Podcast Transcript: 369 – How to Dress your Personal Trainers for Success with Luke Carlson

Please enjoy this transcript for 369 – How to Dress your Personal Trainers for Success with Luke Carlson

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Lawrence: Lawrence Neal here. Welcome back to High Intensity Business, the podcast where we discuss high intensity strength training and provide you with the tools, tactics, and strategies to grow your strength training business.

To download and read the transcript of this podcast, please go to highintensitybusiness.com, search for episode 369 and there you can find the transcript download button to get that transcript.

Today we are going to be talking about how to decide on your trainer and why the team dress code in your business? Today’s guest to talk about that is Discover Strength Founder and CEO Luke Carlson. He’s been on the podcast multiple times. I thought there is no better person to bring on to really talk about this and dive into different possibilities on how we decide on what’s the best fit for our business.

Welcome, Luke. Good to see you again.

Luke: Good to see you. Thanks for having me, Lawrence. It’s always a pleasure joining you.

Lawrence: Pleasure is all mine. We are talking about dress code today. Meaning, when people launch a high intensity training business they think about, “Okay, how do we want our trainers to be presented?” Do we want them to wear shirts and ties, or do we want them to wear athletic leisure wear, or something in between like smart casual which is what we’ve gone for in our business. I guess it is important to understand what are the factors that go into making the right decisions around that. Obviously, it is important because if you’re not deliberately thinking about dress code in the context of your strategy and brand then you’re probably making a mistake.

I’ll let you riff for a bit. What comes to mind for you when thinking about how you decide on a dress code for your personal training business?

Luke: As small or as nuanced as this topic is, it’s a topic that I’m really interested in because I have an emotional connection to how we landed on the dress code that we’ve landed on. Not that it’s the right dress code. It is just probably the right dress code for us right now. I remember visiting, I was 22 years old, and I visited the Gainesville Health and Fitness Center which has now been renamed to Gainesville Health and Fitness. I’m 22. I’m a senior in college. I just hosted a conference in Minneapolis. This was before REC. And we had strength training people from all over that attended. It was nuts. I was 22 and it was actually bigger than any REC we’ve ever hosted. Maybe it was easier to get people to come to events like that in the past.

Jim Flanagan came and he basically was a vendor. He was selling the Avenger Leg Press. Afterwards he said, “I want you to come down to Florida and we’ll spend some time together.” I’ve never met Jim Flanagan in person. On this incredible trip to Florida I got to meet Arthur Jones for the first time and hang out in his family room. I got to meet Ken Hutchins. I got to meet and spent time with Jim Flanagan and drove to Arthur’s old home, the ranch in Ocala. We did all those things.

Well, one of those visits was Gainesville Health and Fitness. I walked in and everybody was wearing a shirt and tie. All of the males had blue dress shirts of some kind and a tie and all of the women… Regardless of what your role was. If you’re working at the front desk, if you’re working on the exercise floor, you have a blue blouse or dress shirt and professional slacks. And then owner, Joe Cirulli, had the same thing. He had a blue dress shirt on and a tie. This is a massive health club. They keep expanding. In 2002, I don’t know if it was 70,000 sq.ft. or 80,000 sq.ft. But it was big. I was just in awe, not just of the club. I was in awe of the professionalism and the consistency. I landed on one word there. The word was… It is so important. This is I think the central conversation of our podcast today. The word is intentionality. When I walked out of there I understood that Gainesville Health and Fitness, their leadership was intentional about everything they did.

Today we are talking about dress code. They were intentional about what they were going to wear. I just thought, “Okay, I don’t have to do a shirt and tie. I don’t have to do a blue shirt but I should probably be intentional.” To me intentional means if someone asks you, “Why didn’t you make that decision? Why are you doing this?” You’d have a number of responses. I don’t think those responses have to be evidence-based. I don’t think those responses have to be supported by marketing and sales data, thought leadership from Jim Collins or Marcus Buckingham, or Patrick Lencioni. I just think you as a leader have to be able to say this is why we did this.

