How to Scale a Fitness Business Beyond the Owner

There comes a point in the growth of almost every fitness business where the owner’s greatest strength starts becoming one of the business’s biggest constraints.

In the early days, being able to do everything is incredibly useful. You make the sales calls, coach the sessions, write the programs, solve the problems and somehow find enough time to clean the toilets as well. The business survives because you’re willing to do whatever needs to be done, and that ability to take action is often one of the reasons you got the thing off the ground in the first place.

The problem comes when the business grows but your operating model doesn’t. Revenue increases, the team gets bigger and there are more members to serve, yet everything important still lives inside the owner’s head. If you want to grow a fitness business, the way you operate has to evolve alongside it. Eventually, growth creates more pressure rather than more freedom because every new member, staff member or service gives you something else to manage.

My recent Profit Made Simple conversation with Ceri Cummings from GOAT Nose Strips was a fascinating example of what can happen when an entrepreneur eventually learns to break that cycle.

Ceri has built and been involved in gyms, Pilates studios, recovery businesses and other ventures, and GOAT has subsequently given him experience building a highly scalable product business. Yet some of the most useful lessons in our conversation came from the mistakes he made building his first gym. He openly admitted that for years he had very few genuine systems because everything was sitting inside his head.

Today, several of his businesses can operate with very little involvement from him. That hasn’t happened because Ceri stopped being ambitious or stopped taking action. It happened because he learned how to combine that bias towards action with systems, numbers, capable people and trust.

For fitness business owners who want to scale without simply creating a bigger job for themselves, I think there are some important lessons in his journey.

One of the recurring themes in my conversation with Ceri was his willingness to take action.

The best piece of advice he remembers receiving actually came from Mark during those early days. After Ceri’s original plans to open the gym had fallen apart, Mark challenged his thinking around risk. The message was essentially that if you never take the risk, you’ll never know what might have happened.

That stuck with him.

There’s a useful lesson there because business owners can easily convince themselves they’re being responsible when they’re actually procrastinating. We want another spreadsheet, another month of data, another conversation with the accountant and another sign from the universe that guarantees the decision will work.

That guarantee doesn’t exist.

At some point, every meaningful business decision contains uncertainty. Opening your first facility, employing your first full-time coach, raising your prices, moving into a larger site or introducing a new service all involve some degree of risk.

The objective isn’t to eliminate risk. It’s to become better at understanding it.

That’s where one of Ceri’s other principles becomes particularly important.

Ceri is the definition of somebody who likes opportunities. During our conversation we touched on gyms, Pilates, recovery centres, GOAT Nose Strips and a new golf simulator business. For somebody wired that way, the danger isn’t a shortage of ideas. It’s pursuing too many of them.

I asked him how he distinguishes between a genuine opportunity and another shiny object, and his answer gave us a useful three-part filter.

First, there needs to be an actual market opportunity. Ceri looks for a gap or an area where he believes consumer demand is moving. Second, he wants the right person or team around the idea. Third, it needs to be something he’s genuinely interested in.

I think the second point is particularly important.

Ceri didn’t pursue one earlier recovery business idea because he couldn’t find the right person. With the golf business, he sees not only a market opportunity but somebody he believes can take ownership of it. In many ways, he’s now playing the role Mark once played for him, providing resources, experience and mentorship to somebody with the hunger to build something.

Fitness business owners should use a similar filter when evaluating opportunities. Just because something could work doesn’t mean you’re the person who needs to make it work.

Is there genuine demand? Do you have the right person to drive it? Does it fit the business and the direction you’re trying to go?

If not, a good idea can still be a bad opportunity for you.

Ceri said something during the episode that I think every fitness business owner should write down:

If you know your numbers, you know what’s doable.

We were discussing the amount GOAT invests in paid advertising. To somebody looking at the spend without understanding the economics behind it, the numbers could appear frightening. Ceri’s perspective is very different because he understands what the business generates in return.

The same principle applies to a gym.

Someone outside the fitness industry might look at your annual rent, wages, equipment costs and marketing budget and wonder how you sleep at night. You see the numbers differently because, hopefully, you understand how much revenue those investments can produce.

Risk becomes more calculated when you understand the economics.

