As a gym owner, you wear a lot of hats, some days more than others. The last thing you need to do is add another hat. As a gym owner running three businesses, I understand how overwhelming it can feel to think about being involved in the day to day of your nutrition program. 

The great news is, you don’t have to be! 

After working with over 700 gyms around the world to implement nutrition programs, it has become evident what the gym owner role should be in a nutrition program. 

Gym owners who are implementing these three key roles are wildly successful, while those who don’t implement these roles are not as successful. 

The first thing you need to do is identify who would be a good fit to help you run the program. When hiring a nutrition coach, I always look for personality first. You need someone that is positive, compassionate, and most importantly, someone who will follow-through. Nutrition coaching is about accountability, and you need a coach who will provide that level of support to your clients. 

Once you have a great fit, and the program is off and running, you need to implement these three key roles. 

 

Here are 3 Key Roles A Gym Owner Needs To Execute To Grow A Wildly Successful Nutrition Program:

Regular Meetings

How often do you meet with your staff? Do they know your vision and expectations? What are their goals for the program? What if you have more than one staff involved with the delivery of a service, for instance multiple nutrition coaches? 

Setting up weekly meetings is so important when you are building a nutrition program. 

As an owner, you need to be on the same page with your nutrition program, which is why we require gym owners to go through the training for HSN Mentoring. What happens if your coach leaves? You don’t want your nutrition program to leave with that coach.   

You want to ensure your coaches are happy in the role and that they want to grow with the program. 

When meeting with coaches, I start by asking these three questions:

1. What do you love most about your nutrition coach role right now?
2. What issues or gaps in the system are you seeing that I’m not seeing?
3. What opportunities do you see that I might not see?

Once your program is up and running, you shouldn’t be involved with the day-to-day, but you do need to be involved with evaluating your program. 

Next, you need to focus on the metrics. 

 

Assessing KPIs 

The numbers don’t lie. By identifying numbers that you need to keep an eye on and having your coaches send reports of those numbers to you, you can easily see the “health” of your nutrition program. 

Here are a few key performance indicators for a nutrition program:

• New leads
• New sign-ups
• Number of ongoing clients 
• Number of drops
• Monthly revenue

By looking at these numbers, you can identify where your focus needs to be: marketing, sales, retention, or expansion. 

These numbers apply for all programs in a fitness business. 

You should be reviewing these numbers with your coach at monthly meetings.

Growth & Expansion

What if you are adding ten new nutrition clients each month, but your nutrition coach can only handle 40 clients? Within four months, you would need to have another coach to support the growth of your program. 

If you weren’t tracking KPIs, you would miss that. 

On the other hand, when I look at businesses that have sky-rocketed their nutrition programs, they have expanded into corporate wellness. 

We have an entire training process on how to get started, how to package your offerings, and how to initiate partnerships with companies to offer nutrition services. Nicole Aucoin even spoke at the TwoBrain Summit last year on how to do this and had a gym owner who built her program using HSN come up and tell everyone how she used the HSN platform to bring an additional $80,000 in revenue on corporate nutrition programs. 

While gym owners do not need to be involved in the day to day operations of a nutrition program, you must be meeting with coaches regularly. 

If you are using the HSN Mentoring platform, jump on a mentoring call. We work with gym owners and coaches to align the vision and ensure everyone is on the same page. 

 

More Free Help

On the Grow Your Nutrition Business Podcast, Nicole interviewed two successful gym owners who have built their programs using the HSN platform. 

Episode #10 Diversifying Revenue Streams & Empowering Your Staff with Kevin Beamon

Episode #18: Building Nutrition Into The Foundation a Cobra Command CrossFit

 

You can listen to these episodes on stitcher, apple podcasts and spotify.