Need to Hire a Manager?

people, gym, coach, work, person, business, tasks, social media, owners, sales, general manager, content, leads, system, money, important, empower, coaching

Tyler 00:02

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome this week's episode of the gym owners podcast. This week, we're going to talk about probably the most important tasks that you have to do as a gym owner, which is replicating yourself. We're gonna go into how you can find people to cover the tasks that you're doing right now how to possibly get to the point where you have people that you can trust that can handle all of these really important tasks, so that you can get on to the next thing, the next thing next thing, possibly even developing new locations or running whole new systems that are going to operate kind of on their own. But as long as you're the one doing all the doing, your shits are not going to be moving forward, you'll always end up being the bottleneck. So before we get into that, make sure you guys join the gym owners revolution group that's in our Facebook group. The link is going to be in our description. Easy to find, just go right there description to the podcast episode right there. Follow the show at the gym owners podcast and Instagram. You can follow me Tyler stone that's Tyler Elphinstone on Instagram and you can find John at



John Fairbanks 00:58

J banks f L.



Tyler 01:01

All right, guys. One of the things that we talked a lot about, and talked to gym owners a lot about, is like I just wish they had just a person who was a go-getter. And I was having a conversation with Jim water the other day, it was the same thing. It was like, you know, you said you can't be hiring people like the sky you got this this isn't gonna work. You can't be putting things on his plate, they poorly represent your business. And he said, Well, just not everybody's built like you. He told me and I said and I but he's right. is right. Thanks, man. Said I'm hoping if he meant by rippling pecs and older shoulders, but I think I think it does just mean maybe like time in the business and No, obviously, but. But I do think that that's an important thing. A lot of people think out there as you think I gotta just it's hard to find good people. And that's exactly true. We talked about this last week, this is a continuation of last week's conversation about hiring personal trainers and how you kind of can slowly give them a little bit longer leash, and allow them to really kind of grow into their own while setting good expectations. The same thing needs to go for finding anybody to do kind of higher level tasks. The worst thing I've ever seen gym owners do is just take somebody at their word, when they are having a conversation with oh, we're getting hired, and then just give them a recess many times just given the keys to the city like yeah, this person, he's gonna help me with everything. And anytime someone tells you this stuff, guys, that they can do a lot of things and they're just ready to go. They fucking can't. I just hate to break it to you. I've never had that conversation with someone who actually can't or does or will.



John Fairbanks 02:37

What it is that either it's 100%, it's 100% never happens. We've now been in it, talked to enough gym owners and interacted with enough people to where we've heard those phrases. So often, when somebody comes in, oh, I know this guy or whatever they came in, they can do all the things they say, all the right things to get themselves hired. And 0% of the time, have those people pan down. In fact, not only do they not pan out, but I think they get fired within one year of having worked there.



Tyler 03:11

By the way, this goes with almost everything. Most of the time somebody just shows up at your doors, I tell them we'd like to just do all your social media. I've done all this stuff. And it's just like, well, what the fuck you're just gonna pay for just like with content to be slapped out there without a plan. It's all nonsense. And they'll come in and just put your logo on stuff. So things look official and act like they've done a thing, where they'll go into your fucking Facebook group with your members and start tagging at everybody. By the way, don't ever use any more up to this. If you're if you're doing at everyone in your Facebook, I just add everyone hates you. That's what I want you to know. If you're ever adding everyone, everyone hates you. I promise it's the worst fucking thing ever. I know it's a formula that people do and it just kind of works but just don't let math make your shit suck just because the math works. I hate that as well. If you just do this all the time, you get x amount of interactions, and then everyone thinks you are a total fucking loser. Just don't go back to the matter at hand though. So getting things up and running with you're trying to bring someone to replicate a lot of your tasks being I call it a manager really is an assistant manager, probably General Manager be very far ahead. The problem was trying to appoint someone as, say , a general manager, right? If you're gonna have someone come and take over, that is a full time job that requires a full time salary. Do you have that freed up? Humans gym? Or can you just for someone who I would describe purely as a non revenue revenue producer in your gym, a general manager is a non revenue producer. They are not on the floor fulfilling services, they very likely are not doing sales, maybe they will be at some point, but they're not going to be killing it in the beginning that I can notice. So can you just start coming in float in full time salaries? No, you can't. So it's not pretending like you can like I just need a general manager. Okay, great. So you need your business to make an extra 5060 $70,000 A year Right now, so you need an extra five grand a month to increase that revenue, then you're going to bring this person in, and then hope that they can grow beyond that point, it's just not going to happen. So hiring a general manager is a terrible fucking move, what you really need to do, like we talked about with our this stuff before, is you need to get, and I don't like going hard systems, but you need to decentralize all of this authority. And you do need to have some, like some processes that everyone is accountable for. And at that point, you'll realize that not all of these tasks gotta be handled by one guy who's a wizard, because that one guy who's an ace, all the skills you've described, I want someone who can sell, I want someone who can manage personnel, who's great with clients, who is who's going to not create content for you, but like, who's going to have a say, on kind of everything, there's essentially going to be in charge of all the operations, the all the workings of your business, that person can make a hell of a lot money in any other business that your than yours. And so I just don't, you gotta get over the fact that there's a person out there just looking for that job ready to rock and roll, that person doesn't exist.