Before deciding whether you can increase advertising spend, you should know your customer acquisition cost and client lifetime value. Before hiring another coach, you should understand the additional capacity and revenue that person could create. Before signing another lease, you need a realistic view of how many members are required to cover the additional fixed costs.

Knowing the numbers doesn’t guarantee that every decision works. It allows you to understand the downside, determine what you’re prepared to risk and make the decision from evidence rather than emotion.

That’s a very different way to operate from simply saying, “It feels expensive.”

This part of Ceri’s story was particularly interesting for me because I watched some of the transition happen.

Ceri said that during the first five years of Bolt, almost everything was in his head. He knew what needed to happen and could execute it himself, but that knowledge hadn’t been properly extracted from him and turned into repeatable processes other people could follow.

That works until you try to grow.

If every decision requires the owner, you haven’t really built a system. You’ve built a dependency.

You see this constantly inside fitness businesses. The owner says they have a sales process, but what they actually have is a way they sell. They say there’s an onboarding process, but the member experience depends on which coach happens to be working that day. They believe their programming methodology is clear, yet only one person really understands why particular decisions are being made.

A system takes knowledge that currently belongs to an individual and makes it transferable.

That might include a checklist, video, documented process, template, KPI or combination of several tools. The format matters less than the outcome. Another capable person should be able to understand what good looks like and reproduce it without requiring you to stand beside them every time.

If the process disappears when you go on holiday, it wasn’t really a process.

When I asked Ceri what he’d do differently if he were opening his first gym again today, his answer was clear.

He’d systemise earlier.

Ceri describes himself as a doer, which will sound familiar to many fitness entrepreneurs. If something needs doing, it’s often quicker to simply do it yourself than stop, document the process, train somebody else and then monitor whether they’re doing it correctly.

In the short term, that’s true.

The problem is that every time the business reaches another level, you eventually have to stop and teach somebody anyway. Ceri described repeatedly hitting those points of scale, slowing down and having to extract something from his own head before growth could continue.

His approach now is very different. If he finds himself doing something repeatedly, it becomes a candidate for a system. That system can then be taught, delegated, measured and improved over time.

This is one reason systems become such an important vehicle for owner freedom. You can’t delegate effectively when nobody knows what success looks like, and you can’t hold people accountable when expectations exist only inside your head.

The first version doesn’t need to be perfect either. A system can have version one, version two and version three. What’s important is that you’ve started turning personal knowledge into organisational knowledge.

Systems alone won’t build a scalable fitness business. You still need people capable of operating them.

Ceri repeatedly came back to the importance of the right team, whether he was discussing existing businesses or evaluating a new opportunity. He wants people who genuinely want to be on the journey rather than people he has to continually drag along.

That’s a distinction worth paying attention to.

Owners sometimes spend enormous amounts of energy trying to manufacture motivation in somebody who simply doesn’t want the same things. We keep coaching, encouraging and pushing because we believe good fitness business leadership means somehow being capable of making everybody care.

You can’t want it more than they do indefinitely.

Ceri put it well during our conversation. You can pull somebody along for a period, but eventually something breaks. It may be the relationship, the business or the person themselves.

Good leadership still requires patience, support and development. People shouldn’t be discarded simply because they aren’t immediately perfect at a role. But there’s a difference between somebody who needs coaching and somebody who fundamentally doesn’t want to be there.

The scalable version of your business needs capable people who want responsibility and understand the direction you’re heading. Then you need to make sure they’re sitting in roles that actually suit their strengths.

One of the things I’ve observed about Ceri over the years is that his team genuinely seems to care about him and the businesses they’re building together.

When I asked him about his leadership style, he admitted that communication has been something he’s had to refine. He’s naturally direct and likes moving quickly, which can sometimes come across more harshly than intended.

What hasn’t changed is his willingness to lead by doing.

Ceri talked about cleaning toilets, making sales calls and getting on camera. His principle is that he wouldn’t ask somebody on his team to do something he isn’t prepared to do himself.

I think that’s a powerful leadership quality, but there’s an important distinction here for fitness business owners.

Being willing to do the work doesn’t mean you should continue doing all of the work.

