SYSTEMS TO SCALE UP YOUR FITNESS BUSINESS WITH CHRIS MUDDELL OF EMPLOYSURE - Industry Change ep 16

You can predefine anything that happens within the business environment at the start of the employment relationship. You can define the activity, the amount of sales calls, the amount of posts on Facebook, the walk around at the end checking that all the weights are put away.

Yep.

The sick days, the annual leave, the holidays, the requests for pay rises, the termination procedure. Every single thing that could happen within a small business can be predefined and reverse engineered within a handbook. To say, if we have this situation, here's exactly how we resolve it. If you take a sick day and you don't bring a medical certificate, you're not getting paid for the sick day, the end. None of this, can you please not do that? How do we do this? Is this an adverse thing? What are you doing with it?

So that's saying everything literally is able to be, you know, predefined so that it's not going to happen. If it does happen, you have a system for it that's already been created.

You've always got leverage.

Welcome back to Industry Change. I am Richard Attorne, GCO and founder of Com Marketing. Now today I've got a special guest like always, and I'm really excited about today because my guest today is Chris Medell. Welcome.

Hey.

And Chris, you're from Employee Shaw.

Yes.

Now Chris is not just from Employee Shaw. Chris is a really sales performance expert, BDM at Employsure. And I'm— I've got Chris on the show today because Chris is one of our partners. Employsure is one of our partners here at Comm. And the reason why we've partnered with such a company is because there comes a stage in business where you really want to start to scale up. And I remember, Chris, when I initially got into business, I was 17 at the time and I had a big fear around like Well, I bought a business and I literally had a big fear around staff. I had a big fear about what should I do with them and what do I need to do with them and what are my obligations. And I had no concept of this at all until something really bad happened where somebody wanted to actually leave and I didn't know what to do. And then I had to hire someone and I still didn't know what to do. And I think a lot of the problems that we have when we scale a business is that— or we want to start to grow a business, like I'm talking about a solo Like, solo operator, let's say a personal trainer for example, and they're by themselves, we want to scale, then we have a big issue of like, well, what do I do? Where do I go? And it's a lot of fear that holds us back then. And so I wanted to bring you on, and the reason why I'm partnering with you is because you're like the magical man that like eliminates all that fear, and somehow, some way, it's just like everything's better and everything's calmer after that. Tell me exactly what you do.

Yes, I am the magical man. Employsure is a service for a small business. We predominantly do your HR, so we're an external HR and safety firm for a small business.

Yep.

Small fee, unlimited services. So, um, so basically you would have said, Employsure, can you set everything up, keep it up to date, and insure us against any claims? Now what's— what is set everything up? Set everything up means I'm going to have a contractor, they're a PT, how do I pay them, what do I pay them, How am I going to be profitable from them? What documents do I need to give them? Is it legally compliant? How do I uplift their performance? And then if they do leave the company, what do I do about it? So what we create is a system and employment packs that you can give to all of your contractors or staff to say, look, here's how we do it around here. Here's who we are. Here's how we operate. Here's how we want to start the relationship with each other in form of an employment contract or a contractor's agreement. And then Employsure is a support service that coach the right behaviours with the business owners to support their staffing and scale.

Now that all seems very intelligent in regards to what they actually get, but again, you guys make it even easier than that. Like, we're talking about like you just pick up a phone at your company and you— that's what I'm saying, like wave the magic wand. You pick up the phone and then everything happens for you. Yes. Like you get what you need.

Correct.

Is that correct?

Yeah, so basically the way it actually works and is rolled out is as a member, if there's an issue, you call us and we resolve it. We give you the options, the advice, exactly what to say, scripts, and the letter that you require for that. So if you had to terminate somebody, we'll say, here's what your options are, here's how to do it. Here's the termination letter. And if you— if we gave you that termination letter and you gave it to the employee, you'd be fully insured against any claim.

Wow.

