Episode 376

How to Deliver Effective Continuing Education at Your Gym

In this episode, we talk about how to deliver effective continuing education at your gym.

[00:00:00] Hey friends, Ben here from Business for Unicorns, and I’ve hijacked the podcast from Michael again, and I’m honored to bring you Mickey, who’s the owner of Annex Sports Performance in New Jersey. They’re a sports performance gym who are just absolutely crushing it in every way. They’re a seven figure business.

I have the privilege of talking to Mickey on a regular basis, and I know he, he approaches his work with such integrity and consistency. It’s inspiring. So today we’re talking all about how to do staff continuing education at your gym from the hiring process through to how much should you be spending on it?

I’m excited for you to hear Mickey’s tips. Enjoy.

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. [00:01:00] Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Let’s begin.

Hey friends. Today I’m here with Mickey, who’s the owner of Annex Sports Performance in New Jersey. And in addition to being one of our amazing BFU coaches and the owner of an incredibly successful sports performance gym, he’s our kind of dedicated sports performance coach. He also presented at our Boston retreat last month.

So before we dive in, because we’re going to be talking all things staff continuing education and how Mickey does that for his team. I wanted to give you a friendly reminder that if you’re interested in doing the certified functional strength coach with Mike Boyle and Kevin Carr, they’re one of the sponsors for BFU.

And you’re interested in doing this for your team. MFFs brought them in to do their entire team search and has incredible things to say. You can get 25 percent off by typing in BFU 2024 at the checkout. So Kevin was also one of the sponsors, Boyle is obviously one of the OGs in the industry, but if you want to save some money on continuing [00:02:00] education, which is conveniently the topic of this webinar or this podcast.

Use the code BFU2024. All right, let’s dive in. How are you doing today, Mickey? I’m great, Ben. How are you, brother? I am doing awesome. How is living through the house renovations going? Are you almost done? We are, I think we’d get a final certificate of occupancy tomorrow. Fingers crossed. So we’re, we are very close.

Yeah, that’s great. So if anyone doesn’t know, Mickey, you have like 300 year old farmhouse. It’s old. Early, pre Civil War is how old it is. We’ve got a pre Civil War farmhouse. You’re also a woodworker, and you’re doing this awesome addition on your house. Yeah, we’re, we’re excited to be done to say the least.

It’s not always goes, you have this vision and this plan and you excited for it. It’s not going to be that bad. And you’re like, damn, I wish I had a functional kitchen. Yes. Yeah. We’re eagerly awaiting the approval. And I think that the fun part about this project is I had very [00:03:00] little to do with it. Other than the design and just paying for it.

So normally most of the products in the house, I’m always the, I wear all the hats. So this has been refreshing where my wife would be like, we got to get this done. I’m like, that’s not my problem. That’s the contractor’s problem. So it’s refreshing, but it’s different. That’s awesome. I’m excited too. I’m excited to see the final project.

I’ve been following along on Instagram with the progress pictures and it looks really cool. Yeah, thank you. Let’s talk all things, continuing education is one of the hottest topics that we get questions on. It’s like how do you do continuing education with your staff? Do you give them money? Do you, how do you mandate it?

Do you force everybody to do it? How much is that money? How hard do you force them? What do you get them to do? Because you know, we all have our, Biases of what ferts are junk and which are less junk. So I’m curious, like, how do you approach continuing education at a seven figure sports performance gym?

Cause there’s probably a lot of things the rest of us can learn. I think the biggest thing we need to focus on is when we’re talking about continuing education with our people, [00:04:00] we want to make sure we’re hiring people out of the gates that believe in development in the growth mindset. So inherently we want people that come into our facility who are of the Mindset that they want to continue to get better.

They want to continue to grow as coaches or whatever role they’re fulfilling within your company. It’s important that that’s part of the hiring process and we’re making sure we’re putting the right people in the right seats. We can’t hire people that inherently aren’t of growth mindset, and then just all of a sudden expect them to take on that level of consideration when it comes to developing themselves.

So first and foremost, get people who actually give a damn and want to get better on a regular basis. And then from that point, that makes perfect sense. How do you like screen for that? Like for, cause it, we’ll talk more about how do you roll out sports performance, but especially for people who are opening a gym or have an established gym or maybe in the hiring process, like aside from saying, [00:05:00] how do you feel about doing student education?

