This Week in Running a Gym - April 24, 2014

I've had evening shift this week which typically means less time for administrative stuff, but I was ambitious and piled my plate high with things to do. One of the hardest things to do as the guy in charge, is to keep existing projects going. It's painfully easy to have a bright idea, plan, and implement. It's so much harder to keep the plan going. It's the daily maintenance that trips me up. The temptation is to think that since you got it this far, it'll keep while you turn to the next bright idea. But the first thing still needs attention, and there are endless new ideas to draw you away.

Thus, my goal this week was to spin up a few of those old plates that might be getting wobbly, so it was a week for setting up meetings about the marketing plan, the T-Town Throwdown, staff meeting, nutrition-based services, follow up on the quarterly owners meeting, poke the Y about a possible collaboration, among other things.

One of the interesting other things was to review the cost of the showers project. All told, the final cost of that little room was about $16,000. Those of you who have worked in the field, will sagely nod your head and say “yup, that sounds about right.” Those of you who have never had to do a project like this probably got a little cross-eyed there. It's funny to see the different reactions that people have when I throw out the actual numbers.

I made a trip to Marine Park early in the week to check it out as a possible venue for next year's Throwdown. I think it'll work. It'll be unique among CrossFit-style competitions, which is sort of the point. I'll drag the planning staff down there next week to do a walk through. Once we settle on venue, we can begin planning in earnest. The preliminary designs for the Throwdown website are finished and are ready to be put online once we have some actual information to put there.

Nutrition services is another big project. You simply can't get great results from exercise without addressing what you eat. Which means that if we as a gym are going to maximize the benefits of training here, we need to have something to offer beyond clean eating challenges and the informal food-talks that we use to address individual concerns. We recently hired Erica Davis, a recent graduate of Bastyr College's Dietitian program. She's not an RD yet (still needs to do the final internship), but has the knowledge to handle the needs of athletes far better than I do. With that, we met together with our resident food educator, Craig O'Hanlon, and talked through what services we'll offer, how that will work, etc.

Also toward that end, Craig, Leon, and I just started our certification process for Precision Nutrition. PN is an organization I've had my eye on for a long time. It's well-researched, relevant, and more than any other guru or system out there, it has a method for going from theory to practice. I've read dozens of books, listened to literally hundreds of podcasts, attended workshops, and have learned more about nutrition and digestion than I ever realized existed. But how do I take the knowledge of the Krebs Cycle and apply that to an individual? Food, even more than exercise, is an intensely psychological and habitual thing. Nobody just considers food as fuel. Food is comfort, identity, fellowship, a reward, an escape. It's not enough to just know a bunch of stuff, there has to be a way to connect that information in a way that elicits a change. And that's why we're learning the PN system, as a way of closing the gap between theory and practice. Tuesday we had our first study group.

Coach Travis D is leading the charge to develop our personal training service. Frankly this is an area that I need help with. I've never worked as a personal trainer really. I went from being a teacher to being a Crossfit coach and figured things out along the way, but I don't have any experience with a personal training business model. Coaching teams, working with groups, that stuff I know. So I've always seen personal training a little bit as a distraction from my core competency. I enjoy working with individuals, I enjoy the creativity and problem-solving opportunities in it. Some of my most rewarding experiences as a coach have come through personal training (I'm looking at you Shar). But still, it takes a lot of my time, and as a training client matures, they need me less and less. I've had clients who knew how to do everything and could have come in and done the daily program without me, so I end up counting reps and acting as a cheerleader which can get a little boring. When I looked at time spent on a single person (time that I need for the rest of the business), how much money it made, and how much I enjoyed the process, I felt like I could do better. So how do we provide personal coaching in a way that is engaging and developmental for both client and trainer, is affordable for the client, but profitable enough to pay the trainer, and is sustainable over longer periods? I'll leave the question open for now and address it in future articles as it develops.

By Morgan on Saturday, April, 26, 2014