Special Episode: From Classroom to Coaching Floor with Pete Dupuis

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Business of Unicorns podcast, where we help gym and studio owners create a business and a life they love. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me and the Business of Unicorns team each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym.

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Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business Phoenix Podcast, and this is another very special episode. This episode is part of something we’ve never done before, which is basically every week inside our Unicorn Society community, we do something called a live training for our gym owners and leaders in the community.

And those sessions, until [00:01:00] now, have been behind closed doors. You have to be a Unicorn Society member to access them. What we did is we picked four of those trainings, four of our favorite trainings, and we’re sharing them now with you here as part of a podcast series. These are real live trainings where we share like frameworks and case studies and all the messy questions our community actually asks during these trainings.

You’re basically getting a seat in the room for these trainings that we’ve recorded. So whether you run a gym or you lead a team at your gym or hope to one day do one of those things, you’re gonna get a lot out of these special four episodes. And the next episode I’m sharing with you today is one by Mr.

Pete Dupuis. This one is basically from Pete, and it tackles a very important problem that every gym owner runs into, which is: where do you actually find good coaches? And Pete flips the kind of typically reactive hiring process on its head. So instead of posting a job ad and then praying, he shows you how to build a steady pipeline of pre-qualified [00:02:00] talent by partnering with colleges and universities and frankly, getting in front of the exercise science and kinesiology students before they ever hit up the job market.

And so he walks you through who to contact, how to reach out, and how to turn one of those relationships into 10. And so if hiring has ever felt like a scramble to you, this one will change how you think about it for good. Let’s dive in

This specific lecture is called From Classroom to Coaching Floor: Partnering With Schools for Talent. And what I really want to do is start with a pretty simple observation, and that is that most gym owners don’t actually have a hiring strategy. They have what I would typically call more of a hiring reaction.

Whereas they wait until they need a coach, they throw up a post, and they hope applicants show up, and they have to sort through a bunch of average options when they’re trying to find someone who’s really just good enough. You’re not finding a ton of rock stars on Indeed or [00:03:00] via Craigslist postings, things like that.

And if we’re being honest, most of the time that process ends up being inconsistent at best. And so the issue isn’t that people aren’t trying hard enough, it’s that they’re fishing in the same pond as everyone else. And yes, CSP will post on job boards, we will post on social media, we will ask for referrals in conjunction with what I’m gonna talk about today.

But the reality is those are all really crowded spaces. They’re noisy. We’re competing with everyone in the same market for the exact same group of people, and we just need something a little bit different. Now, meanwhile, and this is the part that really gets overlooked, is that the best future coaches aren’t often in that system yet.

They’re sitting in classrooms. They’re at school. They’re studying exercise science. They’re studying kinesiology. They might be on athletic training tracks. And the schools are actively trying to figure out where to send [00:04:00] them, either during their breaks or post-graduation. And what I would contend is instead of competing for talent on the open market, what we focus on doing is build relationships with the schools so that when the talent’s ready, it comes to us and it comes consistently, not when we need it, but all the time.

Because if you get this right, you can stop hiring reactively and you can just start building an actual pipeline. But what we’re gonna do here is first we’re gonna talk about this reactive hiring strategy. So like I said, what most people do, including the really good gyms, is we post the jobs, we hope for applicants, we often settle for good enough, and then we end up with inconsistent and underwhelming options.

Again, not an issue of effort. It’s a systematic problem, and we’re reacting when we need someone instead of building a pipeline ahead of time, and we’re only fishing in one pond. The job boards aren’t broken. They’re just really crowded with everyone fishing in the same metaphorical space, [00:05:00] and without the best candidates even being in that system yet, we need to think about our options for looking a little bit upstream for candidates here.

Schools are gonna be your talent pipeline. Now, schools will give you access basically before the market has access, and that way you’re not competing, you’re early, and this becomes a sourcing strategy instead of a hiring strategy. So with this, we’d have a built-in audience. We’re gonna have consistent flow.

Again, the built-in audience are people who have collectively raised their hands and said, “We’re all rowing in the same direction. We’re interested in the same things.” The consistent flow is that while I do believe there is an educational revolution coming here at some point, and college is problematic in a lot of ways, there is still going to consistently be a significant number of people who are entering these academic pipelines who are [00:06:00] interested in a variety of degrees.