I’ll end this riff in just a second. But what I find fascinating in our space… I mean, Joe Cirulli and Gainesville Health and Fitness is a massive health club that does everything. They have yoga, basketball, pilates, and a full physical therapy clinic, and everything that a club has from swimming pools to you name it. They also have more MedX machines under one roof than any club on earth. At that time they didn’t have X-Force. Now they have all the X-Force equipment also. What I find fascinating is most of your listeners and my wonderful friends and colleagues in this space are really intentional about equipment. I mean intentional about equipment. People are trading out their pull over on a third version of the pull over because they found this pullover was available and it’s going to be better than their previous pull and they like the strength curve more. In fact, they bought a different machine and they shaved down the cams so the strength curve was even better and they had it retrofitted so that there was a Kevlar strap traveling over the cam instead of a chain.

We are insanely intentional about equipment choice but there’s a lot of other areas where we are not so intentional about. I think the customer sees and experiences all of our brand, not just the things that we are passionate about or the things that directly impact the workout. If I’m hosting this discussion, I would interject and say, well, obviously we are intentional about the equipment. That is what your physiology is actually interacting with. That is how the resistance is applied to our working muscles. I agree with that. But I don’t know if our target market or our customer thinks that that’s the only element of the brand that they are actually purchasing.

I think the keyword is intentionality. When we wrap up today I’m not going to tell people… Who am I to tell people what exactly is the perfect dress code for a business. But you better be intentional about it. I don’t think we are necessarily intentional. Now, intentional means just what I said, you have a rationale for why you are doing it. Intentional doesn’t mean you are on the spot making up some BS about why you chose it. There’s got to be a reason for it.

Lawrence: Got it. Awesome way to start. Just developing from there because I had here some notes about I think it’s probably important to have a strategy to have gone through perhaps something like EOS and Traction and decided on what your vision is for your business and what you want your brand to be about. And then you use that for helping out with these decisions, right? How do you think one should go about figuring out what’s the best fit for them in their business? What filters would you use if any?

Luke: I’m going to use the scary word that nobody really knows what the definition is. It’s what’s your brand all about? We don’t have to dive into all the elements of a brand and what it means. I think you would have to ask this question of yourself and of your company, “What do you want to be known for?” When the customer thinks about you, what do you want them to think about? When they talk about what you do to their friends, what do you want them to say? When they talk about you to referral sources, what kind of adjectives should be coming up? What are people saying about you? When I say you I mean the company, the workout experience, you as the owner, your staff etc. Those things are on the periphery of the brand. When the customer thinks about your brand or when they think about you, what feelings are elicited. I think that’s the starting point.

Let me just make that a little bit more practical. For us, our first studio was not an attractive location. It was the only location that was available that I could afford. Now fast forward 16 years later. We’ve run the really expensive Buxton analysis of the demographic in the area. It turns out it’s an awesome area. I told people for the last 15 years that our first location was not in the right spot. We just made it happen because we are great operators. That’s not true. It turned out it’s a really good spot. But the physical space itself was not nice. We didn’t have good co-tenancy. It was just not an attractive space. We signed a lease, painted the walls ourselves. I picked up the carpet and got the carpet put in. I went to a store that had big front desks and we bought a front desk and just dropped it in there. Literally my mom and I drove and we picked that desk together. But we did have really great equipment. We bought everything brand new. There was nothing in there that was used. All brand new MedX, Hammer Strength, Nautilus 2ST, Nautilus Nitro equipment. About 60% was MedX. The rest of it was a balance of the other things. And so we had great equipment and then from day one we wore shirts and ties.

We just had our 16-year anniversary and I was going and looking at old photos. I was looking at it, it was like my third day at work. I still remember on my first day at work what shirt and tie I wore. I was not used to wearing a shirt and tie. I was like I can’t believe I’m going to be doing this every day. We just decided that when someone walks on the door we didn’t want them to feel… The keyword to a brand is ‘feel’ – the feelings that are elicited by your customer. We don’t want the customer to feel like they were in a gym. That was our thing. I just didn’t like that they were in a gym. It actually hurts my feelings when someone says, “How is the gym going?” Now I don’t care. I don’t mind the word gym as much now. But then it was like, “It is not a gym.” And so when people walk in the door I want them to understand right away that we were not a gym. It is, “What’s the feeling that you want elicited when someone thinks about you?”

