How to Hire and Onboard your Dream Team Member

[00:00:00] Hey friends, Ben here with Business for Unicorns, and I decided to take over the podcast yet again to dive in with Mr. Chris Travis, owner of SSP in Seattle to talk all about hiring and onboarding your staff. So today we’re going to talk about what goes into a compelling job description, how to interview like a pro.

We take Chris’s 10 years at Amazon and talk to you about how you can apply that to your interview process at your gym, and then talk about In broad strokes, what’s the framework of a really successful onboarding program. So you not only bring on great people, but you get them up to speed as fast as possible and effectively as possible while fitting your culture.

So I know you’re going to love this one. 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 [00:01:00] 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.

Hey friends, welcome to another episode of the business for unicorns podcast. Before we jump in today’s episode with Chris, I just want to give you a quick reminder that if you love these podcasts, you can get more time with us by joining the unicorn society. If you want to talk to me and Mark and Pete and Michael, um, and Chris and all our awesome coaches, um, you can do that.

So we do open enrollment and we enroll people every month. If you’re a gym owner and wants more freedom, more growth, more income in your life, we can help you do that. So click on the link in the show notes to see if we’re right for you. The first step is a completely no obligation intro call to see for the right fit.

And as I always say, cause I do all the sales calls right now, if we’re a good fit, we’ll talk, and if we’re not, I will actively discourage you from giving us money. So there’s no pressure either way. And without further ado, Chris, welcome, sir. How are you doing? Hello. I’m doing great. How are [00:02:00] you? I am doing awesome.

I, we are recording this on a Thursday and as soon as we’re done, I am headed up to my cabin for the weekend. And then I, my wife has. Enrolled me into going to Canada’s wonderland, which is like a, it’s like a six flags, roller coasters and shit. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah. So I’m not a roller coaster. It’s called Canada’s wonderland.

Yeah. It’s in Toronto. Okay. Yeah. When you see it for us, it’s always been, yeah, we’re going to wonderland. This is sweet, but that’s cause we don’t have a lot of theme parks. I don’t know if there’s theme parks in Seattle. There is one theme park. Yeah. It’s called wild waves. No, that sounds great. Yeah.

Waterpark. Yeah. Waterpark. Can’t go wrong. Yeah. I, I’m happy to just like put my head down and work. And my wife was like, Hey, we’re going to go to Wonderland at some point in the next few weeks. Which day are we going? I’m like, I don’t know. I’ll get back to you. And she’s like, let’s look at your calendar now.

So I’m locking it down. I don’t even like Heights, but they have really good funnel case. Okay. I’m into it. Cool. But the reason we are actually here is so you absolutely crushed your [00:03:00] presentation in Boston. The feedback was like off the charts. Amazing. And you talked all about hiring and onboarding staff and you’re in a really unique position because you came into the industry after having a corporate job.

So you’ve done more hiring and onboarding in than probably any gym owner is ever going to do realistically. So for the people who couldn’t make it to Boston, I want to dive into what’s the quick and dirty on. Um, Transcribed Really nailing hiring and onboarding staff. So they are like the number one proponents of your business.

I know that’s broad, but we’re going to do our best. Yeah. I realized after the, I think you said this to me that I covered so much ground in that presentation, literally from like defining what role you want all the way through 90 day onboarding in 45 minutes. So it was pretty, pretty wild. But I think the first thing that I see a lot of times when people start hiring is they haven’t really properly defined their role.

Like what exactly is the role that you’re hiring for? And in particularly, what qualities are you looking for? Do you want an experienced coach? Do you want a more junior [00:04:00] coach? Do you want them to be able to deal with ambiguity? Do they need to be bought into your culture? Like what exactly are you looking for?

And really giving like a brainstorm on that front. And that’s ultimately what’s going to help you define your role and then help you also articulate. Who exactly you’re looking for as you start to write that job description. I think similarly related to that in the job descriptions, oftentimes I see something like, here’s what I’m looking for.