I will read you a list of academic pursuits or graduating degrees that I’ve seen in the last 24 to 36 months, and it’s amazing. I think I landed on 40 different descriptions of people who are in kind of adjacent lines of academic paths that would make sense for interning with us or being employed by us.

And like I said, this is giving us early access, so we’re getting to the people before they are demanding a paycheck or thinking about what step number one is gonna be in their career post-grad. So again, a sourcing strategy, not a hiring strategy. So the reasons this works, like I said, pre-qualified interests.

People have declared, “I’m going to invest in pursuing a degree that is going to make me marketable to business owners like our collective selves.” They’ve chosen the field. Now they’re just looking for direction. Next, consistent pipeline. As I [00:07:00] mentioned, they’re gonna keep filling those academic tracks, they’re gonna keep graduating students, and we’re gonna get ahead of the curve as far as being somebody who’s positioned as a thought leader or an expert in their space if we can establish these relationships early and often.

And the last one, which is important here, is borrowed credibility. And by that, a professor or an academic contact in a school or university recommending you is so much more powerful than anything that you’re ever gonna say about yourself. And so these relationships are just gonna be immensely val- valuable if we can l- leverage them in the right way and make sure that we’re delivering value in each direction So where are we gonna look?

First, exercise science programs near you and kinesiology degrees. Now, that would be what I categorize as the broadest overarching term for what we’re pursuing. Interestingly enough, like I said, we’ve had this wild collection of kind of titles. I’m gonna read you a few. I [00:08:00] decided that what I was gonna do was pull all of our applications from the last three years of intern candidates, and it’s pretty wild just how many different descriptions there are of what people could be pursuing here.

Kinesiology, exercise science, human performance science, strength and conditioning, sports science, applied physiology, human movement science, motor control, biomechanics. Those were just the first 15% most common. There are DPTs, so physical therapy students. We’ve had occupational therapists, athletic training, chiropractic, sports medicine, rehab science, exercise physiology on a clinical track.

We’ve seen physiology, biochemistry, biophysics, even neuroscientists, motor learning and development, ergonomics and human factors we saw twice in the last calendar year. Crazy stuff. Now, out of all of these, I honestly have about 25 different more that I could read you. They’re all, like I said, adjacent or in generally [00:09:00] the same path.

And you could make all kinds of lists like this, but the way that I would attack this is I would go right into your AI platform of choice. I’d ask for programs of this nature near you. If exercise science and kinesiology degrees for the terminology you use doesn’t return enough programs inside of, say, a 30 to 60-minute radius of your space, then you could start going down that much more nuanced, descriptive path, all those options.

I’m happy to email you the list of potential majors that we have. But there are a lot of schools doing this out around us. I did this exercise in real time with a gym owner in Minnesota recently when he said, “I just don’t think I could get the right contact points at any of these colleges and universities.”

And we did one search using one school name, and I got him the email address, the phone number, the [00:10:00] office number, and the office hours of every single member of their exercise science department with 30 to 60 seconds of Google search. All this information is out there, and we’re gonna talk a little bit further here with this content about how we can attack this from both a warm lead and a cold lead standpoint, because there are definitely warmer ways of getting in front of those people than Google searches and cold emails.

But both ways can work Now, I’m gonna suggest that we focus on three to five local schools. We don’t need to overcomplicate this because you don’t need a national network. What you really need is three, four, maybe five schools that just actually send you people. And depth is gonna beat breadth here. So don’t worry about spamming 15 colleges in your area if you’re lucky enough to have those around you, because we just want a handful of really strong relationships where we can start funneling talent out of one to three or four programs.

As I’ve mentioned so far, I want you to [00:11:00] focus on relevant departments, and we’re gonna talk about who in these departments makes sense to connect with next because they have a variety of different levels of influence. The most prolific option we’ve connected with in the past would be professors. We have had luck with internship coordinators, academic advisors, and program directors, or honestly deans.

Not all contacts are created equal here, though. What you want is proximity to the students. So professors and internship coordinators are gonna be your best points of contact. But as a rule of thumb, if they’re not interacting with students weekly, they’re not a very good priority for you as far as how you pursue these types of relationships So warm and cold.

Uh, warm’s gonna be better. Warm leads meaning someone you know connected you with someone they know and got your foot in the door and spoke on your behalf. For us at CSP Mass, that’s [00:12:00] leveraging former interns. Sometimes that’s leveraging past hires who are also past interns, and then sometimes it’s current staff.