The second thing that I consider, and I don’t have a long list. The last thing I consider is, “How could we be differentiated?” I didn’t know anything about three uniques and that uniques were the foundation of strategy. But I did know that I don’t want to be like everybody else out there. Everybody else out there was wearing at that time like Nike and Under Armour athletic clothing. This was before Lululemon existed. I thought that was a good look. I was a strength and conditioning coach in high schools and in professional football. We had just awesome athletic attire. We had all of this great Nike stuff and we had our logo with a barbell through it. We were into the attire. Everybody got tons of great attire when I was a high school strength coach, college strength coach, NFL strength coach. I thought that was awesome. I love wearing that stuff. But everybody is wearing that so I knew that wouldn’t make us different. We needed to find a way to be different from any other workout experience somebody can have. From a visual standpoint, when you walk in the door you see that we wear shirts and ties.

When I hired my first staff, I told them when someone walks in the door, a client works with us, they are really paying us a lot of money. We are charging a lot of money. Everybody in this room is 26 years old or younger. I was the senior person in the room at 26 years of age. Everybody else was 22 or 23 years of age. I said we have to command a certain amount of professionalism or communicate a certain amount of professionalism so I just go about wearing a shirt and tie.

Now, let me fast forward to 2022. It’s probably more than one, but I have a client who is a wonderful VP involved in marketing for one of the biggest retailers in the world. This person will have coffee with me every now and then and say, “Hey, I hate that you wear shirts and ties.” Do mock ups of all the different clothing that our staff should be wearing. And she says, “Well, no one is wearing shirts and ties anymore. Even bankers don’t wear shirts and ties.” In the back of my head all I’m thinking is that’s even more reason that we would continue. I’m okay with that.

Now, I do want to have an awareness or sensitivity, and I believe I didn’t know this 16 years ago and I didn’t know this 2 years ago, that maybe a shirt and tie is actually promoting or biased toward men or males and males being powerful in the workplace. I don’t think that’s a good thing. But we never said [unclear] It is just a male wear shirt and tie and a female wear the equivalent which is a professional clothing of some kind. Today we say that our dress code is gender neutral so you could wear a shirt and tie as a female if you want to. I do have a little bit of awareness of that. I don’t know if I buy into it. I would say I have an awareness of it.

That’s the filters are the brand – the feeling and the emotion, you want to be elicited when someone walks into your business. And then the second one is, well, could you make a choice that actually makes you different from the rest of the competition that’s out there. Our goal is not to look good. Our goal is to look a little bit different. Now, then I found out down the road that every Super Slow place on earth wears shirts and ties. And I thought, okay, I guess I’m not so different. But there were no Super Slow places where we were so it was different for us. People will always say, “Oh, you really had that Ken Hutchins’ influence.” And I thought, well, no. I didn’t know that they were doing this. I went to the Gainesville Health and Fitness and they were wearing shirts and ties.

Lawrence: Who influenced Joe and his desire to do that?

Luke: I don’t know. The oldest picture I ever saw of Joe, he always had a shirt and tie on like in the club like this is in the early 80s or late 70s. I think in that era you just wore a shirt and tie to work. He spread it to anybody that was working in the health club.

Lawrence: Perhaps a generational thing then. I had never thought about the potential derogatory connotation that you just mentioned which I don’t think I buy into either but it is interesting to think about. Does it ever bother you or did it ever bother you? Obviously, there is something about wearing a shirt and tie and wearing a nice watch where you just feel great. You just feel confident and feel like a professional. You probably perform better whatever it is you’re doing for the most part when you feel good. I can see a massive positive. Does it ever bother you? I suspect it occasionally bothers the team where they have to wear a shirt and tie. How do you feel about that and how do you address that?  