The second thing is, if you wanted us to physically come out there, we could also physically come out there as well. Now you wouldn't have to pay for this because the systems we've set up have already clearly stipulated exactly what the behavior was that shouldn't have been breached. Then the situation happens, so there's no surprises. So when you're having a difficult conversation with your employees, ideally they're going to know exactly what's going on. They would have been briefed and trained by us about, look, here's how we do it around here. As a fitness professional, your target market is obviously your customers and personal training and clientele and programs and things like that. What we do really, really well is we tell you how to deal with all the administrative stuff that goes along with running a business.

And I like that because, yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I don't think it's something that people really want to learn. Is that fair to say?

Absolutely not.

Yeah, I was thinking that.

Compliance within the Fair Work Act, compliance within the Work Health and Safety Act, award rates, award provisions, The Fitness Industry Awards, there's a couple of awards around your section. This is a moving beast. Mm. You need certain documents by law to be compliant within the industry. There's a lot of risk now in terms of contractors which are deemed employees. So it's not just a we should have it in case thing. This is a mandatory thing. Every single small business in Australia should have this in place without a shadow of a doubt. seen people have a hard time with Fair Work based on not having the right paperwork in place, even when they were a one-man band with a PT or with a contractor that's alongside of them, so.

It's interesting what you say because I think the whole concept of scaling up your business, and, you know, I think when we work with a lot of trainers, fitness professionals, the number one thing, like I literally had 2 calls yesterday, 2 new of our clients, and their future goal is to open up their own practice, and get 1 to 2 staff, right? And I'm talking about microbusiness. And I think this is the key for a lot of people, but the fear does set in at some level there. And what you're saying is, hey, take all that out, take that equation out, then you can focus on more sales and marketing.

Correct.

And you won't have to worry about the back stuff. And so it's literally like then doing what you want to do.

Correct.

In your own business.

Correct.

And I like this conversation because it's starting to simplify business. And a lot of the time we have a lot of stuff to deal with And your service is literally a service. You pick up the phone, boom, and it just works. You know what I mean?

Yeah, so I'll tell you, if you want to—

Yeah, what's one of your clients too? I'd like—

Yeah, I'll tell you how we met. We met, basically, I got recommended very highly by one of your clients, Bobby Choker, Dr. Bobby Choker. Fantastic professional guy that's been doing a great job for a long, long time. He said, you have to call Richard. You have to call ComMarketing. They're the best. Fixed monthly service, absolute, absolute best. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll do it, I'll do it. I didn't end up doing it. Then I got another recommendation, you've got to call Richard. And then for some reason I got some of your marketing material. Right. I was like, okay. Picked up the horn, we met, and then we found out we've got a whole pool of clients, associates, and advocates that are all using our services in conjunction with each other. So you guys are generating leads, getting lots of great stuff coming in from a top-end perspective, and we're making sure that the performance of the employees and are they putting up the posts, are they putting up their social media, are they doing their job, are they meeting the requirements of the new business? Number one, absolutely, we would align it with your service. But for the one-man bands—

Yes.

They can't grow without knowing what the vision is. So if we tell them, just like Dr. Bobby Choker came to us after your 12 Month Ninja Program, and he says, I've ran a business in the UK before and I did quite successfully. Now I want to set up in Australia, but I don't want to have to do it. I don't want to do the contracts. I know what I need to have in place. I want it tailored within my business and my vision. So I heard you guys can do it. How much is it gonna cost? And we said fixed fee membership. And he said, is that all? And then now we've set it up. So we went to the dental surgery, did a full audit, gave him the wages.

So you go onsite and then you do the full audit?

We do the Justin Temsett effect. We get the bonnet open, get in there, find out what's wrong, if anything. And in his case, there was nothing wrong because it's a clean slate. And then we made recommendations of all the things they could have in place. So obviously first things first, So as a small business with one employee or zero employees, you just need the mandatory systems, which is work health and safety systems, work health and safety policy, ideally to know what wages there are if you're going to employ staff. And now that you've got the system, you're 100% compliant. You've got contractors agreements for your new contractor. Yeah. You can put employment agreements and job advertisements based on the job descriptions that we've given for you. So the thing is, you've got every single thing. Including if you wanted to put it on Gumtree or things like that, rolling ads, so that if you did get the interest, you might be willing at that stage to put your foot in. But if you don't know what you need, how much it's gonna cost, you don't even get off the ground.

