YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
What Happens When You Lose a Key Employee: 5 Lessons Every Gym Owner Needs to Know
In the last couple of months, I’ve worked with four different Next Gen Academy gym owners who lost a key employee and worried their business might be at risk. Then it happened to me.
Hey guys, and welcome to this episode of the Full Out Cheer Podcast. I’m Danielle, and I’m excited to be your host for today. We’ve got a big topic — something I hope never happens to any gym owner, but that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. Today I want to talk about what you do when you lose a key employee, and how you can reduce the risk in your own business before it happens to you.
When It Happens to You
Over the past couple of months, several Academy members reached out after losing a key staff member — a manager, an admin, a tumbling coach, an all-star director — and asked for help figuring out how to announce it to their gym and handle the fallout. I felt confident guiding them through it, because I’d been through versions of it myself over the years. I’ve had a full-time event director leave, and all-star directors move on to other opportunities. It has never been a totally foreign concept to me; I’ve always had a bit of a protection-and-strategy mindset built in.
But I’ve also had staff with me for a very long time — people who’ve been with us for ten, twelve, thirteen years. They’ve become our core full-time team. So I got my own surprise a couple of weeks ago when a staff member who’d been with me for thirteen years quit unexpectedly, with no notice.
This episode is about what to do when a key employee quits — whether it’s a good departure, like someone moving or having a baby, or a sudden one like mine. I’ve had both happen, though the unexpected version was a first for me at this level. Here are the five lessons I think every gym owner needs to know.
I should say: when I talk about a “key employee,” I don’t only mean full-time staff. Years ago I lost a part-time employee who felt like family, someone who’d been part of our gym since the early days. Key employees are the people who helped start your gym, who do a lot for it, or who simply feel like family. In this case, the person I lost fell into all three categories — someone we’d vacationed with as a staff, someone who’d been invited to my daughter’s family-only birthday party. It’s hard to lose people like that. I want to be upfront that even though I might talk about this in a fairly practical way, there’s no way to lose someone like that without feeling it. I just also want to make sure I’m giving you tangible takeaways, not just my own story.
Lesson One: Great Organizations Don’t Rely on Great Individuals
The people on your team absolutely help build your gym’s culture and success — including the staff member who left. I’m grateful for what he contributed. But I’ve never wanted our gym to rely on any one or two people. What happens if I get hit by a bus tomorrow? I don’t want my business partner or my staff to lose their jobs just because I’m no longer there.
Too many gyms make one person a gatekeeper of information or skills, so that nobody else can do what they do. In our case, we lost our male tumbling coach, who spotted a lot of high-level skills and taught many of our advanced classes. Some athletes and families worried we wouldn’t be able to teach those skills anymore. But it turned out we had plenty of capable coaches — myself included — who knew exactly how to step in.
That’s not an accident. This coach spent years training other staff, going to conferences, visiting other gyms, and bringing that knowledge back to train the rest of our team — that was part of his job. We had shared drill libraries, written lesson plans, and documented skill progressions, so no single person held information only they had access to. When staff gatekeep knowledge, it often reflects some insecurity on their part, as if their worth is tied to being the only one who knows something. That’s not a healthy place for an employee or an employer to be. Great organizations don’t rely on great individuals; they rely on teams that share knowledge as they learn it.
Lesson Two: Systems Create Stability
We had lesson plans and documents for everything — how each skill and class was taught, our progressions, all of it. As much as I preach systems, though, I’ll admit there are always things a key player is doing that you don’t realize need a system until they’re gone.
My business partner Dan has a saying: if you do something more than once, it needs a system. The catch is recognizing that you’re actually repeating something — sometimes you’re just in maintenance mode and don’t notice the pattern. With this departure, I’d estimate ninety percent of the role was already systemized, thanks to an audit we do at least once a year where every staff member writes down everything they’re responsible for. The other ten percent was a mix of tasks we hadn’t realized were repeatable, brand-new tasks, or places where a system existed but had quietly drifted from what was written down.
The point is systems create consistency — not people. If you’re worried your staff won’t follow the systems, that’s on you as the owner to build in accountability, not to just hope people stick to it.
