Mark and Michael’s Top Takeaways from Our Boston Retreat

[00:00:00] Hello, my friend. I’m so excited for today’s episode. We just got done a two and a half day retreat for our Unicorn Society members in Boston. So on this episode, Mark and I are going to share some of our top takeaways from that retreat. Some trends we’re seeing in the industry, things that are really working right now for our Unicorn Society members.

So if you want to peek behind the curtain of our latest Unicorn Society retreat, this is a fantastic episode for you. Keep on listening.

Welcome to the Business for Unicorns podcast, where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their business. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym. Get ready to unlock your potential And become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Let’s begin.[00:01:00]

Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up. Welcome to another episode of the business unicorns podcast. Before we jump into today’s episode, I just want to talk a little bit about merchandise at your gym. There’s something about fall being in the air. It’s a perfect time to launch some new apparel at your gym.

And if you’re wanting to work with someone who truly understands the fitness niche, we want you to reach out to our friends at forever fierce. It’s forever fierce. com. Tell them business unicorn sent you, we use them at both of our businesses for creating merge. They help with the design process. They put it up on their website and the easy purchase process.

This is a thing that most gyms want to have and probably should have, but you shouldn’t spend that much time on it. And forever fear fierce really takes a lot of the heavy lifting off your plate. And so if you want to have some newer, improved merch, go check them out. Forever fierce. com link in the show notes.

Fisher, welcome to the podcast. My friend, how are you doing? I’m good. I’m a little cranky today. I’m a little cranky. They’re going to get a, they’re going to get cranky Fisher today. A little bit. My cranky comment is merch almost [00:02:00] always sucks. It’s almost always a horrible waste of your time and stupid.

You shouldn’t do it. Honestly, except for forever fierce forever. Fierce has been, yeah, like the best vendor we’ve ever had. They make it so easy in general, adding on answer revenues like merch, there’s an, if in the broader boutique fitness studio world, it can work really well. You oftentimes see the sort of cliche thing is like the.

The, not always, but is often a woman who opens up the Pilates studio, but actually has a background in merchandising. Okay. That, that type of facility sometimes can do tens of thousand dollars, even six figures in merch. Most gym owners listening, usually, if you don’t have a real passion and skill set at merchandising and the way you set up your space, which I think is a lot of you, Forever Fierce is an awesome person to use.

And they did great shirts for our retreat that we just did, which we’ll talk about. Yeah. Um, right now, if you’re watching the video, I’m wearing our Forever Fierce, uh, sweatshirt they designed for us. for business unicorns. It’s fantastic. We love them. One of the comfiest ones I own. Yeah. We’re recording this just a few days after finishing our Boston retreat [00:03:00] for our Unicorn Society members.

And so we’re both feeling hung over from that three days of friendship thing and yeah, don’t worry. Everyone. My, my cranking is still there. It’s still pretty friendly. I’m still pretty. Yeah. No, a hundred percent. I’m feeling it too. I woke up today. I was like, I barely had a voice just from talking for three days straight to folks, but it was so much fun.

And we don’t want to, we don’t want you listeners to have too much FOMO, but we want you to have a little FOMO. We want you to recognize that these are traits we do for Unicorns and Movers. are so much fun. They are so full of like an amazing community of people who get together and really are open and transparent with sharing with each other.

What’s working at their gyms. What’s not working at their gyms. And then we hope we put together a few days full of really great content for them that engages them even more with new strategies and new ideas for how they work on their gym. And so we thought we’d spend today’s episode, just sharing a few trends that we saw.

Both from the speakers that spoke from the stage and also from just conversations we heard [00:04:00] from Unicorn Society members and guests who came to our retreat, just to share some of that wisdom that we’re taking away from the retreat with all of you. And so Fisher, do you want to just start off by sharing a little bit about what was the experience like for you and what.

What trends did you hear in conversations from gym owners right now? Yeah, I’ll say like at a high level, the pitch for this, whether you do it with us or, or someone else, there’s a number of reasons you can have to get out of your business and think about it at a high level, but it was fascinating to me how often.

The topic of conversation was around how valuable it is to get out of your business and connect with like minded people and renew your vows. And in fact, it was some of the things I talked about in my talk too. These sort of restorative habits that refill your cup and among them are connecting with the community.

