The Real Value of Coaching (And Why It’s Not Enough on Its Own)

Good coaching is necessary but insufficient for a world-class fitness business.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper breaks down why a gym owner must first focus on building a strong foundation for their business before working to improve their coaching.

In the early stages, most gym owners are good coaches but weak entrepreneurs, so they must upgrade their business skills first. Once strong business systems are in place, gym owners can pivot to service delivery as the next big opportunity for growth.

Chris shares six key client outcomes that define great coaching and explains why earning more certifications isn’t always the best way to achieve these results.

He also introduces the “Strength Coach Collective” podcast and free public group, designed to help coaches bridge the gap between advances in training science and real-world application. 

Use the links below to check out the “Strength Coach Collective” YouTube channel and join the collective’s free group to connect with other coaches, share insights and help your team grow. Invite your coaches to join, too! 

For more support on the business side, join Gym Owners United, also linked below.

Links

Strength Coach Collective Podcast

Strength Coach Collective Group

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

02:18 - How important is coaching?

04:17 - When to elevate coaching

05:33 - Getting clients results

10:39 - The gap between science and coaching

12:05 - Strength Coach Collective

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

How important is coaching to your gym business? Really? I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and today I want to tell you exactly how important coaching is when you need to focus on other things, when your coaching is good enough and when do you need to make it better. Good coaches are important to a business. They're necessary, but they're insufficient. And today, I'm gonna break that all down for you. So first, let's start with the question. Can good coaching really make a good business? When I started my gym , I hoped that being a good coach would make me successful, but I found out that it's really a different skill set . Being a good coach and being a good business owner, good coaching is necessary, but insufficient for a good business. The best coach in the world won't keep a gym open if they're pricing or their marketing or their retention or their operations are off certifying bodies like CrossFit and the NSCA send a different message. They want us to believe that good coaching equals good business. And that's because they sell coaching credentials and also because their audience wants to believe that. I wanted to believe it too. I read in the CrossFit journal back in 2007 that just being a great coach would make me a successful affiliate owner. And of course that's not true. There are thousands of highly certified caring former affiliate owners. Now they're selling insurance and real estate as proof. This is called the Technician's Curse. The belief that just being good at your job will make you a good business. It's so common that it even has a name and it comes from the book, the E-Myth by Michael Gerber. Now, on the flip side, we all know that bad coaching can hurt your business. So here's an example from my own gym. A couple of years ago, a client came to our gym. She was visiting our city for the summer. She was a physician. She was paying for semi-private training at another gym 10 hours away. She didn't know, she knew what semi-private was. She didn't flinch at our price. And so we called up her coach, we coordinated our program with his , uh, we set her up in a semi-private time slot that was already going right, perfect. Everything should have been super duper smooth, but we didn't give her a good coach. She didn't get the experience that she was used to getting, and she quit. That was a $2,400 refund and that was painful as hell. I'm sharing it to save you the pain of learning it yourself. We dropped the ball on coaching and lost that client. So how important is coaching in your gym business? Well, most gym owners come into two brain with coaching at a seven outta 10 or an eight outta 10 level, right? It's very, very good. Many over 50% have a CrossFit certification or two, and which is some of the best coaching certifications in the world. But the rest of their business, their gym business, the thing that feeds them and provides the platform for their coaching is a two or a three outta 10. Maybe they have a little sales process or they've tried some marketing or they send out birthday cards sometimes to their clients. Some of them are running their business at a zero out of 10. They have no plans, no systems, just like what's in their head, but their coaching is great. And so where would we focus as good mentors, we focus on their business. If their coaching is a seven and their business is a zero or maybe a two or a three, we wanna fix that first, or all of their coaching improvement will just go to waste. They'll lose their platform for coaching. And so when we meet these gym owners, we're not working on improving their coaching. Instead, we're building an onboarding process. We're teaching the owner how to sell an on-ramp program. We're creating four marketing funnels that they can just keep running forever. We're helping them write their client's first 90 day journey. We're helping them document their operations in a handbook. We're teaching the owner how to read their financials so that they're impervious to threats and can make better decisions for the next 30 years. We're helping them focus for one hour a day on growing their gym before they do anything else. And slowly these changes take their business from a zero, maybe to a two or from a two to a five, or from a five to a seven, sometimes even up to a 10. And the results are that the gym doesn't go bankrupt, that the opportunities for their coaches are right there. So the coaches don't have to go open their own gym and repeat the owner's mistakes. The owner's family gets supported. The owner avoids burnout, and some owners even go on to open more gyms. Amazing. Once the business is stable and supporting the coaching team, then we can improve the coaching even more. Now, there are a few ways to actually level up your coaching. Once your business is worthy of the coaching that you bring to