You started your own CrossFit Box. Yeah! Now, you’re drowning and out of time… You coach all or most of the classes, you do the programming, you do the financials (running bills, cards, etc), the marketing, the member outreach. You’re not getting enough time with your family, you’re not getting enough time for yourself, you’re not getting enough time to GROW your business instead of just maintaining it.
What can you do? What can you do to make your life manageable and put your focus where it needs to be – on building your business while enjoying some stability in your life? Below are some suggestions.
- Know what you do, what you don’t want to do and what others could do to help
- Identify good, trustworthy people and delegate
- Automate your box
Know what you do each day
One of the concrete necessities in any box owner’s life is to delegate jobs to others as soon as it’s feasible. Fire yourself from the smaller jobs (cleaning, minor admin, social media, etc) so you can focus on the big stuff like creating relationships, building programs and expanding your business.
Action steps:
- List everything you do each do and how much time you spend on each item. An hour reaching out to new or current athletes? Two hours cleaning? Three hours coaching? An hour marketing? Be detailed and thorough.
- Now, go through that list and highlight the things that you don’t want to do and/or what others could do.
Identify and utilize awesome people
Once you’ve identified all the things you do and are responsible for, begin to notate those things that other people can accomplish. Your goal should be to do ONLY those things that you can do. The rest? Delegate them. This won’t happen overnight, but should be the goal. People are your greatest asset. Find ones you can trust. Invest in them and provide what they need to be successful and you’ll have them a part of your team for the long term.
Action steps:
- Go through your mental rolodex of your athletes and/or trusted friends. Identify those with great personalities who are trustworthy and love being at the box. Think about which tasks on the list you created in Step 1 you could pass to one or some of them. Contact them and, if they’re willing, do it! Discount their membership for hours worked or compensate in some other manner.
- Create coaches. Find good personalities and make them good coaches. Their personality is KEY to their (and the box’s) success. Remember, they are your ambassadors when you’re not there. You can take someone with a great personality (positive, outgoing, loves CrossFit) and make them a good coach. You can’t take a good coach and give them a great personality. This is HUGE. Your athletes want to be coached by supportive, knowledgeable and positive people. Coaches are a box’s backbone. Create a cadre of good coaches and you can focus more on being the CEO.
- Create an admin assistant and a member experience specialist (could be same person). This is someone who helps reconcile bills (expired credit cards, missed payments, etc) or files paperwork and keeps the admin train running. A Member Experience Specialist is someone who follows up on leads or new members through a phone call and/or email to see how they’re doing and if they need anything. They keep track of birthdays, births, anniversaries, etc.. They’re the ones who reach out to make sure members know they’re loved. A very important person.
Automate your box
This is important. So many box owner’s do things manually that can be fairly easily automated. Make your life, and the life of those who are helping you, easier. Automate as much in your business as you can.
Action steps:
- If you don’t already have it, get an automated member management system (Front Desk, Wodify, ZenPlanner, etc.) that will do your card processing and automated member outreach for you. Whatever can be done efficiently without a constant human hand, do it. Automation saves you tons of time and energy.
These are just a few suggestions that can help an Owner from overloading/burning out.
A good CrossFit community is strong and supportive. You don’t have to (nor should you) do it on your own. Give others the opportunity to succeed and surprise you and free up your time to grow your business. ☺
This guest post was written by the most awesome Don Moss. Don and his wife, Tracy, are the owners of CrossFit Apogee in Riverview, Florida. Don also is one of 321Go Project’s business mentors. To know him, is to love him. He is a retired Air Force officer with 23 years of service who found CrossFit in Iraq and was overwhelmed with a desire to share the methodology and community with anyone and everyone. Following his retirement, Don started his affiliate out of his garage and has never looked back.
Along his CrossFit journey, Don has developed a deep passion for helping other gym owners succeed and thrive, while avoiding the standard pitfalls and mistakes that are so common when opening a business. “Taking care of one another is the best part of this community, from fellow athlete to fellow business owner. Anything is possible with the help of others.”
In his free time, Don devotes himself to spending time with his wife and kids.