John Fairbanks 06:06

And I want to take it one step further. I don't think it should be the goal, to be able to hire that person, or to ever have that person exist in your business. I think it's a vestige of times past, the idea to be able to duplicate yourself with a clone of yourself, that then can do what you were doing for less money than you were doing it for. So that you can go scale, I think that that's what gets perpetuated and pushed on us. Because for the last 100 plus years, or whatever, like, that's the idea where you learn how to do a thing, you get your padawan, or your apprentice, and you teach them and you take all your brain knowledge, and you put it into that person. And then they can do what you can do maybe at 80% or 90% efficiency to what you could do. And then you can move on to do other things. And I think that that is what gets talked about. And I think fundamentally, that's wrong, for one of the biggest reasons and how you talked about this the other day, which is, people do not stay in the same fucking place long enough for you to trust that you now spent however long it would take to fucking get someone spawn up. And then that motherfucker is going to move on average, every five, three to five years, they're gonna go, they're gonna be gone.



Tyler 07:34

What do you mean? That's assuming it. Yeah. And then you gotta pull yourself back. And also now use it, and you have to have the salary to pull you every year, you have to have more money to be able to pay this person. Because here's an important thing about that, too, John, that you mentioned, for you, if you're the owner, and you're operating as a general manager right now, and you want to bring in a general manager, why aren't you making enough money doing that job right now? Right, but Oh, yeah. Because you have all of these skills, and you know how to do this, you are a little ambitious. Meaning you want more money than you're going to be able to make simply doing this one thing here. And you know, in order for you to make more money, you have to start to make money off the person doing this. And you need to start to scale up the business, meaning it's not enough money for you. What the fuck is it going to be enough money for them? This is a thing that 's broken. And John, you kind of made this comment. We were talking about this the other day, but the fact of the matter is, middle management never should have fucking existed. Anyways, those are these are gatekeeping jobs for places that have like a big fucking chunk of just cash that they can burn. So it's every person kind of starts like, like, like, they just start kind of hoarding and all these little responsibilities, it ends up like office space was like, I'm the people person, I take the thing to the people that do the thing. I gotta be the one. And when you really get down to it, the job shouldn't fucking exist anyways, it just shouldn't.



John Fairbanks 09:03

I think middle management got created. So your brother in law could get a gig and you could shut your fucking wife up? Yes, I think that that is why it exists. And that's why it existed. If you really zoom out because I get the unique opportunity each and every day to be able to do business and work within a multi billion multi billion dollar company on the sales side of things. And so I get to watch corporate America at its finest. And they structure and restructure, and add new CEOs and add new department heads and do this and that and they do it over and over and over again. Because they're the business. Their job is to move around money. And then just be able to have people that are important stakeholders that help drive up Their stock in positions of power. And that's the name of the game is the moving of money. If that doesn't sound like your gym in Wichita, then stop fucking playing the game of having a bunch of middle management bullshit CEO positions, like these positions that are nebulous that don't fucking matter. Because who, when you have a fucking downturn, do you know who the first people are, that get fucking fired when you talk about like, when you have depressions, and you have all sorts of shit where it starts getting wiring, it's middle, it's your CEOs at the very top or your middle management people and they get the fucking axe. Well, and we've been



Tyler 10:45

a part of businesses huge in the past that we've worked with. And we've seen this firsthand where it's like, as a business tries to scale, they just try to start assigning important names to things as though the business is more important than it is. Oh, look, now this person is the CEO. And then you just start creating all this structure for fucking no reason fo and that none of this none of this is real. And we watched this from the Senator and be like, Oh, this is dumb. And now what you've done is you've just put a person here, given them a title, and now they want to make things there. So they just start making decisions for no fucking reason. And everything gets very stupid, very, very, very fast. Okay, so your business is not ready for this, if you're listening to this, your business probably is not ready to start. Here's my general manager. And the thing we talked about is nobody walks in and just gets the keys to the kingdom. Nobody like this doesn't exist. So what needs to happen is you need to empower everyone that you have, and you need to give them the tasks that you need to be done. Meaning that's it aside from admin stuff can be hired out, right a lot of that stuff VAs build processes for shit that doesn't need a decider. The fact is decision making, and coming up with ideas. That's the thing for people like you as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, decision making ideas vision that works, that's the thing you could you can be at the helm of that nobody else gets, nobody else gets that, frankly, any ideas gotta be bounced off you in my opinion, you don't need someone coming in and go, Well, this is what I would do fuck off. Because this is what I need you to do. Get good at this before you start telling me what to do or fucking iron, you know, thinking we need to come in and start fucking building new shit get out of here.



John Fairbanks 12:26

Then the one thing I think is important that's on this exact point. And Tim Ferriss goes into this into the four hour workweek, and talks about how much time was saved, when he did empower his people to be able to make decisions up to a certain threshold, or they didn't have to come to them and bottleneck on that. Because we see that on both sides of it, to where we've watched him owners want to be able to let their people do things and feel empowered, but there was no God, no guide rails, no numbers on the bowling and it was fucking it wasn't like they all of a sudden went crazy and started spending lots of money and doing a bunch of shit without talking to anybody. They did fuck all.



