The 7 Deadly Sins of Staffing That Kill Gym Growth

Staffing is the biggest and most important investment you'll ever make in your gym. Get it right and your business grows. Get it wrong and everything stalls.

Today, Chris Cooper unpacks the seven deadly staffing sins that create chaos, kill growth and keep gym owners chained to day-to-day operations.

From hiring out of desperation to keeping people too long, each staffing mistake is pulled from real conversations with gym owners who’ve felt the consequences.

You’ll probably recognize a few of these mistakes in your own business. You might even realize you’re committing all seven sins.

Coop's got absolution and solutions for you. Tune in to hear how top-performing gyms build strong, reliable teams, then take action to do the same.

To get the full guide, join Gym Owners United via the link below.

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2:22 - Lack of clarity and defined roles

7:06 - Over-incentivizing and promoting

13:08 - Hiring in desperation

16:55 - Keeping people too long

19:30 - Abdicating instead of delegating

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey, I am Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and today I'm gonna share the seven deadly sins of staffing. Look, I've owned a gym for 20 years, <laugh> . In that time, I have made every mistake there is to make with my staff. But after working with over 2,500 gyms worldwide through two brain business, I know that I'm not alone, that the same staffing mistakes get made over and over and over. So I took the seven most common sins of staffing from our private group for our clients, and from our public group gym owners united.com, and I listed them on the next couple of pages of this guide, I'm gonna share this guide with you in a moment. If you want a copy, all you've gotta do is go to gym owners united.com , send me a message, or you'll see the post and request it from me. Unfortunately, the Facebook algorithm means that I can't just look for people who want it and hand it to you. You have to actually send me a DM now, but while you probably haven't made every mistake that's in this guide, I'm betting that you've made at least one and this guide is gonna be super useful to you to tell you how to solve it. Solving staffing mistakes is one of the hardest things that you're gonna have to do, but the reality is that you have to do it for the good of your gym, for the good of your family, and your income for the good, of your peace of mind, and for the good of your community. I'm gonna share stories from these gyms so that you can really relate to what the problem is and how the problem was solved. But I'm not gonna reveal the actual gym that brought the story up. Now, I told you that you could join this conversation. You could get this guy to Gym Owners United. That's our free group. Any gym owner can join it, gym owners united.com. And if you want some help with a mentor in navigating this change, you could book a free call by clicking a link below this video. Now what I wanna do here is I want to go through each of the big sins of staffing for you so that you can get a handle on like what the actual problem is and the impact that that problem creates. But then I want to tell you a little story about how this looks in practice, because your situation might be a little bit different. And then I'm gonna tell you how you solve it. I'll warn you, none of these solutions are super duper easy when you're dealing with humans. There's a little bit of change required and there's always a best way to do things. So the best thing that you can do here is talk to a mentor about actually making these changes in your gym. Alright , here we go. Uh , you , you've got my confession here already. So number one is no predefined roles and tasks. Uh , this gym owner said, I hired a guy who seemed like a great candidate. He was a great coach, he was an amazing athlete. He had some really legit weightlifting skills. He was also a really good buddy of mine, so I was really surprised when he showed up late or looked like he had just rolled out of bed sometimes, and he didn't book clients in for their PT sessions on time, didn't follow up with them . Sometimes his group clients were super technical instead of covering one point and then getting in a good workout. And so they weren't any fun. And I think a lot of us have been in this exact spot. We've, we've got the staff who are great people, but they can't read our minds. And so what you need to do is write out roles and responsibilities for the job in advance. So for example, here are the 10 steps that you follow in a personal training program. Here's the 10 steps that you follow when you're running a group. And then you wanna run it out, like write it out step by step by step so that, that your coaches have a template to follow. Now we call this , uh, freedom within a framework. So the framework is, here's exactly what you do. You start precisely on time. You have a, you know, two to three minutes of banter and you know, light conversation. You do a general warmup for 10 minutes, whatever. Okay? You can set that template. Within that template though they do have some freedom. So they might , um, you know, have lots and lots of energy they might be explaining, but you stop , uh, all this individual variation and complexity and chaos in your business by giving them this framework to follow. And the strict stricter that framework is, the more freedom you actually create for them because they're not guessing and usually guessing wrong. Remember, your staff can't read your mind. You have to tell them exactly what to do. If you want them to do it the way that you want it done, make it simple. Simplicity, scales, complexity doesn't, complexity means you've got 10 coaches each doing things a completely different way. You've