On the flight home last night I tried to consolidate my notes from the Affiliate Gathering (aka FilFest) in Austin. Here are my top 10 take-aways:
- A good attitude when you are in the gym is that you are there to practice, not to win. Win at your sport, hobby or life. From Patty's presentation.
- People want to be led and they like to know their rank in the pack. Again from Patty talking about their Leaderboard which deserves further investigation.
- Never raise your prices for existing clients but raise them for newcomers as your gym reaches new milestones or hits full capacity. Aside from Coach Glassman.
- Several affiliates have "eye contact rules". If you, coach or athlete, make eye contact with another person you must say hello and shake hands. If you fail to do so and you get called out the punishment is burpees.
- Affiliates have various established processes for following-up with no-shows. For many its the typical monthly email, phone call, post card. Patty added actually visiting their house or inviting them out for a beer.
- Jeff Tucker's whole presentation centered around the key mantra of their facility: We are about service. Period.
- Many affiliates require athletes to write down their own times on the whiteboards instead of the coaches doing it
- There was lots of talk about raising coaching to a profession in terms of service and compensation. I wholeheartedly agree. I would venture to say this was the theme that ran through all the presentations at the event.
- Tony Budding told a story about the early days of CF Santa Cruz when, at a staff meeting, Greg told his trainers that if an athlete could not immediately identify something they had learned in class that day then the trainer had failed. This was a great story. In my opinion, this is why trainers should rarely, if ever, workout with their classes. Oh, and if you are a client and you didn't learn something you should be complaining.
- Greg told a story about a sub-par trainer who changed someone's life for the better. The lesson of the story was not to criticize other coaches but to seek ways to help them. A corollary was that functional movement is so powerful, especially to the untrained, that anything is better than nothing even if "anything" is less than perfect movement or coaching.
After FilFest I spent 3 days with my grandmother-in-law. Overall it was a very relaxing trip with lots of time to think, very little exercise, and lots of food. I got a little bit of computer work done and read a few books. More on the rest of the trip later this week.