I’m looking for a CSCS and I’m looking for this, and I want somebody to clean the bathrooms. I want somebody to do this. And nowhere in that job description is anything about the company. Anything about. Who you are, why you should work, why they should work for you. So it, it doesn’t make any sense. If an F45 of the street is paying you 50 a group class and you can’t pay that much and you’re putting out a job description and ask them to clean the bathrooms, they’re probably not going to go for it.

So I think you gotta, I always like to say, you gotta articulate who you are. Like, what is your gym about? What is your mission? Who do you train? Why is it important for people to work for you? Like, why should people want to work for you? What do you offer? And, and my guess is [00:05:00] that most training gyms are going to be a better work environment and culture than say your traditional kind of like big box gym.

Right. And so I think you should really play that up in the job description. You may not be able to pay as much. In certain cases, but I think the culture and the day to day life or what they experience is going to be a lot better. So that’s a big thing that, that I covered in Boston. Yeah, that was huge.

And I’m trying, trying to parallel here that like when you’re putting out a. Like marketing to get new clients. You’re not like, we want clients who are going to come Tuesday and Thursday. They’ve got to show up for the whole hour. If they don’t do their homework, it’s not coming. You got to do your nutrition stuff.

Like it’s not about. It’s not about what you’re looking for. It’s about what they’re looking for. And how do you serve that need? You have to market yourself. And as you’re saying, like play to the strengths that are outside of just here’s what the job entails and here’s what we’re going to give you for money.

Because a lot of times people will particularly coming from a big box background or other gyms that might not have the same culture, like even if you’re [00:06:00] paying, Like sometimes significantly less, but you’ve got an awesome work culture. Maybe it’s consistent hours, or you give the membership to the spouse.

Those are all things that people are like, yeah, you know what? I’d rather make a few thousand dollars less and be happy. Yeah. Yeah. I can’t tell you how many times people who have applied to my jobs in particular, when I asked them what attracted them to the role, they say, I think the values that you have and the culture that you seem to have at your, Jim is what attracted me, no joke.

And those are the types of people that I want to hire. Yeah, that’s a really huge point. Now to your first point about getting clear on. What you’re looking for. I’m going to make some broad sweeping assumptions that won’t be accurate for everybody, but we’re all looking for personable coaches with lots of experience.

So could you maybe get a little bit new, more nuanced than like how you get clearer than that? Yeah. I think if you look at your culture, everything about your specific gym is going to be specific to you. [00:07:00] As far as what the type of person you want to look for. And I’ll give an example of, I interview plenty of people all the time who have all of the certifications and all the qualifications of a coach, five years coaching and look good on paper.

But when you actually talk to them, you realize if I put this person in front of my avatar, and I’m just thinking, okay, I’m going to do, they’re going to do a noon class at one of my studios, which is mostly 45 to 60 year old women. And I don’t know that this particular person is going to work out very well.

And so I think you, you want to be a little more specific and you’re still going to get applicants that have like across the board, but you also want to know who exactly are you looking for and what kind of qualities do you want them to have? I think similarly, a lot of coaches in my environments in particular, I asked them to do other stuff beyond coaching.

I also need them to have some administrative skills. But also the ability to deal with a little bit more ambiguity than I think they would be used to in a normal kind of gym environment. And so I am looking for that. And I do call [00:08:00] that out. I call it like a. Roll up your sleeves mentality and the ability to deal with ambiguity.

I call that out in the job description because I’m looking for somebody who is like that and can resonate with wanting to work in an environment like that. That’s huge. Now I have obviously many questions for you, but one of the ones I think might resonate, there’s always the argument, do you hire personality or skill?

And you’ve got an interesting setup at your gym where at the gate you’re asking them to do. Like training and something else that’s still like in the realm of fitness, but oftentimes there’s Uh gym owners who they have trouble getting their trainers to do more than just that thing or they’re not good at admiring I don’t want to have that obviously when you make that a core expectation from literally day one It’s a different situation but let’s say you’ve got a really good candidate who knocks it out of the park with Training and the delivery and the communication and the soft skills.

Yeah, like Maybe they suck at admin. Like, how do you think through that of what do I train? What do I not train and what’s worth working on? Yeah, I will be honest with you [00:09:00] that one, I always hire more for personality and culture fit than I do training expertise. It’s not because I don’t value training.