Yeah, and I think that's a key point, is that it is about ensuring that, you know, when we're dealing with health, fitness, lifestyle professionals, you've gotta impact communities. And to do so, this is a very, a huge stepping stone sticking point for a lot of businesses to really move ahead. Now I also mentioned that you're a bit of a, um, you know, you're a sales trainer as well. You're a sales— you're a performance expert pretty much in businesses. And give me, I guess, your kind of sales tip to really grow a business. Now they've got the structure in place, they've got the employee assurance model, they've got the marketing model in place, how do they continue to scale with ease? I mean, when I say with ease, I probably mean that lightly, but what's the next What are the things that you've seen over time? 'Cause you work with thousands and thousands of businesses as well.

Yeah, so we, EmploySure can also facilitate some of the growth within a business. So what we call performance uplift. People traditionally use what's defined as performance management as a termination tool, and it shouldn't be. It's a bad stigma about it. It's not there for termination tools. It's literally there to boost the performance of employees, managers of gyms, managers of clubs. to a standard where they're gonna be profitable so that they are making calls or they are putting things on social media and things like that. So pretty much another joint client of ours, Adam Gronow, sorry Adam, I hope you don't mind me dropping your name here. He came to me when he had one personal training firm called BeActive. And I believe you worked with BeActive as well?

Yeah, back in the day we did some work with BeActive and his website and some consulting, yeah.

Yeah, so basically—

Shout out to Adam, yes.

Hey Adam, how are you? Sorry buddy. But anyway, I met with Adam when he only had the one gym and he basically just said, look, I need a bit of support. I'm living in the Blue Mountains, the gym's in Five Dock. I'm getting a little bit sick of the travel, and maybe it could have been run a little bit more optimized and efficiently than it was. At that stage, he did have plans to scale, but it was not in the immediate vision whatsoever.

Sure.

First, we've got to make some money. First, we've got to get the managers doing the right thing. First, we've got to put a little bit more rigid job descriptions, and first, we've got to stop with the bullshit. With all respect, sorry. And so anyway, we came in, we dealt with a few things, we optimized everything, we gave everyone employment packs, and then he could run a business from afar, from the Blue Mountains, and then his 5-dock business went gangbusters, and now he's got another 2 businesses, Blue Mountains personal

training. Yeah, I think Adam's a great element of that where he wanted to be in the Blue Mountains and have his business there, and I think that's a big step is that I know personally a lot of the big barriers is that, well, staff and performance and all that kind of stuff, like it's, It's another thing that we have to learn. And clients come to us because they've realized they love what they do, but now they've got to learn marketing, you know, and they've got to learn sales. And I think the whole element not to learn this and just have someone trusted that you can pick up the phone and boom, you've got that sorted. I think that's a huge weight off my shoulders anyway.

And also exactly what you said, systems. You can predefine anything that happens within the business environment at the start of the employment relationship. You can define the activity, the amount of sales calls, the amount of posts on Facebook, the walk around at the end checking that all the weights are put away. Yep. The sick days, the annual leave, the holidays, the requests for pay rises, the termination procedure. Every single thing that could happen within a small business can be predefined and reverse engineered within a handbook to say, if we have this situation, here's exactly how we resolve it. If you take a sick day and you don't bring a medical certificate, you're not getting paid for the sick day. The end. None of this, can you please not do that? How do we do this? Is this an adverse thing?

So that's why everything literally is able to be, you know, predefined so that it's not going to happen. If it does happen, you have a system for it that's already been created.