Tyler 13:08

Yeah, they did nothing. They just did nothing. But they were getting paid more, because you gave them the responsibilities. And that's the thing. Anyone that you have within your system right now. Okay, let's, let's start. Let's just talk about sales, right? All right, sales is a big one for the owners. If you're the owner, and you're kind of handling the one closing sales, it's very, very common with gyms up to a certain point, you're not having a full time salesperson, you're not, you don't have one. Okay? So who is actually handling says if it's nobody, like, if it's just kind of, then you're not even playing the game at the scale, you should be yet which means you should have an idea of how many leads Am I getting this week? What am I doing to get more leads like? Like, that should be a thing that your business is planning? If that's not, that is on you to get that in place. So that can be those can that can be a system now that you're manipulating and changing the inputs to you as the one who has control and decision making. From that point. Who is answering those text messages? Who is meeting those people for appointments? How is that happening? Who is having the sales conversations with these leads? Now that's great, because right now it's you, that's something we can start to offload. That's something where if it's for personal training, perfect when they make their scheduler that starts to go towards my personal training coach, okay? If it's for group fitness, it's my group person, and then maybe you just incentivize performance in that regard. Okay, but you're gonna take these meetings, if you close this, you get x, right? But all of a sudden, now you as a gym owner, you don't have to fucking to do every sales call. You don't have to respond directly to every lead, there's value in doing it. But at some point, it takes a lot away from you. The other side of that is every single one of these little tasks that you give or take off of your plate immediately. You need to set up a full system. I hate that word because it's just the business he talks about. A system says it sucks, but you just need to let you know sort of checklist Okay, where they need to be held accountable to it. They need to be held accountable to the outcomes and they need to be held accountable to the PErforM once and they need to be taught how to do it. That's really important too,



John Fairbanks 15:03

is that that is so important. And that's the piece that gets missed 90% of the time, you have to teach your people and we've I've talked about it before, but I just came across another I was listening to another podcast and was reading another thing. And I came across that I sent it to the other day, which is this, this idea of, of managing your people. The number one mistake is that somehow you think people just know how to do the things the way you want them to do it. And if you don't, and that's, and that's the mistake, and we taught and this kind of keeps us on track, it's the mistake is that you want to be able to get yourself out of these situations or out of these positions and put other people in so you can start scale and work on the stuff that needs to be worked on in your business. But there is a mistake in assuming that you can just that all of a sudden, you immediately get your time freed up. Yeah, it's not an immediate freeing of time racking to make this work. Yeah, abstractions.



Tyler 16:02

And by the way, you have to put in a little bit more work to even be capable of doing it. And you have to go, Okay, well, what can I do to make sure the metrics, I want them accountable towards his closure rate, I want them accountable towards average ticket price, like closure sale price. And I also want them accountable to whatever just the general like the sales process as a whole, right, they need to be good at it, they need to be, you know, it needs to be optimized for results, including the clients results as well, not just financial. Okay, so in that you need to have a sales system. And that works, which means you need to have a system. Because if you've been doing it as a gym owner, you're like, Well, I just meet with the people, and I talk with them. And I am so good and compassionate. And I know how these conversations go, I've been doing this for 10 years. I'm really great. I connect with people, I'm a people person, I hate to break it to you, most of your coaches aren't gonna be as good as you with it at that they're just not and a lot of them are going to suck at it. So training rules, a good sales system, like the one we sell, it's just an app, you go through your buyer, and they say it's just a guided conversation. What are you looking for? How many times a week? Cool? Well, we're just kind of what we got top options here. These other ones, what do you think, then it's just this little thing and the answer a few other questions in the context of that 1015 minutes, they're out and rockin and rollin '? Well, now that is a thing, if you're a gym owner looking to scale. Now we're talking, because now your personal trainers should be closed, no personal training should be closed. sales meetings should be about personal training, if that's the interest that they may be tagged, as they come in, as they're getting nurtured before they come in, set an appointment. Without the personal trainer being the one that's doing it, that would just make the most sense, you're the one they got to meet, they got to like you perfectly. Now you can go in and do some hand holding, you also should be checking in on them constantly. If they're only closing one out of five, one out of 10, one out of two, that's probably you know what I mean? Like, like 50% or less is a pretty bad closure rate, if they're meeting you in person for sure if they're coming that far. But if they are, and you're actually communicating with them directly, Hey, how is this going? Because these are the metrics that matter. Now it's not how many pointless, unguided conversations can you have with potential leads that you hopefully maybe get them to take out their fucking debit card, even though you have no experience on how to get anybody motivated to buy at all like, it's a hard thing. And teaching somebody to be good at sales out of the blue, like they can make way more money selling cars or insurance or fucking god knows what cell phone plans than they can selling gym memberships. So I think it's really important that once they get started, and you find out Geez, you only got eight meetings last week and only close one what's going on. And they're going to have excuses. And some of them might be lies. Okay, we talked about this, whatever. But you do how you say, Okay, well, maybe let me handle a few of these next week. Let me handle half of them next week. And we'll see how it goes. Maybe you just need to do some more training with them. Again, make sure they're running through the process correctly. Do some more hypotheticals. Maybe they're just clumsy with it. Or maybe they're not doing it, doing it and it is usually the problem. That's gonna make me the maddest. But then you know, okay, and you go in and do the next four and you close all four, you say, Okay, well, let's turn out let's get you more sweet or maybe you do the next eight and you only close one also your like our leads, con. Let's look at what we're doing. Maybe we're communicating the wrong thing. Maybe we're putting out there blows, but now your system is improving. And you're not doing all the work trying to fine tune everything and just relying purely on your talent and fucking entrepreneurs skills. Because that's not how your your talent and entrepreneur skills is not what your business is going to be built on beyond a certain point, your ability to empower people to find and identify the right people, to put them in place to be successful and to do everything you can to ensure that they're successful even in spite of themselves. That is the difference between your business 10 axing and your business staying exactly where it is right now.