It’s just that I feel like I can teach somebody to be a good coach, but I can’t necessarily teach somebody to be a good culture fit. And so I think that’s number one. And the second thing is when we’re looking at my, my, I’ll just say my roles in particular, cause they are hybrid roles. If somebody doesn’t exhibit the ability, or I don’t feel like they have the ability to do both, then I won’t move forward with a hire.

And that’s because I don’t want to set them up for failure. I want to set people for, uh, for success. And if I feel like they can learn the other side or they’re capable of doing that, or they express an interest to like, in an ambition to grow and develop in that way, then sure, I might take a chance on that.

But if they clearly are just like, Hey, I’m a good coach. I can deliver well, that’s what I want to do. And I have no skills or haven’t exhibited the ability to want to learn on this side. Then it’s just not a fit for my particular culture. That makes sense. I appreciate how clear you are on those standards.

Yeah. It’s easy to be like, Oh, this person seems so good, but we’d have to, [00:10:00] and that’s never usually a good sign. And for you, it’s, Hey, no, I need training skills. Yeah, obviously culture, fit and personality, and I know I need admin skills and there’s a certain standard you have to hit in each of those and then you can fill the gaps to get them better.

Yeah. And it actually dovetails into my, my other takeaway from the presentation, which I said, and I think a lot of people are like, Whoa, I don’t know about this, but I said this statement of, if you’re on the fence. About a candidate. It’s a no. And I stand by that a hundred percent. And it goes back to my hiring days in corporate as well.

It’s like, I don’t hire candidates if I’m on the fence with them. Now you could take another step with a candidate. So if you’re on the fence and you’re like, I don’t know, but I need more information. You could bring them in for a stress test of some sort. You could do like a case study. You could have them coach some of your coaches for a little while.

You could do a number of things to get that other piece of information. But ultimately, if you’re still on the fence, You shouldn’t hire them. And I think a lot about not sacrificing the long term growth and ambition and culture of your gym to fill a short term need. [00:11:00] And I know it’s really hard. Cause we all go through this period of like, dude, I’m training 30 hours a week, 40 hours a week.

I need to get off this dang floor. It’s awful, but just don’t do it. Like a bad coach will just crush your business and it’s hard to recover from it. It really is all Sierra story, which is I hired a guy over the summer who had great stuff on paper, like MS, like just like great certifications. I had personal train before and he said all the right things and we brought him in and we, we add these kind of like 2 PM youth sessions in the afternoon during the summer.

Cause kids are more available. And the idea was that he was going to train these plus a couple of, Adult sessions around that. So part time and we worked with him for a long time shadowing, and he just wasn’t really getting up to snuff. And at that point, we’re going through some staffing transition. And so I allowed him to train a few days a week in those sessions.

I can tell you, it only was about a month of training and then he left to take a job in Portland. I came back into those sessions to [00:12:00] cover and they were dead. Like he had killed them. They had gone from 16 person classes thriving till six people in these classes and nobody had any energy whatsoever. And so it just shows you like over a short period of time that people have a real impact and particularly in our business.

And so I think it’s just not worth it. hire people and make the hard decision to hire people that are the right fit for you. And you brought up the perfect piece with you’re not willing to sacrifice that, sacrifice that long term pain for short term gain. And yeah, we know how hard it is when you’re coaching all the hours and maybe just lost a coach and you haven’t found somebody yet.

And you feel like you’re pulled a million directions and yeah, I’m with you. It’s usually better to suffer for a little bit longer doing the thing you’re doing than to, you know, Cause if you make the wrong hire, not only did there all these negative consequences, you still got to hire again anyways. So exactly.

Yep. It’s actually even more pain to do it the wrong way. It is. Yep. A hundred percent. All right. So let’s say we’ve got a great job description. It’s clear [00:13:00] to the culture. It’s what you’re looking for. It speaks to your values. It attracts the right people. It’s also written in a compelling way of what did they get by joining your team?

