I know two gym owners.
Actually I know many gym owners but this story is about two of them. You get what I’m saying.
One is named John and the other is named James.
(I wish I was making these names up just for the nursery rhyme ease of it all but those are actually their names!)
John and James are really similar. Both are smart and know their stuff when it comes to training. Both are really hard workers. Both have a lot of empathy and charisma.
You talk to either of these guys at a party and you’ll be signing up for a membership to their gym faster than a 13 year old buys Taylor Swift tickets.
And while these guys do run slightly different gym models (James runs small group strength and conditioning while John owns a CrossFit gym) they both should be uber successful.
But only one of them is.
James’ gym brought in $1.9 million last year. And while that may not seem like a lot compared to Amazon or Goldman Sachs or even a ‘big box gym’ like Equinox or Planet Fitness, for a single location gym in a suburban town this is huge revenue.
John on the other hand is struggling to keep his doors open.
As a gym owner myself who would not only like to keep my doors open but also thrive like James, I got really curious as to why two smart, driven and well-intentioned guys could diverge so drastically when it came to the success of their businesses.
Once I eliminated some minor differences that I ultimately deemed insignificant, a particular character trait punched me in the face harder than a cranky Mike Tyson.
While both these guys were great at training, initially neither of them knew much about business. Which is not surprising. Many a great trainer has opened a gym hoping that their passion for training would compensate for their complete lack of business acumen.
But here is where it gets interesting.
Both guys did ultimately seek out help with their business from experts. The difference is that James actually listened and implemented that advice. John thought he knew better.
To put it more simply, James was coachable. John was not.
It’s completely fine not to know everything. If you are a coach by trade, it’s not reasonable to think that you are also going to be awesome at bookkeeping and marketing and understanding the tax code and the hundreds of other things that come with operating a business.
However, if you want to be successful and grow you do need to gain an understanding of these things. You need to put the proper systems in place and build a team around who has a more intimate knowledge of the things that you lack.
The exact same thing can be said for training itself.
Most training and nutrition principles seem like common sense from the outside. And, to be clear, many are. But unless you have some expertise in the field, putting together a program that is comprehensive and progressive and gets you from point a to point z is typically much better done with the help of a caring, experienced expert.
But even an expert can only provide so much. You must follow that path by being coachable.
I often compare this to doing your taxes. Every US citizen has the right to do and file their own taxes. But no one who is good with money does. They hire someone who will get them the greatest return while also keeping them out of jail.
This is by far the smartest approach. Take your time to build your financial (or fitness) team and then be willing to be coached by them. To implement, iterate and learn. It’s the key to having the business or body that you want.
You may not need a particular expert or coach forever. Once you learn what they have to offer it is completely normal to move on and up the ladder. But it is pretty rare to be the person with nothing to learn. Figure out the hole in your game that is holding you back and find the next coach to fill it (that sounded a lot more perverse than I meant it to!).
Last I heard from John he was doubling down on his strategy. Figuring out how he could just cram a couple of more Echo Bikes into his facility as if that was going to solve his problems.
James, on the other hand, continues to tweak his systems and follow the advice of his business coach that he hired three years ago. Not only are his training methods impeccable, his gym is actually successful. He realized long ago that without having a sustainable business, he would struggle to help people. He had to put on his own oxygen mask before helping the person in the seat next to him.
If you are struggling to accomplish anything, whether that is upping your fitness level, improving your mental health or your business, lay your ego aside, find someone who can help you and be coachable.
It can be very hard to see the way forward until you are standing on the shoulders of someone else.