When starting a business, it’s extremely hard to separate your emotions from your work. You pour your life into it. Your time, your money, and all of your energy is spent on your gym.
Steve Jobs said, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” I can’t agree with this more, although I have learned that certain emotions can negatively impact your business:
Negativity
A negative attitude is contagious, especially coming from an owner or coach. Imagine a coach that is notoriously negative, engages in gym gossip, or calls in “sick” often. That sort of behavior spreads through the gym, creating a toxic environment for your members. These sort of negative emotions and behaviors appear to your members as poor customer service.
Stress
As a gym owner, we deal with a lot of day-to-day stress. Retention, clean floors, programming, workouts… While stress can lead to positive changes, it can easily lead to a negative gym environment. For example, venting to members starts a downward spiral of anxiety in the group. Stress can be hard to manage, especially when you get that dreaded “I need to cancel my membership” email. Stress can blind us and make us focus on losing one member versus gaining two.
There’s good stress and bad stress. Managing the bad while leveraging the good can help drive a solid gym.
Instead of taking the emotion out of your business, you can learn when it’s appropriate to make emotional decisions and when to make logical ones. Let’s call this knowledge, “Emotional Agility.”
1. You need metrics and analysis. Actual hard numbers can put any situation in perspective. Keep track of everything (in your booking and billing software, accounting software, or a spreadsheet) so you can clearly see how each aspect of the gym is performing. This can help you determine where you’re excelling and where you need to improve. We track literally everything.
2. Look at each problem from an outsider’s perspective. If I’m good at one thing, it’s asking my trusted mentors to look at a situation. I have my husband as my co-owner; my go-to business mentors within 321GoProject, and my brother, who is in the military. Each one of them offers an outside perspective on the situation at hand; which makes it easier for me to see what is best for my gym, minus my personal emotions that can come into play.
3. Analyze previous decisions. Look at all of your business decisions–where have you succeeded and failed? What factors played a role in success or failure? If emotions were present, how did they affect the outcome of the situation? Did your SWOT analysis help with outcomes?
4. Take a break. Emotions run high when you’re feeling pressured–say, when a coach makes a mistake or a client cancels their membership. To ensure your emotions don’t negatively effect your reaction/decision to a situation, take a break. If the decision doesn’t need to be made right away, give yourself some time to think about it. I have my dogs, Nora and Allie, at the gym daily. When I feel emotional about anything business related, I take them out for a 400m lap around the gym to clear my head.
You don’t have to take emotion out of your business.
Focus on improving your Emotional Agility. You are invested in your clients, and truly care about their success; that’s good. But consistency makes your business better, and tracking the result of your decisions makes future choices easier.
This post was written by Lindsey Marcelli, co owner of CrossFit Eminence with her husband Kris.