The State of Hiring and Internships in 2026

[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, my friend. I have an exciting announcement for you. This coming September 11th and September 12th, it’s a Friday and Saturday, we’re hosting our Business Unicorns Retreat in Seattle. I’m so excited. I would love to see you there. The theme this year is people systems, because here’s the truth. Your business doesn’t grow past you as the owner until your people can [00:01:00] run it without you.

So we’re spending two full days on the systems that actually make that happen. How to hire well, how to develop your staff so they get better every single month, how to design a client experience that people can’t stop talking about. The stuff that turns a busy owner into an actual leader. That’s what we’re covering.

It’s two days. It’s in person with a room full of smart, ambitious people who really get what you’re building. And here’s the part you’ll wanna act on. Early bird pricing ends August 4th. Until then, it’s $499. Four hundred and ninety-nine dollars for two incredible days of content and connection. After August 4th, it jumps to $799.

So grabbing your spot now saves you 300 bucks. So come hang out with us in Seattle this September. Head to the link below in the show notes to grab your seat, and come build something that lasts. Hope to see you there Welcome to the Business for Unicorns podcast. I am Pete Dupuis, back as your guest host for another week.

I’ve got Ben with [00:02:00] me, and today we are gonna talk about the state of entry-level coaching in the fitness industry. I will do so through the lens of internship programs and development, and Ben’s gonna talk about the hundreds of gym owners he’s talked to in the last 18 months about their never-ending aspiration of finding new coaches, ’cause it seems to me it’s all we talk about lately.

Welcome, Ben. Hello. Is there anything you would like to pitch on behalf of Business for Unicorns? We’re excited about way too many things these days, so I- Well- … I tend to lose my head. Yeah, we’re recording this right the day before the gym owner meetup is happening in New York, which is super exciting, so I think you’re gonna– by the time you s- this episode comes out, you’re gonna have seen some really cool stuff about that.

And keep your eyes peeled in the next few weeks for early bird tickets for our Seattle retreat in September. Yeah, I am working hard to convince you and Mark and Michael that me and Mickey should have a day before sports performance meetup of sorts out in [00:03:00] Seattle, just ’cause I think there’s a pretty cool collection of sports performance gyms out that way, and it could just be good excuse for us to get us meatheads together.

But I know that’s complete- compete with Leadership Society, so- Oof … we’ll see what Maybe we can make that happen. If that does happen, then we’ll have a new thing to pitch on the podcast. There’s the hypoca- hypothetical thing for you all to go and get. Yeah. All right, let me start by explaining why I proposed this topic.

As Ben mentioned, we’re here in late May, right in advance of the BFU meetup, but we are also in week one of a summer internship at CSP, and that is far and away our largest intern candidate pool annually. It’s just the way it’s been for now approaching 20 years, and it doesn’t seem to be changing. And so I’ve got interns on the brain.

We’ve interviewed, accepted, we’re midstream in onboarding, so it’s just– it’s the thing that’s eating up a lot of bandwidth right now. And it’s not a bad consumption of bandwidth, but week one of an internship program [00:04:00] means we’re bringing a lot of pretty green coaches onto a training floor, and it leaves me reflecting about the state of the industry in this sense, because internships and the associated candidate pool have changed so dramatically over the last 10 years, primarily thanks to COVID, in my opinion.

But there, there are changes in some ways that I think are irreparable, and there are other things that I’m seeing starting to trend back to what I would affectionately call the good old days- Well- … back when we were swimming in candidates. Maybe we can start there, ’cause we were chatting before we hit record I’ve been around long enough that like I applied and didn’t actually make it to be an intern at Mike Boyle’s way back when.

I don’t know if I applied at CSB. At which the pitch at the time was I would move to the States for four-ish months and I would work for free and cover all my own costs, and this is after doing a five-year undergrad co-op degree. Now I assume everyone can obviously have a different path in, but that was a pretty big ask and a [00:05:00] lot of people seemed really willing to do it Fast forward to kinda today, what’s the intern look like?