There’s a bonus tip here too: look at what you can automate so it doesn’t require a human at all. We use NG Engine, a CRM that lets us build repeated checklists and automations, so tasks are assigned automatically and everyone’s accountability is visible. We’re also starting to look at which administrative tasks — like building schedules or updating calendars — can be handed off to AI tools like Claude, so our staff can spend their time on the things only humans can do: coaching kids, picking up the phone, building relationships. Setting up that kind of automation takes time upfront, sure. But a task that takes five hours to automate the first time might take four hours next time, then three — and once it’s automated, it keeps paying off indefinitely.
Lesson Three: Protect Yourself Before You Need To
We already had an offboarding system in place, and I don’t think there was any bad intent from this staff member. But protect yourself anyway. Because we use Google Workspace, I could see exactly what files had been shared and remove access immediately.
Here’s something every gym owner should make crystal clear to their staff: anything created while someone is employed at your gym — while they’re on salary or hourly — belongs to the gym, not to them. Update your handbooks, train your coaches, and make sure everyone understands that lesson plans and materials built on company time and company drives can’t be taken to a future job or business. If staff want to build their own materials for future use, they need to do it on their own time, on their own equipment, stored privately.
Yes, an extra few dollars per employee per month for proper Workspace accounts adds up. But protecting the materials you’ve paid to have created is worth it. It’s easy to assume people who’ve been with you for years will always leave on good terms — but when I posted about this topic in our gym owners’ group, I got a flood of messages from people who’d had really painful experiences with staff who felt like family and didn’t leave well.
Cross-train your staff, keep an exit checklist ready — company credit cards, keys, passwords, anything that needs to change quickly — and document everything. You can hope for loyalty, but plan for change, even with the people closest to you.
Lesson Four: Security Creates Better Leadership
When your business isn’t hanging on a single person, you can look at hard circumstances more objectively. Losing a key staff member is going to be emotional no matter what — whether they’re leaving for a great reason, like moving for a spouse’s military orders, or for reasons you’ll never fully understand.
I’ve been there before. Years ago, an all-star director kept delaying answering me about travel dates for a training trip, and it turned out she’d been putting off telling me she planned to leave the gym entirely. I was blindsided, and it took me days to think clearly again. I was sad for a long time and struggled with what came next.
This time was different. I’d already worked through this exact scenario with four other Academy members in recent months, so I had a plan in my head before I needed one. I still felt emotional — genuinely sad — but I didn’t feel distraught, because I’d prepared. I’m not telling you to suppress your emotions. Feel them. But build systems ahead of time so you can move into an operations mindset when it counts, instead of spiraling. And remember: you don’t know what’s happening in someone’s life outside of work. It’s not fair to assume you do, and it’s not fair to feel entitled to someone staying just because you’ve given them a lot over the years.
Lesson Five: Departures Create Opportunities for Others
Despite the hard circumstances, I got to watch other staff members rise to the occasion. This coach had handled a lot of our private lessons, and this year we’d sold packages built around them. When he left, other coaches stepped up immediately, and honestly, I don’t think our athletes missed out on a single new skill.
We had a skills camp this week that he would normally have led. Instead, other coaches — coaches we’d invested in training over the years — ran it, and the kids got just as much out of it. That’s the payoff of not having key-man risk in your business: when you train your staff well, any of them can deliver the same results.
I don’t think one person needs to know how to do everything, and I don’t think everyone needs to be interchangeable. But having people cross-trained, even lightly, and having good systems in place is real protection. You can’t control how or why staff choose to leave. What you can control is how ready your team is when it happens.
Moving Forward
I hope this never happens to you. But if it does, I hope this episode helps you feel prepared instead of blindsided. Thanks so much for joining me on this one — I know it got a little emotional. If you’re not already part of our community, join the Cheer Gym Owners group on Facebook, or Cheer Coaches and Owners if you’re a coach who also owns or manages a program. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok so you don’t miss anything Next Gen has coming your way. I’ll catch you on the next episode.
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like “Good to Great: Employee Potential Across Generations“
