Since starting my gym in the beginning of 2020 a lot of things have changed. Not just within my gym but in the CrossFit space, the fitness industry and even the world. But today mainly I’m going to focus on how things have changed with my gym since the first year that I opened.
If you want know what lead my up to the point of opening my gym then check out my last blog post as it details everything that lead me to opening my gym in the first place. So it’s there that I pick up the story.
I finally opened RIP Training Cessnock in January of 2020 and when I did I went all in. At the time I had been coaching at 2 other gyms for a couple of years and I left both of those jobs to focus solely on my gym. I was also still in the army reserve so I took a few months off of any commitments with that too. And for the first couple of months I coached pretty much every session and was at the gym pretty much every day. The gym started really well and began growing and we were bringing in new people regularly and building our community.
I knew from the start that in order to make the gym sustainable long term I couldn’t keep coaching every session myself for very long, so early on I began to look for other coaches to come in and help take over some of the classes. For our first year pretty much all coaches that came on and helped us were people that I had coached previously at other gyms or who had also been coaches at the gyms I was at. It was great being able to bring these people in and get them coaching but it wasn’t quite the same as building up coaches from within our own community.
So things were moving along well, we had been open for over 2 months and then the pandemic hit. And we were shut, fully, for 12 weeks. At one point we were shut for longer than we had been opened. I remember the day when we passed more days being shut than days we had been open. It was very depressing at the time and I remember thinking a lot about “why did this have to happen now when nothing like this has ever happened before?”
But we came out the other side stronger and I am eternally grateful for how strongly our members at the time supported us through the lockdown. We lent out our gear and ran zoom sessions but it was never the same as what they had signed up for and so many of our members stayed on board with us and supported us even after we had only been open two and a half months.
So eventually the lockdown ended and business resumed somewhat as normal. We used the rest of that year to gain some momentum and continue to build our community. We had a couple different coaches come in and out but mostly I still did the majority of coaching and everything myself. So that leads me to the things that have changed. But before we even get into the physical changes lets go through the coaching side of things.
Compared to 2020 when I coached over 90% of all sessions I now coach very little sessions at Cessnock. And I haven’t had many for about a year and half. Now my goal isn’t to necessarily to coach less as I love coaching and I love our members but I realise that my role as the gym owner is to keep the business growing and in order to do that I need coaches and those coaches need sessions. So therefore I coach less so they can grow their careers as coaches and become better just as I did for many years as a coach before opening my gym.
On the business side of things I don’t think there is a single thing that hasn’t changed. The business looks completely different from what it did in 2020 and that has come slowly over time through lots of work and learning lots of lessons. I’m a slow learner when it comes to business stuff and it can sometimes take years for things to happen that should only take months but I’m always working on it and always trying to keep moving forward and improve myself. It’s this stuff that pretty much consumes the majority of my time if not just the majority of my thoughts.
But lets get onto the more fun stuff, the actual physical changes. In 2020 RIP Training Cessnock occupied a single unit of 125 square metres. It was small, but we used this space well and it made me and any coaches that worked within our walls become very good at space and group management. We had just enough equipment that we needed and we built upon it throughout the first year. When we opened we didn’t even have any dumbbells or benches, things that now get used on the daily.
Throughout the year we added small cosmetic changes like a big sticker on the wall and a sign on the front desk. We added a homemade rig outside and put down a stall mat that served as a small outdoor area that enabled us to increase class sizes. In our first year one of walls was covered with plywood to protect the heeble blocks underneath and this plywood would go on to get infested with termites in the next year. Yes, we got termites in a concrete shed. Lots of termites.
So if we compare what the gym looked like back in 2020 to what it looks like now we have:
- Doubled our physical space
- Doubled our membership base
- Gone from 1-2 coaches to 5+
- Added a recovery room
- Added mobility classes
- Added more sessions times
- Added specialty class throughout the year and regular goal reviews with every member.
I often think about how much the gym has changed and it’s honestly unrecognisable from what it once was. Yes many things are still the same but also so many things have changed and grown and for the better.
If you’ve been involved in this journey in even a small way at some point over the last 5 years then I thank you. It’s been a great ride.
The only constant in life is change. So we might as well try to make it good.
