At its heart, the Training Gym is an analogue business.
Whether you’re coaching someone in the room or whether you’re coaching them 100 miles away through a digital link, it’s still a person-to-person interaction. This coaching-based connection is the foundation of what makes the training gym model a premium service – based on community, trust, and an exceptional member experience.
This means that however sound your business plan, however amazing your premises, however amazing YOU are…if the people you choose to run the show with you aren’t up to scratch, your clients won’t get the experience they’re looking for. You’ll be pouring water into a leaky bucket, and your retention rates (and your business reputation) will reflect this.
Here’s the good news: invest intelligently in your people, and great things will happen.
There’s an old-school mentality in the fitness industry that encourages gym owners to think of our staff as expendable: to pay them the minimum we can get away with, to overwork them, and to offer them very little in return.
We need to redress this balance and think of our staff as one of the most valuable elements of our businesses.
In fact, the best fitness establishments treat their staff like their clients. With respect, in a give-and-take relationship that benefits both sides. What does this look like?
Staff are clients, too
When we want to make a sale, we market, we source a lead, we nurture it, we convert it, and once we secure it, we treat that customer the best we can to keep them happy and feeding our bottom line.
It’s exactly the same with staffing. We pinpoint high potential candidates, we recruit them, we onboard them, we nurture them, and once we’ve got them, we develop them and keep them incentivised to stay.
Long-term investment
In the same way as investing in high quality kit makes good economic sense, investing in your staff is the best way to bump your profit and keep it growing.
The sting of shelling out for staffing expenses in the short term will soon disappear when you realise that you’ve got a team of talented, committed, hardworking, and business-minded people that are with you for the long-term.
Low churn
There’s a very simple formula at play here: high staff retention = high client retention.
In other words, do staffing right and you’ll keep the clients you sign up. You’ll also make a higher yield per client, which is the key to maximising profit in today’s fitness industry.
Need some structure for your staffing approach?
The Complete Staffing Strategy Framework provides a straightforward and effective approach to attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining an outstanding team. Find out more here.