John Fairbanks 19:52

And I think it's really important on that exact fact, which is just because you have one chunk of the system figured out how you run it doesn't mean you have the next I was we were talking, I was talking to a gym owner last week. And he has a system in place. He knows how to be able to onboard people, as far as his own staff, teaching them how to be able to sell and how to be able to do those things. He knows how to manage them. Right, the exact situation that you talked about, right? You got into a situation where the guy that he had been working with the leads that were coming in, they weren't closing. He's like, all right, like you're, you're striking out constantly, let's let me come in, let me come in out. He's like, the way he was explaining he goes, I don't know how it's supposed to be done. Right? It's, if you want to just show him, show him how you do it, let them shadow you. And he goes, and then they'll get it. He goes, so I went in there, big barrel chest and went in. And he goes, and I sat with four of the leads that had been coming in. And he goes on strike out four in a row. And he goes, Oh, so these, these leads kind of suck. And the guy's like, Well, yeah, and that's where like, All right, so but he knew because he had a system that already was built, the he already knew how to do you did all the work, he was able to identify that one variable that was the struggle, right, he was struggling was that lead. But just because he had all of this figured out, didn't stop him from having me in his office. And now I'm talking to him about the next piece in his system that was missing his Bissell figure



Tyler 21:25

out the lead quality. And then you still need to now empower these people to really sell. And to know, and so that you'll know, without you having to re-inject yourself fully into the situation, you'll know when something's amiss.



John Fairbanks 21:39

And, it takes you to be willing to be honest. And that's one of the things that I find that it can be really, really hard. Because if you're going to be successful at this game, whether it's entrepreneurship, or gym ownership, all these pieces, you have to kind of like when it's quiet, and it's just you, you have to kind of be like, I really am better than everybody else at this, like, I'm fucking awesome. And I'm awesome. And that's why this is going to work. And I'm not worried about an hour because it's like, it's, I'm awesome, and I'm gonna fucking will it to into existence, you have to have that, while at the same time being able to be humble enough to step back and say, I need to work on this, or this is a struggle of mine, or I'm not good enough here, or just because I know how to do a doesn't mean I have any idea how to fucking do see.



Tyler 22:27

And beginning to end in your business, whether it's the flow of leads, whether it's fulfillment of services, whether it's a retention, whether it's fucking staff, it's whether it's the quality of the coaching, that's going on the quality of the product out there. To just your efficiency as a business, right? All of these things are required as a person who's spent a lot of years in the technical field, like troubleshooting, as was my dad. The service side of things is your shit, your super complicated shit is broken. Okay, it does not work. And there's not a lot of indicators as to what the cause of that is that just happened out of the blue. Okay, the first, like the first fundamental baseline that you have, from an understanding standpoint, you have to know how it's supposed to work. And that's it, if you don't have that understanding, you're screwed. Because I need to know that at this moment, this contact closes here. And then that tells this, this, and then this does this, and then that closes this thing. And then this thing tells me that this is safe, and this is safe, and then it makes sure all of these other criteria are checked. And then we get to the moment where things go, whoosh, and there's heat, okay, and then up to a certain point. And that is a thing that takes a very, very long time. And you're not going to be fully equipped to do that all the time. Like instantly, that's just not the way you're going to be able to do it. And I think that it is important for you to understand still that the system does operate, kind of like that, that there's a bunch of things that need to be in place, you're gonna have a great understanding of a lot and the ones you don't, then you just got to make pay closer attention to, you're gonna have to spend a little bit extra time you're gonna have to bring somebody else in to cover that pace, you're gonna have to have a very slick system to do it. And that's especially when it comes to sales. Again, if you've got a great salesperson who's just savvy and connects to people, great, you can't pay him enough money to keep him. Those skills are worth more than you're going to get a person unless you're killing it already. You don't need us and you don't need a lot of this stuff like you don't have the money. And what you're gonna need to pay a person who's just a sales ace who just is in a race, to keep them you're never going to be able to operate, you don't charge enough, it's just not going to work. So you need to take people who have other skills that are worth something to you. And you need to make that person more valuable to you. And that's by giving them a system that works. Giving them the training that they need to have to do it, empowering them, checking in on them, making sure now that they understand how this stuff is supposed to flow. You can't just force them to do without them understanding it'll never, never never work if they don't understand it?