Do you still have, what was it, 200 candidates per year or per period? What’s been the major differences you’ve seen for the time you’ve been doing this? So the today answer is no. The candidate pool is nowhere near as big as it was when it was at its absolute apex. The days that you talk about, I remember that fondly when people were looking to relocate from all over the world to intern for us with the hopes that someday they might be hired or develop some meaningful experience that will allow them to be employable, which is still very much the case.

Yeah. This being said, the biggest change in the composition of our internship program now is it’s just a lot more locals. It’s different. Like you said, people moving in from Canada, from the UK. We’ve had Australian interns. We’ve had, you name it, we’ve had it in now 19 years of doing this. And a [00:06:00] couple things changed.

I’ll, I will say that Canada was a very good lead generation source for us for a while, but making this political without going too down, too deep down a political rabbit hole, in, in Trump’s first presidency, it became considerably more difficult for a non-US citizen to come in and capture opportunities of this ilk because- Yeah

they could theoretically be grabbing American jobs from Americans. Yeah. And we went from fielding dozens of applications inter- internationally annually to sub five. Big change. I don’t think I had a single international candidate for our summer program, which is between our two facilities is in the vicinity of 15 interns right now, and cumulatively was probably un- a little under 100 candidates.

And so we do not get tons and tons and tons of applications like we used to. That’s [00:07:00] partially, I think, because of that. It’s just not as easy to get into our country for this type of learning experience. It’s partially because with each passing year, it seems there’s dozens and dozens more internship opportunities and gyms that are raising the internship flag and saying, “Come learn from us.”

And so that’s fine. It’s a competitive landscape. And then I’ll tell you the biggest change in my mind, it was structurally how the college experience was built from a field-based internship experience requirement standpoint. Okay. So there was a time when tons and tons of these exercise science or kinesiology programs All over the United States had mandates that you had to execute a certain number of hours of field-based internship experience before you could walk for your capping out.

And so we had co-op interns, we had people who were taking a full semester off to go deep down this internship commitment process. And when COVID [00:08:00] happened, it became really hard for those schools to carry the insurance policies that they needed to send students out into the field. Mm-hmm. So every time I have an intern start with me and they’re here for academic credit, I get documentation from their insurance carrier saying what their coverage is, what the umbrella policy is that protects the student out in the field, because they’re there as an extension of the school.

Yeah. And when suddenly the world didn’t know what to do with a virus, it was very easy for the schools to say, “That is no longer part of our curriculum.” Yeah. And I’m not getting the impression that many of them brought it back after the fact. And so we have less candidates coming to us and saying, “This is one of the boxes that I have to check to graduate.”

And sometimes someone says that, and it’s concerning ’cause you’re like, “I don’t want someone who’s here because they have to be here.” Yeah. But at the same time, we had plenty of exceptional interns over the years who were both checking that box and hungry for the opportunity. Does that make sense? That makes total sense.

I took a kinesiology [00:09:00] co-op program, so I… It was through the school and, but I wasn’t like, “Oh, I have to do this to get my credits,” or whatever. I’m like, I took this because I want hands-on experience to match my academic experience, ’cause I knew I wanted to go into S&C fitness coaching, something that was fitness-related that required hands-on skills, not just theoretical skills.

But I can understand if there’s less and less schools doing that, and the ones who only have to do the thing, there’s, you have a much smaller pool just from that. Yeah, it’s amazing how much it’s changed the dynamics of the personality of our internship program. It continues to be very student-heavy in the summer months, ’cause this is the period that complements an academic schedule.

You don’t disrupt a four-year, two-semester type scenario by coming and spending a summer with us. And so we are historically younger in this period, but at the same time we have historically had our biggest candidate pool and internship pool be the summer, and it’s also the smallest as it relates to where we make hires.

Yeah. And it’s just [00:10:00] because a lot of the time our interns still have curriculum ahead of them- Yeah … when they walk out of our internship program, so they’re just plain not employable. They’ve still got school to finish. Yeah. And so I’m more likely to make a hire out of our winter internship. Sometimes we call it semester one, ’cause it match…

Or sorry, semester two, ’cause it matches up with the academic calendar, than I would be out of the bigger candidate pools. And it’s just, it kind of makes sense when you think of the fact where people are in life when they’re able to accept an internship like that. So let me pivot back to this and talk about the state of the candidate pool now.

