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The Story
I love stories.
Everything and everyone has a story.
Personally, I love hearing stories about people and businesses because you get to see where they came from, not just where you see them today. The stories have a way of humanizing these larger-than-life figures, as we think of them.
Looking at Habit Catalyst we need to go back a few years when it was just a “cool” idea for something we needed in our own gyms.
But wait, before I get too far into it, I should probably introduce the main characters of this story Trevor, the guy writing this, and Kane.
Trevor and Kane were college housemates and basketball teammates at a small school in Minnesota. After earning their degrees, each went back to their respective homes in separate states. Trevor stayed in Minnesota, after a short hiatus in Germany and Kane went back to Wisconsin, after a short detour in Chicago. Each decided on different paths, but they ended up in eerily similar situations.
Trevor, upon moving back home after a 3-year stint playing basketball in Germany, decided to pursue his dream of helping people. More specifically, he became a fitness coach and started coaching clients out of the local community center. He started working in a one-on-one setting, his first client was actually his mom, then eventually moved into doing the bootcamp thing – don’t judge me it was the thing to do then – and then added in semi-private training as well.
After a couple years of training and building up his clientele, he decided it was time to open his own gym. He found a building, renovated much of it himself in his “down time”, and moved all his clients to this new space he calls Functional Fitness. As his clientele continued to grow and he started to hire people to help him manage everything, little problems started to pop up here and there.
In the neighboring state just to the east, Trevor’s buddy Kane was going through his own journey and struggle to find out where he wanted to make his dent in the world. After earning his MBA, he decided on fitness as his profession of choice. After spending a couple years formally educating himself, doing an extensive internship and subsequently being hired by the struggling gym he interned at, he decided to buy that gym and turn it around.
In less than a year, he completely changed the gym’s business model. He created a space he, his coaches, and his clients could be very proud of. But, like any business owner, little problems started to pop up here and there.
Little did either of these two friends know they would be compelled to do something about one of these little problems together.
Coach Catalyst began as a “how do we get our clients better results as our gyms grow” conversation. This was a challenge, because when you start working with just a few people, you can give them all the time in the world. But as your clientele grows, there just isn’t enough time in the day to do all the little things you did in the beginning.
Like most ideas, we just talked about it for a year or so. We did some searching for other solutions but couldn’t find anything that did exactly what we wanted.
[pullquote align=”normal”]how do we get our clients better results as our gyms grow… [/pullquote]
Frustrated at the lack of options available, we decided to find a way to build it. We knew what we wanted, but had no idea how to get it from this thing in our heads to this thing we could actually use.
Like I mentioned earlier, we were – and still are – constantly searching for ways to get our clients better results and create lasting change in their lives. In our efforts to create the best possible experience for our clients, we had our training systems, marketing systems, and culture systems on point.
We were great at providing the training experience for our clients. But, in order to create any meaningful change, we needed to find a way to “influence” our clients when they were not with us – you know, the whole nutrition and lifestyle piece.
We started by just providing more information.
But let’s be honest, people don’t need more information. They probably actually need less of it. In the age of the interwebz, there is more than enough information available. Yes, we helped our clients sort through some of the noise, but how did we know if they were actually applying it and taking action on it?
We really could only guess. Yes, some of the elite clients were applying it, but the majority were not. We were not satisfied letting the majority slip through the cracks.
Having been trained by Precision Nutrition, we shifted to a habit-based approach. Giving habits to clients was a step in the right direction, but again how do we know if clients are actually doing what we tell them?
To solve this problem, we decided to create some cool handouts that we could give out to clients. The handouts would have education on one side and the other side was their report card. Every day they would report if they did the habit on the sheet.
After two weeks the clients would turn the sheet back in. Like anything, some clients did it and some clients didn’t. But, more clients were doing it, which was a step in the right direction. Some would turn it back in with multiple days missed and others with lots of X’s, which meant they didn’t do the habit on those days. The problem we would run into is that we could never address it until after the two weeks was up and the client turned the habit back in and it was too late.
The accountability sheets never allowed us to know where a client was in the process until they turned the sheet back in. Plus, in order to keep that process going we would have had to hire another admin person just to handle all the paperwork.
There had to be a better way.
I mean, we put a man on the moon with less technology than what our clients hold in their hands every day, we can figure this stupid habit thing out.
Then it came to us. We need to find a way to use technology and the smart phone to automate the entire process. This means technology will deliver the education – slowly and systematically, the technology will ask the client if they did what they were supposed to do, the technology will collect the data and deliver it to the coach in a quick, readable format. This will free up the coach to do what they do best, coach and problem solve.
The system had to be scalable so that we didn’t have to hire another person to run it. One coach should be able to coach 5 or 100 clients easily. The system had to tell us which clients were kicking butt and which needed some guidance and assistance.
We knew what we wanted so we simply went out and found someone to build it. This is just the beginning of Coach Catalyst. Help us build something life changing.
Coach Catalyst breaks down to this….
- Give clients a habit automatically for a set period of time
- Deliver education related to the habit so the client knows exactly what and how to do the habit
- Have the client record whether or not he or she completed the habit
- Notify the trainer if the client doesn’t check-in for a couple days
- Notify the trainer if the client has a few bad days
- Deliver it all where people spend their time: smart phones and email
- Communicate directly with your clients directly on their smart phones
- Track metrics and photos to gauge progress
- AND make it as simple as possible
To learn more about it, check out our demo video.