John Fairbanks 25:02

Well, the way that we do this Tyler and have had so much success with the people that we work with on this very specific task and milestone, is you cannot put all your eggs in one basket. Because this is why in our structure, you have to have, every single person that works with you, that's part of your team needs to be empowered and trained and capable of doing this. Because what you do, because even if you could afford, right, even if you fucking ignore everything that we've been talking about this entire episode, and you really can't afford to flip big time money, that's somebody to be a coach with you. Yes, as they become more skilled, they will leave because they will be able to make more money. Frankly, if you're not being able to pay someone 400,000 a year, they will figure out how to go do sales at a more profitable place, the next piece is going to be, they are going to fucking move because humans don't live in the same place all the time. So there's gonna be they're



Tyler 26:04

gonna get a new job.



John Fairbanks 26:05

So there's so many reasons that are so outside of your control, there's fuck all that you can do. So they are going to leave. And that's why you have to make sure that you are leveraging and hedging your bets, that instead of having one person, that's the ACE, you really are rising, kind of the tide with every single person that's inside your business. And that's why that's how we execute this. If you are sick, take that system that made you good? And how do you make sure you systemize it across every single person that's in there. I mean,



Tyler 26:40

Let's talk about another mistake that gym owners make in this regard a lot. First one is like, Yeah, I'll just have someone come in and they'll handle everything they'll do my admins and users let somebody come in as a shot caller, it's a huge mistake, right. I also see it a lot with gym owners who just hand over social media to a coach who like who does fucking some mildly entertaining shit on their own social media. And you just say give them a login to your Instagram account. And now that person's your social media manager that on its own without any of the other things that we described, accountability, bucking plan, accountability to results, accountability to the content, guidance, all of this stuff, if that doesn't happen, all you're doing is paying somebody more to do a bunch of stupid, stupid shit. I tell you, there's almost nothing I like less than a coach who's been given the social media keys for a business for a gym, because they suck. They suck at it so much. They act like influencers, because they want to be an influencer. And it's so terrible. And everything is about you. Now you're just running reels about somebody doing a deadlift, and it doesn't fucking mean anything like, you know that your job is as many regards to social media management for a gym. But the main one is to like to manage your brand outwardly, make it look nice. And then fucking make sure that you attract new people communicate your offers, you need to make asks, influencers don't make as they just post stuff. And posting fucking stuff is a waste of your time. And if you're paying, now you're paying somebody to do that. And it's a tremendous waste of your time. Now we saw Jim that did this, as well as trying to have somebody else do a bunch of more tasks essentially, as well, to kind of move into like a right hand man position, and then also had other coaches now you're going to handle the social media and the sales. And what happened was, they weren't accountable to any of those things. So all of those people are making that much more money. Now for those tasks, those tasks aren't getting done. And that's because the owner didn't do anything to make sure that got done and got done, right. So since sales, numbers suck, everybody's buying, just nobody's closing the shit they're buying or just busted ass bare bones packages, the other coaches doing nothing on the other tasks that were supposed to be done. And in fact, even performing worse as a coach, and pretending like they have this extra burden of responsibility. And what most of these coaches do is they just still kind of hang out sometimes, and then their worker routers, the rest of the time, they're just fitness errs. Okay. And just know just because you paid them an extra $1,000 a month more for this task that they're doing doesn't mean they're going to do it doesn't mean they're going to care. And if you don't hold their feet to the fire, they will do as little as they can get away with. I fucking promise you, especially with coaches. Okay, trust me on this, trust me. And so you have to use social media, then listen, it still shouldn't be. You either find that out fully externally to someone who really really knows what's up. And that's still hard because it costs a lot of money. Even just posting content creates a little bit of content outside. It's a lot. It really is, it just takes a lot of money and you may not be able to justify it. Know that social media is not as important as it used to be. I'd rather have you put resources and content into doing some placeholders and some consistent asks make it about your products, and a little bit of other fucking stuff. You can do a little bit of fluff. It just can't. We all fluff. And then make a lot of your a lot of that attention, though, should go towards your Google business profile, because that's how people are finding you. But when you do that, suddenly say I have a plan. So what is the plan? What is your plan for Mark? Like, how do you like literally like, I want X amount per day, that plan should also make sense. We had a trucking company that was like, well, you need to post four times a day. That's it for one. The fuck about what you sell one thing that you sell