They are connecting with a forward looking vision for where you want your business to go. So certainly that was nice. One thing that was an interesting trend I saw would speak to potential takeaway for [00:05:00] listeners for something you can do in your business or perhaps maybe even a reframing. The topic of the retreat was people.

So that took a lot of forms, but a lot of it was how you support your employees. And one thing that was interesting that I observed that came up again and again, seem to be from some of the questions for me, a little bit of an implication of at times, Owners may be overestimating what a greener, more junior employee can do, right?

It’s not necessarily an age thing, but a very specific example was, I think there are a few times I heard a version of, and it’s a very good question of owners. observing, I ask my young employees like what their vision is. Sometimes it’s hard for me because I want to help them, but they don’t even always have a vision.

And to me, that is a great example of, that’s, I think a great question coming from a great place. And we should probably just expect that a 25 year old doesn’t know if they want to be, I sure didn’t. I [00:06:00] didn’t, I was getting high and auditioning for Broadway shows and I was 25, right? My life took a really weird right angles.

I think the, to be clear, your action step is not. to not ask these questions. Instead, I would encourage you is one of the best things we can do for employees is to get clear on where they want their future to go. The question we often use is, it’s two years from today, things have gone spectacular for you and you’re thrilled with your role.

What has to happen personally and professionally for us to be very excited about your progress in the next two years? And that is a powerful question. And you should just expect with the types of junior employees that you will get in a typical training gym, they’re often not going to know that answer right away.

And you should still keep asking because what you’ll find is if you ask that maybe every six months over one to two years, what’s really beautiful about that is You’ll help them, you’ll help develop them. So I think being patient with your younger employees and helping them build that muscle of visioning and just going into it, realizing that they’re not going to have very good answers right away, and that’s not only okay.

Like that’s [00:07:00] normal to be expected. And then when you do have the person it’s on fire and 25, that’s amazing. And you’re not going to hold on long because they’re about to go open their own gym, which will be cool if you do it with integrity. Yeah, 100%. I’ll piggyback on that one because I think a similar trend I heard in all of our presentations and conversations around Managing a team is how you have to manage differently not just green employees versus employees have been around for a long time But several times in our conversations we talked about that how you need to treat Part time and full time employees.

Yes. Yes. And how there has to be a separate set of expectations from people who are there 20, 30, 40 hours a week, full time. This is their only gig. They put food on the table and pay their rent for their, from their job at the gym versus people who are there. Sometimes very part time in gyms teaching like two classes a week, or just there a few hours, one or two shifts per week and the expectations you have for those.

And some of the overarching takeaway from those conversations is you do actually [00:08:00] have to have separate expectations. You can’t expect the same things from the part timers you do from the full timers when it comes to things like how many staff meetings do they attend? Right. So one good takeaway I heard from this was like, well, the full timers always have to come to every staff meeting.

Let’s say it’s a weekly staff meeting, but we record them and the part timers don’t have to come, but they have to watch them all. And they have, well, once in a while, quiz them and make sure they got it all. Same thing with continuing education, right? If you’re continuing education happens in those team meetings, you can’t expect your part timers to always participate, but can they participate in some continuing education?

Some of the time? Yeah. They can probably do a book review once or twice a year. They might be able to do some certs on their own time. Same thing with. I could keep going down the list of all the things we expect from our employees, but the main takeaway was we do need to think of them differently. We don’t want our part timers to be held to the different standard, but how long it takes them to rise to that standard is different.

How to manage them is different. And I think it just requires a whole different kind of pulse than someone who’s in the building five days a week. [00:09:00] Yeah. What would you add to that? Yeah, I think that’s all true. And one of the things that’s interesting too is, I think one of the great unsolvable questions you can ask, is it better for the typical training gym to have fewer full time people or more part time people?

For me, in a vacuum with no context, it’s always the former, right? But that’s an important qualification in a vacuum, right? In a vacuum. Yes. And certainly my personal preference is I’d always have, I would prefer less people being paid more money to be more all in. Cause it just makes my life a little bit easier.

Cause I have their full time focus. Having said that, you know, it’s interesting. There’s a number of unicorn sighting members and some that have done, you know, very well and do like really intense numbers of multi locations that have a lot of part timers and I think they’re successful for exactly the reasons you mentioned Keeler is number one, they just have a different set of standards than they would for the full timers.