got chaos and you've gotta sort this out before you can grow your gym. The second is clarity. And I'm hitting this one again, kind of because this gym owner brought up this problem. I hired this guy who seemed like a good candidate, but he had no presence in class. Uh, he was too quiet, he was too passive. I brought this up to him a couple times that I wanted him to get louder, get more enthusiastic, and sometimes I was just hinting I wasn't being clear enough. And so I would send out emails to all my staff and I would run these staff meetings. I would run these coaching clinics and you know, the people who didn't really need to hear it we're like, what am I doing here? I I have good presence. You know, I do all this stuff already, but this guy didn't. And after a year things weren't getting any better so I didn't keep him. And so finally I addressed it with him and said like, Hey, we're not gonna keep you. You have no presence. And he was shocked. He thought he was doing absolutely fine. He thought that he was close to a promotion, but he was actually at the other end of the spectrum close to getting fired. And then on his way out, and because he was caught off guard, he was embarrassed. He reacted emotionally, he spoke up on social media and all kinds of stuff. Here's how you avoid that problem because we have this misperception that staff know exactly how they're doing. The reality is they usually don't. And so we have to give them clarity. And that means setting up quarterly evaluations with your coaches in advance. They should be one-on-one. They should feel like a career roadmap . Like where do you wanna go in your career? And then you say, here's where we're starting from. You pull up the evaluation and you go through it. They should know exactly what's on that evaluation in advance. Our job here is not to make them feel dumb, not to tell 'em how bad they are. It's to say, here's the goal, here's exactly where you are. So you have to give 'em that evaluation in advance. Personally, I really recommend setting these appointments a year in advance too, because if you don't and you make an evaluation appointment with somebody, when you're mad at them, they are gonna know and they're gonna come into that evaluation. Defensive, emotional, you are gonna be emotional, you're gonna be mad. The first time I ever did this, I didn't sleep the night before. I was like sick to my stomach. I hate confrontation. And the coach knew that he had done something wrong, so he was coming in with his backup. Instead, you need to be setting these appointments in advance so that the, the coach knows that they're coming. They aren't emotional about it. They know that they're gonna hear good news. They know they're also gonna hear constructive feedback, and they know that you're gonna measure their progress. That's really what this is all about. And it's like applying the prescriptive model to your staff. When you give them this kind of clarity, they know exactly where they stand and exactly how they can improve their standing. When you don't, they have to guess and they're gonna ruminate, they're gonna stress, eventually they're gonna quit. Okay, so here's exactly what you do. Here's exactly what you say in this guide. If you want it, just send me a DM on Facebook and I'll get it to you. Step three is the golden ticket. And oh man , I, I know we're all super duper guilty of this one. This person said, I had an amazing coach and I went overboard for him. I did so many extras. We did this fundraiser when his mom got cancer. Um , I helped him build his deck. I went to his house. I covered a bunch of times when he couldn't make a class. You know, I made extra leeway for him. I , uh, made, you know, exceptions to the rules for him. Um, I switched him out of like paying him into a salary when he needed to buy a car. We even talked about getting him equity in the gym. I did everything to help this guy and he still quit and opened a gym down the road. Why does it seem like the people you do extras for never appreciate it. Here's the solution. Stop keeping score. I know a few years ago there was a popular business book about like the emotional bank account and how you're putting chips into the emotional bank account. That's bs. Nobody is running off your scoreboard. You might be tracking all the little favors, the exceptions, the times you help them out, the , the golden tickets that you've given them , right? Like I gave that guy the winning lottery ticket. They are not counting, at least they're not counting on the same scoreboard. And so you need to stop keeping score. What their scoreboard reflects is they're lucky to have me. This business would fall apart without me. They need me and they're doing these things to keep me. They think like at best you're even and at worst that you owe them something, right? So how do you get around this? You host, you hold these quarterly career roadmap meetings, you say, what do you want now? And you write the plan to get them there, okay? Use math, not emotion. Mentor the person. Be clear with them. As I said earlier, don't do the job for them. And remember, not everybody should be or wants to be an entrepreneur. Most of your staff don't. Some might think they do, but they actually don't when they get out. The best way that you keep them is that you make a better opportunity on your platform than they could make for themselves. Remember, entrepreneurship is hard. Like do you really want your staff to have to go through what you and I have gone through? You know, you can hand them a golden opportunity, but if they don't take it, remember like that's on them. And, and don't keep giving them golden opportunities or making exceptions for them . And this, this fourth sin is really related. It's over promotion . It's not the same though. So this is when you take somebody who's