And really the primary takeaway is you already have an in. So what do I mean by this? Every intern you have or ever had, not every one, but probably more than 90% of them, have pursued a degree or something that logically aligns with what we’re talking about here. And I would imagine that most, if not all of them, will be able to tell you that they did have a favorite professor during their time in school or they did have an academic advisor that they felt worked harder for them or for other students in their program, somebody that they speak favorably about.

Even if they didn’t love their program, there was someone there who was doing right by them. It’s very rare that I come across someone who said, “My entire program sucked. My school was awful. The entire administrative staff was a disaster.” It’s just not the case. There are good eggs in every bad program, and usually the students can point you toward them.

And so [00:13:00] I make those conversations happen early and often. What was the best thing about your college experience? Who was the best person there to speak on behalf of their program? And would you be willing to make a quick introduction so I can tell them how great of an addition you’ve been to our team?

You tell people they’re doing a nice job, you tell people you wish you had more people just like them, and then you make that ask. You’re gonna get really nice warm intros. Sometimes it’s a text message intro, sometimes it’s an email. It doesn’t really matter, but we’re just trying to get our foot in the door.

And this is a lot easier than you would think because you’re not asking for anyone to deploy anything other than their social capital, and I’ve yet to have someone say, “I don’t wanna make that introduction for you” or, “I don’t think you’re intellectually or professionally ready to have those conversations with those people.”

We’re just not asking for those things. And it’s interesting because everybody in Business Unicorns, everybody in Unicorn Society I would categorize as [00:14:00] At a minimum, slightly above average on up to far above average in asking for referrals. We’re all pretty world-class at building out a system, having SOPs around it, getting our clients to lead us new business as often as possible.

So we’re just talking about deploying the exact same approach, but we’re just trying to build our network, not find people who are gonna do business with us, just find people who professionally will really optimize both how we run our space, and also remember, we’re bringing value to them. We’re making their program look more credible.

If they have people that they know and trust on the other side of graduation where they can funnel their students, they can talk about that openly with candidates who are expecting … who are considering their school, considering their program. They can say, “We place X percentage of our students before graduation in related roles.”

Gyms like ours can be the driving force behind those stats [00:15:00] So let’s talk about the cold outreach piece Now for this, it works so long as it doesn’t really feel like outreach. And the things that you wanna remember are, for starters, this is not about you. It’s about helping their students. And by extension, we are helping the professor, we’re helping the program, we’re helping all of them reputationally.

And the thing that we need to remember is what’s bad is basically coming at them and saying, “Hey, we’re hiring.” What’s good is coming to them and saying, “Hey, we wanna support your students. We wanna improve the industry as a whole. We know that the candidate pool long-term gets a lot better if the students are getting a comprehensive learning experience, not just classroom, and that’s where we come in.”

So what does cold outreach done right look like? First, it’s short. Second, it is hyper-specific. Third, it is focused on the student primarily, and secondarily on the program. And by on the program, I mean we [00:16:00] make it about them. So emails, like I said, you can pull these right off of a Google search to, to a professor saying, “Hey, I’ve been meaning to reach out for a while.

I hear great things about your program.” You might be able to say, “Through a former intern”, or you might just say, “I’ve admired…” I’ll give you an example. In, here in Massachusetts, the Springfield College, Springfield University program is really great. I’ve had countless good interns from there. If I reached out to, say, Adam or Mary Kate Fight over there and I cold said, “Hey, I have heard nothing but good things about Springfield and the students you’re churning out.

I’ve always admired it from a distance, and I’d really love to contribute in any way fit. I run this program over here. Here’s a quick look at what our curriculum is and how we help students become more marketable coaches by the end of an internship with us. I’d be thrilled to discuss if you’re open to it.”

That’s what we’re really doing. We’re just trying to open up a dialogue. We wanna give them real-world experience. We wanna make sure they understand we [00:17:00] exist, and we wanna give them, at a very superficial level, just a feel for what that means. So for us at CSP, that’s, we have internships, we hire fitness professionals, and one of the places that we’ve had success, and I would suggest you consider, is through public speaking engagements with this community.

And so you’d be surprised how often professors bite on an offer to come in and do a guest lecture. And partially that’s because very few of them have so much curriculum material that they’re like, “We’re busting at the seams. We don’t have enough classroom hours to get this.” And they wanna bring something new and interesting into the spa- space.

