How to Build a Studio Culture That Boosts Retention & Loyalty

Most fitness studio owners face a costly problem they don't see coming until it's too late: a disconnect between their personal values and studio culture. This fundamental misalignment leads to frustration, team turnover costing upwards of $39,000 annually, and member attrition that hampers growth. 

In this foundational episode, Zach Coleman shares his journey from overlooking culture to making it central to his business strategy. He reveals how his initial focus on delegation without clear values created a revolving door of team members and the resentment he felt toward employees whose behaviors didn't match his expectations. This turning point led him to intentionally build core values from his personal beliefs and invest in team development—transformations that shifted his entire business trajectory.

For new studio owners, Zach offers practical guidance on identifying personal values and translating them into business principles. For established studios managing multiple locations, he provides a systematic approach to observing team behaviors and extracting values already embedded in your organization. The episode outlines a powerful framework for aligning hiring practices and marketing strategies with these core values, creating consistency across every touchpoint of your studio experience.

Most valuably, Zach demonstrates how values serve as both a retention tool and marketing advantage. By clearly defining what behaviors align with your studio's identity, you naturally attract team members and clients who resonate with your approach. This fundamental alignment eliminates the friction that drives costly turnover and creates the authentic community connection that fuels sustainable growth.

Ready to transform your studio culture? Subscribe to Fit to Grit for more insights on building a fitness business that reflects your values and attracts your ideal community.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Foundation of Studio Culture
• 1:45 Creating Core Values From Personal Behaviors
• 4:14 Aligning Team Performance With Values
• 8:25 Reinforcing Culture Through Regular Assessment
• 10:40 Key Takeaways and Next Steps

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

When you start hiring people, you're going to become resentful towards the types of people that you bring on if they don't match said core values that you align with. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the 50 Great Cast. I'm your host, zach Coleman, and today let's talk about culture. Now, this is the foundational series. I know that culture probably really isn't something that, when you're just starting out a studio, you're really thinking about, but I want to dive into something that you should really really think about and how you can kind of build an unforgettable fitness studio experience through said culture building. You know, creating a high value culture can be challenging. Teams become disengaged, they leave after a few months, turnover continues to rise, members sense that instability, or they have one trainer that leaves and the next thing you know, they leave because they built up a personal brand, or there's just negativity that's spreading throughout, based off of attitude and a culture that you continue to grow. Now, in the beginning of my journey as a business owner, going through this whole spectrum, I really underestimated the importance of culture. I focused purely on just delegate, delegate, delegate. I think that's the first thing that we all try to accomplish. We're doing a lot of it ourselves. Then we start to delegate, we start to learn about culture and I didn't really take culture too seriously. This resulted in a lot of turnover and in fact I can put my now nowadays I can look up in one hand and tell you how many times people left due to a certain value or cultural trend that I needed to eventually put in place and to continue to evolve Right. So I intentionally started to build out my core values, which came from my personal values, and I started to invest a little bit more in team development and I continue to invest in team development as I started to move away from the operation side and slowly started to move into fully visionary, slash ownership mentality, ceo site mentality, and I'll just tell you, these values really shifted my culture. Now, before we get started and I talk about the three points we're going to kind of talk about when it comes to culture building, you know I did a presentation actually just a week ago and this leads to the sponsor of our video, loyal Snap. I did a sponsorship talk with Loyal Snap as a strategic partnership we have, and talked to the sponsor of our video, loyal Snap. I did a sponsorship talk with Loyal Snap as a strategic partnership. We have and talked to a lot of their existing audience on the importance of building a culture. So I am going to take advantage of that and if you want any sort of recollection of said webinar, go down into the comments below. You'll find that webinar and how you can start building your values now and you can get that webinar for free and watch it, just to get started.

Speaker 0: 2:53

On today's topic, I really want to go through and talk about how core values are a branding play, how you can really define those core values and leverage them, not just for employee retention but also member retention and kind of the phases that kind of go around doing that. How you can really align your values to build the right messaging, build the right performance is a marketing podcast for the fitness environment, so I like to try to dive a little bit more into the marketing side of it and we're also gonna talk about constantly reinforcing your culture through utilizing said values. So the outcome is hopefully you'll come across and understand the importance of value building and the importance of utilizing them as a guide for behaviors with existing team to build better retention, more profitability, within your studio. There was a study that was done by the Health and Fitness Association that showcased that around 40% of studios have trouble with retention up. So of spending at least $39,000 or more a year trying to build, continue, to build their team, what could you do with that $39,000? I like to hear in the comment section down below. Tell me down in the comment section below what you would do with that $39,000 for your studio.

Speaker 0: 4:13

Let's be clear, starting off here, building your core values. Now, if you're just starting out in a studio owner, I would say building core values is really going to come from you and your behaviors, and so you need to understand what's going to make you happy, what's going to make the organization happy as it grows, and so you're going to probably build your values off of you and the things that you care about, the behaviors that you like to see, because when you start hiring people, you're going to become resentful towards the types of people that you bring on if they don't match said core values that you have that you align with. So look at your core values, look at the types of behaviors that you do. What are certain circumstances in your life that make you happy? What are certain circumstances that make you feel good about yourself or the way you interact with people. Just to give you an example of me, for instance I'm, you know, we own a communication business, so communication is by far one of our biggest values, but all different types of communication, so that's something that I really feel heavily.

