The Hiring Solution You’ve Been Waiting For with Kathleen Ferguson of Coach 360

Speaker: [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.

Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry[00:00:30]

Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business Freedom Unicorns podcast. I’m so excited to have a first-timer on the podcast today. This lovely person, who I’m just meeting along with you, is the founder and CEO of Coach 360, which you can find at coach360news.com. We’ll be talking a lot about that.

And it’s Kathleen Ferguson. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2: Hi, Michael. Thank [00:01:00] you so much for having me.

Speaker: What a treat, and we’ve only been chatting for a few minutes before we started recording, but I’m so excited to get to know you more, and your business sounds amazing. I’ve been exploring your website for a while, and I’m so excited to introduce you to our listeners.

So maybe let’s get things started by saying a little bit about what the heck is Coach 360, and how’d you get started doing this?

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again for having me and for the kind words. So Coach 360 is a media and staffing platform that I developed and conceptualized out of my own [00:01:30] experience being a health and fitness professional.

I started 17 years ago in the industry as a personal trainer. Came out of this kind of major fork-in-the-road moment in my life where I needed my work to mean something. I felt in my career pretty devoid of purpose and I said, “I’m gonna become personal trainer. I’m gonna change the world one life at a time.”

I think that’s how a lot of us feel when we become a fitness professional, right? We wanna help people and we wanna be that person that’s just right there for them as their guide in [00:02:00] their health and wellness journey. Got certified. Quickly came to find out it is really hard to build a sustainable career in this industry.

Mm-hmm. Even back 17 years ago when I started, there really weren’t any roadmaps. This is, like, you know, pre-technology, like how we use technology now, right? But there was no roadmaps or systems to help fitness professionals become successful, navigate the waters of, first you need to do this. You get your certification, you just, you get a job at a gym.

You’re thrown into it and they say, “Go build your book of business and go sell clients,” right? [00:02:30] And how the heck do you do that? A lot of us don’t have that kind of training just out, after initial certification. So like many trainers, I struggled and ended up meeting the original founders, Peter and Kathy Davis, of IDEA Health & Fitness Association, who are wonderful people.

L-

Speaker: love, yeah.

Speaker 2: And Love that. We’re

Speaker: such big fans of IDEA, so I mean-

Speaker 2: Yes …

Speaker: what a great connection to make for you.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that was my springboard into the career that I’ve been doing for my entire professional life, which is health and fitness media. And I was able to transition from being a coach and [00:03:00] trainer and keep that alive as I dove into the health and fitness media world.

And I did well there, connecting brands that were looking to get in front of coaches and trainers and owners and operators, and really started to learn and understand how to make those connections and how to make those relationships for the brands that were looking to get just, whether they wanted to get products and services in front of them or offer coaches and trainers opportunities.

Quickly came to find out in that, in that role how special the fitness industry was, and I see you nodding your head, so you know exactly what I’m talking [00:03:30] about. Yeah. When you walk into, and actually I’m sure all of your listeners do, but when you walk into a fitness conference, it is completely different than walking into a technology conference in any other industry.

Everyone was high-fiving, hugging, and the energy at a fitness conference, it’s intoxicating, and I knew going to my first IDEA World, my first HFA, that I would never leave this industry. This would be where I would have my entire career. I stayed at IDEA 10 years, and then COVID hit, and ended up going off on my own, consulting for various different startups.

[00:04:00] 2023, I was actually working with Athletech News to help them to build out what we see now as ATN. And then really saw a void in early 2024- For coaches and trainers because what IDEA used to be, it seems like now the Gen Z that are coming in as coaches and trainers, they really want something a little bit different in terms of how they consume their education.

It’s tough to get that newer entrepreneurial coach to go to a three-day conference. So we really wanted to build something that supported them [00:04:30] both from a community perspective with some conference touchpoints, as well as how do we support their business on the daily, right? Like, how do we help them to build sust- sustainable careers in this industry?