So we, I would say once to twice a year, will take an opportunity to send a staff member to a college or university to give a guest lecture. Even myself, I’ve gone and do this a nu- done this a number of times. I’ve got a lecture in the can called Resume Design for Young Fitness Professionals, where I step in front of college classrooms [00:18:00] and I talk about what makes for A professional, tasteful, marketable, eye-catching resume through the eyes of somebody who’s reviewed over 1,000 internship applications over the years.

And those opportunities to step in front of classrooms are just opportunities for me to demonstrate ex- expertise in front of students who are potential future hires, but in front of the professor who is going to have, have dozens if not hundreds of people like that sitting in front of them and trusting them and their credibility for years to come.

And so that is, is like an absolute goldmine if you can get your foot in the door. Get onto a college campus and talk to students and handle yourselves in the most professional way you can because you’re just gonna win. And what you’re doing is, the way I’ve heard it best put is by my buddy Sahil. He always says you want to expand your surface area for luck, and that’s really what we’re doing by getting out there and having those conversations.

You’re gonna get [00:19:00] offers to do those via Zoom. They’re okay, as this conversation right here is okay, but I’d rather be sitting in a room with you collectively having conversations about this stuff and making eye to- eye contact. So if you have the opportunity to make sure that you get out there and you do it face-to-face, always jump on it.

But the primary takeaway here is this is intentionally simple. There’s no major fluff. You don’t need a long intro. You’re just trying to open the door because you really don’t wanna close anything here. You just wanna start a conversation So what we’re doing here for our students is we are trying to make sure that we’re not pitching jobs because students actively being students aren’t really interested in your job so much as they care about what comes next.

So how are we providing experience opportunity? How are we providing mentorship opportunity? Are we giving them career direction? Are we helping them understand what a [00:20:00] career path might look like long-term? What’s a starting point? Where do we build, and what’s the trajectory for a strength coach or a fitness professional?

We are the ones who are there to prevent– present that opportunity to learn. And I have found that the best angle for us has been pitching mentorship and leaning into social proof. Current, former employees, people who are willing to talk about their time spent learning with and from you go really well in these circumstances.

And when I can stand in front of a room and give a lecture like the one I was talking about to a bunch of students and I have testimonials on screen from multiple interns who have gone on to do really cool things and have cool titles and they’re mentioning how important and foundational that time with us was, I tend to have a lot of conversations at the back of the room immediately following it.

So again, launchpad, not job offer. And this is definitely a long-term play. But it’s important that I emphasize I’m not telling [00:21:00] anyone here to stop posting on job forums. I’m not saying don’t use Indeed. I’m not saying don’t publish your job opportunities on social media. Do all of the things you were doing, but build out this personal and professional network in perpetuity in a way that it’ll minimize the relevance of each of those platforms long-term as you expand and snowball this thing because you’re gonna end up just having so many more candidates in the long run in this kind of organic way Now let’s talk about kind of building this flywheel here even further, and this can compound really fast if you do it right.

So every single conversation that you have should lead to another, because you’re building a network and not just filling a role. And if there’s one thing I would like for you to take away from this, it’s that one relationship should never, ever stay one relationship. Like I said earlier, we are so good at bringing a client into the room and saying, “Hey, you’re awesome.

We need more people [00:22:00] like you. Who should I reach out to in your community?” We’re talking about the exact same thing. So if you open the door for a conversation with a professor or a academic advisor or a dean of students, whatever it is, and you show them that you mean you have the best interest of the students in mind, your next question should really be, “Who else around here should I know?

Is there anyone else along your professional career path that you think does this stuff very well at other schools or universities?” I have not found that there is a territorial dynamic in these contacts. So like us gym owners, if we have other gym o- gyms in market, sometimes we’re territorial and threatened by them.

I have not got that vibe yet when interacting with these academic professionals. There, there has yet to be a moment where, say, an internship coordinator at Keene State University tells me, “Oh, you talk to the people at Springfield? I’m out.” That’s really not how it goes. They tend [00:23:00] to loosely know who each other are, and when I start asking, “Who else should I talk to in the field?”

I start hearing the same collection of names repeatedly, and that success tends to leave clues. So if I start to hear the same names more than once, I’m gonna start establishing contacts with each of them, and you’re gonna find that the same three, four, five names are gonna pop up in your market over and over again.