Luke: Actually, I think no. There is a bit of concern I had early on. I thought, well, we are not going to be able to hire people. They are not going to want to do this. But actually it’s been a bit of a positive. Again, everywhere they have interviewed they are going to wear athletic attire and so it is like, “Whoa, this is since this business has been intentional. There is some thought behind this and this is a little bit different and I want to be a part of that.” I think maybe it’s the people that we hire who are like okay I can get on board with this. Let’s be clear if we ever say, “Hey, we are coming into this meeting and it is casual attire.” They love that. They don’t want to only wear shirts and ties.

Let me be a little bit clearer about what our dress code is. It is a shirt and tie for our dress code Monday-Friday. Saturday and Sunday we have what we call a weekend attire. You wear dress pants, you wear slacks on Saturday and Sunday, and then everybody when they are hired is given a Nike Discover Strength polo. You can wear that. And there’s some substitutes that we allow. You can wear a Nike quarter zip top with the Discover Strength logo on it. That’s what we wear on Saturday and Sunday. If someone works on a holiday, we usually let them wear weekend attire on that holiday. This past Monday was Memorial Day in the U.S. and I worked a shift at one of our locations.

Lawrence: I saw that. I was going to email you and say, “Luke, where is the shirt and tie?”     

Luke: We sent out a message saying, “Hey, if you are working on this holiday it is weekend attire.” We’ll often do that. That’s where we landed.

Lawrence: Okay. This is great. You talked about a few potential filters – intentionality, what do you want to be known for, how do you make this congruent with your brand. There is a great book… Sorry, go ahead.

Luke: No, I’m just excited to share another thought. But I want you to tell me about that book.

Lawrence: Okay. You put me on to Denise Lee Yohn, if that’s how to say her name, What Great Brands Do. It’s her book I believe. It’s great. I’ve just started listening to it and I’ve had to pause it to finish what else I’m listening to and reading to make sure that I go all in on it. I love her summary. It’s that brand is what you do and how you do it. That’s the simple definition. We’ll put that in the show notes if people want to dive into understanding the brand and really improving that aspect of their business.   

One of the other filters which you hinted at when you were talking about the professionalism you want to communicate as a business is understanding that you are charging for personal training at a premium price point. You’ve got to have all these different factors congruent with that. You got me thinking about your target market, and this applies to lots of our colleagues, who are affluent busy professionals. They are used to a high level of service. And like you’ve told me they eat at lovely restaurants, they stay in nice hotels. They are accustomed to at least a baseline level of service. One filter is obviously designing the business around that individual and dressing accordingly. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean shirt and tie. But it does perhaps mean that you shouldn’t be a scruffbag. That’s another filter potentially. I love your thoughts on that and also that thought you’ve got as well.

Luke: Lawrence, I agree with that. I’ve probably repeated that 10,000 times over the last 16 years. But as the world gets away from shirts and ties, like you said, it doesn’t mean to be shirt and tie. I think what our target market is used to, is they are used to intentional brand experiences. So whether it is a hotel, a restaurant, or massage, they are expecting the whole experience to be connected. All the brand touchpoints have some synergy. I think that’s what is important.

Now, let me go back to… We talked so much about the workout. But the customer experience, one of the big influences for us on the shirt and tie and one of the ways we explain it to our staff, and I got this from the Ritz Carlton, is we want to have a ready to serve mentality – ready to serve. If you stay at a Ritz Carlton hotel. When you get there, there’s going to be someone dressed to the nines just to open the door for you to walk into the hotel. If you stop and look at that person, you should be saying to yourself, “Hold on! The whole reason you are wearing the shirt and tie and maybe white gloves…” I don’t know. The reason you are dressed the way you are is because you got ready to serve me today. Ready to serve can be demonstrated in someone’s attire. The only reason you are wearing a shirt and tie is so you can open the door for me. Wow! We say the same thing with our workouts – ready to serve.

On everyone’s first day of employment I say, “You can give someone an equally good workout wearing your pajamas. Of course you can. But by wearing a shirt and tie in our case, you are demonstrating that you got ready to serve the customer.” That is powerful communication. The second a client walks in the door that there was preparation going into this I’m a ready to serve mentality. Now, you ask the question to our staff. I think our staff have this strong emotional demarcation that when I put my shirt and tie on it’s ready to serve mentality like it is time to go.