amazing at one thing and then you promote them and you've taken them outta their zone of competence where they're uncomfortable and they're gonna fail. And then what you've, you've lost, you know, a great coach and you've lost a , a manager. So here's what the story was. I had this amazing coach. She wanted more money, so I promoted her to general manager, okay? Again, like you're doing this person a favor, you're giving them the golden ticket. I couldn't really afford to make them gm, but I figured that if she took over managing the gym and collecting money and leading the trainers and doing the marketing, like all the stuff I don't like, then I could use my time to do the stuff that I do like better. I could buy myself time to do what I like more. Makes sense, I get the temptation. But unfortunately, this coach was a horrible communicator. She was a pretty disorganized, the staff never respected her and it ended badly. And in the end, I lost a really great coach. I lost a lot of time, I lost a lot of money, I gained some sleepless nights and almost a staff mutiny. Here's the key. Often we create these opportunities for ourselves and we're thrilled to be successful. And we wanna share that with people, right? Like, I don't know a gym owner who isn't generous and doesn't wanna give their friends a job, they want their friends around, they want their friends to be grateful to them. And so they do them this huge favor and they give 'em a job. The problem is that we're sort of subconsciously trying to buy their friendship or improve our relationship by giving them something and they might be bad at it. Well, what happens if they're bad at it? This is so common that it has a name. It's called the Peter Principle. Basically we promote people to the level of their incompetence and they were surprised when they do badly and we're really disappointed and they're frustrated and they're disappointed. And now it's this big emotional breakup. The alternative is that, you know, they're bad. They know they're bad, but you don't wanna fire them. They don't wanna be fired. And so you keep them in the job forever. You know, there's this great quote from one of our summit events where somebody asked the speaker, Hey, what if I train somebody really well? And then they leave and, and he turned it around and said, well, what if you don't train them? And they stay like, that's worse. It's worse to actually keep somebody who's bad at a job in that job. So if you really need a gm, which I doubt for most micro gyms, go back to the first thing that I talked about and that is like, write up a set of expectations for the GM role, okay? Pretend that you're gonna hire somebody that you don't know and you write it all down. Then you advertise this job among your staff. You don't just walk up to the, to the staff person and say, here's the golden ticket, I'm gonna make you the gm. You offer it to your staff. Does anybody want to apply for this? Here's the set of expectations. Does that appeal to you? You don't say like, who wants a full-time job? Who wants to earn more money? Okay, it's who wants to do this role? If somebody is like, Hey, I really wanna work here, I wanna make more money, but I'm not sure that I'm ready for that role, don't worry. We'll work on making other opportunities for you. And if you do hire somebody and you're like, I don't know, even if you're confident that they're gonna do that job, what I would recommend is a three month trial period and an evaluation at the end of the three months and you say to the , to the person, Hey, look, you're such a great coach. If this doesn't work out, I don't wanna lose you as a coach. So in three months we're gonna get together, we're gonna talk about the progress you've made. You're gonna say whether you like the job, I'm gonna say whether I think this is a good fit for you right now, or if something else might be better. And if this isn't working in three months, we'll go back to the relationship we have now deal. And that's what you're basically gonna do. Okay? So I've got all this written up in the guide. Again, if you want this guide, you don't have to record this video and watch it on half speed or take screenshots. You can just ask me for it on Facebook. Sin number five is hiring and desperation. And boy man, I've been here. As I said, like I'm guilty of all seven of these and you probably are of a few. Um, so this, this came up from somebody that was two Brain and they said that they were getting buried, they were getting burned out. The extra work, the stress of changing the overwhelm meant that they weren't doing the work in the two Brain Mentorship course. By the way, if somebody ever says, I didn't get great results from two Brain mentorship, it's because they didn't do the work. Like I can say that 100% of the time, I can walk up to somebody on the street making that claim and say, why didn't you do the work? And they will tell me when people do the work, we know it works. But people, when you come into mentorship, like you're buried and that's why we chop the work up into tiny steps so that you can do a little bit every day and make incremental ongoing progress. Okay, so listen to the problem this person had. I was getting so many new clients, right? And like everybody's gonna say that's a good problem to have, but any problem is not a good problem. They said that they couldn't keep working on their business because they wanted to coach too often. So they had this staff person who wanted to take their CrossFit level one. Obviously this is a CrossFit gym. And the owner thought, perfect, I even paid for 'em to take it. I was just so grateful. He was a good athlete and he seemed like a positive personality. But pretty soon he started bailing on shifts because he had this day job, he wasn't patient with newcomers. And then he started saying stuff