But again, one relationship should never stay one. So don’t be afraid to ask when you’re talking to a student in a program or a teacher in a program, “Hey…” Maybe it’s you’re talking to a great student and you say, “Hey, I know you ended up at X school. Where would you have gone if you weren’t there?” And you might find that other programs weren’t quite on your radar, but the students have done a lot of homework, and they’ve done it recently as well.

They… These people are in the academic game for four years, these kids. We might be so far removed from that. I’m telling you Springfield and Keene State because I’ve worked with them a lot since 2007, but there are definitely [00:24:00] programs that probably aren’t on my radar locally because I’m not constantly auditing this because my flywheel is generating enough leads from the local schools that I’ve worked with in the past.

But the students who are in it right now have a very current feel for this stuff, so don’t be afraid to ask, “Your school does it great, but who else does it well that I should think about?” If you’re talking to someone within the academic program, ask them, “What’s the gold standard job coming out of your program?

Where do all the kids want to get work? Is there a specific… Are they all trying to go to Nike or are they trying to go to EXOS? Is there a specific professional setting that they’re trying to go to? Are they trying to get into pro sports?” You wanna understand what they’re seeing behind the scenes in their classrooms or in their, their office hours, things like that, because they’re gonna give you a better feel than you could get behind closed doors in your own space.

And all we’re really trying to do is make sure that we expand every connection constantly. Keep working our list So [00:25:00] how can we make this a little bit actionable? We could call it a what’s next, we could call it a Mina, but again, this isn’t a long-term project. This is something that you can start absolutely today because you’re one email away from your next awesome hire, in my experience.

So simple action item, I just want you to identify three schools. You can do that through the people, the people in your gym, the people who have worked with you in the past. You can do it through your own LinkedIn for all I care. But just find three in your area. The closer, the better. If you’re within 10 to 15 minutes of a s- college or university and you can become a meaningful part of students’ lives while they are students, then great.

It’s… These are part-time learning opportunities as well. But find three. I want you to not settle at a single contact at each school. Find two. Look for a professor and an aca- academic advisor. Those names are going to exist. They’re gonna be pretty easy to extract from the people in your network who know them.

And like I said, if you [00:26:00] can’t do it that way, Google is shockingly effective, if not ChatGPT. Then once you’ve got those three schools and two contacts each, I want you to send six emails, and I want you to be diligent in following up, but don’t treat it like a lead where we’re gonna harass them until they tell us to go screw.

One follow-up is enough for now. There are enough programs and people in each of these universities to move on to the next lead and not feel like we’ve skipped an opportunity. Because like I said, your next hire is always gonna be one email away. All right, so I said I was gonna give you 30 minutes of this.

Now I wanna get into conversation where we can talk about tactically how we’ve done this, and I wanna open up purely into Q&A and go from here. All right, so based on the content I dropped in there, does anyone have questions or things that were very vague about how we’ve built up these relationships in the past?

I hit up Bridgewater, UMass Amherst, and UMass Boston, who I’ve had [00:27:00] relationships with, and they haven’t got back to me. So I’m just trying to think of should I change the pitch? I know they’re busy, but how to get their, the prop going before I get on LinkedIn and Indeed. So I personally, if I had three scenarios of cold-ish outreach like that didn’t get a single bite, I would probably take my outreach and audit it.

Reassess. Did I… Did this come across as a little bit selfish in my ask? Because, and I was talking with someone earlier about Gary Vaynerchuk, obviously his shtick has kind of run its course a little bit, but the jab right hook concept is timeless as far as I’m concerned, and maybe you just didn’t jab enough.

I think that the mistake that people tend to make on this front is to show up just being like, “Hey, I got payroll dollars available. Do your students want my payroll dollars?” Which sounds logical in theory to you, ’cause you’re like, “Hey, I [00:28:00] wanna give someone some money to do the job they said they wanna do.”

But- I, based on my experience, the people we’re talking to don’t want these interactions to feel transactional because they’re, in their mind, there are plenty of commercial gyms out there where they can funnel people and tell them to go be good personal trainers. But our specific model is so unique that we should kind of take a unique approach to these relationship development scenarios.

Because otherwise, how are we any better than the Boston Sports Club training director? At Bridgewater, I’m gonna reach out. I hit them with flattery because they actually just add water out of all the programs that are more expensive. I feel like Bridgewater has an unbelievable… They had these kids writing six-month periodized programs and all sorts of stuff, so they’re ready to go.