Not just what you’re looking for. So let’s shift gears into the kind of broad strokes of onboarding. Yeah. Yeah. And this is a really, really critical piece. And because you did all this work to hire somebody, right. You found the right candidate. You did the interviews. And I said, this in Boston is.

Onboarding is absolutely critical because you can’t scale yourself. Talk to a lot of gym owners sometimes who are like, Oh man, I want to be able to bring this person on, but I just don’t know if they can do it to the level that I can do it. And the reality is you got to figure it out. Like you got to train people and you got to figure it out and you got to be people at the level that you need them to be up to, because ultimately your mental health is on the line and your ability to do your job over time and your ability to scale your business and grow.

And actually one of the things I talked about, and I think there’s a lot of different ways to do this. And I’ve seen a lot of different great examples in BFU gyms, but you have some sort of like vetting process, some sort of probationary period. If you want to call it some sort of [00:14:00] internship process, some way for you to evaluate their ability to do their job, to put them through a very consistent onboarding process.

That’s documented that has check ins that allows you to give feedback and allows you to evaluate whether they’re. Able to get up to the standard that you want or not, how they’re dealing with feedback, if they’re taking and implementing feedback and getting better over time, all of those things really matter.

And I think if you, it could be, I’ve seen some that are like four weeks, summer, ours is eight weeks, summer, three months. I think it really depends on how. You feel you can onboard how fast you feel you can onboard people in your business. But having some sort of period like that, I think is really critical.

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And one of the other themes that came up at the retreat is weaving into some of these podcasts I’ve been doing is like, yeah, you gotta have weekly meetings. If you’re going to have, you worded as a check ins, like you have a structured thing, there’s probably milestones of what we expect for them to get when.

And it’s not something we’re holding close to the chest. It’s something we’re sharing with them so that they can win. Yeah. [00:15:00] have that opportunity to give feedback and manage them by having. Yeah. Weekly, or sometimes even more frequently than weekly meeting rather. I heard them. They’ve seemed good. Here’s our exercise library, like train some classes.

That’s a recipe for dealing with the same problems forever. Totally. And I think the weekly one on one is critical. And I talked about that before. I also think, especially when you’re onboarding new coaches, if you’re, we They do a bunch of shadowing and then we allow them to lead with another coach on the floor for a little while.

But I will, I think it’s just giving feedback right away after their session, ask them questions like, Hey, how’d you think that went? And then if you’d notice something, call it out, coach them on it right there. Cause people don’t know what they don’t know. And so unless you’re doing a good job of communicating what the expectations are and what the standards are, you’re just setting yourself up for failure if you don’t do that.

Exactly. And I think an important piece here is often if we hire coaches, we found the Holy grail of. Great personality fit and great training experience, but you’re going to have different names for stuff. Maybe one of your standards is that you have to say everybody’s name three times, and that wasn’t a standard at the other gym they had.

Like there’s, [00:16:00] there’s always going to be pieces that you need to coach them up on that are just specific to the way you do things in your gym. They might know all the things. If I came to see SSP, there’d be things I’d get wrong. It’s because I don’t know your standards, but the only way I can learn them is by you telling me and they go, Oh, great.

Yeah. I’ll work on that in the next few sessions. Hey, how’d I do on that thing? You’re doing awesome. Now I want to see this. Like that’s exactly what it looks like at practice. Yeah. And I do find some people are afraid to give feedback sometimes they’re like, Oh, I don’t want to, they just came on. I don’t want to upset them.

But at the end of the day, it’s your business. It’s your standard. It’s your clients that you have to protect. And ultimately it tells you a lot how people receive feedback. If you give them feedback and they’re defensive or they don’t implement the feedback and they don’t do better the next time that tells you that maybe they’re not the right fit for your business.

I was going to say, that’s another beautiful secondary benefit to giving them the feedback in the moment is. You’re establishing a cultural norm that feedback is a part of this. Yep. Rather than just like, hey, you do your thing, and you wouldn’t actually say [00:17:00] this to your staff, but it’s like, you do your thing, I’ll do my thing, we don’t piss each other off, we’re good.