like, I just want to train the athletes. Well, I had to tell him that that wasn't most of our clients. And then sometimes he'd go train at other gyms and poached post selfies and rave about how great that other gym was. Uh, he never bragged about our gym online. Finally, he just kept saying he was too busy and I just took him off the schedule. I wasted a lot of time that I didn't have and now I was even more buried. So the solution to this is that you need to always be hiring. You need to have a staff pipeline, just like you have a client pipeline or even a staff funnel. If it helps you to think about it that way, twice a year, you wanna run , uh, what we call an advanced theory course. And all this is, is just a test of the waters to see who among your , your clientele might wanna coach someday . So an advanced theory course is just like an advanced course for your clients to learn more about the theory and practice some public speaking skills and maybe read some extra books. And this might be four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks long, they meet up on Saturday, you give them some homework assignments, they learn about training, they get a lot out of it, they love it. The CrossFit level one actually started out this way. Um, Greg Glassman was just making kind of an advanced course for some of his clients who wanted to know more about the rationale behind the programming and explain it. And it eventually became kind of like the certification for all CrossFit trainers. So , um, we do this twice a year. What you're really looking for though, I mean you're gonna put out a great course, they're gonna get a lot out of it, but what you're looking for are people who wanna dive deep, they wanna have knowledge, but they can show up with enthusiasm every Saturday. If you have those two things, you don't need a lot of technical expertise. You don't need them to know how to coach anybody. You've got enthusiasm and you've got attendance on time, you're good. So if you run this program and there is somebody who might make a good candidate to be a coach, then you can approach them after the program is done. You don't wanna set the expectation that doing this advanced theory course is gonna lead to a job. What it's gonna lead to is more knowledge, appreciation and maybe better results at the gym. That's it. And then of course, you know, you can sidebar with somebody after the course is done. You also want to usually probably have , uh, a uh , an ad running on Indeed or Barbell Jobs or somewhere else. If you are in a big metropolitan area with a lot of staff turnover like New York City, la, you probably wanna keep those ads running and have a staffing funnel going all the time. Syn number six is keeping people too long. Look, I'm just gonna read what this person said. I've been there. I can relate. I'm sure you can too . They said, I started the gym with one other trainer. I own the company so I took all the risk, but he was paid well right outta the gate. He was paid, I'm sure before the owner was paid. At first he really loved it. But as I grew, I made changes that he didn't always like. And after a few years of this, he was just burned out. Everybody around him noticed it, but I kind of put the blinders on and pretended not to notice. I tried to help him. I paid for his vacation, I set him up with a mentor, but his attitude was what was stopping him. And I kept just saying to myself, one more chance. It's not a good time. But he couldn't get anything done because he was just done with the business. And so I finally had the big talk with him. He was actually relieved. And as soon as he was gone, clients started coming up and mentioning other stuff, right? The other stuff that I didn't know about , uh, that he was yelling at people, I had no idea. And if I had known, I would've removed him sooner. But how can I trust myself to hire somebody knowing that this might help again? And the the solution here is that you stop trying to read people's minds. You stop projecting what you think that coach wants onto them. So instead of thinking like that coach doesn't wanna be fired or that coach will never get another job without me, or that coach, you know, really relies on me to feed his family, you need to ask. And so you need to do a career roadmap session and ask people every quarter, what do you want? Now, quite often they'll tell you if they're unhappy and you can work on a , a smooth offboarding process before things escalate and get really, really terrible. Um, sometimes you know you need to do other things too. And if you tell people how they can improve, they will. Sometimes you tell 'em how to improve and they don't. But now it's clear to both of you that it's time for them to go. And this is how you decide like when somebody should exit. It's very rare that you keep staff forever. I'll say that it's happening more and more often now, but the reality is that the fitness industry does have a high degree of churn . People are slow to realize like, Hey, I'm gonna be coaching at 6:00 AM and I'm gonna be coaching at 8:00 PM because that's when clients can come. It's not a nine to five . And sometimes they just realize it's not for them. And that's fine, right? It's fine for you, it's fine for them. But keeping them after that realization has happened is bad for everybody. It's bad for the client, it's bad for the business, it's bad for you, your mental health. It's bad for the coach, their mental health too. So as soon as you realize that this isn't gonna work out long term , you should plan to offboard them in the short term . The seventh is abdication . Okay, so, oh boy, this person said, I bought another gym across town. And surprise, surprise, the reason it was going outta business was because it had a lot of problems and I didn't realize it had this many problems when I bought