platform without hesitation. If you're going to attack this project, I'd encourage you to start with a single platform. In hindsight, choosing to focus on both Twitter and Instagram simultaneously created more headaches than I may have needed. If three posts daily is entirely out of the question for you, target two and hold yourself accountable to it. Tell a handful of friends or colleagues that you intend to make it happen, and allow them to keep you accountable to the commitment.

Most importantly, regularly remind yourself of this: If publishing quality social media content three times a day on multiple platforms were easy, everyone would do it. It isn't.

The Value in Giving More Than You Take

A couple of months back I received a chat message from my good friend Jon Goodman. He explained that he was unable to make the trip out to our annual fall seminar here in Massachusetts, and he was hoping that I might be willing to do him a favor...

Jon requested permission to send in a small film team to record a handful of testimonials for his new product, The Online Trainer Academy, on the day of our event. The request made sense - we were expecting to have Eric Cressey, Jordan Syatt and John Romaniello in attendance, and this was a shot at getting all three in front of the camera in a single location on the same day. All three are influencers in the online fitness community, so I get it.

I could have been greedy about it and asked what was in it for me. I could have acted inconvenienced and claimed that the distraction would disrupt the seminar and take the focus away from our team of presenters. Instead, I said: "Hell yes. How can I help?"

I knew that Jon's crew would handle themselves professionally and stay out of our way as we went about hosting our event, so why not do what I can to make his life a little easier?

Things went off without a hitch. We successfully delivered our best reviewed and most attended fall seminar to date, and Jon got some great testimonial videos for his product.

Fast forward three weeks, when another chat message from Jon arrives:

Hey dude. When my guys were at your seminar I asked them to interview attendees to give testimonials for your event and film you a little event trailer. The Dropbox folder below has a few things in it:

1. A full event trailer (3 minutes)
2. A 30-second 'social media friendly' event trailer
3. 5 Testimonial videos
4. 6 Short 'Instagram friendly' videos

Hope that this stuff helps with your promotion next year.

Jon didn't need to do any of that, but he did because he knows the value of surprising others with over-delivery. The lesson here is simple: Be generous with your time, your resources, and your attention. If you take a long-game approach to your personal relationships, the good people in this field will find ways to reciprocate.

Check out the great CSP Fall Seminar event recap video Jon’s crew prepared here.

* PS - Jon got all of his great video work done by Justin Ross at www.monkeyreelmedia.com.

The Dangers of Aligning Your Gym With a Specific Team or Program

You might have heard a few of these before if you run a business catering to youth athletes....

• You guys HAVE TO open a gym in our new indoor training facility!
• Let's list your business on our website as the official training provider of our program!
• We've got 18 teams and ALL of our guys will DEFINITELY train with you if you take over the gym in our building!

Before you go ahead and align yourself with a specific club team or program, I want you to remind you of something important...

There is no loyalty in youth club sports.

I've watched dozens upon dozens of kids declare their new program to be the best because of the amazing travel schedule they've lined up for the coming summer and "their sick new uniforms." It seems to me that roughly 50% of these athletes jump ship immediately following the summer because they are either pissed about playing time, or the lack of organization experienced over the course of a chaotic season.

It doesn’t stop there.

Maybe the "favorite coach" in the program found a better opportunity and moved elsewhere...you think athletes won’t consider taking a walk with him? Maybe the best player in your program just got poached by a competitor offering free enrollment in an attempt to beef up his roster. Maybe the connected helicopter dad who "knows a ton of scouts" insists that the club down the road is going to be at all the biggest tournaments next summer and his legion of followers is considering tagging along.

When all of these scenarios play themselves out, you're the gym owner stuck with a long-term lease and a client roster that unfortunately seems to reinvent itself every six-to-twelve months. You're also publicly attached to the program that is relentlessly bad-mouthing the competitor that "stole their guys" and "has no class."

Do you really want to put yourself in that situation when you could instead position your business to help all of the kids, from all of the programs?

Be the Switzerland of performance centers in your area. Be neutral.

Resent the Idea of Free Evaluations? Here's a Solution

Somewhere along the line, our industry got the reputation of being a place where a free trial is the rule instead of the exception. I couldn’t walk into a new dentist’s office tomorrow and demand a complimentary cleaning “because I’m considering giving them my business,” but it is considered more than acceptable to do so at the gym down the road.

