The number one reason why nutrition programs fail is that they don’t have the “right” person as the nutrition coach.
As a gym owner, you have a responsibility to support your team, which includes your nutrition coach. Consistently having a staff meeting with your nutrition coach and providing them with the support they need to be successful will drastically increase the growth of your program.
Your nutrition coach needs the same support from you as the rest of your staff.
Here are 4 Ways To Support Your Nutrition Program as the Gym Owner:
1. Buy Into The Program Yourself
Last week, I had a gym owner who is running our program ask me if he could do distance coaching with one of our nutrition coaches. I understand why he was asking, he wanted to share his experience with his members. The truth is every gym owner should be participating in their nutrition program, with their nutrition coach.
My recommendation was for him to sign up as a client and work with his nutrition coach, document the process and share his experience with his member and his following. He agreed and is now a nutrition client of his program.
As a gym owner, you lead by example.
Your clients will go where to tell them to go. If you share your experience working with your nutrition coach it is only going to increase interest in your program.
2. Staff Support of Your Nutrition Program
It is highly recommended that your staff participates in your nutrition program. The gold standard is allowing them to pay for the program at the cost that you pay your nutrition coach. If you follow the 4/9 model (from Chris Cooper) then the staff member would pay 44.4% of the original cost to work with your nutrition coach.
Whether your staff participates as nutrition clients or not, it is vital to the success of your program that they understand what your nutrition program is about, how to explain it to clients and most importantly how someone gets started. It is your responsibility as the owner to ensure your staff is on the same page.
3. Build Your Nutrition Coach As The Expert Running Your Program
You want your nutrition coach to be seen as an expert. Email content should be coming from them consistently about nutrition. They should be making videos about nutrition. They should be commenting on social media and asking questions regarding nutrition. When developing a nutrition coach role, ensure that your nutrition coach understands that nutrition coaching goes well beyond in-person visits.
This week, a gym owner told me during a free call that the nutrition program at his gym is seen as Coach Steve’s nutrition program. You want the program to be branded under your main umbrella and the nutrition coach is running the nutrition program.
This will make it easier to scale as you add more nutrition coaches to your staff and continue if that nutrition coach moves on or takes a break from coaching one day.
4. Know Your Metrics
It’s important to know your metrics. Here are some key numbers we look at with nutrition programs:
- Total nutrition revenue and the percentage within the business
- Percentage of nutrition revenue from hybrid memberships vs stand-alone nutrition programs
- The retention rate of ongoing nutrition clients
- Number of new clients each month
- Conversion after a challenge to ongoing nutrition coaching
- Additional revenue from partnerships and corporate wellness opportunities
Nutrition revenue should be at least 20 percent of your business revenue. If you are building corporate wellness programs it could increase to upwards of 40 percent of your business revenue. (If you are coming to the TwoBrain Summit, I will be presenting on this!)
If you are using HSN Mentoring, we highly recommend that owners jump on mentoring calls to help keep your nutrition coaches accountable. You should set up meetings with your nutrition coach regularly and use the income tracker sheets to track your program’s growth.
If you notice that you are adding 5 new clients each month, it’s important to know when you will need to add another nutrition coach to support the growth of your program.
It is now required that gym owners go through the training process when signing up for HSN Mentoring along with the nutrition coach. Gym owners need to know what the program entails, what is expected from the nutrition coach and how to support the growth of the program.
I have heard too many times, “My nutrition program left when my coach left.” Don’t let that happen to your business. Make sure you are supporting your nutrition program and coach.
If you are a gym owner looking to take your nutrition program to the next level, I want to help. Book a free call today.