Like how do you make sure that’s something that’s an intrinsic core value to them? Not just something they’ll reluctantly do when it’s forced upon them. Yeah, that’s a good question. And generally that has to be. The types of questions you’re asking in the interview process, whether it be, Hey, what’s the last type of continuing education product you’ve consumed and why, what is the term growth mindset mean to you?

And is it important? It could be any number of things. You could Google those types of questions. What type of questions in an interview are going to yield more character driven type of questions? Questions. Right. And so by doing that, you can get a general consensus of whether this person is truly somebody who cares about leveling up on a regular basis.

And I think that’s how I go about it in terms of making sure out of the gates, generally, like the second interview I have with our potential members or our potential coaches [00:06:00] is trying to uncover whether or not that’s something that matters to them. Got it. And yeah, for listeners out there, obviously I was being a little bit tongue in cheek.

Do you believe in continuing education? Like that’s not a great question to ask. But if you ask behavioral based interview questions like Mickey does, when people have to give a specific example, it’s going to show the behaviors because we can’t really evaluate like character traits. Is this person a good human being?

But we can see, do they have a history of behaviors that align with the type of values that we’re looking to see? So if I just did this and I’m actually really interested in doing that, but it’s not back in Jersey until next year, I think it’s really hard for people to BS that. Yeah, I would also add that you want to make sure that you want to get an idea of also how well this person takes on constructive criticism because part of the whole education process is being able to objectively take feedback from peers and leaders.

So if I get an idea that this person might not be [00:07:00] somebody who could manage that or, Just have the self awareness to see where potential blind spots are in their skillset. Then I think that’s something that is a potential red flag as well. It’s really good point. Huge. So let’s say you’ve hired the right people by using behavior based interview questions, their values align.

They want to continue to learn. What does that actually look like in practice at the annex? Yeah. So in an effort to keep it as simple as possible, I boiled it down to a very simple framework of who is responsible for whatever the continuing education is. What is being taught, meaning what’s the skill, what’s the, what is the actual subject and what are the needs of your coaches, whether that’s the need as your staff as a whole, or the need of the each individual coach or staff member you have.

And then ultimately, how are you coaching, right? Like, how are you delivering the training? How are you delivering the education? And I think if you can answer those three questions, you can create a pretty robust system and something that’s [00:08:00] scalable and you can constantly be improving. Evolving with the needs of your team.

So I like that. It’s not just, everyone needs to get a new cert every year. You’re critically evaluating who’s responsible, what that looks like. I forget the second question, but you’re asking the right questions to get the right education. Yeah. And so to be more specific, if we break it down to each one of those categories.

So I’d argue that most. Young training facilities, be it sports performance, be it general fitness for most of those young facilities, the who is you, the person who’s the owner of the operator, you are the one that’s setting the schedule, managing the training, doing what needs to be done in order to facilitate staff continuing education.

So for companies that are a little bit more robust and have a bigger staff, our staff included, I’ve now within the last four to five years, I’ve delegated that to our. Sports performance director, Damian Aikens, who does a phenomenal job. And the day I could take that off of my [00:09:00] plate, it allowed me to do other things and be more of a resource to him to enable, to start to continue to build that offering, because I think ultimately one of the things and getting back to the whole hiring processes, some of the best facilities to work at from a coach’s perspective are the ones that are teaching coaches and leveling them up.

You’ve mentioned boils, like the reason why a lot of people want to work there is. As a coach, you’re going to go there and you’re going to learn a ton. And to me, that’s a huge value add. If I’m a coach looking to maybe an entry level coach, who’s looking to level up my skillset, I’m going to want to work at those types of places.

So that in and of itself is a great way of differentiating your facility as a place to work versus other facilities. So, yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. It’s different than just saying, yeah, we believe in education. We’re going to teach you stuff. You’ve actually got a system that you can show them of here’s how we develop coaches and what better opportunity for newer coaches or even moderately seasoned coaches, but might’ve been in a different culture where [00:10:00] they know that year over year, they’re going to get better.

It’s going to be easier to ask for raises. They can be able to make greater impact. And if they do decide to move on to whatever the next best thing is, you’re going to be a very important stepping stone in that journey. Absolutely. Great. And I think understanding that is important, uh, because you want to make sure when people are with you, you’re giving them every opportunity to succeed, right?

