Solving the Turnover Conundrum at Your Gym

The reality of the coaching profession is that the career length is typically short. This is no fault of yours as a gym owner, but let’s look at the normal requirements for a coach:

• Early mornings or late nights, sometimes both
• Low to moderate salary expectations
• High physical output when on the floor

Looking at these requirements, the average coach is going to be under 35 years old, single, and not likely to have kids. At some point in their career, they’re going to likely have to switch to a profession that fits their time constraints, increased living expenses, and a myriad of other lifestyle factors.

So what happens when your veteran coach hits 30 years of age, wants to get married, and start having kids soon? They leave and the hunt begins for their replacement. While the hunt for a new replacement is a daunting task in and of itself, how long is it going to take to get your new hire up to speed?

Enter the SOP. An SOP is a Standard Operating Procedure that serves as a step-by-step guide for a process within your business. These can be made for any process you have in your facility: coaching a session, selling a membership, cleaning the toilets, you name it. Having an exhaustive collection of SOPs is vital to your business for the exact scenario I laid out above. You can hand your new hire the binder full of SOPs and they now have a handbook of how to run through any process they would need to handle on a daily basis. 

What most facility owners do is centralize all of this information inside their own head or a general manager. This is a nightmare scenario if your general manager leaves or, heaven forbid, you want to take a week-long vacation to Bora Bora. With a well-documented SOP library, employees can run the ship without needing to contact you at every roadblock they run into. 

Creating these documents is pretty simple. First, I would recommend picking your method of storing these documents. Ideally, these are in some cloud-based software like Google Drive or Notion that an employee can have at their fingertips without actually having to open up a binder (what is this, 1985?). One added bonus to a digital/cloud-based version is that they have search features with them. If an employee has a question about applying a discount to a membership, they can search the appropriate keywords and the software will take them straight to where they need to be. A second added bonus is that this is a living copy of your procedures. Maybe you change your gym management software and you need to completely overhaul the processes surrounding that area. With a hard copy, you’re going to have to throw out all those copies and start over. A digital copy gives you the flexibility to update it in one central location and it will reflect across the organization. 

As a facility owner in the past, I hesitate to say that coaches are replaceable. Each personality brings its own unique take on training, connects with different clients, and presents valuable skills. That said, you have to anticipate the likely event that your staff won’t be around forever. I would urge you to start looking into the future and create systems that do allow for your coaches to be replaced with minimal bumps in the road.