John Fairbanks 30:26

multiple accounts, multiple account,



Tyler 30:28

forget, four times a day for the four times there's for this one, yeah, one for one. And then I had four times on the face, it was the dumbest thing ever, I refused to do it immediately. They didn't have enough content to last at that pace for more than like, 30 days anyways. And it's like, okay, so you're bringing in photographer fucking now. And like, how redundant is this cop is a total waste of time. It's just all noise. But to do something like that, you should have a plan. Your plan should not be stupid. Okay, if your blog is your plan, don't be stupid. You can kind of make it work, meaning you should talk about your offers a lot like what are you doing? Like, what can people do? Talk about client results, testimonials are great. Before and After are even better. That's a great starting point, as many quotes as you possibly can from people. If you're posting your workout of the day, nobody gives a shit. If you're a gym, like if you're a gym, just a random person seeing your programming for your fucking advanced class or something that doesn't mean anything other than that, like to a person who's new to fitness, it all looks hard. And it all seems like it's in a language they don't understand. So it's almost a turn off. It should be approachable. You can have some fluff content, have some member spotlights, I want people smiling in their faces, I want them getting big results. I don't want it to be 90% Just like people hitting prs. I was doing a bunch of content creation for a gym that we're doing cert for their online coaching programs. And we were doing it getting a bunch of stuff to build for their website videos and shit like that. And I remember that one of the coaches in the gym or on two separate occasions told me Oh, that person is over there like yeah, he's a badass, he's going to be hitting like this big fucking clean and jerk here. You should get over there and get that on video. Like the fuckery that's the last thing I want to do is show some fucking jacked guy. Like straining through some impossible shit. So that you can scare away a bunch of people who are worried who are thinking about maybe starting getting their fitness stuff started. Everyone who's gonna see it, that is what I want. That's what like those people who understand that a fucking 250 pounds snatch is impressive. Like those people already have gyms dude. Like, like, I just don't understand that appeal. But you gotta know all of the bad things that I just mentioned about social media and some of the good things like that, that's you should assemble your plan as such. And then if you're going to hand over the reins to the social media, someone, here's what I need from you. One story posts a day that can be fluffy. Another story post today should be a direct link to a call to action. We should have one testimonial. Twice a week. Okay, we're gonna have a little bit of fluff. Let's have some event stuff going on during the week. If there's any events or announcements great every holiday let's make a post about it. But let's not make it be the most generic stupid shit. Because otherwise nobody gives a nobody gives a shit their gym told them Happy Fucking Flag Day or nobody cares if you don't have anything to really say that just shut up. You know is kind of where it goes, where it goes in regards to that type of stuff for social media. Businesses are different now business social media is very different. A restaurant has no business being on fucking Instagram, unless you really have a comedic brand or a voice for the most part just make it about what people want, which what they're coming to you for.



John Fairbanks 33:39

Now all that sounds like a lot of what you just went over, because, well, it but it's important. It sounds like a lot because guess what it really fucking is. Right? That's a lot. And I wanted to make sure that we don't lose the fact that that was just social media. So go back like pause, go rewind, hit that 32nd 10 Second back thing, because Tyler You just gave you just gave the exact plan. So you've now if you know if it's kind of been over your head and you're not sure exactly what to do. Social media wise, Tyler just gave you exactly what you can repeat over and over and over again, tweak and test. Go back to some previous episodes where we talked and bragged about Hunter Wooten and his garage and how he used the social media methodology, your social media



Tyler 34:25

person batch that content together now, because if you because if you just have a gym guy do it, they're gonna go round well kinda okay. Go back to lifting weights bad like this is what they do if you have a coach do it. So you say so then you could tell them when you're giving them tasks. All right, I want you to harvest all of these testimonies. Oh, we don't have this most perfect. We hear about gym owners' revolution and the gear Academy. We have testimonial acquisition plays for Google reviews as well as some really high quality high level ones that you can get that you can leverage that you'll be set for a year but so I want fucking, I want 35 of these things made next week. Just make the image that can all kind of be semi repetitive. have, you can go a little bit further and do it if you want. But that's that content. So it's efficient. Put it all on a drive so that if you're not posting under five bucks and take this job away from you next week, because you suck, and you're lazy, I know where all the content is like, this is how you build a content business. It's a bunch of layers.



John Fairbanks 35:15

Tyler, why, why are you capable of nerding out and raging for six minutes without breathing, all about how to be able to build the social media side of things. Because



Tyler 35:27

I have done social media stuff for so many years so we started with a little if you go to ATM economics, we started that brand from literally scratch in the middle of nowhere. And now that they've got that up to I mean, 4050 diets, it's just a great fun brand that people really understand. They understand the voice. And once that's done really, really well, I was really proud to have been a part of that when we got that launched, it had sold out but Tanner's done a great job ever since it's a great example, to see how a person can do that stuff, then I did it with my own gym. I did it with blog writing. Before that, I'm just saying that on the fitness blog side of things as well. We went to my own gym very, very quickly. Then we moved on and I've managed for the equipment company, and for fitness education content. And so like high level stuff, as well as marketing, seminars and online probably like all this stuff for these brands that we've done. I've done this content now for what does it mean for a lot of fucking years, six years, seven years, seven, Jesus. Right, seven, eight years, and you're not good at anything, you're not you won't be good at anything at it like a black belt level 10 years, so anywhere yet. And so I'm telling you all this stuff that I'm telling you about, it's from a lot of experience, a lot of trial and error, and save yourself that learning curve. And don't just plug somebody in, like they should be able to explain to you what they're doing. If you have a gym, if you're coaching, and you have somebody who's in your gym, on your staff, doing your social media, ask them what the plan is. And ask them what number and what metrics they're trying to improve. If they're trying to chase things like fucking reels views, they're fucking stupid. And just you correct them once. And the moment they go back to that, take that job away from them, because they just don't get it. And you can teach people to get it and some people you can't. But yeah, it takes a lot of years. And the shortcut to this is listening to people like John and I was a big way. spent eight years doing it, and you don't have eight fucking years