it, you can pursue more advanced credentials, right? You can go get your CrossFit level two, you can go get your Pilates level three, you can go get an advanced yoga certification, whatever that is, you can span expand beyond your credentials so you can go learn something different. You can go spend a weekend learning how to rock properly. You can listen to Peter Atia podcast. You can read books about training and coaching. Or the third way to level up your coaching is to focus on client outcomes. Now, at some point, higher certifications are more about coach validation than client impact. I'll give you an example. If you start doing jiujitsu for self defense , a blue belt is probably good enough to protect yourself in the street. But once you've got that blue belt, you start thinking about the purple belt, the brown belt, the black belt even, right? But you don't need a PhD to transform lives in a gym, and you don't need a black belt to protect yourself. So if our business is creating outcomes for clients, getting clients what they want in life, then pursuing higher levels of credentials might not be very important. Instead, what we need to do is measure our ability to create clients, the outcomes that they want to ask their goals, and measure how quickly we can get people to their goals. We need to do coaching evaluations, of course, because we wanna make sure that the basic habits of coaching are being followed. We wanna make sure that the gym runs its classes on time, and that the classes are delivered by a smiling and knowledgeable and caring coach. Of course, we want to measure that baseline, but our goal is not to have the most, you know, Pilates level three coaches in the world, or the most black belt instructors, or the most PhDs on our coaching staff. Our goal is we get the highest percentage of clients to their goal faster than anybody else. That's what clients care about, and that's what our gym business is built on. When you look at things this way, the best coaches are defined by the people who get the clients the best results. Fastest. It's not who has the most credentials, the highest belt, the PHD , the CrossFit level three, that matters as much as who can get the client the best results. As an example, you know, Richard Simmons helped millions of people lose weight. He was a great coach. He didn't have a PhD, he didn't have high level certifications. What defined him as a great coach was not the haircut or the dance moves. What defined him as a great coach was the ability to get people moving up off the couch and losing weight. So client outcomes are really the most important thing here when you're building your business. Now, I've got a new book coming up with some collaborators called Help Best, and this is what the book is about. How do you help people best? You help them best by getting them to the outcome that they want to achieve increasing their lifespan and their health span . So there are really six buckets of client goals. When they come in, they might say something like, I just wanna lose weight, just wanna touch my toes, just wanna be healthier for my kids. Just wanna not feel like garbage all the time. But these, these things are short term goals and they really fall into long-term buckets, right? Long-term outcomes. And there are about six different outcomes that a client faces when they join our gym. Here they are, and I'm gonna break them down just the way that we've broken them down into the help best book. So the first client outcome is the client says to you, you've changed my life. So something has happened where they've changed their context, their understanding, their habits, their entire life has changed. And often this isn't as measurable. So what we wanna do is we wanna write down, every time a client says, you've changed my life. Okay? So that's, that's client outcome number one. They tell you, you've changed my life. Mission accomplished. Okay, successful client outcome number two is that the client stays at your gym for at least two years. Because if they can build a habit that lasts for two years, it's probably gonna last them a lifetime. Successful client Outcome number three, they continue exercising after they leave the gym. So they, they might quit CrossFit, but they don't stop exercising. Okay? Successful client outcome number four, they had a life changing moment. So they met their spouse, they overcame the odds to get pregnant. They did their first Murph , they ran their first 5K, they survived a heart attack, they've got some measurable health improvement where their doctor has been like, wow, I'm taking you off Metformin. Okay? That's the next successful client outcome. The next successful client outcome is really, really important. They brought a friend, or they've built relationships that reinforce their healthy lifestyle. That means that they can maintain their fitness because they're surrounded by other people who are maintaining their fitness. You know, you're the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. And so a successful client outcome is changing those five people's lives too. And number six, of course, the client comes in, they've got a very clear goal, they achieve that goal, and then they set a new goal, right? This is a , a great, successful client outcome. The challenge in most gyms is that the client's goal isn't really that clear or refined when they come in. And so you can use these other goals like keeping them around for two years, changing the lives of their circle of friends or their families , um, having them have like a peak moment in your gym, do something for the first time, or continue with exercise and fitness outside your gym. Like these are other successful client outcomes and you don't get better at producing these by taking higher credentials or more certifications. And you certainly don't make a gym that survives without addressing these things. And so if you want to build a good business, your coaching must address these outcomes and be focused on these outcomes instead of focused on just achieving higher credentials and wearing black belts around because nobody comes into your gym saying, I just wanna train with a PhD, or I wanna , I wanna grapple with a black belt, or I wanna work out with a highly certified CrossFit level three coach. They care about their own results. They might not be good at iterating those results, but generally their results will fall into one of these