You built your entire business from the ground up, right? Heck, maybe you feel like you built it from underground up.
And sure, you’ve made some mistakes along the way. You weren’t always perfect but when it comes to your clients no-one can connect with them, encourage them, or train them better than you can.
But your business is growing. Now, this is a good thing—you’re stoked about having new business and making extra revenue—but you’re stretched too thin.
There are new systems you never had to deal with before and you’re realizing that it’s time you dedicate yourself completely to marketing, delegating, and selling. Your business absolutely needs you to step off the gym floor and into your office so that you can really start growing the way you want.
So what should you do? You’ve got one option, right? You have hire trainers to take your place and train your clients.
Now, since you’ve read the title of this post you should realize that this is a very, very dangerous thing. Think about it: you’re taking the foundation of your business, the most important task that gets each and every one of your clients to pay, stay and refer, and you’re handing it off to some stranger.
You’re basically saying, “Hello there person I’ve never met, this piece of paper says you’re great and you’ve told me you’re great (and you’re a personal trainer so you probably don’t have much of an ego, right?) so you must be perfect.
“Here, take my money and the responsibility of keeping my entirely livelihood and life’s purpose form crumbling down around me.”
Now do you see how scary this is? You’ve build your business on incredible training and you just can’t know if the person you hire will provide this same level of quality.
Even if you know the trainer or have seen them train, you just can’t know for sure if they’ll be 100% every day, if they’ll stay reliable, or if they’ll completely bail on you. People do some sh*tty stuff when they’re working for a company that isn’t their own.
When I owned my one-on-one studios I was trying to manage dozens of trainers and let me tell you, it was an absolute nightmare. I had guys sleeping with clients, stealing money, lying to me, cheating me— you could pretty much name anything and it probably happened to me at some time or other.
It’s impossible to find someone with your level of passion and your level of commitment because it’s your business, not theirs. They just don’t care about it the same way that you do and you can’t force them to.
Well, then, how do you find qualified candidates who will stay dedicated, won’t screw you over, and will provide awesome training?
Because it’s not like you can avoid this. You need to move into the office. Once you’ve grown to a certain point your business will get stuck and stagnant if you don’t start focusing on marketing, selling and delegating while your employees handle the actual training.
So what should you do?
First of all, if you have problems with firing people, it’s time you get over them right now. I know it’s hard when you like people and make friends, and you should definitely foster good relationships with your staff, but when it’s time for someone to go you’ve got to let them go.
Don’t wait, don’t lead them on, and don’t let your business bleed extra money by keeping them on board. This is your business. It’s not a friendship, it’s not about being careful with people’s feelings, it’s about providing for yourself and your family and making sure you have the lifestyle that you want.
If you let employees like this suck you dry then you’ll go out of business and no one will have work, so it’s never the right thing to do.
But that still doesn’t make letting people go any easier…
I believe the best way to deal with this issue is hiring the right people in the first place.
But what does this mean? How do you hire the right people? Personally, I think it comes down to looking past the qualifications. I mean, qualifications are really friggen important, don’t get me wrong, but passion is pretty dang important too.
And if you hire the most skilled trainer who has no passion for training or for life, then he’s going to be an awful employee. If someone has the passion and shows the potential but lacks a bit of the skill then it’s worth your time to hire and train them.
In the end, with a little investment from you, they’ll become much better employees who commit to you and your business. The investment is worth it.
I also like to tell trainers that they should hire emotional employees.
I know, I know, the term “emotional” usually carries a negative connotation. I’m not saying you should hire blubbering drama addicts who can’t get any work done because their world ends at least once every hour.
What I am telling you, though, is that emotional people get fired up to work hard, will be passionate about training people, they’ll want to help make your business a success, and they’ll have an easier time relating to you and your clients.
You have the ability to play to people’s emotions if they actually have some. They’re more likely to care about wasting your business’s time or money and they won’t want to do that to you.
But if a trainer just doesn’t care, if they’re too lazy, indifferent or uninterested, then they’ll never be the employee you need— even if they’ve got all the skill in the world.
Find people with passion, find trainers with excitement, and hire employees who will connect with your business on an emotional level. That’s honestly the best advice I can give you when it comes to hiring staff for your fitness business.
Committed to your success,
Bedros