In talking to coaches and in talking to owners and operators, what I learned was that the biggest problem that we really have as an industry is not having enough… We have plenty of coaches coming in. In fact, that number has risen post-COVID. The problem is retention. The coach churn rate is at about 80% within two years’ time, and this is [00:05:00] directly affecting the operator turnover rate, which some of our operators, I’m not gonna name who, some of our operators have about 100% or more turnover rate annually.

So that’s the big problem Coach 360 aims to solve, and that’s what we do. We built this modern-day career workforce ecosystem that helps to serve about 45,000 coaches and trainers that are looking to build careers as solopreneurs and as in, in-facility coaches and trainers, as well as helping these owners and operators, about 2,000 of them currently, find [00:05:30] talent within the United States.

So that’s what we built, and it’s a media platform, and it’s a community that’s really quite special.

Speaker: Yeah. That’s amazing. Thanks for sharing your story and for all the background. I think, I imagine a lot of my listeners as they’re listening to you doing a lot of nodding like I was, both in recognition- Yeah

of the fact that a few things you said I think would really resonate. One is that when you get your training for certification, it often doesn’t include hardly any guidance about what it means to now be in the business of fitness, and so having to figure that out [00:06:00] on your own. Right. And then build a community where you can help people find the resources they need to build a business and a career for themselves I think will really resonate.

And the fact that fitness conferences really are unique. There’s a lot of high energy. People are very open and sharing. Whereas technology and other conferences I know I’ve been to, it’s usually not so much. There can be some friendly folks out there. Right. If you go to a sales conference, you’re gonna get some friendly faces, right?

But all in all, there’s not this much kind of camaraderie and, and high-fiving. And so I think that [00:06:30] people who come to this industry really wanna make an impact, just like you. And so I think your story will really resonate. And so I know one of the products that you have at Coach 360 is called FitHire, and it’s all about solving the kind of talent crisis, trying to get the right trainers in the right spaces and connecting gyms and studios to trainers, and I wanna talk about that a bunch.

But before we get to that- Sure … can you just talk a little bit about if anyone listening is still a personal trainer and wants to go to Coach 360, what are some of the resources and things you encourage them to interact with [00:07:00] first?

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So I think first and foremost, subscribe to the newsletter.

It goes out weekly. Great. And we touch on all things that really pertain to building their business. So we talk about fitness trends and education they need to be aware of. We talk about business and coaching, so there’s always business of coaching content within that newsletter. We talk about clubs and studios that are offering career pathing opportunities and where they should look.

That’s a big piece for the clubs and studios because it’s a place for them to tell their story, and we’ll touch on that in a moment. We talk about health and longevity. [00:07:30] Technology and innovation is huge. I think a lot of coaches and trainers, myself included, we can get intimidated by the quickly evolving technology in our industry.

And we try to break it down and keep people abreast of all of the new innovations that are coming out. So that’s the newsletter. We also have two coach-focused Career Lab by Coach 360 Summits that are short format summits where the coaches can come in, they can get their CECs, they get a really fun experience.

We encourage a lot of connection. We’ve had coaches walk away [00:08:00] from Career Lab with new business partners, and just new opportunities that they’ve talked about after that have been pretty incredible, which is the reason we built this. What we found out with these Career Labs is that a lot of them, yes, they want their CECs, but that’s not the main reason they go.

The main reason that they go is for that connection and that engagement with people who are trying to build just like they are. Entrepreneurs, owners and operators of small boutique studios that wanna scale, coaching businesses where they could do content [00:08:30] collaboration. That’s what they really want. And I think that the community component is, it has been big.

We try to create a fun experience. We’ve got a DJ, we’ve got music going, we got food trucks, lighting, so it’s a whole vibe. So they’ll be able to check out our Las Vegas and a rendition of that which is coming out in July, July 18th. So we have that as a resource. And I think the big piece too that I know you wanna talk about is the FitHire by Coach 360, which is a free two-way marketplace where coaches can find opportunities within clubs and studios, and [00:09:00] clubs and studios can find talented staff that are a match for that specific job and that specific company culture.

Everything for the coach is usually almost 100% free. In fact, I give away 90% of the summit tickets. And those are… That’s because I’ve been a coach, and I know that coaches don’t make a lot of money when they first are getting started. So we wanna keep these passionate individuals in the industry and remove all barriers and make it accessible to be someone that wants to just go out there and simply change a [00:09:30] life for the better

Speaker: Yeah.

