When Employees Stay Too Long with Mark Fisher

[00:00:00] Hello, my friend on today’s episode, I’m talking with Mr. Mark Fisher, and we’re talking about a topic I don’t think we’ve ever covered on this podcast before, which is what happens when your employees stay too long? What happens when you have that trainer that’s been around for three, four, five, six, seven, eight plus years.

Is that a good thing? Is that not a good thing? We break down our thoughts and experience on this topic. So hopefully we give you some tactical tips that help you really understand how to make the most of. Long term employees, let’s dive in

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 [00:01:00] in the fitness industry.

Let’s begin.

Hello fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business for Unicorns podcast. Before we jump in I have a quick announcement, which is we put together on a brand new PDF on our website. It’s a brand new tool We just put up there I want to let you know about. For many of you, we know it’s really hard to think of like the right Kind of offers to make to your leads, to make the people on your email list, to make to people on social media, you want to put together offers that are really going to get their attention and get them to take action.

So we did is we put together a whole list of our best converting offers into one PDF that you can grab. Right now, there’s a link down below in the show notes. You can grab and download it immediately on. It’s a list of all of our best performing offers. So you can put it on your social media. You can put it in your emails.

You can put it into your marketing ads, everywhere that you’re trying to get people’s attention and convert them. Boom, we got you covered. So grab that tool and start to use it this week. Speaking [00:02:00] of the tool, the man who made it, Mr. Fisher, welcome. How are you, my friend? Hello, I am doing well. I’m a single dad.

I know how single dad life this week, you know, Mark’s wife, Sheena is off doing a show and so he’s at home at home with the babe. How’s it going? Yeah, she didn’t leave me. Sorry, many fans out there that have got their hopes up with romantic aspirations. Sorry to dash her hopes. I’m still married, but yeah, my wife is in DC doing a show, which is great, but Yeah, it’s, it’s shout out to single parents.

It’s real, it’s real, real, but also like amazing. And it’s like hard in some moments, but I’m very aware that this is actually not to like overly morbid, like, Oh, this is like. This is like deathbed couple weeks is like a really special time to have this much time as Celestia. And it’s like anything of value of life is partly valuable because of a certain cost, right?

So to be single handedly, and again, listen, I’m like, we have daycare, we have Sarah’s I don’t want to make it sound like it’s just me and her all day long every day, but you know, to be personally responsible for all of the [00:03:00] feeding and the cleaning and the changing and the entertaining and the getting her places.

Is actually very, very satisfying. And frankly, still like a, you know, not remotely ever going to pay back the permissiveness. With which my wife allows me to jaunt around the world. Yeah, for sure. It only takes, as someone who’s not a parent, it only takes me about 10 minutes of spending time with someone else’s kids.

Yeah. For me to just appreciate my single mom. Like being raised by a single mom is like, she had two boys, like how the hell did she do it? In 10 minutes with someone else’s kids, even if they’re well behaved, I’m like, she did this all the time, for my whole life. And so it’s wild. Yeah. Wild. Pretty cool.

Yeah. Well, let’s take a hard pivot into something that’s not about all that at all. So today’s topic was a fun one. I think it was a suggestion. We’re not sure where it came from. I think it was a suggestion from Unicorn Society members in our Facebook group, if I’m not mistaken. I wrote it down and I, yeah, I can’t remember if this was.

An office hour convo or a Facebook [00:04:00] group post, but this is exactly the type of topic. That’s like the real reels talk about this one. This is how you know, if somebody is like actually running a gym and not just like, yeah, it talks about running a gym. So we talk a lot on this podcast about how to find talent and attract talent and hire and onboard great talent.

But something I don’t think we’ve probably ever talked about before is what happens when you have that employee in most of your cases listening, that trainer who actually just stays too long. They’ve been working with you for not just a year or two, but maybe three, four, five, six years. And, and often what happens, I’ll just share from my experience, both as an employer and listening to lots of gym owners, is that there starts to be cracks.

Right in their performance starts to be a little, you know, the, the passion maybe dies a little bit. They don’t really not interested in continue education anymore, but none of the cracks are big enough that anyone does anything about it. It’s like a slow, slow washing away of the beach, you know, and, and, and then over time you realize, wow, this person’s been here for a long time.

And [00:05:00] like, if I had a chance to rehire them again. I wouldn’t write as often the experience I’ve had is like they’ve been around so long. They’ve, they were so good and so valuable and they’ve gone all the way in the other direction. Right. Which is not the case anymore. And that’s not a hundred percent.

