Who cares?
Unless someone does, things start to fray around the edges. In your gym, IT HAS TO BE YOU!
Often it is the owner or gym manager who sets a standard of caring about the details. Even better is a culture where everyone cares, and where each person reinforces that horizontally throughout the team. Caring is everyone’s job.
You’ve probably been to the hotel that serves refrigerated tomatoes in January at their $20 breakfast, that doesn’t answer the phone when you call the front desk, that has a shower curtain that is falling off the rack and a slightly snarky concierge. This is in sharp relief to that hotel down the street, the one that costs just the same, but gets the details right.
It’s obviously not about access to capital (doing it right doesn’t cost more). It’s about caring enough to make an effort.
If we define good enough sufficiently low, we’ll probably meet our standards. Caring involves raising that bar to the point where the team has to stretch.
In your gym: The owner of the mediocre gym who’s reading this, the manager who just got forwarded this note- all have great excuses. Times are tough, equipment upkeep is expensive, nobody else cares-why should I, I am a college student and this is just a part time gig, the parents are jerks…who cares.
Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.
Like most things that are worth doing, it’s not easy at first and the one who cares isn’t going to get a standing ovation from those that are merely phoning it in. I think it’s this lack of early positive feedback that makes caring in service businesses so rare.
Which is precisely what makes it valuable.
Money question is, then: how do you get people who don’t care to care? I can think of a few possible answers, one of them being “care so much that you inspire others to join in the caring,” and maybe that works, and probably does, but most certainly takes time. Another answer is “properly incentivize those who don’t care,” and that pretty much DOES require money…A third answer might be “remove those who don’t care” (which is more or less properly incentivizing them with their jobs), and presents the problem of finding new people who do care…A fourth answer might be “properly educate those who don’t care about the necessity to care,” but that assumes a base level of caring that could be built upon to arrive at an abundance of caring… So, what else?
So many good points. As a gym owner and director of a gymnastics camp I take the position of : CARE SO MUCH YOU INSPIRE OTHERS. I have always felt you have to lead by example. If my staff sees me doing the dirty jobs and taking care of the details, they jump in to help. When I see them doing stuff that is truly above and beyond their job requirements, I make sure I recognize their effort. Sometimes a Big Thanks, sometimes a small gift card.
I surround myself with like thinkers.
You are NOT going to get a THANK YOU for doing your job. I already pay you for that.
And I am certainly not afraid to let someone go who doesn’t care.
Tony