They scale what’s realistic to expect of somebody that’s only in the building so often only making so much money. I think that two, [00:10:00] they still do hold those people to a very clearly defined floor of the minimum things they need to do to stay on the same page. But importantly, I think the third piece is one of the challenges you will, I think, can run into here is a grass is greener phenomenon, where if you have a lot of part timers, you look at the full time or gyms with full time staff, and you think, Oh my gosh, it’s so much must be so much easier.

They’re all bought in. And, and listen, oftentimes that is true, but in practice, there is an extra burden to be entirely frank with you as the gym owner with full time staff that are looking to you to build a career that they want to make more money over time. And frankly, the more ambitious they are, the more that there can sometimes be a tension between how big a training gym is going to grow and what you can offer them.

On the other hand, I think sometimes, and again, I’m, they cost more. Yeah. Yeah. Not just because they’re working more, but because they need time off. They need some of these benefits when we do it. So keep on going. [00:11:00] Yeah. And again, I’m still largely again in a vacuum. I’m still going to prefer that. It’s always been my personal preference.

But the thing that is sometimes I think underappreciated about the value of the part timers are, um, Yeah. there’s somebody to be said for having some people in your team that are solid and they just want a few hours per week and they’re not on top of you about where’s my career going and what opportunities can I get and when am I getting a raise and certainly I have no mean to suggest that’s the nature of all full timers.

Kim Scott’s book, Radical Candor, which I, you know, I’m a big fan of the talk about this distinction between rock stars versus superstars, right? And this is not exactly the same framework, but this concept of the person’s like, just happy to do the job, right? It’s a part time thing. And listen, like logistically, oftentimes they have maybe like a spouse that has a full time income and they just love your gym and they want to be around and they’re, I think Sometimes we underweight the value of that type of person because we compare them to the full time staff.

And I would [00:12:00] just highlight, I think they both actually have some pros and cons and both can work provided you’re always honoring the principle of very clear expectations of both sides of what’s expected. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That’s good. Good addition. Hey there. Business Unicorns podcast listeners. I’m just making absolutely sure you have already gotten your free instantly downloadable copy of my new book, the little book of Jim marketing secrets.

You can find a link to download it in the show notes or you can go to jimmarketingsecretsbook. com. I worked super hard to make sure this is a less than a 30 minute read and as a comprehensive overview of all the things you need to do. To grow your gym, get more leads, more clients, and importantly, change more lives.

Again, find the link in the show notes where you can download your free copy at gymmarkingsecretsbook. com. And now back to the podcast. What else did you see Fisher in, in trends and themes from our speakers or conversations you were hearing, what else stood out to you from this weekend? I think another thing that came up again and again that I [00:13:00] saw that I think is important is just, and again, I think I know this and even for me, it was a good reminder of, Oh yeah, it’s just the importance of just investing.

In your people again. And again, I think three speakers did the quote where like, you’re afraid of what if you invest in your people and they leave? Well, what if you don’t invest in them and they stay right? And yeah, I think multiple speakers brought the importance of developing continuing education systems for your team and being willing to invest time and money and doing, you know, in services with the team and training the team.

So there was a lot of conversation around. Ways you can do that. But the particular trend that I saw, which is hopefully intuitive to somebody listening to this, but it’s just the importance of investing time, money, and energy into developing your team. And, and I forget even, I’m sure even some of the attendees, and again, you’re dealing with the people that go to conferences about businesses, the more sophisticated corner of the industry, but even among some of.[00:14:00]

It was interesting to hear. Sometimes there was a little bit nervousness around. Okay. But quite literally that, right. What if I invest in a thing and they leave? And I think that makes sense. I don’t want to be clear. I’m not dismissing. I think it’s a very fair concern and nervousness about, about, I’m not sure even what to, Pick to invest in, right?

I’m going to pick the wrong things and waste my money. Yeah. And it’s, and again, Lord knows that the, over the years I have definitely had many times where I thought myself disappointed, right? Got very excited about a thing and we did the thing and, and then that got mixed reviews from the staff. And then the next step is, okay, I want the staff to have buy in.

