I just got back from a business event in Mexico, and I’ll be honest… I walked out feeling like a minnow. Scratch that, a piece of phytoplankton floating in an ocean of whales.
Multiple people on stage were doing over a million dollars a month, and the most “broke” speaker was somewhere around $800K a month. So if you want gym business advice from people who’ve actually built something huge (instead of a goo-roo who’s never signed a lease), here’s what I brought home: seven lessons from 8-figure entrepreneurs, translated for the independent gym owner. The short version is the 10-member test, the best person writes the system, fire your donkeys, contracts are for the bad times, think in units, post the wins, and grade your team on skill and will.
Kyle and I broke all of it down on the podcast too, if you’d rather watch than read.
Why Gym Business Advice From 8-Figure Owners Applies to Your Gym
Look, you might be thinking “cool story, G.R., but I’ve got 140 members and a leaky roof.” Fair. Here’s the thing, though… one of the speakers was a kid I met a couple years ago at this same event when he was just getting started. He’s British, he can’t legally have a drink when he’s in the States, and he’s now doing a million bucks a month.
The lessons that got him (and everyone else on that stage) there weren’t fancy. Most of them are things you’ve heard before, which is kind of the point. As Leila Hormozi puts it, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. And yes, I practice what I preach here. We coach gym owners for a living, so it’d be pretty hypocritical if I wasn’t getting coached myself.
Lesson 1: The 10-Member Test (What to Fix First in Your Gym)
Most entrepreneurs don’t have a work problem. They have a “what the heck should I actually be working on” problem, and one speaker boiled it down to the cleanest bottleneck test I’ve heard in a while:
- Could you handle 10 more members this month? (In the gym world you can probably push that to 15, depending on your model.) If the answer’s no, you don’t have a marketing problem. You’ve got a coaching and capacity problem, and that gets fixed first.
- If yes, do you have enough leads to get those 10 people? If not, getting leads is your job right now.
- If you’ve got the leads, it’s your close rate.
I’d add one wrinkle to that last step, because “just close more people” can be an oversimplification. Meta’s changed a ton, and we’ve moved our clients toward optimizing for lead quality (landing pages plus full end-to-end CAPI), so the ads learn from what happens further down the funnel instead of chasing the cheapest lead. Before you blame your sales skills, check whether your marketing is feeding you people worth closing, and then check your follow-up.
Then look hard at the close rate itself. In the gym space, if you’re not closing 66% or more of the people who show up, you need some sales work (our gym sales technique that turns cold leads into lifers is a good place to start). Kyle’s advice is to split it into lead-to-book, book-to-show, and show-to-close, so you know exactly which leg of the stool is wobbly. For what it’s worth, most owners we talk to have the marketing problem. Their fulfillment is good (or trending that way), and they just need more butts in the seats.
Lesson 2: The Best Person Writes the System
This one sounds stupid-obvious until you notice how often we get it backwards. The fitness business coaching industrial complex loves to tell you to hire an admin, have them learn the thing, and let them write all your SOPs. Maybe. But if they aren’t the best person at that thing, you’ve just built your whole business on the B-minus version of it.
If you’re the best coach, you build the session standard. If you write the best billing text, check-in message, or “hey, we miss you” reactivation note, you write that system. Your head coach executes from there, and your version becomes the rubric they grade against. Somebody at the event put it this way: an hour spent building a good system now saves you 10x that time later, maybe 100x.
How to Write Gym SOPs Fast (Without Losing a Weekend)
Kyle asked me the obvious follow-up on the show: “I’m swamped, my team has more capacity than I do, any hacks?” Yep, and they kill pretty much every excuse.
- Anything on a computer: record a Loom (pay for the AI version) and have it turn the recording into an SOP. Toss that into Claude or another AI tool if you want a clean, editable doc.
- Coaching: film your sh*t. Start with the movements you program every single week, not the fancy single-leg whatever that shows up once a quarter.
- New trainers: you have to train them anyway, so clip on a couple of cheap wireless mics and film that first onboarding. The next hire just watches it.
- Where it lives: keep it simple. Our first onboarding was unlisted YouTube videos on a free Google Site. A lot of our clients now use the course builder that comes built into our GoHighLevel setup.
Now you’ve got a video version for the visual learners, a written version for quick reference, and AI will even timestamp the video so people can jump to the part they need.
Lesson 3: Fire Your Donkeys
The British kid’s biggest trajectory-changer? A while back he fired, in his words, f***ing everybody, because the culture wasn’t right. It reminded me of an old Dave Ramsey line: racehorses don’t want to run with donkeys.
The way it was laid out on stage, you’ve basically got three kinds of team members:
- Stallions: hyper, driven, and they just want to run.
- Workhorses: steady role players who won’t win the race for you but do good work every day.
- Donkeys: if you’ve got one, they need to go.
I deal with this more than I’d like to admit, and it’s almost never easy. But your good people see what your bad people get away with, and that rots everything around it. Netflix did a version of this early on (kept the high performers, let the rest go), and it worked out ok for them. If it’s the conversation itself that scares you, steal our 3-step framework for tough staff conversations.
Lesson 4: Gym Partnership Advice (Contracts Are for the Bad Times)
We talked about this on our episode with Max a few weeks back, and it came up again here. You write the contract while everybody’s happy, so when the bad times come, the problem’s a lot easier to solve. Kyle lived this one: his first gym was a partnership with nothing on paper, and it got uncomfortable fast. (Max learned it the expensive way too, which you can read about in his full gym survival story.)