That’s amazing. I, I think you’re so spot on here in terms of building a specific tool for that. We’ve been doing Unicorn Society now for, what, eight plus years. And the f- one of the two biggest challenges people come to our group wanting help with are leads and staffing. Those are the two challenges that most, you know, strength and conditioning gyms that we work with face.

Oh, yeah. And leads we can help with, that’s easy. And staffing is honestly much harder ’cause we just can’t control how they [00:10:00] access quality candidates in their market. And there’s, in some cases, people have had some success with traditional places, the LinkedIns and the Indeeds and the Monsters of the world.

Yeah. You have to sort through a lot of folks who are not a right fit to find a good one. So having- Mm-hmm … a platform that’s specific to fitness, I think is such a key for a lot of our listeners. And so just, let’s just zoom back out again, ’cause you mentioned the fact that there’s such high turnover in the industry.

And I’m curious, what do you think is really driving that- Mm-hmm … turnover? How do you recommend studio owners really think about retention these days? [00:10:30]

Speaker 2: Yeah, so a couple different things on that. So I think that the turnover problem is directly attributed to the fact that coaches are taking roles in the industry because of the convenience of the location, and maybe the pay is right.

But the reason that somebody typically stays, and this extends far beyond just the fitness industry, people stay with an organization because of the company culture, and that starts from the top. That starts at leadership. And if the company culture is not a match, why would the coach stay a- as [00:11:00] opposed to just taking another role down the street for similar pay?

So the company culture needs to be a better match, and that’s one of the things that we address with the Coach 360 is that Coach 360’s newsletter tells that story of the company culture and what that career path and opportunity looks like. So I truly believe that the retention issue is due to the fact that we have not personalized matching the way that everything else has been personalized.

So we think about, there’s a couple organizations that are doing really well, [00:11:30] like Handshake’s doing it well. Snap Care is doing it well in, you know, the health sector. But fitness has kept job boards the same for decades, and that’s a problem. So we’ve got personalization on the rise, but the job finding on a lot of these platforms that you mentioned that are pretty archaic is exactly the same as it was 20 years ago.

And so I think that’s the biggest problem, is that nowadays people want to align with a company mission. They want purpose. And they want to know that company’s core values match their own. And that [00:12:00] is another piece of the company culture, and that’s hard to see just from a standard job posting. So that’s really our core belief as to why people have not been able to keep coaches, that the turnover is so high.

Yeah. Because people are just leaving because it’s just not a match.

Speaker: Yeah. Let’s keep pulling that thread for a second, ’cause this is a topic I’m passionate about. Yeah. We talk about culture a lot on this podcast. And you already started to list a few elements that you think are critical to culture.

Giving people a sense of purpose, having a clear mission, maybe values. Can you maybe keep going and saying for all our listeners out there who think- [00:12:30]

Speaker 2: Sure … ”

Speaker: I have a great culture,” how do they know if they do? And what do you think are the real drivers to changing culture at a gym?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think one of the things that we need to do as an industry is do a better job of reframing staffing, and not look at it so much as a problem to solve, and really reframe it as a, a growth strategy.

So we need to move from being transactional in terms of our hiring, and we need to move to a place of creating talent ecosystems within [00:13:00] our organization. How do you create a talent ecosystem? There’s certain things that people are looking for when they decide on Organization A versus Organization B in terms of where they’re gonna go and company culture.

People spend a lot of time just scrawling in paint on the wall what their company culture and their mission statement is. But that doesn’t actually work unless it starts from the top at leadership. And what that typically looks like, and what we’re hearing from coaches in terms of what they want and what they need, is they want [00:13:30] investment in their careers, so investment in their growth and education.

What does that look like? Talking to someone who has a small studio, maybe they don’t have a huge budget for that, right? What they could do is very simple. Lunch and learns. Bring in a subject matter expert to talk about leadership training, EQ training, things that actually are going to make them… Things that are gonna make them more efficient in combo with this rising technology, right?