John Fairbanks 37:21

now. And it's for every one of these topics. And that's why it's important to harp on because it's every one of these elements, it's going to be able to perfect this and get this so it works exactly what your gym needs, your market needs your people need, whether it's going to be like Tyler's just you cranking them out, right? Whether it's going to be a sales process, we've talked about onboarding new staff, whether it's going to be social media, with the accountability, piece, management, execution, all these different pieces, it will take you years. And the way it doesn't take you years has absolutely started us here on the podcast, start reading shit doing that. But the easiest way that I have always found that allows me to accelerate my learnings and skip the line. Skip all those people that started learning five years ago, how can I get in front of them and learn quicker and start taking action quicker. And it's always been getting a coach paying somebody to say, tell me what you know. So I can start doing action right now. It always has gone faster. And so that is where I would encourage anyone that's hearing all of these pieces on all of them is DM us, shoot us a message and come and join us in the gear Academy. These are the pieces that we put in place, take action on and show you exactly because you don't even know. It's knowing what I know about folks, when it comes to social media, you're like well, you just need to be able to go and talk to the people that are managing. If you don't even know the questions that you're supposed to be asking the gear academies where you're supposed to be



Tyler 38:59

for sure. Yeah, if you don't know what metrics are you chasing? What is this stuff, we do this so John we're going through so we pay someone for video coaching, we go through programs pretty intensive it's been often but I want to learn from an expert on how to do these things, how to do them well especially as we start adding layers and layers and layers to this business. I just want it to be good. And so as we go through this, you pay a premium, right but then you learn a lot of stuff. But one of the things is we're going to this group because I do this okay, so you place this focus on this thing for this month you're gonna make this content these are the metrics you want to grow you want to move forward and they kind of the coach or coach or kind of gloss over that piece and was just like so yeah, just decide if you're trying to get you know, whether it's lead conversions or reach or whether it's views or whether it's, you know, you're just trying to expand the cut off date or that what are the what did they call it the click through or not click through the what's the point when people stop watching? Whenever that metric is dropped? Their drop off rate? There's a lot of things you are trying to grow. Is it directly to sales? You're trying to close sales with content for this month? Like, where are you at with, but a lot of this stuff was like, as I'm reading these things ever, I could see the looks, I was like, Oh, they're, this, our coach knows what she wants, and what the business needs this month, and they're gonna place emphasis on this. And I thought I said, Hey, I don't think any of these people actually should be making this decision on their own. Like, like, you want all these people to just choose which one and they don't understand where they are, or even worse, for what platform they should be using for which thing, if you're on Tiktok, or if you're making reels, that's going to have a very different desired outcome, then something a video you're doing for here or there. And so, so what we found is like, oh, people don't even know the starting point, the starting question. So they just make stuff and you learn and you get better, in a very general way. But then you're just making stuff throwing it to the wind and it goes fucking nowhere and creating stuff time is really it's either expensive. If you're not doing it's time consuming if you are. And that's a terrible way to do things. So you've got to be asking the right questions. If you don't know what questions about getting the gear Academy, I want to touch on one thing: do your job quickly before we wrap up. So I'll move, cover the sales piece, cover a little bit of lead generation as a whole and content creation would cover social media strategy, like social media taking over your social media. The next piece is coaching this done on the floor. And one of the things that is really important is that you coat yourself to be a good coach, and we see a lot of people who are good coaches, and then they don't ever put anyone in a position to coach because the gym owner is the good one and all the other people suck. Well, you need to understand two things, one, people who are as good coaches as you maybe get over yourself a little bit but who are as good a coach as you probably are to coaching someone. So you know, they're just wandering around having all this skill and passion just boiling over in their soul at their fucking other job while they make their way into this. Because that doesn't, it doesn't happen. So there may be someone who has the passion, but not the skill. Okay, whatever that is, you're gonna have some people in your gym that aren't aces, dude. And it's okay. Our first technician we had guys, that was a 1012 Your guy, right? And so I knew my shit. It's not a problem, I could walk into that I couldn't confidently know that I like I'll figure this out. And I'll figure out what's wrong. And I'll figure out how to fix it. There's a lot of guys who were left, if unguided would have never figured out anything, just know that. And yeah, why were they able to go through, why were we still able to send them on calls and charge the same amount of money for their services as I do for mine, because we had a system set up to help them, okay, meaning we had other skilled people around. We taught them stuff every week a little bit. But we also didn't try to teach these people everything all the time. And that's the problem. I see gym owners who are good coaches have when they try to develop staff is you try to develop your coaches, you try to make them be an ace and I got to know everything about this and internal torque this and the breathing this and the nervous system, this and you just end up giving these fucking dissertations that fly as far over their heads as they do and then they start talking to your clients about this shit. Okay, so just keep things on a fundamental level. And just make it about the one thing we gotta get through today. Okay, Mrs. Jones's furnace isn't working. Okay, here's what's going on. You don't know, you're stuck. Perfect. Give me a call about what to do with our servers. Okay. That's how it works. Sally needs to lose 40 pounds. She can't move with a shit. She doesn't know much. I don't know where to start with her. I can't. I know how to squat with a barbell. I know what it is. I just don't know what to do. She hates running. She doesn't like any of the cardio. Perfect. Those are teaching moments with your business, by the way. So it's not a thing where you have to wait until they're failing when they're coaching people or training people in group classes or one on one. You can take this and be out in front of it. All right, perfect. I've got you two clients this week. Welcome to the team. Okay, you sold one, I set you up with another, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna go through both of these sessions with you. And we'll kind of just talk, they sit down with them beforehand, maybe game plan what we're going to try and do know that and teach them hey, this thing we do pretty flexibly though, because if they don't know, this, and this and this does work, we got to be flexible, okay, we stay still need to leave. And then all your the great things that you do are focused on the customer experience and results and less about fucking wisdom, which is the bigger the wisdom trap is the worst rep for coaches. Don't be a wise brother. Just fucking be effective. It's fun. And I think that if you can focus on those things, now, you know, like, Alright, so we're gonna have a meaning for 1015 minutes just before we go out and coach Mrs. Jones, okay. And we're gonna throw like, here's what I think we're gonna try and do is what do you think? Perfect, perfect. Let's go. And they go out there and you respond and say, hey, if she doesn't like this, you get through that session, and then you fucking talk about it afterwards. We should have done this differently. We could do this differently. That's, that's how you're going to develop your coaches. Maybe once a week when you're having a sale. We're having a staff meeting. 90% of staff meetings should be about all the other stuff going on in the gym, make you reminders about supplements, sales, have any questions on any of this stuff, triage any troubles and then it will be about coaching. Hey, I cannot get so and so The squat their fucking knee is the whole thing or they do kettlebell swings, it's always with their back, what do I do? Now we address that problem, we solve that issue. And now that person knows how to address that issue, stop trying to impart a four year, five year, six year, 10 years worth of experience onto these people before you let them have any responsibility. Give them some people to work with, let them sell, let them sell themselves. And then you're going to be able to start to like, improve upon that. They can grow and be great with the person they have. And they don't have to know everything. They don't have to know how to teach, snatch and clean and jerk. They don't know how to teach ring muscle ups, not people walk on their hands, because you know what, you can maybe make sure that the few clients they have, that they can do an amazing job for that person. So then they learn to deliver results, they learn, it's about results. It's not about hey, I saw this new fucking worship is a coach this awesome new exercise on fucking Instagram. I'm gonna jam all my people through this shit that I saw on Instagram. Because it seems cool to me. And it's fucking dumb. And don't do it just don't do this. So that thing for training, I do believe you still should pay for some sort of other education, whether it's seminars, stuff like that, because they should have an appetite for education, an appetite for learning constantly. But in the meantime, work with them in the context of their clients. And the problems are trying to solve for those clients.