buckets. And so the gyms that really are successful are the ones who can deliver clients these outcomes, not the ones who are better and better at coaching CrossFit or jujitsu or whatever. That means that we need to pursue knowledge that helps our clients reach their goals, not just add more letters after our name. The fitness industry lacks right now true scientific leaders who are good at connecting the science, the research with application in the trenches to get people to these goals, to help them build habits. I would say that Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit, was great at bridging that gap. He understood the science, but he could explain it in a simple colloquial way that we could all understand. He was good at telling stories, making the complex simple, and making it actionable. But there are very few leaders in the fitness industry like Greg today. You know, there are science leaders like Peter Atia and Andrew Huberman, and they're putting out amazing work. And then there are training leaders like Dan John, and I'm sure you've got your own favorites, but there's this gap between training and science. I mean, you can listen to Peter Atias podcast all day long and still not know, like, what do I actually do today? And that's actually what happened to me after a four year degree. I got my very first client, they were meeting me out back of the treadmill store where I worked, and I was starting to write their plan that morning. I was all excited. I was looking at all my old textbooks and I was going, but what do I actually do? That's the gap right now between science theory and application in the trenches. What do I actually do today? Now I wanna help bridge that gap because we do have a lot of gyms who are now running at an eight or a nine or a 10. Their coaching is like a seven, and their biggest opportunity for growth is actually to improve their coaching. Improving their coaching means, improving their client outcomes. So to do that, I'm gonna introduce to today the Strength Coach Collective. So first, we have a brand new podcast called Strength Coach Collective. What we're trying to do is bridge that gap between science and application. So we're gonna have guests in the tech field, we're gonna have guests like Dan John , who are in the application field and the host of the podcast. We'll rotate between me and a few collaborators, and we're going to try and bridge that science with knowledge like, okay, Peter Atia talks about zone two. How do you actually introduce that into a group training program? We're gonna tell you stuff like that, okay? We want to make science applicable so that you can get clients to their goals no matter what. Now, I don't have anything to sell you. I don't have a credential, a certification, anything for you to buy. We're doing this to help gym owners improve the outcomes that their clients get, because that will improve their business. Now, beyond the podcast, we have a free group. It's called Strength Coach collective.com. It's a Facebook group. There's over 3000 strength coaches and fitness coaches in there already. A lot of CrossFit coaches, but a lot of martial arts instructors, Pilates instructors, all kinds, and we're in there every single day talking about science, bridging that gap between science and application in real world applicable lessons that you can take and apply it an hour later out on the floor. That's really important to me. My single goal of doing these two things is to make gyms better. When your business is running on solid systems and clear plans, then coaching improvement becomes the next logical step for you. But great coaching isn't about bigger credentials, it's about getting better client results. Your job isn't to make your clients better at Pilates or better at CrossFit. It's to get them the outcomes that they want. So finally, we're working on a book called Help Best. This is a collaborative project too, with many of the mentors from Two Brain and some of our favorite strength coaches. And what we're trying to do here is give coaches the fundamentals that will help them get clients better results. The core of this book is what we call the prescriptive model. Here's how you meet with clients. Here's how you coach the client to sign up. Here's how you keep the client engaged for the first 90 days. Here's how you meet with them. Again, here's how you program. Here's how you work with different clients, depending on their avatar. The book is not about kinesiology. The book is about human relationships, building habits, having clear goals, and getting the clients to those goals. Now, we're gonna be talking about the core principles at the Two Brain Business summit, www.twobraininsummit.com. But I'd love to have you in the group. I'd love to have you, if you're a fitness coach, CrossFit coach, running coach, you know , track coach, throwing coach, weightlifting coach, I'd love to have you in this group because if we can collaborate and we can learn from each other, then we can really bridge that gap between science and application. And bridging that gap is what gets our clients' results, expands their health span , expands their lifespan, and keeps them exercising long enough to actually change the health of our gyms, our communities, and our society as a whole. So here's the final takeaway. How important is coaching to your business? It's necessary to have good coaching, but good coaching alone is not sufficient to build a good business. I had to learn this the hard way. All of my earliest books were about this theme. You need to work on your business first. Bring your business up to a seven or an eight outta 10. That means you could walk away from it, somebody else could step in, follow your process, follow your operations. Know how to market, know how to sell, know how to retain clients, know how to deliver a great class. Know how to measure whether you're delivering a great personal training session or not. Once you have that, then you can elevate your coaching again, to change more lives. For most of us, the coaching is the fun part, but the reality is, is it's the business that feeds us. And so if that's not strong, then our platform will not provide the best opportunity to provide the excellent coaching that we're all capable of. Thank you, coach. Thank you Gym owners. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym , and I look forward to seeing you in the Strength Coach Collective.