You've always got leverage. Leverage means it's not master-servant. Leverage is basically, you put me in a position which has now made my life a little bit untenable today. I now need to come into the shop and deal with this. 'Cause I see that you're on a cruise and you didn't give me enough notice for your holiday. So therefore, because that's happened, I'm not gonna do anything now, but next time it happens, I will have to docu-pay, I will have to give you a letter, I will have to give you a warning letter, or I'm gonna have to terminate you. We've already pre-agreed what was happening here, so, you know, consider yourself lucky. So I don't mean to be self-righteous, but it's like, as a business owner, you guys do the right thing. You pay the correct wages, you pay on time, ideally. Yeah. You don't kick or beat up your staff ideally. But then unfortunately, usually where the relationship wanes is human beings are human beings.

Yep.

Where they go off the course, where they might test out their freedom limits here or might test out the lateness limits there. And if you've got things defined about what happens next, it's very, very much easier to get everyone back on the ship sailing in the right direction. But if you don't have that in place, it's very, very difficult and it causes cultural problems, a lot of cost, a lot of time. And emotion. You can have emotional relationships, but if you've set the right rules, the rules are just followed as a natural state. You don't need the emotional crappy conversations to follow on for it. So basically, EmploySure sets those things up, defines them, you both agree on them, and usually what happens is the staff hasn't done the right thing.

Yep.

You have a conversation, say, can you not do it again? The reason we've got these rules in place is because all these are bigger, all these standards are bigger than all of us. Safety.

Bigger than all of us.

Bigger than all of us. So in other words, it's not about me, it's not about you. I don't want to have this meeting as much as you don't want me to have this meeting with you. I just don't want to have this meeting again.

But we're having the meeting because it wasn't predefined, and I think when you've never experienced getting staff, or when you are in a growth stage in your business, you don't know what you don't know. You're not, you're not sure which is the next path. Okay, let's talk about Let's talk about some more practical, some practical questions. I might put you on the spot and ask you a few questions. What about a business that has contractors? So a lot of the fitness industry, they may employ all different contractors and they pay them in the ABN. Can, you know, how, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is that something that you guys can handle as well?

Don't hire contractors. No, I'm

only joking. Oops, there goes the business.

No, I'm only joking, I'm only joking. Fair Work says they don't want regular and systematic contractors, nor regular and systematic casuals. For what reason, I'm not exactly sure, but legally speaking, after about 3 to 6 months, they're deemed as employees anyway. Right. So if you're going to get contractors on a regular basis, so regular hours, regular weeks, just be very cautious that after 3 to 6 weeks, or 3 to 6 months, they may actually have employment rights under the deemed employment status. The second thing is, if you are going to have contractors, which obviously PTs, most are, And it's a pretty silly law considering fitness industry and the general practice industry, doctors and medical practices, PTs and gyms. What do you do? Have a really rigorous contractor's agreement saying, we will have regular work with you.

Oh yeah.

We do invoice you. You'll need an ABN number. We don't pay for your superannuation. So if you're super duper clear with exactly what's expected, you're going to waiver a lot of the liability away. But again, don't forget Fair Work laws still override your contractor's agreement after a certain amount of time. Rolling contractor agreements, if they've got work somewhere else, if it's just the cleaner, that's not going to be a problem. But full-time PTs, just heads up, don't do it.

Okay, next question. What about when you are a solo business? How do you know when it's the right time to kind of like get your first employee? And who would the first employee be?

Good question. Now. I

told you you were on

the spot. Get it now. I mean, if you don't take the plunge to your first employee, it's never going to happen. If you do get your first employee, yes, financial risk. Yes, you might be concerned that it's not going to be paid off. But if you know for a fact that you're busy, you're working 12-hour days, you don't have enough time for the kids, it is time to start advertising for your first role. You can get someone on as a casual, a permanent part-time, so very minimal hours. So minimal risk. Minimal risk, minimal hours, minimal commitment. So it's sort of like the side hustle, so to speak. So look, we're working 12-hour days, let's just do 8-hour days and try and offset some of that work with someone else. And then in terms of what to pay the person, the conditions, things like that, that's again something that you can call Employsure about.

Cool, that sounds really good. So the concept of like, let's say you're a growing business and you start someone off with 10 or 15 or 20 hours, can you then immediately move them up to a full-time rate? And how is that? Like, is that a new contract that you need for that?

