Hello, hello! Welcome back to another Fitlosophies blog post, where we explore the role of small business owners in the Fitness Industry, real world anecdotes, and my thoughts on how to properly build a successful business. In my last article, I wrote extensively on employee disillusionment, its causes, and the basics of how to identify and create solutions–which I hope you found helpful. Today, I’ll be getting into a bit more specific about ways that CHT works to combat disillusionment from an expectations and business infrastructure standpoint. Previously, I’ve repeated the sentiment that we as employers have control over the system in which we and our employees work. That power, however, comes with some responsibility to create the conditions for success. In my experience, the best way to get buy-in from staff is by commingling the goals of the staff and of the business to create an environment where everyone wins, or everyone loses, together. Let’s explore!
One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn over the years is how to properly set expectations, create growth opportunities, and properly motivate my staff without causing a net negative to the business (within reason of course). Early on in my career, I think I failed at this primarily because I was concerned with my own financial security, and frankly, wasn’t sure how to effectively communicate with my staff. But, overtime, I think I’ve improved this skill greatly and have been able to create a great working system with the proper conditions for individual and collective success, or failure. So, why is a system like this important? Primarily it’s to keep a proper set of checks and balances, but also to incentivize stability, security, and growth over time. If my goals (the business goals) are dependent on the individual success of my employees, then it means that I will HAVE to work hard to make sure that they are successful, so that I am successful. And vice versa - if my employees' goals rely on me being successful at my job, then they are INCENTIVIZED to fulfill their responsibilities and ensure the businesses’ success. Okay, generics are out of the way, what does this look like?
Every year I create new goals for the business and new goals for each of my individual employees, and every quarter, we evaluate these goals. There are subjective AND objective measures for each of these and they can be broken down into Macro level goals, Meso level goals, and Micro level goals. I use these terms because they are directly related to terms used for training periodization: macrocycle, mesocycle, and microcycle.
Macro: Highest level goals and measurements available. Typically measure the performance of the entire business as a whole. These goals are built and influenced by Meso level and Micro level goals. Some examples of a macro level goal would be total revenue generated, employee retention, or total volume of training hours accumulated in a given time interval.
Meso: Mid-tier level goals and measurements. These evaluate the success of separate factions of the business and are influenced by the conditions created at the macro level and the performance of the micro level objectives. A common meso level goal would be total revenue generated by a specific service, client retention strategies, continuing education requirements for our staff, or employee satisfaction measures.
Micro: The lowest tier goals and measurements. These evaluate specific interactions between clients and staff, clients and clients, or clients and business. Think - individual staff training hours, client satisfaction, or things of that nature.
Alright, so how do we commingle these goals to create the conditions that I mentioned above?
Staff Facing Goals for Mutually Assured Success
At the macro level we’ll be defining staff facing goals through total staff retention, satisfaction, and income. After all, a business can only succeed if it has staff to render service, correct? So, our overall goals will be to retain our staff, ensure they are satisfied and motivated in their job, and are financially secure and happy with their income. Looking at it from the business side, that means we need to create the underlying meso and micro level goals to have a high level of employee retention, make sure that each staff member is individually motivated and likes their job, and has the ability to be financially stable. At the meso level, we’ll look at job satisfaction and the subjective feelings employees have regarding their job, their monthly income and ways to improve that if needed, and their current career/continuing education opportunities. At the micro level, we’ll discuss client retention, conversion, training hours, and other day-to-day objectives. Check out this chart for a break down of how these measures influence business and employee success:
Macro
Goal | Business Benefits | Employee Benefit |
Total employee satisfaction | Employees who enjoy their job are more likely to be motivated to do their job well, go above and beyond, and ensure proper service quality; Happy employees mean it’s easier to attract new staff as needed, creates a positive and easy working environment, and improves overall morale | Employees want to enjoy their job and feel fulfilled. Waking up to spend most of one’s day at work has to be enjoyable for it to be worthwhile over the long-term and not lead to disillusionment. We work to measure TOTAL employee satisfaction and create pathways to improve the environment that everyone works in: gym tidiness, cleanliness, ability to gain more clients, PTO, benefits, etc. |
Employee Retention | Personal Training is a relationship driven service. It’s much easier to retain staff and maintain great relationships with clients than to rely on new staff every so often to recreate magic; Retaining staff allows opportunity for growth, while also ensuring quality training and measurable improvements to service rendering overtime. | Maintain access to pay and retain great relationships with clients. The PT industry is one of the harshest to start out in, and avoiding the restart period of building a client base is a high priority for most employees. We also have a tiered trainer system, so the longer our staff stay with us, the more money they make. |
Total Payroll | At CHT, employee pay is tethered to revenue. Our employees are paid based on services rendered, so if our payroll increases, it means 1 of 2 things: we’re paying our staff more and/or we’re rendering more services; More pay = happier employees (sometimes), and more services means more total revenue. | I actively WANT to pay my staff as much as I can based on expectations and goals. At the end of each quarter and year, my goal is to have a payroll increase, somewhat disproportionally to revenue. |
Meso
Goal | Business Benefit | Employee Benefit |
Continuing Education Opportunities | We get a more qualified and educated staff, over time, whose skills improve and thus improves the quality of our services. | Employees have the chance to learn and grow within the workplace without having to take additional time outside of work to find these opportunities. |