So now you let the staff choose, but even then there’s not consensus. And The staff leaves it, but there’s still some people that are like, Oh, this wasn’t necessarily a good use of our time. So yeah, I don’t know if you ever got a thousand. I feel like the thing that we’ve, I think, I feel like the thing that we kept learning more and more, and while we might never get it right ever, the place, the thing we got more and more focused on was we need to be learning things that can have a [00:15:00] specific impact on how they do their job better the next day.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like what’s, what’s, what’s in it for me? Yeah. Yeah, all the learning was, and I see this with regular unicorn standing members all the time, that it’s learning for learning sake. So we think we should know more about this. We think, and it’s often obscure fitness training concepts, which is not wrong, but it’s, it doesn’t often close the loop back to how does this knowledge make us better.

At our jobs the next day, make it better at serving clients, talking to clients, getting clients results, being more effective as a team, running more profitably as an organization. Like how does this learning make us better at our jobs the next day? And we’ll, again, like you said, we may not ever get 10 on this, but that still seems to be like the right North star.

Yeah, I think it’s a good thing to consider because I think this is another place where I think again, these thinking errors of leaders can come in where you’re just not factoring in like they’re just, they’re not like you, they don’t want to own a gym, they don’t want to work as hard as you, because for a long time, that was a [00:16:00] point of frustration of mine was like, how are you going to be massively successful if you’re not going to put in massive amounts of time of effort and money of learning and following threads that are maybe not always apparent how you apply?

And it became apparent over time, um, A lot of them don’t want to be that massive. I don’t say they don’t want to be successful. They just have other priorities in their life. And that’s good because again, I wouldn’t be able to hire them at least for long if they want to do what I did. And that I think is one of those interesting, I think it’s classic leader thinking error, right?

Where everybody was like, I’m working so hard. My team doesn’t appreciate it. And they’re not. And I think the older I’ve gotten, the better I’ve gotten about, and again, this can fall into the, I think the tyranny of low expectations. I just think I’ve gotten better about. being realistic about what I’m actually going to expect from somebody that is working for what I can pay them to be like in a training gym.

And I’ve become more appreciative about people that show up and are easy to work with and they’re happy to have the job. And the cost is, yeah, they’re not naturally lighting the world on fire. And sometimes I have to like. Nudge them to do some of the [00:17:00] con ed stuff. And again, that’s where I think, yeah, inspired them a ceiling, but just like make a reasonable minimum standard, build a floor.

And then the other piece I think of being successful with this was something that Kevin’s car set our keynote speaker. I think he was quoting Jenny Rarick who I don’t know if she made this up or somebody else, but I was like, this is the thing I keep thinking about. I’m just gonna tattoo to my forehead is rules without relationship, equal rebellion.

Rules without relationship equal rebellion. And I just found that to be so powerful because even frankly, even this whole conversation, the meta conversation is to some extent, it’s like, how do I get my employees to do what I want? How do I get my employees to want what I want? And they won’t always want what you want.

But in practice, if it’s really built with care and I’m sure a lot of like, even like the, The coach and stuff that you have talked about, right? How do we like actually intentionally build and again, it’s a professional relationship. I’m not suggesting that you need to be like best friends, but that you really invest in a caring relationship where it’s so clear you’re committed to their longterm development and success.

It, you [00:18:00] just get so much more wig room and buy in, where lots of times they are willing to do things with, and I think that happens a lot. Like, they’re like, I can tell her they’re not on fire, but they’re okay. This is what I’m being asked to do. And I know I have a pretty good job here. So I don’t totally want to do this because I’m not going to choose it, but okay.

I will give it my best. Then for me at this point as a leader, like I’ll take it. I really actually appreciate the person that’s doing the thing that they’re not on fire to do because they’re like, wow, you’re. The boss and you’re a pretty well intentioned and you’re a nice boss. So I’m going to, I’m going to do this thing to the best of my ability.

Now I’ve come to really appreciate that. Obviously I love the people that are on fire and just want to do it on their own. But again, there’s 12 years in a hundred plus employees in it. So that’s not going to be 70 percent of the people that I get to work with. Yeah. So funny. You bring up relationships in this aspect of building relationships with the people you manage are really.

Critical to get into be motivated at all, or inspired at all, or effective at all, or disciplined at all that the relationship is really a big part of how you do that as a manager, as an employer, just [00:19:00] maintaining that kind of growth, fostering relationship by all the things we talk about all the time.

I’m not, but the reason I say it’s interesting you brought it up is because another theme I heard. In this retreat is about the importance of building relationships with clients, that the relationships between the training team or the whole team and clients is critical to everything we want for our clients.

