Hi there, I’m Steve Grant, I’m the admin for the Gym Owners Network, and I’m a gym owner like you, my gym’s based in Sydney.
Today I wanted to record a short video response to a question inside of the group, which is, Do I need to achieve mastery in all areas of my fitness business?
So firstly, I would say great question. Most of us go through and do some level of fitness certification, and we get those kind of technician level skill sets like how to deliver a lunge or a bench press. We also learn how to do like a group class. However, very few of us will actually go on to get those sort of entrepreneurial level skills that help us to run the business. Things like finance, things like sales, things like recruitment and development of staff.
I love that you’ve actually identified there is a bit of a skill gap from what we’ve been accredited in or learned at the start, what you kind of need to run a successful business. The other things I think we’d all agree that we already know is that, you know, there’s a, I guess, a thing online that talks about its 10,000 hours to master a skill.
You have to understand that’s like a good 10 years of applying stuff. We also know that of the 100% of people that do their fitness certification, only about 50% or less have spent time and money in actually learning those higher order skills.
Just to summarize, there’s a whole bunch of things to learn to close that skill gap, but we don’t actually have the time or the resources to become a master in all of them. So with limited time and money, I think the question is not, should I look to master all business skills? But instead it should be, what should I focus my energy on? And one of those things that are really easy to delegate or leverage without having to master them.
I wrote down a couple of examples. One thing I would suggest is you wouldn’t try and spend years or you wouldn’t go into the mastery level in things like Microsoft Excel. In the past, that might have been a great skill for you, but these days we’ve got really good programs. You can put them on your phone like zero to do all your finances and you can actually pay like a bookkeeper $30 an hour for data entry. So for me, that’s one where it makes sense to delegate and use the technology available rather than you becoming the expert in that.
You wouldn’t become an expert in cleaning the gym because it’s a really cheap one to delegate.
You wouldn’t become an expert in sort of graphic design when you can pay $20 a month to use Canva. You’ve got access to literally thousands of professional looking templates for everything, business cards and emails and Facebook ads, all those types of things.
You wouldn’t spend 50 grand anymore studying Frank Kerr and how to become an ad copy expert when you can spend $10 a month using chat GPT. And it’s not as good, but let’s say it’s 60% as good as something that Frank Kerr can write and it’s ready right now.
So why would you spend 10 years learning to become an expert in something that you could actually be pretty good at straight away?
So they’re the things like examples of things I would delegate, leverage, really tap into the technology. However, there are a bunch of things I think it does make sense to focus on. I would focus on having a really clear business growth plan that your staff can actually get involved in and they can get behind.
Number two, I get a clear point of difference with so many sort of competing gyms around you at the moment. You don’t want to be competing on price.
Number three, I would recommend investing time into designing a structured marketing funnel. So you’ve actually just got that steady flow of new members and new sales coming in each week. And it’s not like chasing your tail.
Number four, invest time into training your staff how to sell things. If you if you can do more with the leads that you get, you can obviously spend less in marketing.
The last one is systems for member retention. You and I both want to avoid that sort of fitness first merry-go-round where half the members leave every year because you just don’t want to spend that money and the time and the effort sort of chasing people every single year.
Just to summarize it, I wouldn’t aim to be a master in all things. I would try and delegate things to, you know, offshore staff to people in your team and really tap into cool technology like Canva, like chat GPT and just take a whole bunch of things off your plate of the limited time that you still have. Try and focus on like your business plan, your point of difference, your marketing funnel, your team’s ability to sell and make sure you’re really good at member retention so you don’t have to keep going through that sort of merry-go-round. And as a result, you’ll make a lot more progress in the things that are most important. I hope that helps.