Things that are gonna give them that competitive edge and competitive advan- advantage within their organization [00:14:00] is the people. Those people are the ones that are gonna be the connection point for the members and keep those members coming back for that particular experience and that particular program with that specific coach.

So investing in that coach’s growth and development is going to be huge to, you know- Moving away from that reactionary, “Oh my God, I just lost another coach,” to actually using your talent and your people as your growth strategy. So investing in your people, whether that is as simple, as I mentioned, as a lunch and learn or [00:14:30] actually going in and saying, “Here’s an educational stipend.

We’ve partnered with NASM or ACE or one of the certification organizations. We’re gonna give you a course in women’s hormones. We’re gonna give you a course in performance or physique.” Whatever it might be that really resonates with how they can diversify and create new streams of revenue within your organization with your member base is going to be huge.

So I think that’s a big one that is honestly fairly simple and something that people don’t spend enough time doing, is just investing in that development [00:15:00] of their people. Because if you do invest in your people, they’re going to see that you care about their future there. You don’t see them as just another coach that can be replaced next week.

You see them as someone that’s there for the long term. The other thing that I hear from coaches a lot is like, “I get onboarded, and sometimes it’s like a series of three slide, slides in a deck, and I’m expected to just go do the work.” Onboarding should be much more of a cohesive, consistent experience for everyone within your facility, [00:15:30] and that’s something that technology and AI can completely offload off your plate and make it com- make it easy.

The human component that comes into onboarding is where you as a leader need to sit down with your staff that you are onboarding and say, “Where do you wanna be in one, three, five years? What does that look like? Let me help you to get there.” So really sitting down and pathing out what that person’s journey within your facility looks like is going to be yet another way that you’re showing them, “I care about you here, and I want you as a part of our future [00:16:00] within this organization.”

So those are just a couple of things that you- I hear from the coaches that we serve and we talk a lot about with the facilities that we work with.

Speaker: Yeah. I really appreciate those examples, Kathleen. I think that those examples really help our listeners get a clear picture of what they could be doing differently or better than they are right now.

And I think your focus on investing in the career growth and the professional development of trainers makes a lot of sense because I, the mistake I see a lot of gym owners make that we work with is they think that investing in their [00:16:30] trainers is just, costs a lot of money, that they don’t do en- a lot of it ’cause they’re afraid it’s gonna be so expensive.

But the reality is even the- Mm-hmm … some of the examples you gave is just bringing in a person to do a quick talk, that’s usually not that much money. Having a book, buy them all a book. Right. Have a book club once a quarter. Curate a bunch of YouTube videos you want everyone to watch, right? There, there’s a lot of things that owners can do to make their team feel invested in- That’s not gonna break the bank.

But as you so well said, it’s that invest- it’s that sense that my boss cares about me. [00:17:00] It’s not just a transactional relationship, but someone actually cares about my development and my growth, and they’re actively giving me opportunities to stretch myself and learn new things. That’s the thing that someone want- that’s gonna keep them around.

‘Cause we’re f- you know, gyms and studios, they’re pretty flat organizations. We don’t have a 10-layer deep hierarchical org charts, right? It’s a top three level org chart at most gyms at best. And so there’s not a big ladder to climb, so you gotta give people a reason to stick around and feel like they’re growing [00:17:30] over time, and I think that’s just a smart way of thinking about it.

That being said, just back to FitHire fi- specifically, this is a really pretty tactical question, which is for folks who wanna go onto the FitHire platform and try to find their next, the next talent to fill up a role, how do they stand out on a platform like this? How do you recommend that they share some of their ideas about their values and their culture in a way that will really resonate with the folks who are looking for those roles?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So a couple different things. A lot of times they can just [00:18:00] simply reach out to me first- Mm-hmm … or my co-founder, Al Mendoza, and what we like to do is we like to create content. I don’t do pay-for-play content, which I actually think has become quite unique in this industry. You can’t pay for any content on Coach 360.

We write about things that we think are actually gonna move the needle on careers for coaches and trainers. So we like to write stories about owners and operators that are offering great career opportunities. We don’t care how small the organization is or how large. We’ve done everything from Lifetime, [00:18:30] all of their 180-plus locations, to smaller, one, one or two shop facilities.