So I’m gonna tell them, “Hey, this is, you do such a good job. We want to get these kids in right after they get out of school and on- start teaching them.” UMass Boston, I actually speak there every semester. Yep. But the [00:29:00] coordinator is being lazy, so I’m gonna speak to the professors that brought me in to speak and say, “Hey, I pinged.

I know they’re busy. Is there anybody else I should hit up?” And I’m hoping to either pressure her or push me in the right direction. And then UMass, they changed the people, so I don’t know these new people. That’s my alma mater, so I gotta figure out a way to maybe ping some, a couple people that I do know over there to point me in the right direction.

Sure. Okay. So I, I like the, specifically the UMass Boston approach. I think the law of reciprocity says that those professors are gonna feel like they, they probably owe you a simple ask like this, so you should do that. But I’ll give you a, I don’t want to call it counterintuitive, but a concept or suggested approach that I did not mention in my content, and that would be if, Bridgewater, for example, if you reach out to them and you’re like, “Hey, I have really admired how you have athlete, or have students going deep down the rabbit hole of program design over a six-month span.

I think it’s thoughtful, I think it’s meticulous, and you don’t see it at [00:30:00] other programs in our area. Good on you.” From there, I would say, “Is there a world where I could potentially audit a class? Just come and sit in and see how you’re teaching your students, because I really admire the approach. I completely understand if that’s disruptive.

I’m just interested in making the industry a better place.” And my guess is they would be welcoming of that. We had some success in years past where we had students come in, or sorry, interns come in from out of state. Now, this was back, like, when we were making the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration back in the day, like 10 years ago.

Suddenly, it became impossible to let an intern come from, say, Western Europe. I would have a lot of people from the UK who interned from us back in the day, and suddenly it was like hell for them to get into the country and stay here just for the sake of learning. And- We found that the loophole was if they were pursuing anything at [00:31:00] all academically, they could be considered a student visa and they could participate in what we were doing.

And so we just reached out to the Harvard Extension School where they had some programs of this nature, and we just said, “We’ve got some interns here who are…” We leaned into the fact that they hated the new policies, and we were like, “We’ve got some international interns here who are genuinely trying to better themselves and bring their knowledge and skill set back to their country to make it, make a big impact.

Is there a world where they could sit in and audit your classes? We’re just expl- exploring all our options.” And they opened the doors and rolled out the red carpet. And so that was a way at the time for us to really get our foot in the door with some of the influential professors. And it’s, if you do it the right way, especially with UMass, with you being an alum, I think that one’s a no-brainer personally Good stuff Plus, it’s interesting.

We wanna… I think we spend a lot of time quietly be- behind closed doors shitting on these academic programs, because [00:32:00] you’ve collectively, I would bet all of you have probably had a young coach or an intern say to you, “I learned more in the last six months here than I did in four years of school.” I’ve heard that a lot of times in the last almost 20 years.

And while some of it is probably true, I think it’s a little bit hyperbolic, and I think that the schools don’t, they actually don’t get enough credit for the knowledge they’re pouring into these students, because us private sector gyms are just badmouthing them, being like, “You don’t have any relevant experience.

You don’t know how the real world works. You’re just teaching people how to take an exam.” Sure, the CSCS test, I don’t think it brings a ton of m- merit to our training floor, but I understand why it exists. And so I have found that the kill ’em with kindness approach to academic interaction has just been so much more fruitful than being like the, “All right.

You did all the stupid book stuff, now come become a real coach.” And there are a lot of [00:33:00] people saying that. There’s, there’s a good saying, I can’t think of the guy’s name. He’s the UMichigan, one of their head strength coaches at Harbaugh always brought with him, a Scottish guy, I think Neil something or other.

I can’t think of his name, but he always said, “You have to learn what’s inside the box before you start to try to think outside the box. Learn all your kinesiology basics before you get knees over toes or whatever it is that you’re trying to expand out of that.” So that’s what he always says. That’s so true.

That’s probably my biggest complaint with our interns over the years, where they show up really green and they’ve already identified what their niche is gonna be and how they’re gonna be a world-class specialist, when they never became a generalist in the first place, and I’m not… Look, we’ve, I’ve made most of my career earnings in alignment with the fact that we have positioned ourselves as elite baseball-specific strength and conditioning specialists.

