For the last two years we’ve averaged helping a new gym open every week (we’re really good at helping folks scale to multiple locations lol). The biggest driver of success or failure? The person the owner hires to run the gym. Some call the position a GM/General Manager, others a facility leader or director of training, but regardless of what you call the seat the hire is absolutely the most make-or-break decision you’ll make with a new location. That said, let’s talk about hiring a gym manager the right way, because most gym owner/operators and franchise owner/investors are winging it, and it’s costing them months of pain and tens of thousands of dollars every time they get it wrong.
The short answer: before you post anything, you need to know exactly what qualities you’re hiring for, then build a process that exposes those qualities as early as possible. Everything below is how we actually do this, and how we coach our clients to do it.
What Does a Gym Manager Actually Do?
People call this role a lot of things: GM, Director of Training, facility leader, DOT. For the rest of this post, let’s just say GM. The specifics depend on your model and where your business is right now, but in most of the small group personal training or semi-private facilities we work with, the GM is doing some combination of these things:
- Managing other trainers (could be one person, could be a few)
- Handling sales and follow-up with new prospects
- Tracking KPIs and reporting to you
- Managing lower-level contractors (cleaning crew, etc.)
- Accountability conversations or check-in calls with members
- Some amount of coaching on the floor, especially early on
The mix shifts over time. During a pre-sale, it’s almost all sales. Once you’ve got a full training staff, the management load goes up and the floor coaching goes down. Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure that you tailor to where your gym actually is, not where you wish it was.
One thing worth saying out loud: you might never hire a GM if you plan to be the operator forever and that’s totally okay. But if you’re thinking about a second location, or you just want a different relationship with your business, this role is the key that unlocks that door.
What Should You Pay a Gym Manager?
This is where a lot of owners either lowball the role and lose good candidates, or overpay on base salary with no performance incentive and end up with someone coasting. Neither is great.
The compensation structure I love, and this is stolen directly from our pal Connor Flahive, is a base salary plus tiered bonuses tied to active member count (or gross revenue). Here’s why that self-balancing KPI matters so much: if you only incentivize new sales, your GM ignores retention. If you only incentivize churn reduction, they’ll want to overstaff you until your bank account is bleeding to death. Active member count forces them to play offense and defense at the same time.
On base salary, market rates vary a lot by city, so do your own research on PayScale or Glassdoor. Roughly speaking, we see bases in the $50K to $70K range for most independent gym markets. With a fully dialed facility hitting strong member numbers, a GM in this structure can realistically earn around $90K total. That’s a genuinely good job in the fitness industry, and it should be, because it’s a genuinely hard job.
Track the bonus monthly, pay it quarterly. If they’re above the member threshold all three months, they get the full bonus. One month below? Two months of the bonus. It keeps things honest without being punitive.
Skip the pure sales commission structure. It sounds clean, but it creates a GM who’s laser-focused on closing and couldn’t care less about what happens after the credit card is swiped. Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the behavior.
Where to Find Candidates for a Gym Manager Role
These are tough roles to fill, and “unicorn” is not an exaggeration. Depending on the roles you specifically need to fill, you might be looking for someone who can sell, manage people, coach a little, and genuinely care about your members. That’s a lot to ask. Here’s where we actually find them:
- Your own team: Someone who already knows your system, your culture, and your members. This is the smoothest path if you’ve got the right person.
- Your network: Ask around. Sometimes clients have worked with great managers at other gyms and can make an intro.
- Job postings: LinkedIn and Indeed both work. Pay to play. A hiring funnel is basically a sales funnel where you pay the person at the end instead of the other way around. Don’t go cheap on the distribution.
- Headhunting: This is my favorite move if you’re having trouble. Go on LinkedIn, find people managing the big franchise locations in your market, and message them. Don’t say “I want to poach you.” Say, “Hey, I know you’re in this world. We’re hiring a facility leader. Do you know anyone who might be interested?” They know themselves very well, and if they’re tired of their current gig, that message lands perfectly.
Staffing agencies? I haven’t heard great things from anyone in the gym space on that one, so I’d skip it unless you’re truly stuck.
The 4 C’s Framework for Hiring a Gym Manager
Before you run a single interview, you need to know what you’re looking for. For any sales-adjacent, KPI-driven role like this one, I filter hard for what I call the 4 C’s. You don’t have to steal these, but you DO need to identify the specific qualities you’re looking for before you start trying to hire for the role.
Here’s what I look for:
1. Coachability
This isn’t just about having a good attitude when you give feedback. It’s about having the ability to actually implement on said feedback. We’ve all had someone who smiles and nods and then does the exact same thing the next week. That’s not coachable, that’s just polite (and frankly, a future headache). You’re looking for both the humility to receive feedback and the ability to change based on it.
2. Competitiveness
These roles are scoreboard-driven. You want someone who treats your KPIs like an absolute blood oath to you and your business. If they don’t have that intrinsic drive to win, the hard stretches of the job will grind them down fast, and you’ll be replacing them in three months.
3. Consistency
Following up on leads, getting rejected, calling someone back after they told you to get lost, doing that week after week… it’s genuinely a freaking grind. You want someone who doesn’t need a pep talk every Monday to do the work. Consistency isn’t glamorous, but it’s what separates the people who last from the people who flame out.
4. Care
The relationship with any company worth their salt isn’t over once the credit card is swiped. Your GM needs a deep, genuine give-a-damn for the people your gym is built to serve. Gym’s depend on recurring revenue… not the first payment… which means your GM’s job is to earn that recurring trust every single month. Prospects can smell when someone doesn’t actually care about them. It kills close rates, and it kills retention.