We just wanna share these opportunities across the US and showcase that there are incredible careers for coaches and trainers. So work with us. We’ll write a story and, and get it slotted into one of the newsletters and socialize it. In fact, I just dropped one today on the new PT career opportunity for coaches and trainers at Planet Fitness and the new pilot program that they’re rolling out.

We’ll talk about it on social media. So that’s one of the ways, is we’ll get that content in front of our [00:19:00] community. Another way is we’ve created a video component. So you can go in there as a facility. You can create your own profile. It’s completely free for you to create the profile as an owner and operator or a facility.

You can go in and in creation of your profile, there’s a video component. You can say instead of it just being a random job posting where if we’re, we’re hiring down the street at X, Y, and Z Pilates studio, it’s, “Hey, I’m Kathleen Ferguson. I’m the GM for X, Y, and Z Pilates. Here are the three reasons you wanna come work for me.”

And so instead of it just being this flat [00:19:30] job posting, it’s actually giving life and human connection to that job posting. So I always highly recommend go in there and use the video. Have fun with it. Showcase your personality and why someone would really wanna come work for you because otherwise you’re just gonna look like everybody else, right?

So I think it’s really cool. It’s a cool feature for you to be able to go in there and just give your profile a little life.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: So that’s the other way that we’ve tried to distinguish what we have versus other stagnant job boards.

Speaker: Yeah. What a great feature. Good for you. I think the world has been [00:20:00] video-oriented for a while now, and the fact that things like job boards and things have not caught up is so upsetting.

And so the fact that you’re really- Yeah … raising the bar here for all of us is so appreciated, so thank you and bravo. You mentioned a few minutes ago AI, and I know it’s a topic you cover a bunch in some of your content on Coach 360. So I thought maybe we’d just take an extra minute or two here at the end of this conversation, just talk a little bit about what the tre- what trends are you seeing in the I- AI world?

I know a lot of gym owners and coaches alike are a little nervous about the AI that already [00:20:30] exists, and as we all know, today is the worst it’ll ever be. It’s only getting better- … and better by the day. Yes. And I think I, I hear nervous conversations around programming and program design already being pretty darn good in AI.

All kinds of at-home tools and online tools that are starting to cut into the market in terms of instead of in-person workouts. And so I hear a lot of concerns over these things, but what are the trends you’re seeing in AI in this industry?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I wanna touch on first, [00:21:00] so at FitHire, on FitHire by Coach 360, we are integrating AI algorithm because we believe that we should leverage this technology to create a more robust profile of the coaches when owners and operators are going on to look for potential talent staff.

It’s really important because we’re able to assess through an algorithm a h- score, a fit score as we call it basically saying whether or not you would be not only a fit, but like how long that owner and operator would have in terms of a retention [00:21:30] potential with you as a hire. So-

Speaker: Mm-hmm …

Speaker 2: I might be a fit score of a four, and you might be a fit score of a nine, which ultimately will tell the owner and operator, the hiring manager, that you would be a better fit for the role based on everything they can see on paper, behavioral traits through a behavioral quiz that you would take, as well as the likelihood of retention.

So that’s coming soon. It’s not quite here yet, but just an example of how we at Coach 360 are leveraging technology to couple it as a hybrid option to really enhance and [00:22:00] amplify the person, the coach, the personal trainer. I just wanted to add that in there. But in terms of some trends surrounding AI, I think one of the things that I keep coming back to, and I’m gonna be touching on this at my, during my talk in Remini Wellness next week, but one of the things that I think is really important is that we can’t see AI as a threat to our jobs as personal trainers, coaches, fitness professionals.

Because AI should only, again, amplify the human component of what we do and bring us back to the connection piece. We are [00:22:30] not the output, we are the person that’s interpreting the, the data, and the person as a whole picture the clients, the members. We are the person that has the context to that person’s entire journey, either within a facility or someone that we’re coaching and training.

