Hire these 3 people? What if you’re broke, just starting out, scared you won’t be able to pay them? I get it. But at some point you will be ready.
When you first start your training business you wear all hats. You’re the trainer, the marketing manager, the customer service manager, and the janitor. You may be lucky enough to hire a bookkeeper early or not.
You train the clients, create the group programs, set the rates, make the phone calls, respond to emails, create the “flyers,” or the graphics, you start the Facebook business page, you make the posts… and if you’re in a brick-and-mortar facility you clean the bathrooms, and vacuum, order equipment, check it for use, pay the light and electric bills… its all you.
I’m tired just typing that! And yet, it’s what I did as I was a trainer starting in 1987 for myself for years. The error I made was doing all of that even as a manager of a large growing program. Having done it all again 30 years later when I transitioned from being a face-to-face trainer and director of programs to an online business for four years ago I’m sharing the biggest insights with you about who to hire, how to hire, and fiascos and time-wasting processes… so you can learn, and earn, from my mistakes.
This is a big topic! Honestly, it’s huge. It’s not about how to write a job description, how to conduct an interview, or whether to use Indeed.com or Craig’s list. It’s about really finding three key people for your business. When you realize the need for these people you’ll start assessing who you’re hiring so very differently.
Hire as Soon as You Can
If you’re going solo right now don’t click away because this is for you too. I still spend time wearing each of these hats sometimes. But the difference is now I know which hat I’m wearing so I’m sticking to my business mission much better and doing each task better. Hire these 3 people for your fitness business when you’re ready and you’ll grow exponentially faster.
Hire these 3 people as a part of your business plan. If you’re running your own business solo right now, even if you can’t hire right now, or think you don’t want to hire, you still want to know when you’re wearing which hat.
Roles are Not Positions
Why hire these 3 people?
It took a long time for me to truly understand these roles. It’s so much faster to jump in and hire for positions, like the ones I mentioned earlier. It’s obvious you need to market, advertise, create copy for blogs, articles, and emails, answer phone calls and emails. You need to have someone handling accounting, designing your website, handling the customer relationship management. It doesn’t matter what kind of a fitness business you have, online or offline you need all of those. You may also need a sales manager a janitor, and a maintenance manager, depending on your business model.
So it’s easy to make the mistake of hiring someone to fill a position. You have an idea of the tasks that you want them to do. They’re tasks you don’t want to do, can’t do, or don’t have the time to do any more. So you hire someone to do those tasks.
But there’s another layer.
Whether your business is tiny and you, or it’s big, or it’s just growing the sooner you think about these roles the better.
Define these three roles. Whether you, or someone else is in them, you’ll be able to move forward faster and avoid pitfalls of crossing the boundaries. Hire these 3 people as fast as you can once you identify them.
#1 Visionary
You’re the visionary if you’ve started a business. You see the direction you want your business to go and what your through lines are. That is your mission and the foundation of your decisions. The vision is bigger than a mission statement though.
I realized very recently that someone I originally hired as an implementer was doing more integrator work. I wanted to check in with him and be sure that he was happy with the way working together had evolved. When I had a discussion with him about this, he thought he was a visionary!
That was an eye opener! In his own business he may be, but if you are not the visionary in your own business, something is wrong!
In our case, it may have been a language gap. We work well together.
#2 Integrator
This is like your project manager. This person can often do the work but shouldn’t. Their role is to coordinate all the people who will do the job. The integrator determines the steps, the timeline and the deadlines so it all gets done.
If for instance you’re looking at Thanksgiving week specials or New Year’s launches then months before the integrator is pulling together graphic designers, copywriters, and webpage designers to have it all ready to promote the weeks and months before you want the class full or the emails and social posts to go out.
The reality is if you’re trying to do all of this yourself – on top of everything else you do as superman or wonder woman – something is going to fall through the cracks and not happen on time. That makes your revenue stream much smaller than it should be and let’s down anyone else on your team depending on you.
#3 Implementer
You’ll have more than one of these. I’m a solo entrepreneur for the most part with a six-figure business and I couldn’t do it alone. I don’t design websites or new pages. I don’t set up e-commerce myself or the integration of my shopping cart with my website and CRM. I write the books but I don’t layout the books or ebooks I create.
I’ve got a tech team who take care of my website, and integrate all the behind-the-scenes tools. Fortunately, my integrator can dance at visionary and implement both. I hire quick jobs for podcast production and graphics on Fiverr.com (and you should too!)
Don’t just hire a warm body that wants work to be an implementer unless they are skilled at the task, have experience, and can provide examples of prior jobs. You teaching someone else to do their job and babysitting them takes more time than doing the job.
There you have it. Hire these 3 people for your fitness business and you’ll be farther ahead faster. You’ll compliment each other instead of overlapping. Each role is super important. One is not better than the next. It would be terrible if everyone on your team was a visionary. It would also be terrible if everyone were an implementer or integrator.
