You Own a Gym. Now What? The Business Perspective Nobody Warns You About
Behind the Design, Episode 33, with OPEX Coaches Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher
You signed the lease. The equipment is in. The lights are on and there are names on the schedule. Now what?
Last episode Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher worked through what a coach does the morning after certification, and the third step was a fork in the road: work with or for somebody, or build your own thing. This week they walk the second road all the way down. Between them: facilities opened, operated and exited, a CEO seat, an investor, a board, a business partner, and a shutdown nobody planned for. Neither of them is trying to talk you out of it. Both intend to do it again. They would just like you to know what you are signing.
There Are Two Perspectives, and Only One of Them Is Yours
Daniel starts where most coaches start, which is from their own side of the desk. It would be cool to have a gym. It would be nice to train in my own space, on my own equipment, with my own music on. That is usually the honest reason underneath the plan, and there is nothing wrong with it.
Then the business arrives. It turns out to be its own entity with its own needs, and those needs do not care what time you like to train. Sometimes the best thing for the business is a class in the hour you have always trained. Sometimes the business needs evening classes, you cannot find a coach to run them, and you wanted to be home with your kids. The skill Daniel names is the ability to step outside and look at yourself as a resource the business either has or does not have, then step back inside and ask what you actually want. Those are two separate conversations, and holding them at the same time is what makes this hard.
One line from that section is worth pinning above the desk. Looking at it from the business perspective, the money is not automatically your money just because you are the owner of the business.
It Is Lonely, and That Is Structural
Daniel does not describe the loneliness as a mood. He describes it as a job description. You will be the only person holding the business perspective when it gets pushed to an edge. Your coaches and your staff will share the passion for the business, and they will share it as long as it lines up with their own interests and their own path. That is fair. It also means that at the moments where the two pull apart, you are on your own.
His route in was unusual. He came off his education as an employed head coach at a facility whose investor had never run a gym, so the two of them figured it out together. Later he became CEO and part owner of a second gym, with partners who did not touch operations. His chairman set the terms early: our job as the board is to hire and fire a CEO, and as long as we trust you, you do whatever you want, until you don't. Support with knowledge, yes. The day to day is yours.
Brandon had a partner, and he calls it the blessing and the curse. The blessing is that somebody is there to ask what do we do here. The curse is that somebody is there to answer to, and decisions move at half speed in exactly the weeks where speed matters. When half the member base disappeared inside a week, that gap between what he wanted to decide and what could be agreed on became the whole problem. Solo is lonely in one place. Partnered is lonely in another.
Coaching Drops to Fourth on the List
The idea most coaches walk in with is that they will get to coach all day. Brandon is blunt about where coaching actually lands once you own the place, which is fourth, and not because it matters less. Because everything else has to be true first for the coaching to happen at all. Marketing, accounting, the schedule, the payments, the ordering. Those come before you, so that you have people to coach and a room to coach them in.
His actual mornings: clean the floor, check the shower is not clogged, check the room being built looks right, confirm the payments processed, chase the order that has not turned up, put the weights back properly. Okay, now I coach.
Then there is the slab. Second location, everything ready, and the city would not let them open because a small access slab for a wheelchair was missing. Brandon offered to personally lift anyone who needed it into the building. That was not an acceptable plan. They lost close to a week scrambling for a piece of concrete while a facility full of equipment sat there.
So the expectation to set before you sign anything: go in ready to have very little time to coach, and enjoy it properly when you get it. And understand that if the place grows, you will coach less over time rather than more, because somebody has to work on the business. That is not a failure of the plan. That is the plan.
Do Not Open a Gym With Your Twin
Daniel has watched this one repeat. Two coaches who can talk program design all day get along beautifully, and getting along beautifully becomes the reason they open a gym together. They share the same interests, so they have roughly the same skills, so they have exactly the same holes. Then the questions arrive that neither of them finds interesting. Lead generation. Marketing. Bookkeeping. Who is answering the phone.
Getting along is not a business qualification. Work with people you admire and enjoy, and then look hard at whether their skill set is different from yours, because a team of two identical people is a team with one skill set and a lot of exposure.
Brandon puts himself in the example. Outside of the age gap and the fact his partner had a family, they were too similar. Two good coaches who wanted to coach and were not particularly strong at the other stuff. That works right up until the business needs to go to the next level and there is nobody in the room who knows how.
The friendship piece sits underneath it. Brandon could not turn off friend Brandon and turn on business Brandon, and business Brandon has to have hard conversations, state a position, and ask for what he needs. You can absolutely be friends with the people you run a business with. It only works if you can set the friendship aside for an hour, say the honest thing, hear the honest thing back, and still want to be around each other afterward. Their accountant summed the whole arrangement up in the first meeting: you two are getting married. Brandon laughed, and then thought about it.
Be Hands-On Before You Hand It Off
Daniel's position on competence you do not have is to be brave about investing in it. If you are bad at marketing, either you learn it or you find someone who can do it, because every business needs marketing and the need does not go away because you find it boring. The alternative is the pattern he sees constantly: the team starts big, a coach leaves, the owner covers the classes to avoid paying someone, and the owner is now further away from the only work nobody else can do. The business has needs. You need the skills and the team to satisfy them.