I’m painting with a broad brush, but generally speaking, this is like the pattern that I see. And so I don’t know, we can talk a lot about this topic, but Fisher, you know, what are some things you see when it comes to trainers who have just stayed for a really long time? Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s precisely the issue, right?

It’s the old trainer smell, because in practice, It’s not a smell. The old trainer smell. They’re stale. That’s a trainer. I got that. That’s an old trainer smell. No, but listen, all kidding aside, if somebody’s like stealing money from you, right? It’s easy. That’s easy. Right? If somebody’s like, you know, whatever, like stealing clients.

Oh, great. Easy. Then the issue we’re talking about here is particularly pernicious because it’s not such a drastic drop in performance that anything’s necessarily wrong. Yeah. Sometimes you have a challenging situation where the performance is still. [00:06:00] Good and the clients like them, but they’ve become very difficult for the rest of the team and or you to to manage.

And, you know, there’s a few different ways, I think, to try to hopefully prevent this happening in the first place, right? The first thing I do just want to say is it is possible to just be a trainer on someone’s team and to be an employee for 10, 15 years and that’d be great. It’s a particular kind of person, a particular kind of fit between that person and what they want in their life.

Like that does happen again, my sense. of this from having worked a lot of gyms in many places is that’s hard to find someone like that. Maybe in a place like New York City. Not that we’ve never had it. We’ve definitely had some long term trainers. I was like, all right, you are still amazing. Raj law and a bunch of other people I mentioned, but that’s an example of like still great buddy.

But I would say that, you know, if you’re not in a market where people are very happy just to have like a job and they come up and they do a great work and. It’s only normal for people to want the next [00:07:00] thing in the nature of a gym is you’re not going to have unlimited next things and another tough thing is the better.

of a work environment, create and the better of a leader you are and the better your culture, the less attractive other options become. So then you get yourself also stuck with, and I say this to give empathy for what it’s like to be the trainers. I think maybe that’s as good a place to any is historic, both with curiosity and questions around, okay, what’s actually going on with this person.

And ideally, if you have enough of a relationship, you can. Open up a safe, a dialogue that makes it safe for them to be really honest about what’s going on, right. Rather than just making assumptions and stories and you know, whatever, because obviously you can certainly address the behaviors, but what you’re also looking to do is stress test.

Okay. Here’s the, you know, as always, here’s the specific behaviors that I’m seeing. And this gets hard because it’s like, the energy is lower. You’re not speaking as loudly. Uh, you’re coming in right before sessions. Like definitionally, you’re not finding behaviors and actions that are so, uh, So [00:08:00] wrong. So problematic.

So egregious. Yeah. So you start with, that’s the word I was looking for. So you start with the, I think behaviors, you ask the questions and then from there in the perfect world is you ideally be human with them, right? And allow them to express what’s going on. If there is an issue, if they do want something else, certainly one thing that one hill I’ll die on.

If there’s one thing I know I’ve done a good job on my career and I’m far from perfect, but I’m, I think I, I’m, I’m tied for like the least weird leader in the world when someone wants to go somewhere else. And we’ve had amazing team members and, and this is not a reflection of them not being amazing. I can’t tell you, and we’ve lost some real killers over the year.

I can’t tell you a time where I was like, no, I mean, I’m like a little sad sometimes, but it’s always like. Oh my God, that’s so cool. You want to do the next thing? Oh God. And, and we’ve also had an incredibly unbelievable run of people always giving us like, you know, four to three months, four weeks to, you know, three months notice that this is coming.

Yeah. So, so anyway, [00:09:00] I’m sure you have other thoughts to add as well, but that’s my initial opening salvo. Certainly we can address a little bit, ideally how to avoid it before it even happens. But those are some thoughts around how you might approach this. If you’re noticing this is what’s going on. Yeah.

Yeah, I’ll get into those. I just want to continue playing that one thread, which is, I think, you know, we’ve got to recognize that as a gym, especially if you have a single location, even if you have two or three locations, you only have so many opportunities to give someone there’s only the ladder to climb in a gym is like more like a stepstool.

Right. There’s like not a big ladder to climb. So if you have people who are real career climbers, real ambitious, have real big goals, they want to keep making more money over time. They want to keep learning. You’ll be lucky to get two, three, four years out of them. Right. And we have to normalize the fact that those kinds of people who are really hungry, I want to keep growing and learning and getting paid more.