If you’ve read my material in the past, you know that we rarely offer free assessments at CSP. Since our inception, the cost on day-one has been $99. That’s our prerogative, just like offering a free evaluation at your gym is yours. However, I know for certain that there are a number of you out there who resent the feeling of obligation to issue a “freebie” thanks to the competitive alternatives in your area.

What if we were to meet somewhere in the middle?

Instead of giving away that $99 initial visit (I’m using the CSP price point for this example), why not charge the fee on day one, but offer to apply the total toward the first month of training should the client choose to return beyond their first visit?

A few years back, we had an agreement in place to offer complimentary assessments to members of a specific collegiate development program. Over time, we found that our conversion percentage following day-one was noticeably lower with this population than it was for those who paid for their initial visit. Our solution was to continue to offer $99 worth of savings, but it was contingent upon signing up for the initial month. And wouldn’t you know it...conversion rates improved.

Consider mixing in this approach at your own shop moving forward and you may find that new clients have a better appreciation for the value of your time, and an improved perception of the quality of your services.

In the end, you’ll still be able to advertise “$99 worth of savings in month-one,” right?

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My Time in a Commercial Gym Influences the Way I Run My Facility Today

Note from PD: Today's guest post comes from my buddy, Mike Connelly. Mike is the owner of Rebell Strength & Conditioning, located in Chicago. He's got an extremely grounded approach to building a team, a community, and a profitable gym in general. Enjoy! 

It wasn’t until I opened my own training facility that I gained a proper respect for the years I spent in a corporate gym setting.  While I was in the trenches of the big box world I had a hard time seeing the positives for one simple reason; I didn’t know what I didn’t know.  I wasn’t aware that no matter where you go in the professional training world there will be a quota waiting for you.  I didn’t realize that training the clients was the easy part and that getting them in the door was where the real work was happening.  I had a sense of entitlement to more than I really deserved and that drove me to go out and find it for myself.  A great deal of what I implement in my daily business practices stem from the very things I complained about as a young, corporate trainer.  Now, I am very grateful that someone took the time to instill these values into me. 

Here are five rules I employed in a corporate setting that absolutely carry over to running my own business:

1. Be disciplined & consistent  

My first manager used to turn applicants away if they were even 30 seconds late for an appointment. To him, if being on time wasn’t part of who you were, you had no place in this industry.  I agree.  We have to be reliable, and our performance has to be like clockwork.  It’s one way we build trust with our clients and break down barriers in order to build productive relationships.  A consistent experience will create long-term clients, while inconsistencies and unreliability will burn through your book of business if you’re even able to build one. 

2. Work as a team and be on the same page 

Our training team averaged 13 or so trainers at any one point of the year.  The turnover was a little better than average by my guess.  Here’s why; we didn’t see each other as competition.  New trainers were welcomed into our little community very warmly.  We worked with each other on our weak points and bolstered up our strong points.  If someone was hurting for business, we worked together to help them out.  This all created synergy, and when that happens, the limits to what you can do disappear quickly and so do the negative vibes.  It also kept the powers-that-be at bay.  Nobody is going to interfere when business is good, and you are taking care of business.  This is a lot easier to do when everyone is working together toward one goal.

3. Build relationships with everyone   

One thing my team was exceedingly good at was creating a positive environment that everyone wanted to be a part of.  Our welcome didn’t stop at our clients; we were friendly with everybody.  Everyone knew who we were, and we knew everybody’s name. A big barrier in the gym setting is misconceptions.  Walking up to someone with a smile and greeting them by name on a consistent basis clears things up quick. Spend time building relationships that are centered on making people happy and the business will grow organically!  

4. Put a smile on everyone’s face, including yours

The people we work with deal with different stressors throughout their day.  They have bosses giving them deadlines, kids’ schedules to keep up with, and countless other adult things that nobody wants to think about.  Let’s do our best to not add more to that list than we have to.  Sure, we add physical stress to their day, but try to keep it light otherwise.  My goal was always to make everyone I ran into throughout the day laugh or smile.  Sometimes you succeed and sometimes you get crickets, but if you’re trying that will not go unnoticed, and it will be greatly appreciated.  

5. Do whatever it takes to better yourself & your work environment    

Nothing is perfect, including the job description you were given when you applied.  If you can get past the idea of “that’s not my job” and focus more on accomplishing a common goal, then your business, as well as the business as a whole, is going to reap the benefits.  Is the training room dirty?  Grab a mop and a bucket and go to town.  Garbage on the main floor?  Pick it up.  Someone’s client needs scheduling and their trainer is unavailable?  Grab a pen and dive into that scheduling book.  Your daily habits should revolve less around a job description and more around mission accomplishment.  People who write job descriptions are fallible, but that doesn’t lessen your responsibility for bettering yourself and your work environment.  

