An Important Question to Ask Yourself As a Gym Owner

Hey, It’s Ben from Business For Unicorns again!

For a few years, I’ve been a part of a Men’s Leadership and Support group in my town.

From the outside, it’s a community of like-minded people who want to grow and serve their families, and communities, and show up as better humans.

From the inside, it’s bonding, leadership coaching, and a lot of what I can only call group therapy.

A large part of each 3-hour biweekly meeting is for something known as inspections.

You can think of inspections like very direct, brutally honest, 1:1 coaching sessions. The gloves come off (so to speak) and in only 10-15 minutes people make some incredible breakthroughs.

The results are remarkable and although I know this sounds like hyperbole, I’ve witnessed the course of someone’s life change thanks to what they uncovered.

One of the key tenets that lead to these results is the idea of “Where else is that behavior showing up?”.

For instance, if they are having communication challenges with their team at work, it’s completely understandable that they might not be the best communicator when it comes to their spouse or family.

You’ve seen this idea show up all frequently when it comes to business:

• If a prospective hire is late for the interview, it’s a safe bet they will probably be late for work if you hire them.
• If a team member is slow to get back to you on communication, they are probably slow to reply to clients as well.
• If a coach’s personal life is unorganized and chaotic, you can hazard a guess their work life is as well and it’s no surprise you’re hesitant to give them some extra responsibility, even when they say they want more money

In my experience, the answer to “Where else is that behavior showing up?” is almost always “everywhere”.

Everyone is their own worst enemy.

But like an inspection in Men’s group, the deficiencies are crystal clear when you are looking at someone else, and borderline impossible when you are holding up the mirror for yourself.

You can see it in your clients. Your team. Your kids. Even your spouse (but we both know to keep our mouths shut about that haha).

And when you forget to reply to a client email, miss a deadline for your business, or are slow to follow up with a lead, you probably think

"Oh, that's weird"

"That's unlike me."

"I don't do that."

Doubtful. It probably happens all the time - this is just a rare occasion where you caught it.

Your team is picking up on all this, and it’s no surprise that when you are missing some deadlines in your business, it’s telling them it’s okay for them to miss deadlines too.

You get frustrated at the lack of operational efficiency, your business suffers because that perfectly timed marketing promotion is now a few weeks late and needs another week to re-tweak the messaging, and you’re frustrated with staff who missed the deadline because in your head you always hit your deadlines.

Your leads suffer, and your margin suffers.

It’s understandable when you look at your business you think “If only we could get a few more leads each week, then we’d be set.”

I want you to encourage you to look deeper.

Hold up the mirror and ask yourself “Where else is that behavior showing up?”.

Start with the root cause - and you’ll know it’s the root cause when it feels incredibly uncomfortable to address.

Address it anyways. Your business will thank you and your life will be easier.

Ben Pickard
Coach and COO
Business for Unicorns

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