So, how do you like working for Tim? I am in a good spot work-wise right now. For those that do not know, I opened my 4th location of Allegiate last November. It was a pretty rough start for me from a workload perspective.
I’m not going to complain, nor should you listen to me complain, but it was a fairly rough time. But fortunately, I am in a much better spot from a workload perspective. I have a group of young, hungry, reliable, and capable staff working for me, and we are hitting our stride. Now is where the feedback phase begins.
I have a deep connection with our customers at this current location. Working Monday-Friday 5 AM-8 PM, Saturday 7 AM-1 PM, and Sunday 8 AM-1 PM will forge a unprecdented amount of intimacy with your physical space and connection to your clients. To say I have a sense of something being wrong would be an understatement. Much like someone who has been struck by lightning creates a heightened intuition towards increased sensitivity to atmospheric pressure, I can feel sensations in the gym that are hard to explain.
The feedback comes flooding in various ways. As they say, this is not my first rodeo. Side note, went to an actual rodeo in Fort Worth, Texas recently, my advice is you tell everyone this is your first Rodeo to hear the joke “now you can say this ain’t my first rodeo!” I have learned to respond to this in various ways.
Feedback forms:
- Compliment sandwich: “love the new person….. but……
- “This is usually the right way to handle this. The expectation is there based on working with me for so long, so listening and appreciating the delivery is really important.
- Finding Weak Spots: “I was told by another coach to do it this way….”
- To me, this is the hardest. It is loaded with subtext. Are they actively looking for inconsistency or passively noticing it? The difference is immense. Actively seeking inconsistency is leverage. Passively noticing creates curiousity of who is saying and doing correctly.
- Quiety mutinay: showing up less, one-word answers, or straight avoidance.
- This is the feeling of abandonment. There is a connection created when you help alleviate doubt about something. A bond is strengthened when you can have conflict from a place of empathy. A relationship is built over time, and milestones in the gym represent a timeline of that relationship. When you have the opportunity to step away from working 14-hour days, that will inevitably come at the cost of not seeing someone as often as you once did.
That is what prompted “So, how do you like working for Tim”?
Control what you can control
I cannot control how people feel. I’ll be honest, we all have less control over how we think. But, and this is important, we can always make an effort to control SOPs and our space.
I have three filters I focus on daily as a gym owner:
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- Coaching
- Programming
- Facility
I turn the dial up and down on each of those filters all the time. Coaching is number 1, and this is constant work. Daily commitment to communicating, collaborating, workshopping, evaulating and giving feedback, and most importantly connecting. But that is no overnight thing and takes time to learn the nuance and instincts required to deal with people with their own lives.
Programming is seeing patterns. Where are we developing? Where are we not? Where are we getting acute injuries (this is logistics, btw)? Where are we getting chronic injuries (this is biased and agenda, btw)?
Lastly, and this is the point of this post, is the facility. I am a firm believer that a gym is an ecosystem. My dream with every space I create is for Charles Darwin to be reincarnated, come to my gym, give an approving head nod, a fist bump, and say, “Nice work, bro.”
Everything matters. What’s on the wall, what’s on the ground, what is put in one place, and what is put in another place. How intuitive something is versus how convenient something is is an important consideration. Finally, what is the throughput, which for us is people improving strength and body comp without getting hurt, and organizing your gym to facilitate that.
When my coach was asked how he liked working for me, he responded with “he likes to move stuff around a lot.” Anyone who has ever trained or worked at my facility knows that it’s my thing. There are hundreds of stories of me coming in massively early and moving heavy equipment around. I am in search of the holy grail of facility design: perfect balance, precision tools designed to elicit a certain outcome, and experience that is stress-free during work, but at the same time, the embodiment of tranquility between work.
All of that is window dressing to circumvent inevitable feedback. If you are experiencing a new coach in the same environment, you will feel abandoned. However, if the environment changes, now both the new coach and the existing client feel at ease. If I reorient the room to make it more efficient, the coach is perceived as the facilitator of that. If I clean more often because my schedule is freed up to do that, the perception of prestige is enhanced.
If you have worked for me and are reading this. I thank you for your time, your dedication, and most of all your patience with me as a leader. I often tell athletes that transition to coaching – do not confuse being good at something with knowing how to lead. It is one of the universe’s greatest ironies that the people who are most capable of doing something have the hardest time explaining how they did it.