I am finding that it’s a little bit more eclectic. We- I’m seeing a little bit more, like, career change type internships, people who are, maybe they were in fitness in the past, they stepped away and they’re like, “You know what? I thought the grass was greener in corporate,” or wherever it was, “but I wanna get back to this and I wanna do it right.”

That’s increasingly popular for us. That’s cool. Sure. I am thankfully seeing more females in our candidate pool. That’s [00:11:00] amazing. Which is, it’s not a big number, but it’s slightly bigger which is progress. What, 97? There was a time in, like- 97% male, like you, having f- more females we’re at least split shifting in the right direction.

There was a late, a period in the late teens where we audited our entire intern candidate pool historically, and the number will never leave me. We were in the well over 600, 700 applicants at the time, and 8% of them were female. And- Yeah … that was really discouraging because we desperately needed a female presence in our gym, and it’s a little bit better, but it’s not exceptional at this point.

But that’s, that’s the nature of performance training, I think. That’s the nature of being niched into a sport that is very male dominant. There are some females playing baseball, but it’s not a big number, and they’re, I’d kill to have a great softball strength and conditioning coach right now. But we also can’t compromise on, still gotta be a great coach.

I can’t just say every female candidate gets through carte blanche. [00:12:00] Yeah, it’s a– I completely understand that. So I will ask you, seeing as how we both talk to a lot of gym owners here- We do … at the BFU, and I think we collectively, as far as BFU coaches go, agree that hiring is not something that’s going away.

It’s picking up steam. Everybody is perpetually hiring. Yeah. From an onboarding standpoint, are you talking to people more about taking entry-level coaches onto teams or taking, skipping a level there, maybe a director type role, somebody with a little bit more career capital? What are you seeing more of these days?

Kind of 50/50. I think because I have a rockstar GM who is quite independent, who doesn’t rely on me, and most of my job is to get out of her way. I get a lot of GM questions just because of my experience, but I’m still getting a good number of questions around the hiring pool for bringing on an entry-level coach.

And I have many thoughts on that, but I’m not sure. I don’t wanna derail you if you had a direction you wanted to go with this. No, I’m kinda [00:13:00] interested in what you see the state of the industry being based on all the conversations we’re having, because I’m seeing more conversations about people coming out of academic programs and being pretty green.

And I like that because I think that those are people who haven’t developed any habits that I’d be interested in changing just yet. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. But I might have a skewed perspective on that as far as the candidate pool goes. No, I’m, as much as we do in BFU, so we’re not dictating what people should do and how they should run their gym.

We’re trying to help them build the gym and life they love. I’m generally trying to encourage people to hire, is what I would say, certified nice people, hire attitude over skill. And I know that means that you have a higher hill to climb to train them to be as good of a coach as you want them to be. And I try to think of this– I was thinking about this the other day in terms of a skilled trade In Canada, if you wanna be an electrician, you, you go to school for it, but then you do an apprenticeship, and you get your [00:14:00] journeyman’s, and you get your whatever the next one is, and you get your master’s in electrician, and you work at a company, and you get paid a salary, and you’re learning to do it under the tutelage of somebody who’s been doing this for– We all know the old dude who comes and fixes our stuff and, like, taps on the wall and knows where the problem is, right?

And fitness is actually not that different. For a long time, it’s being, and still currently is in a lot of places, like being paid like an unpaid, unskilled trade, but then we’re expecting people to do, “How do I get my team to do continuing education for an hour a day? And what about this, and what about that?”

And it’s like, yeah, you’re paying, depending where you live, like sometimes close to minimum wage dollars here, but you’re expecting master’s electrician-type dedication. And I think my hypothesis here is that, one, if we treat it a little bit like that, it’s not, “Oh, you don’t have electrician experience? You can’t become an electrician.”

Then it’s every job needs three years experience, and no one’s hiring anyone without it. You can never get the three years experience. So there is an element of if you can build the systems and structure and onboarding to turn green coaches into good coaches [00:15:00] into great coaches, you’re fucking bulletproof because now your hiring pool is people who are interested in helping others through fitness who are, like, nice.