Depending on your gym, you might add qualities to this list. Heavy management load? Add patience with a team and experience having tough conversations. Big coaching component? You’re screening for that too. Know yourself well enough to know what you can train versus what you need to hire for on day one.
How to Actually Expose Those Qualities in Your Hiring Process
Identifying the qualities is step one. Step two is building a process that surfaces them early, before you’ve wasted six weeks (or six months… yuck) on the wrong person.
Require a video application. I don’t look at resumes without a video submission. An unlisted YouTube link or a Loom takes five minutes to record. If someone won’t do it, they don’t care enough about the role for me to care about looking at their application. It replaces the old five-minute phone screen and tells you about personality, communication, and basic effort all at once.
Have them do the job first. For sales, give them a mini script and a simple role-play scenario. Give them the answers to the test beforehand. Your worst case is they’re talented and didn’t look at it and still knocked it out of the park. Your best case is they prepared, practiced, and showed up sharp. For coaching, have them run a micro session. For management, create a test scenario and role-play a difficult employee conversation with them.
Give feedback and watch what happens. This is the part most owners skip. After the role-play, give them real feedback. If they’re the type who walked in convinced they’re the greatest closer since forever, push harder on the feedback and watch their body language. Any defensiveness, any “yeah but,” any sense that they’re gritting their teeth through the fake smile of accepting the feedback… that’s your answer. You just found out they can’t be coached, and you found out before you hired them.
Scare them away from the job. Before you make an offer, tell them everything hard about the role. Split shifts. Scoreboard accountability. The fact that great effort with bad results still has consequences. If that scares them off, you just saved yourself the pain of them quitting in month two when reality sets in. The people who lean in when you describe the hard parts are the ones worth hiring.
Look for evidence of grit. D3 athletes, actors, door-to-door sales reps, musicians or actors who’ve done years of auditions and rejection. Note that these aren’t requirements, just signals. Someone who stuck with something hard for a long time, without a scholarship or a guaranteed payoff, knows what it feels like to keep going when it’s not fun.
One more hiring tip I love: if this person is going to do any selling, find out if they can sing or do impressions. Not kidding. Not everyone can hear the voice inside their head, and that matters in sales coaching. Someone who’s tone deaf can absolutely learn to close, I’ve seen it. But it takes a lot more work to train up the tonal side of a sales conversation with someone who genuinely can’t hear what they sound like. It’s not a dealbreaker, just another useful signal that might make your life easier if you’re between two otherwise equal candidates.
Actually ask for and call references. When you ask about job history & references, don’t ask “what would Dave say about you?” Ask “what is Dave going to say about you when I give him a call?” Present tense, certain. Watch how they answer. If everything in every past role was someone else’s fault, that tells you everything you need to know about their locus of control. Then call the references and make sure the stories match up.
Red Flags to Watch For When Hiring a Gym Manager
A few things that should stop you cold, no matter how good the resume looks:
- Any defensiveness when receiving feedback during the role-play
- Badmouthing every previous employer with zero self-reflection (“it was always someone else’s fault”)
- Being late to the interview, especially if you scheduled it early on purpose to test for morning reliability
- Not following the application instructions
- Vague, theoretical answers to experience questions (“I would handle that by…”) instead of real stories (“here’s a time I actually did…”)
Frequently Asked Questions
When should I start hiring a gym manager?
Most independent gym owners aren’t hiring a GM as their first employee. You’ll typically hire a trainer or two first. The GM hire makes sense when you’re planning a second location, when you want to step back from daily operations, or when you’re approaching retirement and want to keep the gym running without you. If you plan to be the operator forever, you might never need this role, and that’s a completely valid path. If you’re a franchisee in an owner/investor role, you’re gonna want this person hired a few weeks before your presale starts to build in time for training and role play if they’re gonna be helping on the sales front.
How much does a gym manager make?
Base salaries vary by market, but we generally see them in the $50K to $70K range for independent gym GMs as a base, with on-track earnings up to about $90k/year. The real earning potential comes from performance bonuses tied to active member count or gross revenue. In a well-run facility at full capacity, a GM using this structure can realistically earn around $90K total. Use PayScale or Glassdoor to check your specific market before you post anything.
Should I hire someone with gym management experience or train someone up internally?
Both can work, but they come with different tradeoffs. An experienced hire can hit the ground faster and may teach you things about running the role well. An internal hire already knows your culture and your members, so the care piece is easier to verify. If you’re deeply confident in your ability to train and develop managers, you have more flexibility. If you’re not, lean toward experience and make sure their references check out.
What’s the biggest hiring mistake gym owners make with this role?
Hiring based on a resume and a conversation, without ever seeing the person actually do the job. Run the role-play. Give them the feedback. Watch how they respond. A 30-minute working interview tells you more than three rounds of talking ever will.
What if I can’t afford a full-time gym manager right now?
Then you probably aren’t ready for this hire yet, and that’s okay. Focus on growing your membership base and your revenue first. The compensation structure we described is designed to scale with the business, so the bonus costs you more as the gym performs better, which means it’s self-funding when it’s working. But you do need a stable enough base to cover that salary floor before you make the move.
If you want help building the kind of gym that can actually support a GM and a second location, we’d love to show you how we do it. We’ve worked with 350+ independent gym owners, and the ones who scale aren’t doing it alone. Check out our free trial at gymmembermachine.com and see what it looks like to have real support behind your growth.