I understand that there are a lot of frustrations when working in this kind of environment, but if we focus less on those frustrations and more on how we can make a positive impact, then things turn out pretty nicely for everyone involved.  Look at it this way, you are getting paid to prepare yourself for bigger things!  I promise you that if you pay attention and work at it, the payoff will be big someday.   Just don’t be in a rush to get to that day. 

In the Strength Faction we are working hard to build a sound support system for trainers in this environment.  Luckily, we have a robust network of coaches with varying experiences to add to brilliant conversations about this subject.  Things are developing quickly! 

If you are in a rut or would like to work toward improving both yourself and your work environment, feel free to contact me at mike@rebellstrength.com and I’d be happy to help.  If you would like to learn more about the Strength Faction visit www.strengthfaction.com.

A Surprising Lesson Learned While Building An Online Fitness Community

Note from PD: Today's guest post comes from my good friend, Todd Bumgardner. Todd has recently given me a unique forum to share weekly fitness business insights with his crew at the Strength Faction, so I was excited to get some of his material up on my platform when he offered. Enjoy! 

A Surprising Lesson...

We were standing in the gravel lane outside my buddy Josh’s house shooting the shit. We’d just finished taking a few passes up and down the fence row in his fields, hoping to kick out a few rabbits but really just taking our guns for a walk. A guy we went to high school with stopped by because he was borrowing some camping equipment from Josh. Josh is friendly with the guy, I remembered him from school, and we played a bit when we were little kids, but we weren’t really friends. He started in, however, on the current state of affairs in his life.

“Yeah, I’m at $13.21 an hour right now, I’m hoping that if I get this new position at the plant that’ll bump be up to an even $14 an hour.”

My first thought was something like, “Holy shit, man, how do you eat?” He worked hard, 40-plus hour weeks at a diaper and hygiene products factory a little closer to town. Though his story held a twinge of convoluted and corroded gratitude, he didn’t seem to take much joy, or pride, in his work. By all accounts he’s a decent guy, and don’t think for a second that I’m dogging him for a humble job and a humble wage. I sincerely believe that no work done well is trivial. It’s also taken me a lot of hard work to make a decent living in the fitness industry. There were quite a few years of trying to figure out how to pay all of my bills and put gas in my car.

I was raised by someone that worked a humble job for a humble wage. My mom worked in a super market deli for 20 years. Her final wage, before she had a stroke could no longer work was about $16 an hour. So, when I considered where I came from, mostly, I thought, “Holy fuck, there’s no reason that I couldn’t be doing the same thing as him.” I could be right along side him, stuffing boxes or moving them. But I’m not.

I think we’ll all agree that doing something that you deeply enjoy, and know has a profound impact on other people, is better than working some job just to get by—even if all work, no matter how humble, is in some way honorable. The experience of building something you love is deeper at all levels than just working a job. And the whole of the production actually holds more capital—no matter which way you choose to apply the word in context. And I get to do that.

My job is to getter better, to continually develop myself, so that my partners and I can take this thing we created, Strength Faction, and evolve it so that it better helps people. We created something that didn’t exist before, and it helps personal trainers and strength coaches learn, grow, and live better lives. And I stop for a second and think, “Fuck, man, that’s my job. This is bananas.” That’s where my mind went that evening in the gravel driveway.

A few years ago when I was in transition out of one job and into the wide-open ether that is fitness entrepreneurship I wrote on a post-it note that I wanted to be “The Dave Grohl of Strength and Conditioning.” I stuck it to the wall in front of my desk and stared at it every day for months as I worked. To me, that meant, and still means, to be a good dude, someone that brings passion and energy to their work, that creates things that people enjoy and also greatly improves their lives, to do my best to be approachable and fun to be around. Dave Grohl has been one of my heroes for a long time, and it’s because of how hard the guy works to put out quality art while also appreciating that he gets to do what he does—entertain millions of people all over the world while writing songs that relate to parts of life we’ve all encountered and felt the pain or joy of. It’s his palpable gratitude that’s so magnetic to me.

As I’m writing this article, blog, whatever in the hell you want to call it, I’m listening to the Foo Fighters song “Aint It The Life.” The first verse goes like this:

“Dear Haley

 Can you save me from the borrowed cloud I’m on?