One of the biggest issues I see in our space is all of our studios… Our wonderful colleagues and friends, their studios become a second home to them. Why? Because they spend so much time there. They are also passionate about it. They care more about their equipment than they do about the furniture in their own home. Well, their studio becomes almost like a second living room to them and they want to be comfortable. They want to have the music that they like. They want to dress the way that they would dress if they were really in a comfortable environment. It becomes a little bit of a man cave. You could argue that maybe it is intentional that it has become that. But I think we have to think about the customer’s experience. Hold on, are we being too relaxed? Are we almost letting someone into our man cave rather than no this is actually a business and we want them to experience and we want to elicit certain feelings and emotions as a part of this experience.      

Lawrence: Yeah. Just to tag on to that. You are talking about customer experience just getting ready to serve. You’ve talked, and we were talking before this podcast at length, about the importance of the workout and the customer experience and how that’s really for a long time has been not focused on enough by our colleagues, who are looking for that news of magic marketing secret when really they probably need to just hone that customer experience and the workout. And they will then be generating many more referrals and obviously retaining more clients.

This is one component in that for you, isn’t it, for Discover Strength? It is ready to serve. It is that customer experience, and it’s also that talk trigger. It is the thing that they are going to talk about with their friends after they workout, “Hey, you know what, Discover Strength, they all wear shirts and ties. It is really strange. It is really different.” And that’s going to ultimately drive more referrals. Can you speak on the talk trigger aspect or any thoughts on what I have just said?

Luke: I agree with everything that you said. So a talk trigger is what can you operationalize in your business that people are going to talk about, that they are going to comment on. People comment on, “Oh, that’s the place where they wear shirts and ties.” No one has ever left a gym and said, “Oh that’s the place they wear Nike and Lululemon.” Well, obviously that’s every gym on earth. No one is going to comment on that. It becomes a talk trigger if it’s something that people actually mention after the workouts.

We actually think we only have a couple of talk triggers. One of the talk triggers is the intensity that I got just absolutely pummeled for 30 minutes. That’s a talk trigger. Let’s be clear. If you are training too shy of momentary muscle failure or maybe just momentary muscle failure, that’s not a talk trigger, right? No one is going to say, “Can you believe I went to 2 reps shy of failure? That was something special.” But when you go to failure and then you use some advanced overload techniques, that’s a talk trigger. People will always talk about it. One of the many reasons I know that is that we host a conference every year. We do early morning workouts and we train people just like we train every one of our clients. Every one that does that workout talks about the workout afterwards. We are thinking, “Why are they talking about it?” This is normal. This is what we do literally. Every one of our staff does it 12x a day every single day. Our staff are baffled by it. They just don’t realize that not everybody trains that way. So it’s a talk trigger, right? Regardless of whether or not it is the right physiological decision. It is a talk trigger. Wearing a shirt and tie is a talk trigger. Someone is going to talk about it after the fact.

Lawrence: Awesome. Okay. Let’s just wrap up by talking about some various options. I just had a few written down here. I mean, maybe there’s many more but you’ve got shirts and ties, smart casual, chinos, trousers, smart shoes, trainers. I don’t know how to describe it. Luke, you are way more fashionable than me so you probably know the lingo. With a nice fitted polo, or like a fleece or something like that. That’s kind of our thing. But what I’m thinking about doing is moving over to shirts and trousers but no tie. Open neck, nice trousers or slacks as you would say. That kind of look and then a V-neck jumper sort of thing for the colder months. That’s kind of where we are headed. We have yet to really push the button there but that’s what we are going to do. And then obviously you’ve got athletic leisure which is ubiquitous. It is what every one of our competitors is doing. And like you say it is that homogeneity. It is that lack of differentiation. Maybe that’s not a problem if that’s not what they are using to differentiate, right?

Do you have any thoughts on what you see out there in terms of attire and what the options are for you?

Luke: Yeah, I think I really look at it. Our little space there are three options or three points out of continuum. On the far end there’s shirts and ties or dress clothes. The other far end is purely athletic attire. You are literally wearing yoga pants, workout pants, Lululemon, Nike shirts of all different kinds. And the middle to me is always a polo shirt that’s tucked in in some way.