They might stay with you for the long haul and they might not, but it’s your job as an employer to. Level them up and give them as many resources and opportunities to grow as a coach in their role as possible, because the worst thing you can do is not coach somebody. And then they’re just on your staff for eternity.

And now they’re your weakest link. So I think that’s something that we’ve really, as I’ve gotten further along in my evolution as a business owner, just really prioritize making sure that my coaches and my team members. are continually taken care of because they’re the ones that are ultimately serving our members.

They’re the people that are in front of the [00:11:00] members every day. And if we’re giving them the tools that they need to succeed as coaches, then we’re doing our job from a leadership perspective. Yeah. That’s a perfect example of service leader, servant leadership in practice. And it reminds me of a quote that I can’t remember who it’s attributed to.

That’s probably a meme now where it’s, we want to invest in our staff and the other team members, like. But what if they leave? It’s like, yeah, but what if we don’t invest in them and they stay? Yeah. 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 Gym Marketing Secrets.

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

Again, find the link in the show notes where you can download your free copy at gym marketing secrets book.com and now back to the podcast. [00:12:00] Yeah, so let’s get a little more tactical, whether it’s you or Damien, like what does that continued education look like? Are you doing in services every X period of time?

Do you bring in certs? Like what’s the, here’s how we do it at Annex. Absolutely. I think the, so really breaking it down to what are some of the things that we do are, obviously we talk about coaching, we talk about programming, all the stuff that’s happening on the floor. And that’s obviously more towards like our coaching role, but then we also have other people that from a administrative role, like what, what type of communication skills do they need?

What type of sales and marketing skills do they need? And then as people start to elevate within our staff, there’s more from a leadership perspective and. What are they doing in terms of those types of things? So as far as our facility and what we do is we do a lot of different things. We do weekly staff and services, which Damien leads.

And that’s generally, it’s a mixture of he’s coming to those meetings with a [00:13:00] specific agenda, but he’s also holding space for the coaches that maybe they’ll, they’ll talk about a specific case and the case study within our, our list of athletes. Maybe there’s some specific case that that’s challenging them that they need a little bit of guidance with and they’ll go through like thought partnership and say, all right, here’s best practices.

What we should do come up with different scenarios, maybe coach them through specific scenarios and how to coach movements, so on and so forth. So I think it gives them a level of like discord where they can communicate with their peers and then they can communicate with other coaches. I might from time to time jump in there.

We’ve often done things where some of our coaches, they’ll. Be given a specific topic and they come and present. So through the ability to teach their peers, they’ve gained better knowledge. And so I think that is also another way where you need to prepare a topic. You need to prepare his presentation.

You’re leveling up your skillset and there’s opportunities for people to improve their, their overall capability [00:14:00] as a coach. So how long is that weekly in service typically? I’d say about an hour to an hour and a half. It really, it depends on how much, how much substance they’re working through. It could be as quick as 30 minutes, right?

If it’s, and it’s never really a black and white, it has to be 60 minutes. I think the purpose is to serve the coaches, making sure they always have the ability to come to us, whether it be Damien or myself, if they have challenges, we’re here to help you guys out. We don’t ever want you to feel like you have, you know, You don’t have answers and you’re just guessing lean on us between between all of our coaches.

We’ve got decades of experience in the field. Chances are we’ve had we’ve dealt with that type of experience before. And so we could also through those types of meetings, we can start to self identify. Hey, here’s a consistent challenge that we’ve been faced with. Maybe that should be a seminar that we’re sending coaches to.

Right. Maybe it’s something where we bring in an [00:15:00] expert and he teaches or she teaches our staff. And so I think the challenge becomes when owners and operators and us, like in the leadership role are, whenever we think of staff education, all we ever think about is it’s got to be us. It’s got to be a one on one conversation.

And yes, I agree that early on, that’s generally how it is, but that becomes very time consuming and often not scalable. And so it becomes a daunting task when we’re trying to continue to build up our coaches. So. I would really encourage people to think of other ways that they can be efficient with their time.

And one of the big things that I started to do was I started to find myself having the same Coaching conversations with new coaches over and over again So what I did is I just started creating different types of presentation and almost built like a web style type Preview like pre recorded video and that was part of their on ramp to come on as a coach.