In the early stages, showing your team that no task is beneath you creates credibility. Over time, your role needs to evolve. If you’re still cleaning every toilet, making every sales call and solving every operational problem five years later, you’re no longer demonstrating leadership. You’re preventing other people from taking ownership.

The best version is a leader who’s prepared to get into the trenches when required but doesn’t need to permanently live there.

GOAT has given Ceri an interesting perspective because he now operates both service businesses and a product business.

His gyms can grow, but service businesses have natural constraints. More members generally require additional coaching capacity, more floor space, additional equipment or more management. The business can absolutely become very profitable, but growth usually brings additional human and physical requirements with it.

A product business has different economics.

Ceri described the scalability of GOAT as one of the biggest revelations for him. The team can remain comparatively lean while the number of customers increases dramatically. The business doesn’t need to sign another five-year commercial lease every time it enters another market, and one product can potentially be distributed across enormous geographic areas.

That doesn’t mean fitness business owners should abandon their gyms and start e-commerce brands. That’s obviously not the lesson.

The useful question is: how does revenue scale inside your current business?

If you add another $100,000 in revenue, what needs to increase alongside it? Do you need another coach? More space? Additional administration? How much of that extra revenue eventually becomes profit?

Understanding that relationship helps you identify the more scalable parts of your existing model.

Semi-private coaching, digital support, products, nutrition, events or other revenue layers may have different capacity requirements from your core membership. Some may allow you to increase client lifetime value without increasing fixed costs at the same rate.

Revenue growth is good.

Revenue that becomes progressively easier to deliver can be even better.

The story behind GOAT also reinforced something Ceri had already learned from gyms and rugby: people want to belong to something.

When he first tried a nasal strip, he believed the product worked for him but saw obvious opportunities to improve it. He wanted better adhesion and a product that looked better, but he and his co-founder also understood that technical improvements alone weren’t enough.

They wanted to build a brand around the product.

That’s relevant to fitness businesses because your workouts are rarely as unique as you’d like to believe. Somebody can copy your exercises, equipment and timetable. They can hire coaches with similar qualifications and create a membership at roughly the same price. If you want to differentiate your gym, the real opportunity lies in creating an experience and identity that competitors can’t easily replicate.

It’s much harder to copy what it feels like to belong to your business.

Ceri described Bolt as fundamentally being a strength and conditioning gym, but the members experience more than a collection of workouts. The community and culture give the business meaning beyond the technical service.

That’s what a strong brand does.

It creates a reason for somebody to identify with you rather than simply transact with you.

Your logo and colour palette matter, but they’re the visible expression of the brand rather than the brand itself. If you want to simplify your fitness business, focus on the things members actually experience: your people, language, standards and community.

Another thing that stood out in Ceri’s description of GOAT’s growth was how little of the marketing strategy appears to have come from pretending they had everything figured out from day one.

They tested.

Early content came from activities and communities they genuinely enjoyed. Run clubs, rugby, gyms and breathwork were already part of their world, so they documented what they were doing, posted it and watched what happened.

When something performed well, they did more of it. They tested different formats, hooks and creative approaches, then increased investment behind the things that showed promise.

The same process now applies deeper into the business. Email isn’t simply a message that gets sent because Tuesday’s newsletter is due. They’re looking at purchases, subscriptions and other KPIs, then refining the communication based on what the numbers show.

Fitness business marketing should operate the same way.

Too many owners decide marketing “doesn’t work” after trying something a handful of times. Alternatively, they continue doing the same thing for years because it once worked, without measuring whether it still produces a meaningful outcome.

You need both creativity and measurement.

Create the content, run the campaign, test the offer and talk to the market. Then look at the numbers. Which message generated enquiries? Which ads produced customers? Which emails drove action? Which content was shared?

Marketing becomes much less mysterious when you treat it as an ongoing process of testing and refinement rather than searching for the perfect campaign.

There was another idea sitting underneath almost everything Ceri talked about during the episode.

He knows what he wants the businesses to eventually give him.

That doesn’t mean he wants to stop working. If anything, Ceri appears to have an unusually high appetite for work and new projects. What he wants is greater control over where he directs that energy.

He talked about potentially travelling around Australia with his wife and dogs while continuing to grow GOAT, visiting gyms, run clubs and events along the way. The reason that’s even conceivable is that his existing businesses have teams and systems capable of operating without his constant physical presence.

