YouTube: https://youtu.be/BvBLe5N5Vww

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Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cheer-biz-podcast/id1596523298?i=1000775436800

Five Ways Cheer Gym Owners Accidentally Drive Staff Away

In this solo episode of the Cheer Biz Podcast, host Dan Cotton flips the usual advice on its head, walking through five management habits that are practically guaranteed to make coaches miserable — and what gym owners should do instead to keep their best staff around.

In this solo episode of the Cheer Biz Podcast, host Dan Cotton tackles a problem that surfaces every single year around this time: staff burnout, staff quitting, and gym owners left scrambling to figure out why. Rather than the usual list of best practices, Dan takes a different approach. Drawing on his own experience managing roughly 75 employees annually across Next Gen Dream Camps and Oregon Dream Teams — and admitting he’s made every one of these mistakes at least once — he lays out the five surest ways to make staff hate their jobs, so gym owners can recognize the pattern and steer clear of it.

Never Ask What They Think

The first mistake, Dan explains, is simple: never get their opinion. Place teams without input. Build the class schedule and curriculum without consulting the coaches who will actually run it. Change someone’s schedule without asking. As the owner, what you say goes, and their opinion doesn’t matter.

Dan has firsthand experience being on the receiving end of this style of leadership. He recalls supervisors during his time in the military who told him outright, “When I want your opinion, I’ll tell it to you.” His response, internally, was that he didn’t need anyone to tell him what he thought — he could think for himself. He also remembers leaders who would ask for his opinion only to later present it as their own idea. Dan admits he didn’t mind that dynamic much, since he’d often nudge those leaders toward a decision by framing it as their idea, knowing the outcome he wanted would happen either way.

The lesson he draws from both experiences is that gathering staff input matters, particularly on the things that directly affect them: team placements, curriculum, schedule changes. He points out that if he’s not in the trenches every day — currently, while recording the episode, he has three classes and two teams practicing without him — he has no business overriding a coach’s approach without first asking why they’re doing it that way. That said, Dan draws a clear line: broader business strategy and tactics are a different matter. He’ll take input there occasionally, but he leans on a business coach and mentor for those bigger decisions rather than relying solely on staff opinions or his own instincts.

Pay Them Wrong, Pay Them Late

The second surefire way to make staff miserable is mishandling their pay: sending it late, shorting the amount, docking pay on a whim, or not paying at all and expecting people to volunteer their time.

Dan is blunt about why this matters so much, especially with a younger workforce. Coaches in the 18-to-29 range are often building a living, at least in part, around coaching cheer, and many are working with tight margins. A paycheck that lands late by even a day or two — whether it’s $350 or $500 — can mean a bounced check or a failed autopay. Dan acknowledges that pay has occasionally gone out late on his own watch, usually around a holiday he forgot to account for, but he stresses that the moment it happens, staff need to be told immediately, and it should never become a pattern.

He’s also direct about the legal risk of docking pay arbitrarily. In most cases, it’s simply illegal to dock an employee’s pay because they showed up late or upset you, and gym owners should talk to an attorney before attempting anything like it. If there’s a genuine performance issue, the right path is a documented conversation, a write-up, and a clear, forward-looking change to pay rate or role — not an on-the-spot deduction. Dan also pushes back on the idea of using “volunteers” to sidestep employment obligations at a for-profit gym, noting the legal exposure — including IRS scrutiny — that can come with that approach. His view is straightforward: if you’re running a business, you’re running a business, and people who work for you should be paid properly and on time.

Micromanage Every Move

Dan’s third tactic for making staff hate their jobs is constant micromanagement — or, as he puts it with a nod to a favorite episode of The Office, “micro-management.” He describes it as one of the biggest morale killers in any workplace: if staff feel like they can’t take a single step without approval, or that every decision will be second-guessed, they’ll burn out, and so will the owner doing the micromanaging.

He’s careful to note the opposite extreme isn’t the goal either — gym owners still need to actively manage their teams. But there has to be room for coaches to make mistakes and learn from them without someone standing over their shoulder undoing every choice. Dan paints a specific picture: an owner who insists no one can coach a team without them present, then overrides everything the coach says anyway. In that scenario, staff are left wondering why they’re even there, since the owner is effectively doing all the work himself.

Explain the Why Behind Decisions

The fourth habit on Dan’s list is refusing to explain the reasoning behind decisions — just telling staff “it is what it is because I said so.” Dan pushes back hard on this approach, arguing that when staff understand the reasoning behind a decision, they’re far more likely to support it.

His own practice is to give staff a window into his thinking whenever he can, even briefly — a quick email or text explaining what he’s decided and why. That way, staff aren’t left simply following an instruction with no context, wondering why “Dan said so” and afraid to ask him directly. He’s candid that he doesn’t always get this right either; there are moments when he’s in a bad headspace and not the best person to field a question in that instant, something he recognizes as an area he continues to work on. But as a general practice, he believes owners owe staff — and parents — an honest explanation of the decisions that affect them.

Protect Their Life Outside the Gym

The fifth and final way to make staff hate their jobs, according to Dan, is expecting them to have no life outside of it: texting them at midnight and expecting an immediate response, calling them into the gym off the clock when they’re not on salary, and treating their personal time as fully expendable.

Dan warns that this pattern leads directly to burnout, and burnout breeds resentment toward everything connected to the job. He argues that owners have a responsibility to actively protect their staff’s time away from the gym — encouraging a day off, encouraging coaches to go on a date, encouraging them to actually rest. This is especially important for the hardest-charging staff members, the ones who are always willing to give 100 percent, since they’re often the ones least likely to set boundaries for themselves. Dan frames this as part of the owner’s job: being the adult in the room who makes sure staff aren’t running themselves into the ground.

Join the Conversation

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Cheer Biz Podcast. If any of these five habits sound a little too familiar, Dan’s challenge is simple: use them as a checklist of what to avoid, and start closing the gaps with your own staff today. Be sure to join the conversation over in the Cheer Gym Owners and All-Star Cheer Coaches and Owners groups on Facebook, and check out nextgenowners.com to learn more about the academy and how it can help you scale your business and train your team. If you’re a gym owner looking for hands-on help, look into a Cheer Biz Accelerator event, where you can see firsthand how Dan’s gyms operate and get an owner’s-eye view of your own business.