Individual income measures | We analyze industry trends in trainer pay as well as cost of living adjustments to make sure our employees feel secure. We also work with staff to find ways to improve take home - whether that is through our Tiered Trainer system, or through improvements in training hours, retention, conversion. We also come up with bonus opportunities for those who want more resources. Once again, more payroll is tethered to more revenue, so if we pay our staff more, they are likely training more. | More money! But also financial security. We work hard to try to keep our employees able to have only 1 job and 1 career they can focus on. In a field dominated by “gig” workers, we’re working to flip the script and ensure an easier path to financial security and success. |
Micro
Goal | Business Benefit | Employee Benefit |
Individual Training Hours | Hours are a great measure of services rendered and thus total output. A higher output results in overall better business performance. We also use individual goals to create overall business goals for revenue. With multiple employees, it means that we can rely on improved performance at certain times of the year, for individuals, while also building in times for rest and recovery. | Analyze overall performance and tether it to income. With an overall goal to hit a certain amount of training hours in a time interval, and employee can objectively measure their own success or failure. |
Individual Client Retention | Happy clients mean recurring income for the business. | Happy clients mean recurring income for the employees. It also takes pressure away from staff to find new clients when they go through downturns in their schedule. |
Individual Client Conversion | We use this to measure the ability to convert clients from a prospect to a revenue generating client. Having a good understanding of which staff are great converters allows us insight into the best and most efficient pathways for securing business growth AND client satisfaction. | Employees can better understand their ability to make sales and create good first impressions. If they lose clients, understanding their strengths/weaknesses with conversions gives insight into how easy or difficult it may be to hit certain goals with respect to total training hours and income. |
Alright, so we’ve broken down our goals and the benefits to both employers and employees. Now, why is it important to break these down? I promise an example of commingling is coming up! Bear with me…
We break these down because the common sentiment is that employers and employees are diametrically opposed to one another. Afterall, Revenue minus Expenses equals Profit, right? And Profit is the end all be all of defining business success, objectively, right? As business owners, we should be looking to maximize that profit at every opportunity, right? Again, while the common answer here is yes, I wouldn’t be writing this article if I fully agreed with that sentiment. The truth is, chasing profit is a hollow measure of success and will almost always alienate your employee base, create a lower quality service over time, and lead to the death of a business and incredible disillusionment from employees. A much better way to begin this journey is to start with yourself and your business - what do we, as business owners, and our businesses need to be successful and stay in operation. How much profit do we need and how long will it take to get there? How HAPPY will we be at that amount of money? Will we feel secure and capable? Once we have that, we can begin to figure out what operations need to occur to make that happen. Within those operations, we then NEED to do the SAME analysis with our employees - what do they need to be happy, feel successful, feel secure? When we have those answers, we can then build systems to ensure mutual success! Alright, no more generics - let’s see this in action!
At Chapel Hill Training, one of the biggest systems I’ve implemented has been our Tiered Trainer System. This system creates objectives for staff to hit on a yearly basis. They have continuing education requirements, retention and conversion rate goals, training hour goals, and more. These are evaluated every year and revisited every quarter. I created this for a couple of reasons:
Our staff needed opportunities for career advancement
Things got more expensive. If I wanted to retain staff, I’d need to find ways to improve their pay
Employee Retention - I wanted to incentivize staff to stay at CHT and grow WITH us. Having great employees also leads to better client satisfaction and retention, so it helps secure our revenue
Frankly, more money with built in price changes as needed. It’s a bit difficult to make pricing changes when you’re the gold standard of training, but also you have a wide variety of staff of different tenures and abilities. Adding premiums to work with higher quality staff creates more income for the staff, but also a bit more income for the studio, which we can then use to invest in our staff, improve benefits, or create much better financial security opportunities
It created an incentive for my staff to train as much as they could, up to a point they felt secure, and then overtime, retain their clients and improve their craft
If I could incentivize my staff to fulfill their roles as trainers, it meant that I could focus on acquiring clients and growing the business. I could move away from training as a source of security for me, personally, and focus on what would make the business more successful and healthier. If my staff are secure and satisfied, then the business is secure and satisfied, and then I am secure and satisfied. If I am secure and satisfied, I can create the conditions and goals for the business to be secure and satisfied, and the business can provide opportunities for my staff to be secure and satisfied. This system tethers my staff and I, for better or worse, but means that what is good for any of us individually, is good for all of us collectively. In my opinion, that’s how a business SHOULD operate. As I said in my first ever article, a business is the culmination of a group of individuals working together to solve a problem. In order to do that, we’ve got to take care of one another. The best and easiest way to do that, is to make sure that what is good for someone individually, will also lead to it being good for the group, collectively. It negates the opportunity that one person’s success will diminish that of anyone else, and ultimately will lead to mutually assured success.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and learned something from my experiences! If you’d like more information or want to get involved with Chapel Hill Training, check us out at chapelhilltraining.com or email me at cody@chapelhilltraining.com. If you want more content, let us know in the comments below! I’m exploring options to make these articles available auditorily OR switching to a podcast format. For now, this has been another installment of Fitlosophies! Train better. Live better.
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