But the reality is, Eric Cressey and Tony Gentilcore personal trained the shit out of housewives and [00:34:00] 40-something business owners and normal human beings long before we ever raised the baseball flag and said, “This is who we are.” And the newest coaches since that time that I’ve come across are really trying to skip steps, and you can’t skip steps in the academic setting

Do you have any academic outreach out there? ‘Cause I would make this Danny’s problem. Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m thinking also. We currently have an internship program with one of the universities here, University of Texas, San Antonio. The issue we’re having is that we have… We- where they switch their internship hours from 300 to 150.

Yeah. And we’re finding that by the time they get good enough to where they’re actually helpful, they’re out the door. So we’ve been kind of weighing that in terms of what’s the, our time put into these people versus what we’re getting out of it. Yeah. I had this conversation on the training floor with a GenPop client yesterday where she approached me and she said, “How many summer interns are coming and when do they get here?”

And I realized she’s always [00:35:00] excited for new blood on the training floor. And- She said she asked some really interesting questions. One, she asked, “What’s your biggest candidate pool?” And I said, “It’s always summer.” And she said, “Okay, so we’re getting good ones.” And my feedback was, “No, we’re actually not.” The summer candidate pool is historically our biggest candidate pool, and to that, the summer candidate pool is bigger than our semester one and semester two combined every year like clockwork.

And it’s for the wrong reason, and that is that students are just doing that. They’re like, “I have to check a box, and so I’m gonna do it during the summer because that’s what’s most convenient for me.” Whereas when somebody comes to us and they do a full-time internship with me in semester one or semester two, they’re making a declaration that this is important to them because they’re inconveniencing themselves.

It’s either conflicting with their academic pursuits or it’s conflicting with full or part-time work. [00:36:00] It’s longer than the summer program. It is like a declaration of dedication to me. And so historically, I have hired almost nobody out of our summer internship. Our hires come from these smaller candidate pools during parts of the year where it’s a little bit more of a grind to do an internship with us.

And I think that this has been down- downgraded a little bit as a problem since COVID because pre-COVID it was really common for these academic programs that I mentioned to have a field-based learning requirement of a specific number of hours, like you said, Jesse. So 300 became 150, whatever it is.

Pre-COVID, that, like that 300 was fine, whatever it is. But then a virus set in and suddenly these colleges couldn’t carry insurance packages that would allow them to deploy students, because I would imagine Texas Antonio probably sends you a, a documentation of their umbrella [00:37:00] policy every time you start a new intern just saying, “Hey, we have coverage of XYZ for our student while they’re with you.”

Just it’s kind of like the rules of engagement for them. And they stopped being able to pick up that coverage during COVID because it just became wildly expensive to insure sending students into gym environments where they couldn’t control those variables and they were afraid of getting sued for getting COVID while at a school-mandated internship.

And so it just, instead of being like, “Hey, we’re gonna do less hours,” they were just like, “Hey, no more field-based requirements to graduate.” And that hurt our candidate pool to the tune of more than 40% of our candidate pool disappeared. But honestly, if I’m gonna lose 40% of my candidate pool, I want it to be the people who were doing it because they had to graduate.

And so the people who are showing up now are making a little bit more of a declared commitment to learning and getting better and being interested in the field-based piece without saying, “I have to do this to get my cap and [00:38:00] gown.” But even beggars just can’t be choosers. The size of our candidate pool…

Back when we started, we were competing with NBSC, EXOS, which at the time was called Athletes Performance, and DeFranco, and maybe the Cosgroves. That was it. It was just, we were getting… I remember I had summer candidate pools of over 100 kids and for three or four spots. It was wild. We were doing Ivy League enrollment statistics with intern candidates.

And since that time, our product, like our internship curriculum, our learning opportunity, our continuing education process from start to finish, has improved by a multiple of 5X as far as the user experience goes, and our candidate pool has dropped by 70% because there’s just a billion gyms out there that have declared they have internship programs, some better than others.

Some super legit, I’m sure. But more [00:39:00] often than not, all that they’re doing is really just watering down this candidate pool, and we’re ending up with lower quality options available in smaller volume of hours, like you’re saying. And we can sit around and bitch about it, but I think all you and Danny can really do is design the 150-hour option that’s gonna give you an employable coach at the back end, and work with what you got for now until we see a little bit of a swing.

But I have seen a swing. If there’s one silver lining, I’m seeing applications go up a little bit, and I’m finding that the product that’s coming through here from an internship standpoint has been better in the last 12 months than it was in the 36 months prior I don’t know if people have similar or markedly different experiences as of late or historically, but we’ve gone through highs and lows of quality candidates over the [00:40:00] years