That’s a big ass pool. But if your hiring pool is people who have, like, really good soft skills, and they’re really nice, and they’ve got a good attitude, and they’ve got a kinesiology– and they have to have a kinesiology degree, and they have to have CFSC, and they have to have done an internship at Cressi, and they need to be logging 52 hours a year of continuing education, and with love, you pay them $23 an hour That job isn’t that appealing.

How many people really want that? That’s a very small pool. So again, I’m obviously a little bit fired up about this ’cause I think this is one of the main things that will help our industry in the long run, and I don’t have the answer to this. Our coaches don’t make $150,000 a year. I know electricians who do.

I would love to get to the point where society values it the same way, but that is the direction that if we can bring in these people who have the passion, and we can [00:16:00] actually be the on-ramp for them, yeah, some of them are gonna open competing gyms, some of them are gonna quit before they get to the end of the apprenticeship, some of them are going to not turn out the way we wanted them to.

You’re not gonna get a bullseye every time, but I don’t know. I’d love to hear a counterargument to why that would be a bad idea if you’re willing to put in the work. But if we want our gyms to last more than three or four years, like we’re gonna have to do this work at some point anyways. Yeah, I don’t have a counterargument ’cause I agree with you.

And- … I would be interested in touching the conversation as a result to training the people who build the com- future competing gyms, because that’s obviously something that we’re all conflicted by. And I’ve always theory that we win if we build those coaches, then they leave and they succeed, and we win if they leave and they fail because- Yeah

they leave, and it’s like a… I always make the example of a professional, an NFL coaching tree. If Cressey Sports Performance is, we’ll say Andy Reid, [00:17:00] currently arguably the best coach ever, and his spinoff of dozens of now former assistant coaches who are now head coaches, some are absolutely crushing it, winning Super Bowls, competing with him, which might be stressful, and others are falling on their face.

It happens. But nobody is saying, “Andy, good on you for making Sean McVay a Super Bowl champion coach, but we really need to talk about that guy who flopped.” No, they’re just saying, “Of course Sean was great. He apprenticed under Andy Reid.” Yeah. That’s a no-brainer. The guy runs a killer system. And then the ones who flopped, they say, “They never should’ve left.

He had a really good working with Andy Reid, but that’s his fault. He shouldn’t have left that exceptional coaching experience.” And that’s kinda how I think of this. We can’t protect against the downside of building great coaches who wanna go out and be entrepreneurs. Yeah. We just gotta keep building.

Just build the next one, build the next one, build the next one. And this is the game that I have to play With increasing frequency in our pitching cage. It just never stops. [00:18:00] I, every time I hire someone, I know I am hiring the next MLB-affiliated pitching coordinator. We’re nine for nine so far. The 10th is standing in our pitching cage, and, and the other nine not only did it, they’re all still doing it.

That’s nine people collecting paychecks from MLB organizations actively right now- That’s- … dating back to our first one. And so- That’s a badass thing to have on your resume when you’re looking for your next pitching coordinator. Holy shit. It’s, it has made it… You know what? The resume piece, yes, it’s fairly, it’s easy for me to put up a post and say, “Hey, we’re looking for a new pitching coordinator.”

We’re gonna get lots of options there. In fact, we posted a job, a strength and conditioning, excuse me, like a department head job for S&C yesterday, literally yesterday, and I said to John, “How many applications do we get before we get our first pitching-specific or hitting-specific coaching inquiry, even though that’s not at all the language that we use?”

And he said, “I expect one of those two to be the first.” “We will get one of those before we get a [00:19:00] strength and conditioning applicant.” And I have not asked what that number was. I know we have 16 candidates since last night. I have no idea how many of them asked for what John said, but I’m sure some of them were skill development.

And so that piece is easy. But the place that makes my life easiest with each passing one of these is managing the optics of departures. Because with the first one, it was really hard. The second one was pretty hard. People were kinda like, “That person leaves, you’re never gonna find another one of them.”

And that’s a tough hill to climb, and it was a tough sell with high schoolers, college, and professional athletes. But now, when I’m like, “Hey, did you watch opening day when Netflix broadcasted the Yankees and the Giants game?” And they say, “Yeah.” And I say, “Do you know that the pitching coach for the Yankees was Matt Blake, our first pitching coordinator, and the pitching coach for the Giants was Christian Wonders, who replaced Matt Blake in our pitching cage?

