The Lounge Q+A: Eddie Zhang, Fitness Business Coach

What do you do?

I own a gym in Columbus, Ohio called Training Grounds. Basically the way that I set up my gym, it’s like a salon but for trainers. There’s a business here in Columbus called “salon lofts” where you can rent your own room and you can cut hair, run your own business, cutting hair. I basically did that. But for personal trainers, I have basically like two car garage size gyms within my gym that are just like these, we call them training pods and they’re all identical. They’re just repeated over and over and over again.

I rent them out to trainers, they run their own gym. I’m basically a landlord, I just collect rent, they run their business.

How did you set up your business?

I set up my business in a way that I like, as long as the trainers are making money, then like I make more money. So the more money they make, the more money I make. I basically started just like experimenting, helping them out with some marketing stuff, some business stuff. And lo and behold from, for this was probably in the last two years or so, this turned into basically its own full on mentorship slash mastermind situation and I became, without even realizing it, almost like a business coach for trainers and such.

Some good business advice?

Something I personally believe in and I’ve found is that, if you want to grow a business, you can’t make yourself like the essential piece that it doesn’t work without you. In my mind, I’ve always imagined the CEO is not necessarily the one that has to be doing all the individual tasks. They find a way for others, they create systems and they make it scalable so that way somebody else can come in and duplicate that task and do it while the CEO works at a high level and just focuses on growth and creating new things.

“The trainer has to be a part of it. We’ve always coached them to create systems in a way that the business can run without them and to create that relationship where the people feel like they have that intimate relationship with their coach. We’ve actually kind of started focusing on creating more of a community.

Tell me about your protege Kaylin Pyles.

She only works with young girls between the ages of like 25 to 30. When a new client signs up, she has created this amazing community where a new girl gets put into their group chat and then she gets bombarded with 50 new messages of, congrats, welcome to the squad. You made the best decision ever, or something like that. So now Kaylin doesn’t necessarily have to be the one all the time, you know, being leaned on, answering questions. Like anytime somebody has questions in there, usually they’ll ask a question, their group chat and then four or five other girls jump in and they’re super supportive. And so she’s done really well by creating this online community, they’re in there, supporting each other, creating relationships, creating friendships.

How have you changed your mindset?

Back in the day I used to think that big business had to have all these moving parts. It’s complicated and the more complicated it’s almost like a sign of value.

Your thoughts on PocketSuite?

I love PocketSuite. I’ve never found another platform that does everything PocketSuite does, I don’t want to say you guys should raise your prices, but if you were to price each of these features is [worth] way more than $20 a month.

More business tips?

I think everyone needs systems and the right business model. I think one of the things that people do wrong a lot is they look to the old way of doing things where it’s one-on-one personal training, One-on-one online training and that’s not really scalable. You only have so much time in a day. All I do is I basically, I just got connected with other six figure and seven figure online fitness coaches in person, fitness coaches, gym owners and I got to be friends with them. So part of my mentorship is this is what they do. You should probably do the same thing.