Now, I think that the key is intentionality. I should walk in and understand… This is my opinion. Whoever is working there gets dressed to go to work. I talked before about the ready to serve approach. I’ll just give some examples of brands that are out there. I love what fit20 does. fit20 appears to be some type of slacks or pants and then they have some type of we would say vest, quarter zip, gilet. James is going to give me a hard time. We don’t say jumpers in the U.S. It has a logo on it and maybe they wear a dress shirt under it. That look, right? I know that person if I saw him at the grocery store I know that they just came from work or they are about to go to work. That is their work attire. I think I should understand that you got ready to serve and you intentionally are wearing whatever you are wearing because you are at work right now. Whether that is logo etc.

If you are going to go on the far end of the spectrum and wear athletic attire, that’s fine. Just have it all be logoed. I didn’t say an unbelievable look. Not an unbelievable look but everybody has to have the logo on. We are in the backyard of the largest health club company in the world, Life Time Fitness. They go athletic but everybody is wearing logoed Life Time Fitness attire in there. I think they could pick better looking attire but at least it is all logoed and it is brand consistent. When I look around I know who works there. You may say, “Well, in my studio everybody knows that I work there.” That’s clear. But I still think we have to dress in a way where we are representing that intentionality.

Now, there is a step beyond that. I used to wrestle with the idea that professionals don’t wear uniforms. So like your dentist, your doctor, your attorney doesn’t wear a uniform that’s got a name tag etc. That’s what you would get if you checked into a hotel. They have to have that uniform on. But a true professional doesn’t wear a uniform. They just dress professionally. I think I was turned on by that and I just said, alright, we are not going to have our people wear a uniform. We are just going to say dress up.

I’ll actually go one step further. Gainesville Health and Fitness in the last few years have changed the dress shirt and tie to a Gainesville Health and Fitness dress shirt and tie where they have a logo on the dress shirt. That’s not what we want to do. We are not going to go that far. Because we just want to say, just like your attorney, as an example, an accountant would just put dress clothes on wherever they went. That’s what we are going to do. There is intentionality there but it’s not, “Hey, we have to put on this specific uniform.” It sounds like I’m speaking out of both sides of my mouth because over here with the athletic attire I was saying you got to have logos. With the dress attire I was saying you want to avoid logos. I just think you have to be intentional about that. Do you view your people as professionals and therefore you don’t think they should truly wear uniforms? I think it is a big decision, a big discussion. 

Lawrence: What do you think are the benefits? Excluding what you’ve already spoken about so talk triggers, sure. But do you think there’s other benefits like it does enable you to perhaps charge a higher fee. It does enable you to attract different types of customers. It does enable you to be associated with medical professionals that are perhaps seen as being more elite than a standard personal trainer.

Luke: I agree with almost everything you said except that last part because I think there’s more doctors that are going to cross fit and they are not dressed professionally than anywhere else. I don’t think that doctors actually care. I just think that the customer has to experience brand congruence. You can’t say that you are the smartest and you are an expert and not be intentional about how you are dressing.

Lawrence: Okay. Cool. Alright, well, that’s covered up my list. Any final thoughts on dress code that you want to share?

Luke: I think we hit it from all angles.

Lawrence: We did. Just before we wrap up here, we want to mention that Luke and I collaborated some time ago on a couple of courses which you can check out on the website over at highintensitybusiness.com/products. There is a fantastic course I recently revisited called How to Build a Million Dollar Training Gym. You can tell Luke is far more happy about using the word gym these days. It’s just an incredible course. It is 3 hours of pure gold. I went through it recently and identified a lot of challenges and issues that we need to address and find it so beneficial. You can go and check that course out. And then there’s Build a Website that Generates Clients with Hannah Johnson, your VP of Sales and Marketing. There’s a few others as well.

If you are interested in checking out these courses, just go to highintensitybusiness.com/products. To find the blog post for this episode and download the PDF transcript, please go to highintensitybusiness.com and search for episode 369. Until next time. Thank you very much for listening.