So AI exists to remove the friction and bring us back as health and fitness professionals to what we do best and our main purpose in becoming a fitness professional which is leaning into the connection component and truly helping [00:23:00] those on their health and wellness journeys. The more that AI can take and offload things like scheduling, admin, answering pho- sales phone calls, and things of that nature the more that we can lean into and the more important those human qualities become.

So I think the trends that I’m seeing is, again, what can we, how can we use AI to offload the friction points within our business? Because that’s gonna truly allow us to scale. Years ago, we couldn’t assess patterns the way that we can now, and humans will never be able to assess the [00:23:30] patterns that we can with AI.

And that in itself is an entire job that we can essentially take off of our plate so that we can focus on things like investing in our people, investing in growing our staff and making sure that our members are happy and that we can retain them. So I really think that’s the future of the fitness industry and where we’re going, is coupling our human skills with AI to scale our businesses.

Speaker: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Earlier you mentioned emotional intelligence and how important it is to help people in this industry develop those skills. [00:24:00] Because at the end of the day, what people buy from people, as we know, right? And people don’t buy f- to buy from businesses, they really care about the relationships they’re forming in this space.

And so the fact that we can have AI do some of the back end administrative data analysis stuff that maybe we don’t even like doing, but have always seen as a necessary evil as part of our work, we don’t have to even do that anymore. And I love that your focus is really getting back to the face-to-face people connections this industry has always been so good at.

And [00:24:30] frankly, what makes it so sticky. People stay at gyms because they have a relationship with their trainer. They’ve made friends. It’s the community that keeps them there. So I think that’s really wise. Let me just one last question as we wrap things up. Where do you see Coach 360 going? What do we have to look forward to?

You mentioned some AI tools with FitHire, but what else is coming down the pike for y’all?

Speaker 2: Yeah. If I could wave my magic wand and have all the resources that I need today, I would be rolling out to other markets. So that is on the horizon. We’ve had some [00:25:00] demand from other countries for FitHire by Coach 360 and pull this community that we’ve built into places like South America, Australia, and multiple oth- other countries and locations.

That is on the horizon. Great. But right now we are a staff of two full time, myself, my co-founder, and some co- contractors. It is, it has been a passion project and pretty incredible ride so far. But that’s where we would love to go. Good for you. But right now we’re, we’re super focused, laser focused on the US and [00:25:30] really establishing proof of concept with what we have here.

Speaker: Yeah. Good for you. That’s exciting. Exciting things. So let’s finish with a call to action. So we have both coaches who listen to this and studio owners and, and business owners. So w- how do you recommend that those two groups go and interact with Coach 360 next?

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So one thing, I’m always accessible if anyone ever just wants to chat and needs advice or needs some guidance in terms of how to find talent or where to find jobs.

Reach [00:26:00] out to me. It’s kathleen@coach360news.com. I can also be found on LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn, so you can come find me there too. You can follow us on Instagram at Coach360News. Our website to subscribe and find roles on FitHire is coach360news.com. You can hit the FitHire tab. We also have our upcoming career lab.

That is located on the webpage as well. So would love to help you find your next dream role or if you just wanna talk about how to scale your business, I’m here to [00:26:30] do that. I’m al- I’m here for that. So reach out.

Speaker: I love that. Yeah, thank you for making yourself so accessible. We’ll put all those links and things down in the show notes below so all of you can go connect with Kathleen immediately.

And I really recommend all of you, go subscribe to the newsletter immediately, and for those of you who have hiring coming up in the short-term or long-term, go, create an account, and find your next staff through the FitHire by Coach360. You’ll… You’re gonna love it. It’s a unique platform that I think is we’re, we’re overdue in needing something like this, so thank you for making it, Kathleen.

And thanks for your time today on this [00:27:00] podcast. Appreciate it. It was so great getting to know you and your business a little more. I’m sure we’ll have you back again. Once, once you’ve achieved true world domination, we’ll have you back again to hear about all … your community around the world. And, and I really appreciate your time, so thank you for doing this.

Speaker 2: I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on, Michael.

Speaker: Yeah. I’ll see you all, listeners, on the next one. Have a kickass week. Bye.

Speaker 2: [00:27:30] Bye.