That’s a very different definition of freedom from doing nothing.

For some fitness business owners, freedom might mean working three days per week. For somebody else, it could mean continuing to coach because they love it but no longer dealing with administration. Another owner may want multiple locations, while someone else wants one extremely profitable studio and more time with their family.

There isn’t a correct answer.

The important part is knowing what you’re building towards because that answer should influence how you design the business today.

If your goal requires the business to eventually operate without you, systems and leadership can’t be projects you leave until later. They’re the infrastructure required to make that future possible.

Scaling a fitness business requires more than finding ways to increase gym revenue. You need repeatable systems, clear KPIs, capable team members and a model where revenue can grow without requiring the owner’s involvement to increase at the same rate. Start by documenting recurring processes and progressively delegating responsibility to people who can own them.

Important gym systems typically include lead management, sales, member onboarding, coaching delivery, retention, billing, staff onboarding, cleaning, marketing and reporting. The exact systems depend on the business, but any important recurring activity that currently depends on one person’s memory is worth examining.

Start by identifying everything only you currently know how to do. Document the process, define what good performance looks like, train another capable person and establish KPIs or review points so you can monitor outcomes without performing the task yourself. Repeat the process gradually rather than trying to disappear from the business overnight.

At a minimum, understand revenue, profit, member churn, average client lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, cost per lead, sales conversion and the capacity of your current service model. These numbers help you understand whether growth is financially sustainable rather than simply increasing revenue.

Assess whether there’s genuine market demand, whether the opportunity aligns with your goals and expertise, and whether you have the right person or team to execute it. You should also understand the financial risk and opportunity cost, because pursuing one opportunity usually means directing resources away from something else.

Systems become increasingly important as the team grows because they make knowledge transferable. Without systems, quality depends heavily on particular individuals and the owner remains involved in too many decisions. Good systems create consistency while allowing capable employees to take greater responsibility.

Yes, although a gym is naturally more operationally intensive than some product or software businesses. Scalability can improve through stronger systems, leadership, better capacity utilisation, additional revenue streams and services that increase client lifetime value without requiring fixed costs to increase at the same rate.

Start by setting clear expectations, communicating directly, giving regular feedback and allowing people to take genuine ownership of their roles. Lead by example, but avoid using that principle as an excuse to continue doing everybody else’s work. The objective is to build people who can operate confidently without constant supervision.

There are plenty of impressive numbers in Ceri’s story, particularly when you look at how quickly GOAT has grown. But I don’t think the most useful lesson for a fitness business owner is that you should find a scalable product and try to build the next big consumer brand.

The more interesting lesson is what had to happen before Ceri could pursue those opportunities.

His first gym began with around $1,700 from crowdfunding, a vehicle used to help secure finance, a business partner willing to take a chance on him and a considerable amount of belief that he’d somehow make it work. There was plenty of action and passion, but very little infrastructure.

Over time, that had to change.

The knowledge in his head became systems. Those systems could be handed to other people. Clear KPIs allowed him to understand whether things were working without personally touching every part of the business. Capable team members were given responsibility and trusted to use it. Eventually, businesses that once relied heavily on Ceri became capable of operating largely without him.

That’s what created the capacity for the next opportunity.

I think fitness business owners sometimes get that sequence backwards. We want the second location, the new revenue stream or the next business before the first one can operate effectively without us. This is where the right fitness business coaching can help owners identify what needs to be systemised, delegated and strengthened before pursuing the next stage of growth. Then instead of creating leverage, we’ve simply multiplied the number of things requiring our attention.

Ceri’s experience is a useful reminder that action matters enormously, but action alone doesn’t create scale. At some point, the entrepreneur who can do everything has to become the leader who can build systems and people capable of doing things without them.

You still need to take risks, but know your numbers so they’re calculated risks.

You still need to work hard, but don’t create a business where hard work from you is the only thing holding it together.

You still need great ideas, but make sure the opportunity, people and direction actually make sense before pursuing them.

And when you find yourself doing the same important task for the third, fourth or fifth time, stop for a moment and ask whether it should still belong to you.

Because the objective isn’t simply to build a bigger fitness business.

It’s to build one that can become bigger than you.