We have to normalize the fact that they’re going to leave. And you have to, you know, to Mark’s point, we’ve always been, we’ve always been excited when people decide they want to leave because often it’s because of those people. I want to move on to something bigger, better, where they can get more money or [00:10:00] better health care or, you know, and like, I’m stoked for that.

Go do that. So I think one is like making sure that not every person that leaves is like the end of the world for you. And you have a process put in place that you can anticipate as much as humanly possible, normalize that people can and should move on. I think it’s useful. But going back to the people who do stay for a long time and want that like rock solid job and stick around.

I think. Going to, you know, the question you asked for sure. So how do you even avoid it in the first place? I think that my very short answer I’ll make the podcast version is just don’t let anything slide just because someone’s been around for a long time. And often I’ll, I’ll speak from my own experience.

People have been around the longest at places like MFF or like my friends, like my closest friends in some cases. And it’s very easy as you get closer and closer with team members. That you just kind of let things slide. Oh, that’s just how that person is. Or they’re, you know, everyone loves them. So no one cares about that.

And the minute you start letting those things slide, they start piling up somewhere. You may not see where they’re piling up at first, but they’re [00:11:00] piling up somewhere and it’s going to bite you in the butt. So I think having systems in place. To maintain quality, to maintain your standards, things like regular one on one check ins with your employees, things like regular audits of their performance, performance reviews, reviewing client feedback.

These are all systems that, you know, we teach our Unicorns members to put into place all the time. But without, without those systems, you start to treat different people differently. Yeah. And I think that that’s a real recipe for letting longterm team members get away with shit that you would never let a brand new employee get away with.

So I think if you want to avoid that, the scenario I laid out at the beginning of this conversation, which is that long term employee, who’s like just one foot checked out, you got to maintain those high quality standards for many, many years of employment. In some cases, I think all those systems matter.

I’ll mention them again, one on one meetings with your employees, regular performance audits. Uh, annual or biannual performance reviews, reviewing and using client feedback on a regular basis. Like those are just some basics [00:12:00] of like maintaining high quality standards. Yeah. What would you add? And I think the only other thing I would add is one thing that we started doing several years in was having the conversation.

in onboarding for what we think the tenure of this role is going to be and being up front like, look, I want you here at least a year unless something went bad on either side. Yep. And for most people, three years is a pretty good run. And my expectation is about three years in, you’re going to want to be looking for other things.

And the goal of your time here is to make you a more effective professional and a more effective human and set you up for whatever the next thing is. But I’m the, you know, I think it’s appropriate to acknowledge the nature of this role is it’s most of the time not going to be a 15 year tenure and you can make allowances for.

So I think rather than assuming people are going to be around for years and years and having it feel bad if they’re not, I think you start with the fact that most of the team, not everybody, right? Not your sous chef, right? Do there’s some people that give some real stability [00:13:00] that. are maybe paid more, maybe a competency on the performance of the business, have more responsibility, give you a little bit more freedom and lift a little bit of your load as the owner.

But I think for people that start and have a trajectory that’s only going to be, and again, I don’t mean the majority, but it’s like rank and file or the cook or whatever metaphor you want to use. I think making that okay is. It’s important. And again, then it becomes like a happy bonus if they do wind up working out indefinitely, right?

You know, the most extreme version, this is obviously our, our partner, Mr. Pete Dupuy, who has people sign a two year contract and then they can, they can beg to apply for a third year. And I think that’s a great idea. I think that’s not going to map for almost any of you. I think it’s, you could try it. I think for a lot of you, you’re not going to be in the situation where you’re like, which of my many former interns will I hire?

Yeah. If you have a deep bench of, of interns or former employees, you should definitely do that plan. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. That sounds magical. And if not, maybe not because I, I think one of the thing that I’ll [00:14:00] acknowledge that is a part of this whole conversation that she’s like tough, right. Is, you know, first of all.

As your business grows, it’s just the luck of the draw. If you do or do not have the opportunity to that individual, right? Something I’ve been reflecting on recently, maybe this is a top of its old podcast is, you know, hiring Alana Bradley for alloy and selling Mark Fisher fitness to coach fury and.

Bring in Callum on the Business for Unicorns team, how these people that I’ve worked with over the past 15 years that went away because we didn’t have the right thing or they want something else. We’re now getting it sort of like the client reactivation. of like, Oh, wow, this is amazing. Our paths are coming together again because now it’s the right fit again because you kind of have to be lucky that that person’s particular appetite for growth.