John Fairbanks 46:23

That's embedded. And that's the beginning of a system that allows you to be able to empower and try and build trust with these coaches that you have. That then allows you to be able to elevate them through your system and let them prove their worth and prove their reliability. Nobody likes coaching the 5am class. No one likes coaching the 6am class. But does that motherfucker show up every day? Oh, make sure the gym is open, the lights are on, people are in there happy. And you're not getting fucking calls at your house because the gyms not open. Right? As you build that trust with those coaches. Now you can now you want to give them more opportunity. And this is where you can start to have people that are levels of maybe I could see myself giving them the keys to the kingdom. But you know, you give them keys to sections? Because



Tyler 47:21

they've no time. Yeah, exactly. Understand your social media philosophies, they can start to ramp the employees as you did to them. Yeah, exactly. That's perfect. So I hope this helps guys, I hope I didn't bark at you all too much. But I think I do think there's a high amount of value here in this episode. So I really think if there's an episode for you to go back and listen to and kind of take some notes on how you can craft some of these systems. If you don't feel like jumping into gear Academy and just fucking Lightspeed in this shit to make it everything ordered for if you want to keep taking for free, go for it. Just go back and listen. Take these notes. So is each one of these pieces, especially the main three, which is the sales, social media stuff, and coaching quality craft, what that system should look like for you. Okay, each one of those things like what tasks need to be done? How do I systemize that meaning if an appointment is going to be made? How do I make sure it goes to them? Do I need a back end thing like Calendly? Do you need to start to make sure that like an interject to build just build this process? As you make that progress process? And you need to know what metrics do I need to hold them accountable to what processes do they need to be accountable to what outcomes need to be accountable to if Mrs. Jones, came here to lose 4040 pounds, and you got some guy who's a big super genius who knows all this stuff about training. And nine months later, Miss Jones still had 40 pounds to lose. That person is not serving Mrs. Jones very well, right? That person is more worried about themselves and their ego and being smart than it is getting Mrs. Johnson results. And if Miss Jones is in the way then we need to coach her better. Okay, so all of those things in each step of that way, I'm just writing up what that process should look like for you. What do you want it to be? And then and then start to figure out how I can do that now with all the things that you're doing. And then now we can now you can start to do this and you don't need to hire a general manager, because I hate to break it to you if your business is pulling an extra 70 or 80 grand like right now, like if you exceed this and you just got that extra money coming in. You're gonna want to keep it you're gonna you're not just gonna give this to somebody else and then I'll go like, find more like it's gonna be hard for you to do and it's just not that necessary. Do you not give anyone that much power because it's not necessary. It's just not it really isn't because you're better off than just completely duplicating your gym with these processes at the scale that it's at in a different location than you are just trying to keep turning up the noise. Okay, so thanks a lot for listening to everybody go to the gym owners revolution Facebook group, the link is in our description. Make sure you follow the gym owners podcast and Instagram. Follow me at Tyler Elphinstone on Instagram and John



John Fairbanks 49:57

you can follow me on Instagram at Jay banks. F L



Tyler 50:01

thanks a lot for listening everybody we'll see you next week