THE GYM OWNERS BLOG

This is part three of three for our series on how to make assessments kick ass in your gym. We've touched on these last couple episodes about why you should do assessments and how you can change selling them by changing the way you communicate. This third step episode is really about how to make sure that the assessment itself becomes a very premium product.

Today we have a continuation from last week. If you missed our last episode, we went over using a blueprint to make selling assessments easier in your business. And we wanted to elaborate on that, because we got some feedback from coaches and one of the very common things that they say is that they know how to do assessments, but nobody fucking wants to buy them.

Gym owners out there have done a lot of work on the education side of things, we've seen it. The thing we want to get into today is what I believe to be the pinnacle of a lot of coaches' skills and this is their ability to assess movement in a one-on-one diagnostic capacity. I think that's extremely important for any coach out there to be able to see somebody move, take them into a space and say, Hey, let's go through this. So I can make sure we figure out exactly what's wrong and come up with a plan or movement assessment.

Today we are joined by Willem H from Unscared in the Netherlands, I want to open with one question, William, how many members do you have? Well for the last two, three years, we've been balancing between about 550 and 600 active members in one location.

Welcome Everett, Everett, what's the hardest lesson you've had to learn as a gym owner? Definitely that I cannot take things personally. If somebody wants to leave my gym, even after nine years, sure it hurts but you can't take it personally. The gym is not you.

Today we want to talk about a thing that a lot of gym owners are doing. And it is not "a lot" of you. I would say it's almost all of you. I think this stems from the generous nature, the giving nature, the community building stuff that's in your blood as a gym owner. But you have to stop giving away free classes, free giveaway weekends etc for a lot of reasons.

So I was on a call earlier this week with a husband and wife having a jam. They were talking about Gym Hacking University, the product that we've been putting out to help gym owners. I was asking them what some of their headaches are, and one of the things that came up was, well, doesn't it really hurt when people cancel their membership?

The hardest thing that I've had to learn since becoming a gym owner is that when you open your gym, regardless of how much money you have, or you think that you have, it's less money than you think, and you should put your money into shit that is going to immediately make you more money.

As coaches, we really have a gripe when our clients are just being bombarded by all this shitty advice in the fitness space, right? There's tons and tons of pieces of bad information for people to latch on to and get dogmatic about. As a fitness coach, you see it all the time for your clients, right?

Today we're gonna have conversations about pricing, comparative pricing, fixing yourself within your own market, all that type of fun stuff. It really has a lot less to do with what's out there, and a lot more about what you think about your own gym.

I've been geeking out on frameworks. We've been doing a lot of building and streamlining on the back end of things for us. And a big piece of that has been, what are the things that we've been doing with clients successfully on a one-on-one basis? And then how can we continue to provide some of those frameworks and things to make it more easily accessible or consumable by everybody? In the community as a whole?

I think one of the most important lessons for us is that it was really important to learn to stand for our values. And to be very clear on what we think our value is worth, money wise. It was a very important lesson to learn because by doing that, we could create financial sustainability. And of course, that's what you need to have as the motor.

The hardest lesson I had to learn as a gym owner what that I needed to stop trying to do every single thing in the gym myself. In the beginning I had a freak out moment, because when the paper gets signed, you realize that you own the gym now, and you're still a coach, and you're still somewhat an administrator. And your days are now filled with more hours while you're trying to maintain a business.

As a gym owner the hardest lesson I had to learn was to make sure know my numbers and that I know what's actually going on in my business, then I can bury my head in the sand. I came into this thinking I could just be a coach and help people. But you know, bills have got to be paid. So you need to make sure you know what's coming in and what's going out every month. So that was one of the biggest wake up calls for me.

One of the hardest lessons was having people not stay at the beginning. I was pouring my heart and soul into this, and then it was just not their thing. And that kind of hurt my feelings in the beginning. I had to learn that it was ok and that it was going to weed out the people that didn't fit what we were doing, and didn't fit our culture.