Building the right team to grow your business is everything, but finding and keeping great coaches can be a struggle. Many coaches dream of owning their own business one day and this mindset can be great for attracting leaders with a vision who will put in time and effort to achieve it. However, it can also create friction if they feel like they can do better on their own.
A few things that will keep coaches working for you long term are compensation, resources, education and vision.
Compensation: Compensation is an important structure to have in place, and it is difficult to set up a fair compensation plan. Growth is the most important part of this plan. Having a flat fee or flat percentage-split quickly becomes dull. Design a plan that rewards employees for great work. Commissions, bonus structures, and tiered pay goes a long way. You want to ensure that there are goals to work towards, and rewards for achieving those goals. Have a long-term plan in place that provides the opportunity for trainers to be successful over time. For example, coaches may start out earning 40-50% of sessions and be promoted to 60-70% when they have successfully completed over 80 sessions per month. Adding in a 10% commission on new sales, or monthly bonus opportunities can ensure a high work ethic as well.
Resources: When building a company, it is important to provide more resources than just a facility. The facility is a great way to attract coaches and clients, but to keep a team long-term, what else can you provide? Access to enrollment forms, tracking systems, programming logs, prospects – these are all very simple, but extremely useful, especially for new coaches.
Education: This may be the most important component to keeping the best coaches happily working for your company. Teach them programming, sales, marketing, leadership, business. Let them in on the company’s tactics. Host ongoing seminars, perform one-on-one reviews, and help them become great at what they do. When you find extremely talented coaches they can help develop other coaches as well.
Vision: Keep coaches motivated by working toward a common vision and maintaining a purpose. Share the vision and mission with your team and find people who are on board with the vision. Break it down into steps for growth and be clear on assigning tasks and goals each day, week and month. When people buy into a vision, they become a team that will lead to long-term success.
