How to Find and Hire Great Coaches (Personality Assessment Included!)

Stop trying to clone yourself when you hire coaches.

Today on “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper explains why hiring for personality and training for skill is the smartest path to building a team that lasts.

Most gym owners hire based on certifications and technical knowledge. Then they micromanage every rep, correct every cue and watch their coaches burn out within two years.

But clients don’t care about perfect squat mechanics; they care about how they feel when they walk through the door.

Coop explains where to find coaches with great personalities and also provides a 10-question personality assessment you can use on potential hires.

Before you start looking for coaches, take the assessment yourself. If your score reveals you’re burned out, use the strategies from this episode to deal with that first.

The key takeaway: Hire people who light up when they’re around others. Then teach them the technical stuff.

DM Coop through Gym Owners United to get his free Energy and Attitude Assessment—link below.

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0:01 - Intro

2:52 - Where to find potential coaches

8:06 - The personality assessment

12:02 - Dealing with burnout

17:08 - The problem with bad personalities

Transcript

Chris 0:03

One of the biggest mistakes that gym owners make when they're hiring is trying to clone themselves instead of building a team. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Runner Profitable Gym. And today I'm going to teach you how to hire for personality and train for skill. And I'm also going to give you an exercise that you can do, and we're going to do it together because you should do this on yourself. It's a personality assessment that you can use on all your new trainers. If you want to get a copy of that, just go to gymownersunited.com and you'll see our post. But if you can't find it in there, find me on Facebook, shoot me a DM and say, Coop, can I please have the personality assessment quiz? All right, here we go. So here's what happens: you're a gym owner and you're buried. You're coaching every session, you're cleaning the bathrooms, you're answering emails at midnight. And so you finally decide to hire a coach to buy you back some time. And what do you do with that time? Well, you skim through Instagram, you reorganize the equipment closet, you move the barbell rack to the other side of the gym, you clean the bathrooms again. And then because that coach isn't as good as you, who could be, right? It's impossible. You micromanage them. You give them a six-month internship. You watch them like a hawk. You put them under surveillance, you correct every little thing they do that isn't exactly how you would do it. And eventually, that coach burns out and quits. My staff used to call this the eye of Sauron is on me. And then you have to start all over again, replacing staff every two to three years. And the worst part is that your clients don't actually care about the technical knowledge of your coaches. They really don't. They don't care that much about certifications. Not really. They want a warm welcome when they walk through the door. They want somebody who can lift their mood after a terrible day at work. They want someone who gets super excited about their wins. They want somebody who will actually listen to them when they talk because that's what they're really buying. They're not buying perfect squat mechanics. They're buying the feeling they get when they show up. I know a lot of gym owners who say, well, I'm not here to be a cheerleader, but sorry to say it, the successful fitness professionals are often more like cheerleaders than they are like PhDs. Especially if you run a spin studio, especially if you run a CrossFit gym where the workouts are already scripted, the warmups are pre-written, and you're handing a class template out to your coaches. In that case, you really need to hire for personality, not skill. Because you can train skill, but you can't fix a bad personality. Now, in the rest of this episode, I'm going to tell you exactly how to do this. And as a bonus, I'm going to tell you how to improve your own client-facing personality as the owner. Because if you're not happy, nobody's happy. And you don't hide your stress nearly as well as you think you do. Let's start with finding future coaches. First question: where do you find potential coaches with great personalities? Well, you start inside your own gym. You run what we call an advanced theory course or an ATC for short. Here's how it works. Once or twice a year, even if you're not desperate for coaches right now, you run an eight-week ATC, advanced theory course. It happens on Saturday mornings. Usually, your coaching prospects come in for a classroom style session. And the way that you advertise this is here's your chance to see what's on the other side of the clipboard. If you want to see, you know, what it's like to stand in front of people and lead a class, you can sign up for this. We're not hiring right now. This is just your opportunity to see what it's like to be a coach. Okay, you want to make that clear. So they come in on Saturday mornings and they do book reports and presentations for the group. Most importantly, they coach each other through a workout. And this serves multiple purposes. First, it positions you as an expert and a leader in your community. Second, it lets your clients who are more invested in your gym, even the ones who don't want to become coaches, just enjoy learning more. And third, it creates a pipeline of potential staff for the future. At the end of the eight weeks, you graduate everybody who completes the course, you give them a little certificate. Congratulations, you did our advanced theory course. And then you cherry pick the best leaders from that class. You approach them privately and you ask, hey, would you ever be interested in coaching? Have you ever thought about it? And if they say yes, then you send them to get certified. What this does is it lets you know who's interested in coaching before you invest in them. And yes, none of them will have any training yet. But