We got seven more of those. I’ll list them off.” Now people are like, “All right. We trust you.” “Whatever you guys build next, we’ll come join.” But you make a really good point here. You can’t get to the [00:20:00] point where people have that level of trust in you until you’ve climbed the hill of it was challenging the first few times.

True. And if you’re not- If you’re not willing to have the fear and the challenges that are gonna come with losing that person the first, second, third time, you’re never gonna get to the point where you have the reputation for building MLB-affiliated pitching coordinators. And ty- tying this back to the trainers leaving their own gym, I don’t know what the numbers are on this, but we all know that everyone who’s a good trainer is not cut out to be a good gym owner.

And I don’t mean that as one is better than the other. I’m just saying it’s the E-Myth. You’ve got technicians, you’ve got managers, and you’ve got visionaries. If that’s the model you ascribe to, the best accountant is not the person who should be running the firm. That’s okay. It’s the same in fitness. So if every person who comes through your door, even if they do go decide to do their own thing, it might not be for them.

And I’d argue, yes, there’s a small percentage of people who are, like, not good people and will actively try to do bad things to harm you and steal clients and et cetera. And for the most part, [00:21:00] most people who go and start a competing thing are gonna give you some cred, and they’re going to– I haven’t had this.

I imagine you ha- you have. But it’s not always gonna go bad. But that’s different than someone coming in and being like, “Hi, I’d like to work for you, and I’d like to gain all your secrets, and in eight months I’m gonna open up three feet down the road.” I’m not hiring that person. But people are allowed to change their mind.

I can bring on a great part-time coach who really just wants to learn and help people and get better at coaching, and then in five years decides to go and open their own gym. People want different stuff over time. We can’t prevent that, but I do think we can make a contribution to the industry by helping develop those people and That’s how you get that reputation, even if you had to eat a little bit of shit early on to do it And the reality is we’re not offering jobs that are commensurate with people with more than five years experience in certain circumstances.

So- Yeah … they don’t owe us anything beyond that entry-level window if we’re not prepared to elevate their wage and their role and their title in perpetuity. So- Yeah … they should go out and hustle [00:22:00] and build that next thing. To the point of the bad people you mentioned, my favorite quote all time that my buddy Zach has said to me on more than one occasion, Zach who I– he’s in the insurance industry, but I’ve interviewed him on this podcast before actually.

He just reminded me o- when this happened to me a while back, he said, “Pete, karma is undefeated.” And truer words have never been spoken ’cause the bad ones who have done it, I’ve watched them all flop, and that happens. But yeah, we just gotta always have a next man up mindset unless we are– unless you can raise your hand and say, “I’m offering full benefits and a matching 401, and I’m guaranteeing you a comfortable salary with tons of PTO.”

Until you’re doing that stuff, you gotta accept the fact people are gonna move forward, and that’s the way it goes. Yeah. And keep on building. Yeah. That’s the best thing you can do. And instead of being afraid they’re gonna leave, I’d argue you should be stoked that you could be one of the stepping stones on their career journey.

Yep. Again, we- People are a career training, right? That’s… I don’t know. There’s a– [00:23:00] I’m not big on, like, legacy and I need my name to be carved in a building or something, but there is something about making a contribution to an industry I care deeply about. Amen. All right, let’s leave it there. I’ll make my takeaway here.

One, I’m feeling good about the direction of the candidate pool we have had in the last six to 12 months at CSP, and I’m feeling it trending in that direction. In fact, for the first time in a couple years, I’ve got just about a fully stocked fall internship program months in advance and feeling really good about that.

So that is nice. I don’t think that we’re gonna get back to a point where field-based internship experiences are mandated through colleges and universities. I just don’t see that as being the norm like it used to be, but that’s okay. And then lastly, to your point, don’t be afraid of people who you train and might leave and do good things.

Be afraid of the ones who you don’t train properly and never leave. Yes. Agreed. All right. Thanks for your time, Pete. Good chatting, man. Take care. See [00:24:00] ya.