 All you’ve gotta do is try, pray you’re just getting by.”

Sometimes I feel like I’m on some borrowed cloud, like this shit can’t be real. I get to run a business with two of my best friends. I get to build a program that educates people, that helps them develop personally and professionally, and watch the people of a community congeal to take care of each other in so many ways. And I feel grateful.

I know I could be working a factory job back home in Pennsylvania. I could be doing something that isn’t nearly as meaningful to me or anyone else, and I could be bitter and resentful about it. I realize that if I sit on my ass and grow complacent that all of this will be taken away, and that I’m not the only one that will suffer because of it.

But today, I woke up with the coolest job in the world, building an online community of people all over the world that want to kick ass, be better at their jobs, and be better people.

So, apart from all of the tactical lessons, the learning about how to organize systems, get people on the same page, and develop something from the ground up, the biggest lesson I’ve learned over the past two years of running Strength Faction is to be even more fucking grateful for my life and what’s in it.

That’s something we can all take away from whatever situation that we’re in. We get to be wherever we are, doing whatever we are doing right now, when things could be impossibly worse. But they’re not. And we have all this opportunity to impact other people and help improve their lives while doing the same for ourselves.

Ain’t it the life?

Gym Owner Musings – Installment #8 – Internship Edition

There are currently nearly 200 names in the Cressey Sports Performance intern alumni database. Each and every one of these individuals has taught us something valuable along the way. In this eighth edition of Gym Owner Musings I will share a tip for internship candidates, a frustration about the state of the internship industry as a whole, and a valuable reminder for the business owners currently leading programs of this nature.

Here goes…

1. Attention Candidates: You Are More Powerful Than You Realize

Seth Godin has said that “the closer you get to the front, the more power you have over the brand.” When he speaks of “the front,” he means the client-facing portion of your business. In a gym setting, this would be the fitness professional delivering a memorable experience on the training floor. When I give an intern the opportunity to engage with our athletes, I am effectively giving him the keys to my brand.

If you are a coach considering internship opportunities, make sure to ask your interviewers what kind of autonomy you’ll have on their gym floor, and if you will have an opportunity to impact the character of the training environment. As the person sitting on the other side of the table, I can vouch that there is nothing more refreshing than finding a motivated candidate who is requesting a structure that sets high expectations while also providing the freedom to be remarkable.

The CSP Mass Fall Interns Have Been Especially Good To-Date

2. The Frustrating Thing About Low Barriers to Entry…

There is almost no barrier to entry for personal trainers. This is obviously dangerous for the fitness consumer who is willing to put his or her faith in fitness professionals. Similarly, there is nothing stopping mediocre gym owners from throwing an Internships tab on their website and declaring that they provide a great resume-building experience. Many internships prioritize driving unpaid employees through the doors of gyms over the education of the coaches who will one day move on to influence the direction of our industry. Buyer beware.

The internship program offered at CSP is far better today than it was a decade ago. We’re constantly improving our onboarding processes, the overarching curriculum, and the on the floor coaching of coaches.

Despite our dedication to improving the experience, the volume of applications is on a bit of a downswing in recent years. Today I have to think about my program as a business within my business that needs to be properly branded, positioned, and marketed. I have no doubt that we’re on the cusp of seeing targeted internship program advertising on platforms like Facebook as similar businesses look to continue developing talent.

In the long run, we will all be reminded that survival and success are not the same thing, and the strongest programs will have the staying power that keeps them relevant a decade from now.

3. A Reminder for Program Coordinators

Making a bad full-time hire hurts bottom line, negatively impacts the optics surrounding your business, and can set you back months. This is exactly why we will only hire through our internship program at CSP. With 300-500 hours of coaching experience under our roof at the conclusion of an internship period, we can safely say whether or not a coach fits our culture and possesses the necessary skill set to thrive as a member of our team.

I don’t make bad long-term hires. I do, however, swing and miss on the occasional intern. It is important that I continue to do so in order to ensure that we are regularly identifying the character and personality styles that align with our goals, or introduce new aspirations. There are plenty of phenomenal coaching approaches and training philosophies out there, but they don’t all make sense for my business.

If you offer an internship program at your gym, embrace the fact that you’re going to choose poorly from time to time. What you can’t afford to do is fail to learn from each poor decision you’ve made.

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Market Toward One Audience and You'll Enjoy the Perks of Many

“How am I supposed to focus on marketing to a single demographic when my business has about five different client avatars?”

