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A Four-Step Framework for Staff Accountability in Your Cheer Gym
Dan Cotton shares a practical expect, train, inspect, and correct system for getting the most from your coaches and knowing when it is time to part ways.
Why Staffing Is So Hard
Welcome to another episode of the Cheer Biz Podcast. Host Dan Cotton takes the mic solo this week to address a challenge every gym owner faces: how to get the most out of your staff. His goal is to leave listeners with an exact framework for building the team of their dreams, including how to know if and when it is time to let someone go.
Dan opens by acknowledging that entrepreneurship is a series of challenging events every single day. It is an amazing experience, but it is hard, and learning how to use your staff well is one of the biggest reasons why. He also encourages listeners to join the Cheer Gym Owners and All-Star Cheer Coaches and Owners Facebook groups, and to sign up for a Cheer Biz Accelerator event. Any gym doing more than $10,000 a month in revenue qualifies, and the events welcome everyone from those gyms up to gyms with a two to three million dollar run rate. Attendees learn the newest marketing techniques, see how AI is saving time inside Dan’s gyms, and join a small group of like-minded owners.
Expect: Put Standards in Writing
The first step is to expect. Dan says you need to write down exactly what you expect from each employee: the job description, the dress code, the standards, and the key performance indicators, or KPIs, that tell both of you whether they are succeeding. Many owners have a rough idea of what they want but have never listed KPIs, and he acknowledges it is not easy. Every gym will have slightly different ones, and this is a good reason to work with a business coach through the Academy.
Some KPIs apply across the board. Anyone in a client-facing role delivering the product should have a retention KPI. A tumbling coach whose athletes are dropping out of the program, rather than moving up to the next class, is not meeting the expectation of keeping families enrolled. The same goes for all-star coaches who are not retaining kids year after year. Competitive performance can be another KPI. Dan notes it cannot always be laid at the coach’s feet, but he believes a great coach given even a decent team should be able to get an exceptional result if they are willing to do what it takes.
Whatever you choose, Dan says to make it written down and agreed to at the start of each season or each contract renewal. That includes the job description, the position agreement, and the KPIs, so that nobody is guessing about what success looks like. Without that clarity, he explains, it is unfair to hold anyone accountable later, and it makes every difficult conversation harder than it needs to be.
Train: You Are in the Training Business
Next comes training. Coaches are often expected to be great without ever being taught how to reach the KPIs. Dan reminds owners that if you run a service-based business, you are in the training industry. Your job is to train your staff to deliver at the level you can, or better, and in a larger operation, to train your managers to train and supervise the staff in the same way so the program can grow.
Dan explains that the problem is rarely a lack of effort from owners. Most of them simply run out of time or assume that training is something coaches pick up on their own. But if the standard is that your team delivers at your level or better, someone has to show them how, watch them do it, and coach them through it.
The common mistake is calling a manual or a PowerPoint day training. Dan says the step most gyms skip is the logical conclusion: getting out, doing the work, and receiving real feedback from real repetitions.
Lessons From the Army and Police Work
Dan draws on two very different training experiences. In the Army, much of his preparation before deploying to Iraq felt like death by PowerPoint and a liability-protection exercise. He watched videos on improvised explosive devices, explosively formed projectiles, and rollover safety, practiced escaping a flipped vehicle in a simulator once, and then signed a form saying he met the expectations.
Law enforcement was vastly better. As a 23-year-old new officer, he went through an eight-week academy that moved from classroom lessons on use of force to practicing the maneuvers, then to variable scenarios, then to more complex ones. After that came the field training and evaluation program, roughly six months in four phases, where a training officer gave him feedback after every single call on what he did well, what he got wrong, and what to improve. Dan credits that process for making him as good an officer as he was.
The contrast taught him a lesson he now applies to business: training that stops at slides and a signature protects the organization on paper, but training that includes practice, variable scenarios, and constant feedback is what actually produces capable people. In his view, the second kind is what separates great teams from average ones.
He challenges gym owners to ask what it would take to level up coaches that aggressively. Perhaps it means an instructor on staff whose only job is to train and elevate employees, covering not only skills but also classroom management and what it takes to run a great tumbling class.
Inspect and Correct With Confidence
Third is to inspect. Check on your staff regularly, whether weekly, monthly, or every other month, reviewing their KPIs and determining whether they are succeeding, stagnating, or failing. Inspection gives you the information to move on to the last step, which is to correct.
Dan sums up the sequence simply: expect, train, inspect, and then correct. Because the expectations were written down and the training was real, inspection stops being a surprise ambush and becomes an ordinary part of how the gym operates. Staff members know what is being measured, and owners can see early whether someone is thriving or stuck.
When someone is not meeting expectations they have been properly trained on, correction can include documentation, additional training, verbal counseling, and then potentially written counseling. If you reach the point of separating from an employee after those steps, Dan says, you can feel good knowing you did everything you should to set them up for success. When he lets someone go, he wants to know he created an environment where they could truly succeed.
Start by Hiring the Right People
Dan adds one caveat he has covered in other episodes: none of this matters if you are not hiring the right people for the right reasons. If you hire the wrong people, expecting, training, inspecting, and correcting will not make a difference. With the right people in place, though, the system can build a team capable of taking your program to a level it has never reached.
He closes by thanking listeners and expressing his hope that the framework helps them level up their staff, create more opportunities for their people to progress, and make their gym into what it is truly capable of being. Join the Cheer Biz Podcast Facebook groups to keep the conversation going, and tune in to the next episode.
