You're building a hill you'll have to climb

One of the owners on my Tuesday call is back to coaching almost every class himself. On purpose. He trusts one other coach, the gym is losing money, and he's not adding payroll before he pays himself.

That's a completely defensible decision and I'd probably make the same one.

Then another owner in the room pushed back, and it turned into the most useful argument we've had in a while.

You kind of shoot yourself in the foot doing that. You see it as, I'll build it back and then add people in. But you're gonna create way more friction when that happens, because by then they're all obsessed with you. You build it back and you've just made the hill higher to climb.

He'd watched a friend do exactly this. That guy coaches everything now, members complain any time somebody else is on the floor, and there's no version of the next five years where he gets a Tuesday off.

Meanwhile at his own gym, when he takes a class, members go "oh, you're on today." Not disappointed. Not thrilled. Just a normal Tuesday, because variety is normal there.

Nobody told the first guy to stop coaching. That wasn't the point.

The point is that every month you're the only one they see, you're not just covering a shift. You're teaching them that you ARE the product. And the bill for that lesson shows up eighteen months later, when you finally hire somebody good and your members treat them like a substitute teacher.

I've done a version of this to myself. Not with coaching, with everything else. Every problem I personally solved fast and quietly taught somebody that I was where problems go.

There's a standard that makes the other side of this survivable, and it came from another owner in the room:

Our coaches are coached by me and my head coach. If you're not in our sessions, you don't coach. You're removed from staff.

That's the piece people skip. The reason members get attached to one person in the first place is usually that the rest of the floor is a coin flip. Fix the coin flip and the attachment loosens on its own.

If you're in a stretch where you have to coach everything, coach everything. Just don't confuse it with building something. Know you're taking out a loan, and know roughly when the payment comes due.

Nick

Nick Habich owns Shark Bite Fitness in Cape Coral, Florida, and coaches gym owners in Pathfinder Collective. These notes go out to his email list on Tuesdays and Thursdays.