Maps with what your business has available for growth opportunities and that they have the right skill set. So the classic example of this gone horribly wrong is the ambitious sales person that wants to grow in their career. It gets [00:15:00] hired to sales manager and then it’s. Terrible. Cause they’re not actually good at the job of managing sales.

So they wanted the next thing and that’s for a lot of gyms too, right? You’ll have the trainer that wants the next thing. They’re like, I want to be a manager. I want to be a fitness director. I want to be sales, whatever, whatever, because they want growth. But they don’t always actually have the skill or interest to really be good at actually what that job entails, other than they want to make more money, have more challenge.

And that, that’s, that’s a sticky thing too, that there’s no perfect algorithm for it. That’s it. And I think that I’ll continue playing that thread, which is, that’s the thing that, you know, in small businesses, we can’t do the same things they do in large, but so in large businesses, right. Often they expect you to kind of be doing the next job you want for a few years before you get promoted into it.

In larger businesses, they have like management and Training programs. So you start to go through and learn all the things you need to learn to be even qualified to take on the next job you want. And in small business like ours, we often don’t have that ability. So the, the way that we get around that is [00:16:00] we often talk about this when it comes to people development is you start to give your people stretch goals, right?

You may not have a management program, right? Management training program, or you may not have. The, the ability to ask people to do a job they’re not getting paid for, but can you ask them to take on a few projects here or there that stretches them closer to the skillset they need to be in the next role?

Yeah, we can absolutely do that. Delegate some things, you know, bring them into your leadership meetings, right? Help them get them to help you with your quarterly planning, right? Help involve them in the hiring process. There’s all kinds of ways you can have, bring them under your wing and mentor them to get them ready for that next level.

But to Fisher’s point, if you don’t do that. And just throw them into a job that they are not prepared for, not trained for, don’t have the skills for, no one’s going to benefit from that, you know, and we don’t always have a choice, right? But I think when we do have the forethought to bring them under our wing and prepare them, even for a few weeks, right?

It makes a big difference than just throwing them to the wolves. Oh boy. Yeah. And I’ve done that a lot. [00:17:00] We’ve done it so many times. But to my defense, I didn’t know how to even do the job I was now hiring them to. I was so figuring it out going along. Hard to train somebody how to do something when you’re not even sure what the job is and you weren’t very good at it.

But I don’t totally kid. I think that actually is true. I think, yes, I’m a little older and hopefully a little reasoned now with some more context, but yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s start to wrap this up because I think we’ve covered a few things already. I mean, how do you, how do you summarize some important takeaways for our listeners here, Fisher?

Yeah. I mean, I think the, the first thing I would say is start to normalize that people are not going to be around for forever. Right. Make that like an okay thing in your culture where people are okay to talk about it. So it doesn’t become this like shameful, bad thing that people feel bad about if someone moves on.

Um, certainly that can start with having a conversation in onboarding and letting people know. Now I’ve shared with you what we think, what Pete thinks you might have a different. Rubric you use. I think that’s fine. But I think having some sense of where people are going is something most employees are gonna want to have anyway.

And then think [00:18:00] certainly, you know, here you had a lot of very good tactical things for how ideally you prevent. Progress from deteriorating, which was largely like hold to your standards, get clear on the behaviors, don’t allow things to slip at all because it’s all, it’s, you know, again, it’s also parallel to like a long term training client, right?

The first like year, you’re really hard. Maybe not in the first year, his first few months. And eventually you’re like, so did you watch Lost? This weekend, right? Or like laws. That’s a very contemporary reference. And then all the other structures we talk about things like one on one meetings, helping them with goal setting, giving them educational opportunities to grow towards whatever their career goals, whether they be in or outside of your business.

And then if and when you do create an opportunity for them to move up into other roles in your business, make sure that you’re clear that they actually have a skills and interest that matches that it’s not purely a desire for the next thing. And then should you choose to promote them, really make sure you properly train, manage, and hold them accountable for this new position so that you don’t move them into a thing and then watch them flounder, unable to help them.

I think, [00:19:00] is there anything else I missed? You crushed it. Yeah. Great summary. I love it. Let’s leave it there. Well, hopefully this was valuable to your dear listeners. If you have some team now and think through how to, how to best manage them for the longterm, hopefully there’s some great pointers in here for you, for those of you who are developing a team, there’s some food for thought as you grow your team over time, don’t forget if you go down the, in the show notes, It says a link to that PDF we made of all of our best converting offers.

So go steal it now and start using it right away. Thanks Fisher. See you on the next one. Bye.