So you have to watch all these videos on certain [00:16:00] training programming, certain training practices, how we coach this movement versus this movement and all these other things. And I think those types of things are a really good way of being efficient with your time and energy so that you’re not having to repeat all these things over and over again, which really is what sucks up a lot of your time.

Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like step one is to make sure you’re hiring, just to recap a lot of good information here. Step one is making sure you’re screening for people who are, have a growth mindset and truly want to learn and develop and be a part of a culture where they’re going to be better coaches next year than last year.

Step two is recognize that you as the leader are the one who is responsible for making sure that happens. You can’t just assume that all your coaches are going to do the right things and hope it works out. That’s it. And it sounds like for you, step three is like the, the weekly in service is the foundation and you’ve done it in a one to many approach, which makes sense.

You probably don’t train a ton of athletes one on one. You do one to many for coaching. You can do one to many for contained education. [00:17:00] But you’ve also really leveraged your time by recording some of those things and turning them into webinars and making some of that staff onboarding that if 80 percent of your coaches have a question with X, you’ve got resources for that.

So the next person coming in is going to still be able to learn the same information, still sing from the same songbook, as they say. Yeah, absolutely. And so I would say that’s definitely more for the group needs, right? As we start to identify the needs of our whole coaching staff. The other thing that we need to look at from a leadership perspective is, and this is generally sought through one on one meetings with your team, is what are the individual needs of your coaches?

What are the things that they need that they’ve either, we’ve identified or they’ve self identified as potential blind spots and areas where they can improve? And again, the same thing goes into that. It’s if it’s just you, it’s generally one on one meetings and you’re building up their skillset and you’re coaching them, providing frameworks and giving them constructive feedback on how they’re [00:18:00] growing or it’s sending them to seminars or it’s bringing in people or it’s recommending books or giving them access to webinars on online that maybe stuff that you haven’t done.

One of the things that we’ve offered, which is also a benefit to the coaches, is we offer a stipend every year for each coach to go out and go to seminars, whether it be airfare or travel or accommodations or the seminar itself. We, we cover a lot of those expenses because if I feel that if we can remove at least one of those tripping blocks and barriers to wanting to go out, because these things can get very expensive.

And. If that’s one less thing a coach has to worry about, and that removes the tripping block for them to go to these things, then by all means, I’m happy to do that. The big caveat to that is, if our coaches do that, they have to come back and coach the rest of the staff on what they’ve learned, because generally it’s just one of them who’s gone, so.

That’s clever. So if I work for you and I go to CFSC. When I come back, part of the deal to get the reimbursement and [00:19:00] stipend is I have to teach what I learned to the rest of the staff. So everybody, like the tide raises all ships. Absolutely. Absolutely. So this is the loaded question because we get a lot, how much money should you give your staff for continuing education?

You mentioned you have a stipend, like not saying and listeners just cause Mickey does it one way. It doesn’t mean it’s the only right way. And I’m curious. How much is that? And how did you come to that being the right amount for your team? I think it’s given the level of my staff and just knowing like what some of these seminars cost, we’ve, we give a thousand dollars per coach.

And again, it’s, if the seminar is 500 bucks, I’ll cover the rest up to a thousand dollars for airfare and accommodations. And, but I think that there’s a lot of years where coaches don’t use them. And. It’s not something that rolls over and we encourage people to use it and we push people to use it But I get it.

It takes a lot for people to Our [00:20:00] staff is a little bit older. We have a couple coaches who have kids and wear a lot of other hats other than just a coach. So it can be a challenge to step outside and, and go to some of these places. And, and as like, we just did our retreat, like it’s not easy to get to those places sometimes, not just from a cost perspective, but a time perspective too, so, yeah, it might only be 500 bucks for the seminar, the certification, but.

The hotel is another 600, the plane is another 500, and you got to be aware for your families because fitness is always on the weekend. So it’s, I love that you’re trying to remove some of the barriers as well as encourage them with the in services and the one on ones. Yeah. Bring up a good point here is we can’t really force our staff to do stuff outside of it.

We still want to have a culture where people want to do that. But. It’s not wrong if I didn’t do some Canadian education outside what’s already provided in your four walls this year. Absolutely. I would say back to your other question is how much is enough? I think that’s ultimately up to the owner, to the [00:21:00] coach, or to, to what you as a facility and business can handle.