Yes. So basically there'll be transitionary events or lifecycle events for your employees or contractors. Again, the true definition of a contractor is someone that comes in to do a job and then goes again.

So

it's like a builder will get someone to do the gyprocking or to do the toilets, the plumber to do the toilets, and They'll do the job, then they'll go. They'll have their own tools of the trade, their own ABN, their own logos, all that sort of stuff.

Own equipment, things like that.

Own equipment. So obviously that doesn't happen in fitness and in gyms at the moment.

So people aren't bringing their bench presses into the gym.

They're not, yeah, they're not bringing it, which is again, it is what it is. But basically, yeah, so you start them off again as a contractor relationship if you wanted to. After that 3 or 6 months, you do need to decide on the commitment you're gonna make. Usually it would be a casual or permanent part-time role. Casual is at a premium rate, 25% above the award rate, but you don't need to pay all the other entitlements like the sick days and things like that. Or you can commit to a permanent part-time role, but yes, in stages. And again, you should be getting advice the whole way through. So organisations like yours, ideally, if you're giving enough leads and enough momentum in there, there's always going to be a need to get the employees. So that's why our clients Works so well using our services, because you're getting the leads, they're growing, we're getting the staff, they're using our services, and as they grow and scale, there's even more value there for both of us.

Yeah, I'll quickly talk about that. I'm really excited about this particular partnership because it just means that our clients can start to generate leads, and when they start to scale, meaning they want to open more sessions, they want to open up a gym, they want to get their first or second or third or fourth staff member, there's no slowness down. And that's where a lot of the time we get stagnant in growth. A lot of our clients is that they have that scary, oh my God, I've got to get a— I've got to get an expensive lawyer, or I've got to get a template agreement, I don't know what to pay them, all those kind of things. And I think that eliminates a lot of the risk, and you can actually then put that back into marketing. And that's what I love about it, like putting it back into marketing, because marketing then will equal sale, sale will equal success in your business.

Correct. So We're all about systems for scale. So basically you're getting a lot of leads in, now you're even busier than you were before and you're already on an 8-hour day. So you need these platforms like ComMarketing, like the EmployShaws to say, you know what, I don't want to do the bullshit stuff. I just want to get paid, get more money. I want to be up here and I want my team, my systems to be down there. And unfortunately, if you don't want to be a growing business, you have to make that decision as quickly as possible. So if they've got you, it's a good start to think about employees, and if you've got employees, it's a good, good time to start to think about EmploySure.

Amazing. Well, I found this, uh, very interesting, and if you are in that space of scalability, if you are in the space of growth, um, I think this is one kind of area that you shouldn't really do or really learn yourself. I know, I know you can learn all this and you've got all the tools and the resources, and you show me the manual that you guys have and the whole portal that you can go into, but really, I don't think it's that— I mean, excuse me, but I don't think it's that exciting, really.

It's not exciting at all.

It's really boring stuff.

It's boring. Regulatory compliance within the Fair Work Act and the Work Health and Safety Act is the most dry thing in the world, but that's not what we're doing here, and that's not what you're doing. We're trying to get you guys selling more, earning more money, staff performing, and Getting us through the crappy systems.

And that's why I said at the start of this show that you are the magic man. Literally.

Hey, thanks, man.

All you have to do is pick up the phone and give you a call and you sort the rest out and then your team can sort it out.

Magic men. Magic men.

Yeah, that's what it's about. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for tuning in for another edition of Industry Change. Like all episodes, it's really important to deep dive and understand the backstory behind this. So for more information about EmploySure, you can go to their website, employsure.com.au. If you are in the fitness industry and you want to go deeper in the conversations about marketing and sales, just go on Facebook and you can search us on a Facebook group called Crush Your Fitness Marketing and just request to join and we'll enter— you can enter in for free and you can get all the resource information and more conversations like this to really ensure that your business can continue to grow. I'll see you next time on Industry Change.