The operating agreements I’ve used spell out how we’ll value the business, what happens in the “D” scenarios (death, disinterest, drugs, delinquency), and that we’ll split the cost of an outside appraiser if we can’t agree on a number.
What is a shotgun clause?
The guy running the event (another 8-figure entrepreneur) recommends a shotgun clause in every partnership. If one partner wants out, they name a price to buy the other partner out, and the other partner can flip it and buy THEM out at that exact same price.
Say you and I own a gym worth $2 million, 50/50. If I offer you $500K for your half, you can turn around and buy my half for $500K instead. Lowballing gets real dangerous real fast, which keeps everybody honest. (Not legal advice, obviously. Run it by your attorney before it goes in an agreement.)
Lesson 5: Think in Units and Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing
As your gym gets more successful, the “opportunities” start rolling in. Want to invest in my software company? Hey, gym owner, I’ve got this thing you should get in on. The host said his worst deals were pie-in-the-sky software plays with no real plan for cash flow, plus anything that wasn’t truly passive.
His rule is to treat side investments like gambling. Decide how much of your net worth you’re ok gambling with (say $100K), then pick a unit size (say $10K). If a deal doesn’t fit in one unit, you pass. He picked that up from a guy worth hundreds of millions who still wouldn’t go past his unit, even when the extra money was a rounding error to him.
And the line that got repeated by multiple speakers: the number one thing you can do for your net worth as a business owner is focus on the main business.
What is your gym actually worth?
Here’s where that focus pays off. Business valuations typically run off a multiple of EBITDA (for most gym owners, just read that as profit), not revenue. So no, your gym that just did $300K isn’t worth $3 million because some software company sold for 10x revenue. Congratulations, I love you, but you are so wrong.
But we’re now seeing gyms hit seven-figure profit numbers, and that’s a real business that real money pays attention to. Several of the speakers at our own upcoming event make their income only from their gyms and are in seven-figure profit territory. If they’d chased five side hustles instead, I guarantee the gyms (and their net worth) would’ve suffered. If you want the honest math, here’s how much a gym owner can actually make.
Lesson 6: Post the Wins (Even the Tiny Ones)
We’ve got a Slack channel just for client wins, and one of the 8-figure owners on stage said the same thing: post every win, even the small ones. Agency life can feel pretty thankless (it’s easy to become the scapegoat for every problem in a client’s business), and it’d be seriously demotivating for our team if all they ever saw were the fires. Not every win is a million-dollar day. Sometimes it’s a client booking their first couple of consults after launching ads, and that counts too.
For your gym, set up a wins channel wherever your team already talks and get everybody in the habit of posting. If you’re still doing all the sales yourself, it keeps you going, and it shows your trainers they’re actually making a difference.
Lesson 7: The Skill/Will Grid for Grading Your Gym Team
Not a brand new idea, but a really useful one. Put skill (how good they are at the job) on one axis and will (motivation, values, culture fit) on the other:
- High skill, high will: keep them, promote them, pour your energy into them. These are your stallions.
- Low skill, low will: let them go, ideally right after you finish reading this.
- High skill, low will: the toughest one. They’re good at the job but not living the values, and they can be the bad apple that spoils the bunch. Have the crucial conversations and try to win them over first. If clear expectations don’t change anything, they probably need to go.
- High will, low skill: this one hurts, because you root so hard for these folks. Coach them up, and if the skill still doesn’t come, you may not have a spot for them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the best business advice for gym owners who want to grow?
Find your real bottleneck before you do anything else. Ask whether you could handle 10 more members this month. If not, fix capacity first. If yes, check whether you have enough leads, and then check your close rate.
What’s a good close rate for a gym?
In our experience, if you’re closing less than about 66% of the people who show up for a consult, sales is likely your bottleneck. Track lead-to-book and book-to-show too, so you know where the drop-off really is.
How do I write SOPs for my gym quickly?
Record a Loom of anything computer-based and let AI turn it into a written SOP. For coaching, film your most-programmed movements and your first trainer onboarding, then reuse that footage for every new hire.
What is a shotgun clause in a gym partnership?
It’s a buyout mechanism. One partner names a price, and the other partner can either sell at that price or buy the first partner out at the same price, which discourages lowball offers.
How are gyms valued when you sell?
Usually as a multiple of EBITDA, which for most gym owners is close to their profit. Revenue alone doesn’t set the price.
One last thing: we’re bringing back our own live event in San Antonio the weekend of January 22, 2027 (grab your early bird tickets here), with speakers who are operators, not influencers (James Pratt, who built 900 members out of a wedding tent, is one of them). And if you want a marketing partner that’ll tell you straight which of these bottlenecks is yours, grab a (yes, actually) free 30-day trial with us here.
Keep reading
- Forget the “5 Whys”: The Gym Sales Technique That Turns Cold Leads Into Lifers
- Gym Business Coaching: A 3-Step Framework for Tough Staff & Client Conversations
- He Opened a Gym in February 2020 and Survived 18 Months Locked Down: Max’s Real Story
- How Much Can a Gym Owner Actually Make? (Plus the Questions You’re Too Afraid to Ask)