Speaker 0: 5:12

So, as you're building out those core values now, if you have a team already in place and you're like, well, what happens if I have two or three locations, we have managers, we're trying to manage all these locations, then I would say that you have to kind of look at the behaviors of. You have to build, build out certain behaviors, and the only way that you're going to understand the core values of what you already have entangled within what you've built is by looking at each one of your employees and kind of coming up with I'm not going to say a good bit, a bad behavior, a good behavior, but behaviors that you really resonate with compared to the ones that you think could be better. Tom's always on time, janice always goes above and beyond with her exercises and you take these different types of behaviors and you write them down to each person and then you find the ones that correlate together and then you contribute that to a certain behavior that you see and that's how you're going to start building out your core values. Again, if you want to download, if you want to view this yourself and take the exercise yourself, go ahead and go down to the comments below and you can definitely go through this exercise yourself.

Speaker 0: 6:11

Next is aligning team performance and accountability. Now, I always say that there's two ways when you're going through your hiring process or when you're going through developing messaging that you need to take into consideration, and that is you already have messaging out there, you already have a hiring process and gonna have to not just worry about performance, but you're also going to have to worry about the messaging right, the behavior. So we already talked about the kinds of behaviors that you're looking for. Now let's talk about the types of behavior that you need to think about when you're hiring new people. So I usually say take these behaviors, take these behaviors down and associate them with a said core value. Once you have that aligned, then you can kind of dictate a certain type of behavior amongst your hiring or the ways you market yourself. If you're looking at hiring versus you're looking at marketing, I like to kind of have a chart and kind of say, hey, these are our core values. Right here are for, here are the behaviors, here are the behaviors that we have, and then next to it the do's and the don'ts, and then you can even put your ideal member next to it. So you can put your ideal member next to the end and say which one of these really works, especially with messaging, or even the type of employee you want to bring on, based off of their performance. And so that's a good way to start dictating out some questions and or some do's and don'ts when it comes to your your. You utilize those questions. If it be for hiring, you'll utilize those questions to dictate behavior. So you'll know automatically when you're going through your hiring process.

Speaker 0: 7:40

The way you do your hiring process, the way people react, could be a sign of they don't match your values. For instance, we're very big on communication. So if we get a employee that comes in and they don't attach a cover letter or say why they don't want to work with us, you know I'm looking at it as they don't really like to. That's an easy behavior on lack of communication. They don't really want to communicate, they just want to do the work, which is fine in certain positions, but we want all of our team to communicate with prospects and clients, so that's something that we look in the first and foremost. Now you can look at the same thing when it comes to your marketing and I'm kind of double edging this here, because we can do it. Values and branding in itself is just as much of a marketing play as it is an employee play. So here's a great example.

Speaker 0: 8:26

Connection is one of our key pillars.

Speaker 0: 8:29

I like to connect with our audience.

Speaker 0: 8:30

So what will I do? What will I not do? I'm not just going to do gimmicky marketing tactics and try to talk to people, because that's not connection. I like to connect with every single person that we bring on in our agency. I'm in this game to build relationships and to help people grow, not necessarily just to deal with bottom line, top line shit. So that's something that we'll look at. So we'll say, huh, one thing we'll do we'll do webinars, we'll make sure that we're connecting with people, we'll ask questions, we'll do speaking arrangements, we'll talk to people, we'll consult. What we won't do I'm not going to email a million people and just hope that I get a click. This just doesn't resonate with me in our marketing direction. It's just not something that I want to do, just not something that I want to do. Is it okay if other people do it? Yeah, I'm not going to diss it, but that's part of our pillars when it comes to relaying our message and the things that we'll do and the things that we won't do.

Speaker 0: 9:21

Right, and lastly, here is how do you reinforce this culture? Well, a good way that I've kind of come up with this is I will assess, if you have quarterly meetings with your team, kind of take that, that sheet, which is, of course, in the comments section below, or you take your overall sheet in your behavior sheet that you use to dictate behaviors, and you assess that every month with your existing values. So not every month, every quarter, sorry. And so you'll sit down and you'll actually sit with your team managers and say all right, how many people you have on your team here, let's go through each one and let's see if they can contribute to a good attribute for all of our values and see if they're aligning with them and or they're not. And then you'll start understanding some things that you can either help an employee improve on or that you have to improve on as a team to reinforce that value, and that's something that we try to do on a quarterly basis. We try to see if every single person on the team is still matching these values. So, just to cut this to the end of the video here how do you clearly define and communicate your core values? Find them yourself If you don't have a team. If you do, look at your team and who you have on your team and focus on that as you start to build out your values, aligning teams and accountabilities with studio values. Utilize a worksheet or utilize something to take those values and align them with your messaging and or your team. On hiring, with certain types of questions to dictate behaviors on different types of hiring, different types of marketing channels, etc. And lastly, is how do you reinforce it? Every quarter, assess your existing values with your team or reassess with your marketing team the different directions that you're going and how that can work out.

Speaker 0: 11:01

Again, my name is Zach Coleman. This is Fit to Great Cast foundational series. We'll dive much more into values and branding on a much further series that we're working on right now, but for the time being, I thought it was nice to just present this because we recently did a value-driven workshop, and if you want to know more about that again, the link is down in the comment section below. Also, we'd like your opinions on this. Fit to Grit is new. Go down and subscribe. Allow us to get to more people, share it. Give us a review if you're watching the podcast. It really helps out the channel and it really helps us out as we're continuing to improve what we're doing. Give us feedback. I love feedback from our audience and so, again, fit to Grit. I hope you all have a gritty day.