My buddy Andy was thinking out loud in the back of the room this past weekend as he and I listened to presenter Adam Bornstein wax poetic on the importance of knowing what problem your business solves, exactly whom it helps, and what makes your service offering valuable. Andy runs a gym we'll call Andy's Gym (AG) that KILLS it with the elite football scene, but he’s afraid of that reputation costing him business with other populations.

Bornstein's Walk-out song was "I'll Make Love To You" By Boyz II Men. True story.

The fear of being typecast…

I know it. I’ve felt it.

Back in 2007, my business partners and I sat down to discuss our “growing problem” that football players and lax bros weren’t going to want to train with us because we were becoming seen as “the baseball guys.”

God forbid we veer off of the popular jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none track, right?

As you probably already realize, we quickly dropped that discussion and went all-in on our pursuit of cornering the baseball-specific strength and conditioning market. Had we not made this move, you likely wouldn’t be reading any blog material from me right now. The odds are decent that I would have burned out and left the industry entirely thanks to the frustration that comes with struggling to operate a business in a crowded field without possessing any differentiating traits.

So here’s what I asked Andy…

If you had a football client moving to the Boston area, and they asked you how they were going to survive without AG in their life, what would you tell them?

“I’d tell them to get in their car and drive to CSP.”

I facetiously pressed further…

But you’d hesitate because us baseball guys could never fully understand the unique needs of the football-playing demo, right?

“That’s bullshit. I know you guys would take good care of him.”

Exactly. And here’s the lesson that it took me a couple of years to learn: If you successfully position yourself as “the best” in one particular realm of fitness, you can count on people assuming that you’re far above average in working with most other athletic populations.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered “I know you’re the baseball guys, BUT…”

• I figured you’d be able to take care of my daughter who plays volleyball.
• My son’s tennis coach said you’d be his best bet for fixing his cranky shoulder.
• Someone told me that the work you do with pitchers might translate well to swimmers.

The leads keep rolling in, and it turns out that being pigeonholed isn’t so bad for business. My best advice for Andy relating to brand positioning is to embrace his “football guy” reputation. He should speak directly to that population in his marketing efforts without fear of retribution from the general fitness community.

The middle-aged recreational athlete living around the corner from Andy's gym is never going to say: “That guy who trains a dozen NFL players probably can’t handle the task of helping me get a little stronger before golf season rolls around.”

Master one trade, and people will assume you’re a jack of all the rest.

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The Best Thing Your Can Do to Improve Your Gym's Training Environment

My phone pinged with a Facebook notification at 4:47pm on Saturday afternoon:

John O'Neil tagged you in a post.

I opened up the notification to find an image of four full-time CSP staff members and a pair of fall interns circled around a table eating what appeared to be ice cream cake. The right side of the image featured a (clearly fake) picture of the cake.

"Happy Birthday, Pete! Here's the crew celebrating with a micro-creamery ice cream cake for you.”

I was being trolled.

If I had to pick my favorite part of this post, it would be the fact that John & Co. intentionally chose not to remove the HappyBirthdayCakePic.com graphic from the top corner of the photo as they attempted to pass it off as a real cake purchased to celebrate my birthday at an event I wasn't even invited to.

Why did I love it?

Well, for starters, I have a sense of humor. You can't own and operate a gym without being open to some good old fashioned ball-busting. After all, I tolerated my Office Manager Stacie’s “Happy 51st, Pete” sign that sat at the front desk the entire day before, so why not laugh at this one? (I’m 36, for the record.)

Secondly, I loved it because it illustrated the fact that I have a team that genuinely enjoys each other’s company. 4:47pm on a Saturday happens to be close to three hours after we close up shop at the end of an exhausting six-day work week. These guys could have raced home and enjoyed their 36-hour work-free window. Instead, they chose to get a lift in as a group following client hours, and then hit the road for ice cream.

There is nothing that positively impacts a training environment more than employing a collection of individuals who love working together to facilitate it.

When your coaches share a bond, the positive vibes bleed into the client experience. Camaraderie on the training floor between staff members can be contagious, and clients begin to feel at home in this setting. If you train athletes for a living, the connection that your team shares will closely simulate the clubhouse vibe that they have acclimated to during their competitive seasons.

Begin the process of cultivating a cohesive team today by focusing as much (or more) on “fit” as you do on “competency” during the hiring process. If you’re considering adding a coach to your staff, get all of your employees involved in the decision. Your coaches want to feel that they have an ownership stake in the team that they work with, not just the programming they design.