it so soon that Jim was taking up all of my time and emotional bandwidth. And so I just said, I can't do this. I put a woman in charge of staff scheduling and billing and social media posting and lead nurture and no sweat intros, basically a manager job. And things seemed to be going well at first. Um, she was even working with her own mentor that I set up through Two Brain . But after a few months I noticed that my metrics were getting worse. They were going south, she always had a reason, but things kept getting worse. And then the staff started quitting and they were polite, but they always had a reason. And I started getting suspicious. One day I went into the gym and there were clients everywhere doing their own thing. She was out back on in her van on the phone and I started digging into things and finding all kinds of problems. Staff didn't respect her. She was never there. Phone calls weren't getting returned, emails weren't getting returned. She wasn't even following my processes. And she had been lying to her mentor about the work that she was getting done. The gym was a shambles. It wasn't even clean. So I had to fire her. And that meant working 70 hour weeks to fix two gyms at once. My existing gym and this one that I bought, I thought about selling it or just closing it in the end, I dug in and fixed it, but I never wanna put somebody else in charge again. And so now I've got two jobs and it's unsustainable. The solution is to mentor your staff. This is different from micromanaging them. You wanna do all of the pre previous things that I've told you in this episode. You wanna have roles and tasks. You wanna have checklists, you wanna have evaluations, you wanna have career roadmaps. You don't wanna read their mind. You wanna ask them questions. But all told, this is what mentorship is all about. You need to uh, tell them what you want. Paint a clear picture, lay out the steps to get there. Ask them to tell you when they've made progress or when they've been stopped. Then you need to objectively audit their progress and give them feedback. It's not really management, it's mentorship. Management is they can't do it. I'm gonna do it for them. Management is, I can't trust 'em to run a class. I'm gonna show up and look over their shoulder. Management is not telling them how to clean the bathrooms properly, but getting mad when they don't do it the way that you would want it done. That's micromanagement. None of us signed up to be managers. That's kind of the hidden secret of owning any business is that you have to manage other people as much as we wish that wasn't true, it is true, but the key is your own mindset. You need to switch from, I need to manage that person, control what they do to, I need to mentor that person so they know how to do well by themselves. Especially if you're going to multi-location, you cannot be in two places at once. You really can't manage two staff. You have to have somebody that's really in charge. You know when the roof starts leaking to to call the roofer and you have to mentor them to success. My mistake personally was abdication. I put somebody in place, I hired them and said, okay, you're good. You're getting paid. I'm out. I'm gone. I'm gonna go work on this other thing. You know, I did that when I started working for CrossFit Inc . I did it when I started working for 3, 2, 1, go. And I did it when I founded Two Brain Again. And every single time the manager failed because I put them in a position where they couldn't possibly succeed. And so some of the managers didn't wanna bug me 'cause they knew I was busy or they were scared of getting in trouble. So they would hide things. They would get on a call with their mentor and they would like cry for the hour or they would get on hold with Zen Planner and sit there for three hours instead of actually like solving the problem. And the fault is mine. I wasn't mentoring them. And that's the key here. So look, there's more sins than this to hiring staff. There's so many mistakes that you can make. Every mistake that I've ever made with staff has cost me a hundred thousand dollars because I didn't set them up for success. I didn't mentor them and then I didn't correct it when things were going wrong. Or at least correct it soon enough. Staffing is the biggest and most important investment you'll ever make because staffing is what gets you leverage in your business. Once you've got a working well-defined model, you hire staff to run that model, not to create their own ways of doing things, not to create their own system for cleaning or their own checklist for running a class, not doing it their own way because you've already solved those problems for them . The key is teaching them how to run your model, giving them feedback on how well they're doing at running your model, and then replacing them when they're not running your model and they're doing some their own model, their own thing, right? That's chaos. Your business can't scale with chaos. But fixing these problems is a challenge because we're dealing with humans. We're often dealing with our friends. That's where a mentor comes in to guide you through that, as well as can be when you know that you have to make a change. That's what a mentor business coach is there for, is to help you through that change. I've just given you the knowledge on what's probably going wrong in your business. If you find yourself going, oh , or Coop , you're so right, or, oh man, that's me, or What are you talking about? I hate you. That's understandable. This is not easy stuff. This is the hardest part of running a business, but it's the most important part. You've gotta get the people part, right? Go to gym owners united.com. If you want to ask more questions about this, send me a DM if you want to get the guide. And hey , thanks for being there . Don't give up .