That relationship that we build with our clients helps them build their self confidence to show up and follow our programming builds our trust. With them. So they will show up and try new things and be uncomfortable. Building relationships with our clients helps us deliver better customer service because we better understand what they need and what they want and then can deliver it.

A better relationships with our clients helps us with retention because they’ll make more friends and want to stay longer. Those relations with the clients means that, and there were so many speakers who talked about this, that. Really building relationships with our clients means being in kind of constant dialogue with them about what the clients want from us, what they don’t want from us about what are we doing that’s working [00:20:00] for them?

What are you doing? That’s not working for them. Who on the team, are they in the community? They’re really resonating with, who are they not resonating with? These are all important things to know. And in some cases, we learn this information about our clients in one on one conversations in sales conversations.

When they first join us in just casual on the floor conversations during the workouts. And in some cases, a lot of our speakers, specifically Brittany, one of our Yeah. Just unicorns coaches talked about the importance of surveys and automations and reaching out to people at regular pulses to get there and get information about what they as a client are valuing, what they’re liking, what they’re not liking using clients as a sounding board.

Like Brittany does this really well. She has a kind of a kind of board of directors of old timey clients who she turns to and asks for advice and guidance when she’s making key decisions. And all of this just really. struck me so hard that we talk a lot about our relationships we have with our team, but, and the relationship we have with our clients are really what we’re selling.

And I’ve gotten to say recently, the thing we’re selling our relationships and results. [00:21:00] Those are like the commodities that we’re selling. And I found that this retreat. Pushed on that in a way that I was like, Oh yeah, Michael, it just really reinforced the fact that yeah, results are important. People come to us because they want to look different, feel different, act different.

But really it’s the relationships that enable those results almost more than anything else. Yeah. I mean, there’s that famous precision nutrition story about Brody trolling message boards online. And he saw someone talking about their experience with, or someone was like asking about people’s experience of precision.

I don’t know if this was like a Reddit thread or whatever. And there was this woman and the gist of her comment was, I lost a hundred pounds, but it wasn’t a good experience. I don’t think this should work with me. He was like, what? Yeah, it’s not that. Yeah, because certainly results are great, but yeah, really the relationship is really what makes this sticky over time.

And it’s an interesting. Uh, and I think there were a few good ideas around this too about how we operationalize that, right? Like, how is it that we have things that we do daily, weekly, monthly to make sure we build and strengthen those [00:22:00] relationships? Because yeah, like that’s how that all that stuff is a retention stuff, which is always a little bit, tends to be a little less sexy.

It’s often not an immediate, it’s one of those things too, where Punished, frankly, if you don’t do it, it’s not always apparent to value when you do it. Yeah. Positive feedback loop that says, good job doing that. It’s just like, yeah, like I was going to terminate if you hadn’t sent me that, that random text message to check in, but now I’m not going to, you don’t, yeah, you don’t, it’s a crisis that don’t happen.

And there’s a lot of different ways you could do that, right? You can operationalize a certain number of text messages that happen per day or per week. For years, we’ve talked about the benefit of handwritten cards. You can track, is there a certain number of personal, you know, Gifts and you maybe have a modest monthly budget and then you track that in your team’s SOPs to make sure that’s happening.

But yeah, it is an interesting. For me, that stuff, it’s so like fun to play this game of, okay, given our constraints of time and money, how do we build systems that make sure we’re getting our arms around as many people as possible and make sure that people are not able to show up and be anonymous, which for gyms, [00:23:00] like the ones we work with is that’s death, right?

That’s the thing we don’t want to your point. Even if they get results like that, ain’t it? That’s not what we’re selling and that’s not what’s going to lead to business. Yeah, 100%. I think it’s a great place to leave it. I think we keep going all day because we had in our Boston retreat two full days of speakers.

Yes, plus some other hang time with all our whole community. So we keep going all day for the the million and one takeaways we’ve had but I think that’s a good overview and I I hope listeners that was useful to you in hearing some of the practical things that we’ve we took away from the retreat. The things that kind of top level gym owners are talking about these days and finding value in and so let’s leave it there.

Friends again Quick reminder, if you want to go do get some, a great merch and you don’t have any great merch and you want some bad ass t shirts, sweatshirts, things for your gym, go to foreverfierce. com links down in the show notes. We love them. They’ll make the process much easier and we hope that you use them.

Thanks for a great chat Fisher. I’ll see you on the next [00:24:00] one.