again, you're looking for personality first. You're looking for people who show up every week of the eight weeks, who engage with the others, who smile, who lift the energy in the room just by being there. And if running an ATC doesn't bear fruit, or if you need someone sooner, then you can look outside your gym. So you start with the local trainers. You're not poaching them from the global gym down the street. You're offering them a better opportunity and you're keeping them in the industry. So you ask your clients, hey, who have you trained with before? Uh, who did you really like? What were they like? Who had the best attitude at your old gym? And then you go and train with those people. You book a personal training session or five or 10 or whatever. And if you agree that they're great, you ask them if they're looking for more work or better opportunities. That's all. And if that doesn't work, then you go to local colleges. But here's the key: you don't go to the exercise science department asking for the student with the best GPA. You go to any department and you say, who's your most upbeat student? Who has the best people skills? Who do the other students kind of gravitate toward? Now, these people are not going to have your technical knowledge, and that's not the point. The first coach that I hired was for the 6 a.m. class at my gym. Her name was Charity. She was a sophomore in college. She did not have any of my technical skill. And that was okay. We put her into 6 a.m. She greeted everybody at the door. Good morning, like big and happy, happier than I've ever been in my life every single day. And clients loved her. And that group started to grow from two to four to six to eight people because they loved seeing charity. After you've done that, after you've tried all those three steps, the ATC, trainers at other gyms, local colleges, only then do you post on job boards like Indeed. The problem with job boards is that you can only see technical qualifications and experience listed on a resume. You can't see personality. You can't see if somebody lights up when they talk to people. You can't see if they genuinely care or if they're just looking for a job. So posting on Indeed or another job search website is actually the hardest, longest path to finding staff because you have to vet people more thoroughly. You have to do multiple interviews, you have to do tryouts, you have to do reference checks. But this is where most gym owners start and it should really be your last resort. Now let's talk about how do you assess personality, right? I want to give you a personality assessment that you can give to potential hires to help you evaluate whether they're a good fit. But before you give this to anybody else, I strongly suggest that you take the assessment yourself. Why? Because most gym owners are tired, broke, they missed dinner with their family last night. They try to hide all their stress and fatigue in front of their clients, usually, and they think that they're doing well at it. They think they're hiding it. But they're not. It's obvious. If you're having a bad day, everybody knows it. Because if coach ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Sometimes gym owners hit absolute rock bottom and they actually confide in their clients or their staff how stressed they are, how hard things are, and how worried they are about money. This is a huge mistake. Nobody, no matter how empathetic, wants to pay to come to a gym where the leaders are miserable. So take this assessment honestly and then give it to your future potential hires. I call this the two brain energy and attitude assessment. And what you're gonna do, I'm gonna talk you through it right now. We're gonna do it together. I want you to answer each question honestly on a scale of one to five, where one is like never or strongly disagree, and a five is always or strongly agree. Okay, question number one. When I walk into a room, I naturally smile and make eye contact with others. Score yourself. Low is a one, high is a five. Question two, I feel genuinely excited about other people's successes and accomplishments. Be honest, only you are gonna see the results of this test. Question three, even on difficult days, I can set aside my personal problems and be present for others. This is probably my lowest score, I'll be honest with you. Question four, I wake up feeling rested and energized most mornings. Okay, maybe this is my worst ones, but score yourself honestly. One is low, five is high. Question five, I look forward to interacting with clients and people during my workday. Okay, looking forward, that's really important. Uh one is a low score, five is a high score. There's no pass fail, you're just identifying where you could use some work here. Question six, when somebody shares a problem with me, I listen without immediately trying to fix it or making it about me. Question seven, I maintain consistent energy levels throughout my workday without crashing. Question eight, I can remember and use people's names regularly in conversation. This is actually my highest score because I've trained for this. I've practiced it. Question nine, at the end of my workday, I still have energy left for my personal life and relationships. Score yourself from one to five. And question 10, I actively look for opportunities to celebrate others and make them feel valued. Now, what I want you to do is add up all those scores and give yourself a total out of 50. Okay? If you totaled between 40 and 50, then you have excellent energy and client-facing personality. This person or you is ready to create positive experiences for clients consistently. If you scored 30 to 39, you've got a good foundation, but you're showing signs of stress or fatigue. You might need to work on specific areas or implement better self-care strategies before taking on more client-facing responsibilities. That's right, you can still work backstage, but you probably shouldn't be at the forefront of your service in front of people. If you score 20 to 29, you've got a significant energy deficit or a personality challenge. And if this is you as the owner, then you need intervention now because your gym's growth is