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What's The Worst They Could Say?

"List the worst things that the other party could say about you and say them before the other person can."

This is a section I highlighted in Never Split The Difference - Negotiate As If Your Life Depended on It.

My most recent entertainment.

Have you bothered to list the most common counter arguments you've received while giving your fitness services sales pitch over the months or years you've been in business?

• Your gym is too far from my home for me to train there consistently.

• The cost is a big jump from the monthly rate I pay for my commercial gym membership.

• I'm concerned that I won't be able to properly execute my program without supervision upon returning home. What if I forget how to do an exercise?

These are a few of mine. A little frustrating? Sure. But insurmountable? Definitely not.

I can anticipate the sticking points in my canned sales pitch coming into just about every conversation as long as I know a little bit about the lead. Did they list a home address in their email signature? Who referred them to our business? What kind of terminology did they use regarding injury history or training experience in their voicemail?

Unless you answered a phone call unprepared, or someone dropped in unexpectedly, the clues are probably already in place to allow for an informed pitch while getting ahead of "the worst things the other party could say."

Want an example?

"I noticed in your email signature that you guys are from Connecticut. We've got clients coming in from all over New England, so I'm certain we can take good care of you...We know the long commute can be a limiting factor in the frequency with which you'll be able to make it in to see us, so we've created a system that allows for a single weekly supervised training session here at CSP along with training material designed to be easily executed at a gym closer to your home. We'll also give you access to our regularly updated exercise video database to ensure that you have a resource to lean on should you find that you're a little hazy on proper exercise execution upon returning home...We want to make sure that you feel properly equipped to maximize what you take away from your time in the gym since you'll be paying a premium price point for your entirely individualized training materials."

Distance concerns? Not anymore.

Worth the cost? Yup.

Productive use of time, even if just once weekly? Absolutely.

A little proactivity in your approach to selling can effectively eliminate some of the biggest headaches you currently encounter on a daily basis. Sit down and write your list now so that you can start closing more leads and abbreviate some previously lengthy pitches.

Do you enjoy my fitness spin on business concepts?

I publish my “Friday Four” newsletter at the end of each week featuring links to useful articles and insights on applying concepts from each to your own fitness business endeavors. Check it out here.

Sometimes the Customer is Wrong

“This place just isn’t the same as it used to be…”

When this message comes from a client, it is rarely meant to convey positivity. It always stings.

You’ve probably heard the same thing yourself if you’ve been running a gym for more than a couple of years. I have some good news - sometimes your clients are wrong, or simply don’t appreciate what is in the best long-term interest of your business.

One of our first, and most loyal clients is a guy named Sahil. He was one of the dozen or so athletes who set foot in our first facility on day-one, and has managed to complete close to 1,000 training sessions here at CSP in his lifetime. Sahil has earned the right to be critical of our business, and he has never been afraid to share his thoughts.

He dropped the “this place has changed” card on me a couple of years back after returning to train as a recent college grad. It didn’t stop there…

• The training environment isn’t as rugged as I remember it.

• People aren’t as strong as they used to be around here.

• You guys are too corporate now.

Most of the things he said were probably accurate. We had changed, but it was due to necessity. Grungy powerlifting gyms don’t scale well, and they hardly illustrate a safe and professional training environment to professional athletes and parents of teenagers.

When Sahil began training with us, we were bootstrapping it as a startup trying to find our identity as a business. Our optimal training environment changed dramatically between year one and year six. At some point during that very same period, Sahil stopped representing our ideal client. That’s okay. If you were to ask him now, he’d probably tell you that he sees why we pivoted a little bit and understands the rationale.

The next time a long-time client tells you “this place has lost its magic,” fight the urge to make immediate changes in an attempt to be everything to everyone. Instead, ask yourself these two questions:

1. Have we lost sight of what makes this place great, or are we simply making the necessary adjustments to take us to the next level?

2. Is the person who is sharing their concerns still a member of my target market, or have their life circumstances and training needs changed over time? If you've built a business that is designed to cater to high school and collegiate athletes, you probably shouldn't be losing sleep over the tough feedback that you got from a client who is no longer a member of either of these demos. 

You’re going to have to let go of some of your garage gym tendencies if you want to take this operation from an entertaining hobby to a viable long-term business. There will be times where “thank you for your feedback” will suffice, followed by staying on your course.

Remember, the client doesn’t always have to be right.