If you want to really build that team culture, like, we all need to be singing from the same songbook. Totally agree. Any other kind of major points for onboarding your staff? No, I don’t think so. I think the only thing that we didn’t cover too heavily, which we probably don’t have enough time for, but it’s just the types of questions you ask people.

And I went really deep into kind of this idea of behavioral interviewing. And I think it’s about when you’re talking to somebody, you really want to get specific with them and help them drive down to specific examples. And I talked a lot about this in terms of getting to the, what I call like the bullshit meter.

And I think when you really ask specific questions, you force them to give. Examples from their past, you’re really helping to understand, does this person like just blowing smoke up my ass or do they actually have something to say and real examples of the past that they can stand by? And I think that’s really important when you’re vetting candidates.

Absolutely. Yeah. We have BFU has behavioral based interview questions, I think available online for [00:18:00] free, but that would look like, it’s not just, Hey, can you tell me about a time where you dissatisfied a customer? Oh, whenever I dissatisfy a customer, here’s what I do. You need to have the courage in a certain degree.

If you’re afraid of feedback, could you give me in a specific example of a time? What was their name? What exactly happened? Yeah, that’s it. And, and then digging down on that, I like follow up questions. Like what was the outcome? Or if you could do it over, what would you do differently? Or even just saying something like, tell me more about this specific thing you said.

Right. Because ultimately you just want to understand how are they thinking? And there’s no necessarily right or wrong answer, but you want to make sure that the, how they’re thinking and how they conduct themselves is in line with your culture and your values. Yeah, that’s perfect. Cause we don’t often, sometimes you do an interview and you’ve got your.

Whatever, five to 10 questions prepared, depending on how many you ask, but if you’re really doing a good job, what I think you’re getting at here is like each of those questions actually has zero to six probing questions, depending on the perfectness of their answer. Yeah. In the workshop that I did in Boston, I [00:19:00] actually asked people to role play and ask at least three follow up questions, which honestly people were like, Oh my God, this is so hard, but I think it really forces you to like, think about the person’s answer and then think about.

Okay. What is the follow up question I want to ask, or what do I want to know more about in this situation? And so I think that just doing through that exercise is really impactful. Yeah, it’s huge. So it aligns with the feedback pieces. Sometimes we’re a little bit nervous to do that extra thing. And it’s give them that feedback in the moment, ask them that question in the interview, because those are things that if it’s a perfect example of nip it in the bud, they don’t know what they don’t know.

And maybe you might’ve said in the question, Hey, can you give me a specific example of this? And then they had to think a little bit, and I’m like, I don’t have a specific one, but that, and you’d be going like, that’s great. And I still need it to be specific. Exactly. Yep. So to wrap this up a little bit here, make sure you’ve got a compelling job description.

If your job description is, here’s what we, here’s what we offer, join our team. It’s probably not going to fly. When you’re going through the [00:20:00] interview process, make sure you’re looking for specific examples of behavior based interview questions to make sure that you’re really seeing, is this person a culture fit for the team and seeing how they think.

And then when it comes to the onboarding period, you may want to consider doing a four to eight to 12 week kind of probationary period, but you’re really spending a lot of time with people on a very structured onboarding. So both people know what’s expected of them and you’re giving them feedback in the moment to make sure that they’re course correcting as fast as possible.

Is that a good summary? That was great. And then last thing is, if you’re on the fence, it’s a no. Don’t sacrifice the long term of your business. Yeah. That is the hard one. I’m, we’re actually in the process of hiring. We’ve been hiring since July, but you had someone perfect. It’s a very long story. It wasn’t her fault, but it didn’t work out, which is sad.

And yeah, we’ve had a lot of people who are like, we could maybe make that work. And yeah. Nope. GM. I know this sucks. We got to wait. Yep. It’s not worth it. It’s a smart move. This is great, Chris. Thank you so much for the time. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom from a decade at Amazon. [00:21:00] It is a decade, right?

True. Yes. This is just, I think it’s so awesome that you’re bringing what you’ve learned there into a field that is primarily driven by training and leads when there’s so much more to the managing of people to have a really thriving, successful business. So thanks for sharing your wisdom. Of course.

Thanks for having me, Ben. Talk soon.