Brandon adds the timing caveat, and the two of them together make the actual rule. For the first year or two, be as hands-on as you can stand. Understand what a KPI sheet is. Understand a profit and loss statement. Know what a lease looks like, what you want in one, what you do not want in one, and the difference between triple net and utilities. Not so you can do all of it forever, but so that when you hand it over you cannot be bamboozled, and so you can sit with your accountant or your contractor and follow the conversation without a headache. That understanding is what lets you expand properly later, because you can give someone the reins and still read what comes back.
Decide Fast, and Be Wrong Faster
Daniel's business mentor is all over this episode, and the best of it landed during COVID. Daniel did not know whether to make a change. The answer: what you do know is that what we are doing now is not working, so the worst thing you can do is keep doing it. Try something. If it fails, fine, then we know, and we keep trying things until it works.
The same man's entire handover when Daniel took over the company was three sentences long. If you owe people money, they will find you. If you make a mistake or forget something, people will be upset, so correct it. You will be fine.
Brandon says the same thing from the other direction. Speed kills, in the good way. Hire, fire, decide, get it wrong, learn, decide again. You can get very far very fast when there is no lag between what is working and what is not. His biggest frustration was watching that speed drop because two people had to agree first.
And Daniel has a standing objection to the escape hatch coaches reach for here. Somebody always says our business is a bit special. It is not. It is far more similar than special. The tactics, the strategy, the structured budget, the discipline that makes companies work in other industries, all of it applies. We are in the business of relationships, and so are plenty of other people.
When the Numbers Should Answer the Question
A listener asked when a gym owner should start considering closing the gym, given group numbers falling while online and in-person one-to-one coaching climb.
Brandon answered on instinct first. Ask what you are actually getting from the physical location right now, and whether the online business replaces it. Most people know when their time somewhere is up. If you are feeling it, the people around you are probably feeling it, the business is probably feeling it, and your energy is already going toward the thing that is giving you more back.
Daniel answered on paper. Vision first, then the operations connected to that vision, and the numbers follow. Decide what you are trying to build and whether it happens in person, then work backwards into an action-based budget where every cost in the profit and loss ties to something you actually said you wanted.
Then separate the revenue streams into cost centers. Group training revenue against group training costs. The same for online. The same for in-person one-to-one. Then ask where the leads come from, because that is the part most owners skip. If the online clients arrive with no connection to the gym at all, that is a clean, separate equation and the decision gets easy. If the gym is generating them, the gym is doing marketing work the numbers are not crediting it for.
Which gives Daniel his reframe. You can carry a small net loss on group training and read it as a marketing window for yourself as a coach. It is very hard to get rich coaching classes. Classes are excellent at putting your coaching in front of people and showing them what you can do. The gap between what you earn on a class and what you would earn coaching individuals in that same hour is your marketing cost, and it may well be worth paying.
There is a habit buried in that story too. Daniel once told his mentor that their conversion from leads through the door into members was strong. Asked what the rate was, he did not know. The answer he got: if you are converting ninety percent of the people who walk in, I will happily put a lot of money into getting more people through that door, but I need to know first. His homework was to go and measure it. They measured it, and then they ran the campaign. If a decision feels right it probably is. Do the numbers anyway.
The Part That Makes It Worth Doing
The second listener question: should clients feel at home in the gym, or should it be a place where they work and then leave?
Brandon, aside from a firm position on socks and toenail clippers, wants both. People should know that when they walk in they are locking in and coming to work, and they should be comfortable enough to sit around for an hour afterward and talk. That is how he came up. Thirty minutes early to warm up and catch up, a hard session, then an hour on the couch arguing about whatever the owner felt like raising that day.
Daniel agrees and puts a coaching frame on it. Fitness should be hard, and pushing against resistance is the entire point. But he is not asking anyone to make fitness their life. It is there to enable their life. If, while that is happening, he can take responsibility for the interactive structure of the place and connect you with a couple of people worth knowing, you come back. Coming back is the whole game. He says the same thing about why he stays close to the OPEX community: being around people who inspire him is what holds him up when running his own business gets heavy.
Brandon wanted this said plainly, because most of the episode is warnings. Owning a gym was one of the best things he has done. Seeing the work pay off. Watching people build friendships in a room he built. Being the reason somebody cannot wait to get there today. He will do it again. He will just do it with these pieces already in hand, which is the entire reason they recorded this one.
Where to Go From Here
Everything above is the business half of coaching, and it is the half most coaches are never taught. The OPEX Method Mentorship covers it directly: purpose, vision, mission, values and philosophy, your offer, the financial acumen behind running a practice, and the marketing that keeps it full. Ten weeks of live lecture, lab with your own clients, office hours, and a final project you build as you go. The October 13 cohort is the last one of the year and enrollment closes October 9. Book a call with a coaching advisor, who is a graduate of the program rather than a sales rep.
Behind the Design releases weekly on the CoachRx Podcast Network. Next episode: employee versus employer, and what both coaches found when they exited their own gyms and went to work inside someone else's.
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For the full pathway into this kind of program design, look at the OPEX Method Mentorship.
Connect with the coaches
Brandon Gallagher:Brandon’s Instagram (@bgperform_)
Daniel Persson:Daniel’s Instagram (@danielcapersson)
Join us live on Tuesdays mornings 11:30am EST on the OPEX YouTube Channel
Start your free 14-day CoachRx trial and bring principled programming, habit tracking, and high-touch communication all in one seamless coaching command center.