I think at the end of the day, if you’re offering something to your team, it shows in good faith that your actions are aligning with your core values that, that we do believe in. Growth mindset. We do believe in improvement of, of our coaches. So we are putting our money where our mouth is, so to speak. And that’s important also, whether they use it or not, whether they use it or not.

At least we, we are showing that we care and. So yeah, you’re acting in integrity with your values and your organization, whether or not they take it as could be circumstantial. Maybe they just had a new baby or whatever the obstacle is. But even if you don’t have much of a budget to do this, like you don’t even have to start with a weekly in service.

People could start with a monthly in service. And as the owner, there’s probably, I’m just trying to put myself in the shoes of a new coach coming into this industry and you could, you might take things like the joint by joint approach or what cue to give [00:22:00] that person a deadlift. Like totally, that just might be like regular everyday stuff for you.

And someone else might be like, how did you know how to do that effectively? And you could come up with, you could do a in service on the main lifts, on plyo, on core training, on mobility. That could give you in five or 10 minutes, you could have a year’s worth of monthly in services that even if you don’t have the budget to provide for people, you can still teach them a lot and live those core values.

Absolutely. The biggest thing, and obviously I’ve been in business for a long time and my role has certainly evolved. And so there were periods of the evolution of the annex where I didn’t have the time and energy and bandwidth to do weekly meetings. A lot of it was, I wouldn’t say on an as needed basis, but it was more or less, we would do it maybe once a month, once every other week.

The challenge becomes is everybody puts the expectation out there that, Oh, you need to meet with your team every week. And if you’re not doing it, you’re not doing it enough. And it’s gotta, it’s [00:23:00] gotta work for you. If meeting with your team every week is going to drive you crazy. And also from the perspective of your coaches, if you’re just meeting for the sake of meeting and there’s no value out of it, that can be a challenge too.

So yeah, I encourage people to find a cadence that works for them, that works for their team. Uh, ask your coaches, right? Ask your coaches what they want to get out of it. What maybe put the onus on them and say, what do you guys want to learn and how can I provide the resources? Maybe if they had a little bit more skin in the game in terms of what was being learned and taught.

Maybe they’d get more buy in. So there’s a lot of ways or like you do get them to coach on something and get them to run that, which is a great way to put them in the driver’s seat. And let’s not take away from the very informal impromptu on the floor. Hey, I saw you doing this. Maybe think of it doing this way.

And there was a lot of that coaching on the fly in the earlier years of my business, where it wasn’t a formal meeting, but on a daily basis, there [00:24:00] was conversations being had about. Maybe best practices or those types of things. So it doesn’t always have to fit in a neat little box as a coach. And as a leader within your company, you have to figure out what works best for you and your team and whatever resources you have.

And, but at the end of the day, you have to make sure that if you want to continue to level up and continue to grow your business in a positive frame, this has to be a priority and that’s how you retain good coaches. That’s how you continue to guarantee that you guys, or your, your, your. Staff is continually always getting better and your business and your offerings and everything from a, just a performance and retention standpoint, it is where it needs to be.

So that’s beautiful. I can’t think of a better way to say it than what you just said. So let’s, let’s leave it there for now. Even though I know there’s many more things we can talk about. So the recap is if you want to have strong, continuing education in your business, hire people who want to have strong, continuing education, [00:25:00] make sure you’ve got the appropriate meetings in place to do that.

It could be. Weekly, monthly, it could be on the fly daily. Like you’ve got to start somewhere. You don’t have to have the perfect system yet. It sounds like you’ve found a lot of this through trial and error and it’s evolved over time. Like it’s okay to make those mistakes. That’s part of entrepreneurship and make sure that you’re not meeting for the sake of meeting.

It has to be a real value add and that could be doing staff in services, having someone else do it. And if you got the budget for it, you can send people out, but pro tip for Mickey, make them then teach it to your team. And you only have to send one person to a seminar, not your whole team. Thank you so much for your time, Mickey.

This was great. I know it’s a really hot topic. There’s probably a million more things to say about it. Listeners, if you want more on continuing education at your gym, please let us know. And Mickey, thank you so much for your time. This was awesome. You’re welcome, Ben. Thank you. Take care.