It’s no secret that retaining a personal training staff is a difficult feat in the fitness industry. In fact, personal training employee turnover is about 80% each year. When a gym owner loses a member of their fitness coaching team, it impacts revenue, operations, and client trust. Therefore, just a personal trainer employee retention strategy can be just as important for a fitness club as a client retention strategy.
The best ways to keep a stellar personal training staff come down to providing a great onboarding and employment experience, delivering valuable and transparent communication, and maintaining a personal investment in employee professional and personal development. Here, we’ll explore why fitness employee retention is so important. Then, we’ll give you useful tips that can reduce trainer turnover, creating a better business and company culture.
Importance Of Personal Trainer Retention
Finding the best fitness new hire to enhance your personal training staff is hard enough. But holding onto talent can be just as hard. When a gym owner loses a current employee, they can face the following challenges:
- Distrust among current clients: Since most personal trainers develop a great rapport with their clients, it’s likely that a client will feel allegiance to the trainer. It’s also likely that, during casual conversation, the trainer has aired some dirty laundry and expressed their dissatisfaction with their employment. All of this can lead a current client into thinking maybe the business, management, or studio owner are at fault.
- Existing client attrition: Sometimes, a personal trainer doesn’t leave because they’re unhappy. Instead, they realize the financial benefits they might reap if they strike out on their own, earning their full potential with clients. For an employed fitness coach to take this leap, they’ll likely take existing clients with them. This means the clientele base you spent time and money on converting are now customers of a different business. Nothing is worse than losing customer loyalty to a trainer you helped develop.
- Revenue slips: If your former personal trainer takes any of their clients with them, you know the direct impact it has on your business. There are additional revenue hits you might see too, however. For example, the trainer you lost might be great at converting prospects into paying personal training clients. You’ll have to account for this in your financial projections. Similarly, clients and gym members also develop relationships with their peers. Since working out is often a social experience, you might further lose clients as part of your (now) competition’s referral strategy.
- Disruption in client progress: Even if you’re lucky enough to keep all the clients of your former employee, chances are the client will suffer too. They’ll have to get used to a new trainer, style of coaching, and more. And, sometimes, you won’t have a new trainer waiting to take on more clients. Therefore you’ll be servicing the sessions or, worse, forcing the client to hold off on their training until you can find a replacement.
- Wasted time and money onboarding new talent: It’s not easy to find the right fit for your personal training team. So, you’ll be adding more work to your existing plate and possibly spending money on recruiting efforts. Further, you’ll be spending time making sure they know your systems and processes, so the paying clients are impacted as minimally as possible.
For all of these reasons, and more, keeping existing team members is a better investment of your time than trying to find and onboard a new hire.
Tips For Improving Personal Training Staff Retention
Contrary to what a business owner might think, you don’t need to offer the best staff member salary or be an “easy” employer. Instead, you should think about keeping a personal trainer similar to how you keep clients. Fitness clients don’t want the cheapest or easiest personal trainer. Instead, they want oversight that helps them get to their next step in life. They want to be set up for success, have clear expectations and communication, and rely on the right feedback.
The same goes for any personal trainer on your team. If you can offer a great onboarding and employment experience, deliver valuable and transparent communication, and maintain interest in their professional development, you’ll have the best odds for hanging onto team members.
Follow these tactical tips.
- Provide a great onboarding experience. Whether you provide an offer letter or welcome letter, make it valuable and memorable. Make sure the new trainer knows, personally, why they were hired and what you see in them. Then, make sure the onboarding experience is structured and professional. This sets the tone for the professionalism you expect from them too. You don’t need a human resources department to convey these things. Just a little organization work and prep time.
- Give them the tools they need to be successful. You should be setting the new trainer up for success. Make sure they know how the systems work at your gym, the demographics or niche you serve, how other trainers have been successful, and other processes that will help them along the way.
- Make sure you take the time to fully train and develop them. Even if you’re having a seasoned trainer show them the ropes, make sure it’s a consistent experience that you put together for them. Provide an agenda, topics to cover, full training on the software you use, and how you conduct client sessions.
- Set clear expectations. Most employee tensions arise because expectations weren’t clearly stated. If you want your trainer to function a certain way, like always including nutrition coaching, make sure they know this. If they should come prepared each day with workouts written in advance, make it heard. Any employee can only be as successful as they know how to be based on what you tell them. You don’t have to be harsh in your delivery, but you should let them know what is acceptable and what is not. Or, if you expect them to be acquiring their own new clients by day 30, make sure they know this milestone.
- Provide regular and objective feedback. Sometimes difficult conversations with team members become harder than they need to be. Most often, it’s because smaller and easier conversations have been neglected along the way. Some managers fail to provide positive feedback, while others fail to provide negative feedback. Make it a point to check in weekly with every one of your team members. When you do, provide objective feedback about what you see them doing well and what they can improve upon.
- Value and convey transparency. Any employee hates fearing the unknown. The more you can be honest and transparent with your personal training team, the more you can reduce employee turnover. For example, if you know December is going to be a tough month. Make sure they know it in advance to prepare themselves financially and also brainstorm ways to keep clients and members engaged. Or, if you lose a team member, be open with the other trainers and talk through what you could have done differently and ask for their mirrored feedback. Create a company culture where they feel as though they can be transparent with you, too. This facilitates better communication and better employee relationships.
- Maintain an interest in their professional and personal development. When you have a genuine interest in the betterment of the people that work for you, all else becomes easier. When you take on a new hire, consider it like taking on a new client. Be interested in their success, whether that’s as part of your team for years to come, or not. Don’t be afraid of losing quality trainers. If you can care for their development, you’ll earn their loyalty along the way. All of this will translates to lesser damage if and when they decide to move on. You’ll get more advance notice, help with the transition, and a better experience for the entire team.
One of the hidden gems with Naamly’s personal training software is its ability to support your personal training staff retention. It provides a system and structure for how clients are managed, engaged with, and coached. It also provides oversight to the activities of your personal training team.
This creates an excellent springboard for meaningful conversations around expectations and ongoing development. This allows you to manage by data, while still teaching them soft skills that they’ll use in the communication features.
Fitness clients and personal trainers are similar in their experience expectations. So, when you use Naamly as part of your fitness business, operations become easier, fewer conversations fall through the cracks, and everyone has a better experience.
Keep the clients you earned and the trainers you recruited when you use all features of Naamly.
Schedule a Naamly demo today for a custom tour on how it can fit your fitness business needs or learn by doing with our FREE trial.