being limited by your current state. If this is for a potential hire, they might not be ready for client-facing work yet. And if you score below 20, I'm really worried. That's a critical concern. You need immediate change. And if this is you, then I guarantee you, I promise you, your business is suffering because of your personal state. If this is a potential hire, don't put them in front of clients. Okay. So there's also some really key insights here. If you want to get psychological about it, if you look at questions one, two, five, eight, and ten, then you they measure natural personality traits. And these are harder to develop, and they're what you're primarily hiring for. Questions three, four, seven, and nine measure energy management and burnout indicators, and these can be improved with better systems and boundaries. And question six measures emotional intelligence and genuine care, which is critical for client retention. If you scored yourself low, below 30, you should hire somebody now. Get yourself out of client-facing roles. You might think that you're hiring or hiding your bad mood, but you're absolutely not. Now, look, before we go any further, I want to give you this exercise on paper so that you can really put some thought and time into it. Just go to gymownersunited.com. That's our free group for gym owners only. No coaches, no staff in there. And just find me in that group, hit me a DM. Hey, Chris, can you give me that personality assessment, please? And I'll just give it to you. I'll DM it to you on Facebook. Okay? Now look, before I go any further, if you're already burned out, do this. Okay. What do you do if you took that assessment and you realize you're tired, you're burned out, and it's showing in your gym, even though you thought you were hiding it. Well, you know that that's hurting your business right now. So here are my top tips. Number one, replace yourself in the first session of the day and the last session of the day. Put a coach in there just like the charity story that I shared earlier. Get a little more sleep. I mean, that will help you enormously. Get home a little bit earlier. See your kids, you know, home in time for dinner if you can. Come to the gym a little bit later. Get an hour of sleep or half an hour of sleep and a decent breakfast. Your clients are not impressed by the quantity of hours that you're putting in. They are one and kept by the quality of the interaction that they have with you. And when you're tired, you can't have a quality interaction with anybody. Your martyrdom is not impressing anybody. Showing up exhausted and irritable at the 5:30 a.m. class is worse than not being there at all. It's a net negative. If you can sleep until 6 a.m. instead of 5 a.m., you will be a better coach later in the day. I promise you. And the same goes for that 7 p.m. class. If coaching it means that you're resentful because you're missing dinner with your family, your clients can feel that. Replace yourself and go home. The second tip is to create a pre-shift ritual that resets your energy. Before you coach, you need a transition period. If you've been working all morning and you're, you know, responding to texts, you're calling people, you're writing the emails, you're doing the accounting or looking at your metrics. You need a transition period. Whether you like that work or you don't, you need a place to shift gears. Not just physically walking from your car to the gym, but like mentally taking a break and resetting. This might be five minutes in your car listening to music that pumps you up, right? Like I'm picturing Dwight from the office listening to Kickstart My Heart and punching the back of the driver's seat. That works for some people. It might be a specific playlist you put on when you're setting up for class. It might be reviewing your why, remembering what you're actually doing this for. Professional performers do this. Musicians, actors, public speakers, they have a pre-show ritual that gets them into the right headspace. And you need one too, because coaching is performing. You cannot just roll in from dealing with a difficult vendor call or a fight with your spouse and immediately be the energizing presence your clients need. You need a reset button. Third, ruthlessly protect your time off. If you never truly disconnect, you never actually recharge. That means that when you're off, you're off. No checking the gym camera to see how your coaches are doing. No responding to client texts at 9 p.m. No working on your social media during your kids' soccer game. Set boundaries for yourself and honor them. Your phone has a do not disturb mode. Your email can have an autoresponder. Your staff can handle things without you for an evening. Many of our Tinker level gym owners use the brick device to shut down their social media and other apps when they're at home. They just put it next to their phone and it blocks all that stuff for them. The irony is that gym owners who are always available are usually the least effective because they're never fully present anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not on the gym floor, and they're probably burned out and angry and sure with people. So that means they're burned out everywhere instead of energized somewhere in the gym where it counts. Fourth, invest in your own physical and mental recovery. Now, you preach this to your clients every single day. I know you do. You need to practice it yourself. It is more important to be an island of calm and happiness than it is to be the most fit person in your gym. You should be training regularly, not just demoing movements, but actually training without overtraining. If you're training to compete in the CrossFit games or some crazy like super duper high rocks event where you're training all the time, you might be dumping so much cortisol into your system that you're just stressed all the time from that. You've got mental stress from work and you've got physical stress from your workouts. This was me a few years ago. There was one day when I was so burnt out that I walked into my gym, I saw the coach's lunch spread all over the front counter, and I just lost it. And I said, I'm done. I'm leaving this gym. I'll be back at the end of the summer. And I just went out and rode my bike all summer. So you need to be aware of your total stress level, your total cortisol load. Are you eating well? Or are you grabbing whatever's convenient between coaching sessions? Are you drinking too much coffee? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you staying up late answering emails? You can't pour from an empty cup. I know you've heard that before. Your energy, your positivity, your enthusiasm, these are the products that you're actually selling. And if you don't have them, your business suffers. Consider this. If you were a professional athlete and your performance was declining, you would address your training, your nutrition, and your recovery. You are a professional coach. Your performance matters just as much as a professional athlete. Treat yourself accordingly. Let's talk about the problem with bad personalities. Because here's something that most gym owners don't want to hear. If you're angry, resentful, or burned out, you need to remove yourself from client-facing roles until you fix that. Because you can't run a good gym angry. You can't build a thriving community while you're resentful. You can't create transformative experiences for your clients when you're barely holding it together yourself. This is why we say fix the owner, fix the business, because the gym's energy comes from you. If you're negative, the gym is negative. If you're stressed, the gym is stressed. If you're checked out, the gym feels abandoned. Whatever you're feeling trickles down first to your staff and then to your clients. Your staff will mirror your energy. Your clients will absorb that negative energy. And eventually your business will reflect it in declining retention, decreased referrals, and a reputation as that gym where the owner seems mad all the time. And the same goes for any coach that you hire. If they bring negative energy, even if they're technically excellent, they will damage your gym. Negative energy spreads faster than positive energy. One bitter coach can poison your entire culture. Training for skills is the easy part. Once you find people with great personalities and strong energy, training them for skill is actually the straightforward part. We have a great course in TubeBrain called the Coach Basic Training Course that takes somebody with zero experience and makes them insurable and competent in a structured step-by-step way. It's not complicated. Most of the technical components of fitness coaching can be taught in weeks, not years. What you can't teach in weeks, or sometimes ever, is how to genuinely care about people. How to remember somebody's name after the first conversation. How to notice when a client is having a rough day and needs a win, needs encouragement, needs a high five, or maybe even a hug. How to celebrate somebody's small win like it's a massive achievement. Your coaches should be going up, showing up, ready to go on stage and put on the best birthday party they've ever had for all of your clients. And these are personality traits. Either somebody has them naturally or they develop them over years of intentional personal growth. You can't give somebody a certification and being a good human who enjoy being around people and who other humans love being around too. And that's why CrossFit gyms or any gyms with scripted workouts and pre-programmed warmups and coaches' notes and class structure are the perfect environment for hiring personality first. The technical demands are manageable. The personality demands are everything. If you run a highly technical sports-specific facility or you work with advanced athletes, the equation might be slightly different. But for 90% of the gyms, serving 90% of the population, personality wins every time. Okay, let me tie this all together for you. First, stop trying to hire a clone of yourself. You'll never need another version of you. You'll never be satisfied with anybody who tries to be exactly like you because they can't. You need somebody who compliments you, somebody who brings positive energy, somebody your clients will like. Hire for personality, train for skill. Start your search inside your gym with an advanced theory course twice a year. Look for people who light up around others, who show up consistently, who care enough to smile and give all their energy to that class or that client. Then look at other trainers. Then look at colleges for upbeat students from any major. Then, and only then do you post on job boards. Give every potential hire the personality assessment, but take it yourself first. Because if you're burned out and it's showing, no hire is going to fix your gym. You have to fix yourself first. Replace yourself in the early and late shifts. Create a pre-coaching ritual. Protect your time off. Invest in your own recovery because you can't give what you don't have. That's what pouring from an empty cup means. And remember, your clients aren't buying technical perfection. They aren't buying movement skills. They're buying the feeling that they get when they walk through your door. They're buying connection, they're buying energy and excitement, and they're buying somebody who cares. Hire people who can give them that feeling. Then teach them the technical stuff. That's the path to a team that actually serves your clients well and sticks around longer than two years. Remove people who are angry or burned out or resentful, including yourself, if necessary. Be honest with yourself because you really can't run a good gym angry. Thanks for listening. If this resonated with you, or if you want the free guide, share it with another gym owner, go to gym owner.com. United.com, just ask me for the guide. And if you need help actually implementing this, building the systems, running an advanced theory course, finding the right coaches, fixing your own burnout, book a call with our two brain team right now. We've helped thousands of gym owners through exactly this process. Now go hire for personality and train for skill. Your gym will thank you. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and you cannot run a profitable gym with an angry team.