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The Hidden Business Mistakes Great Cheer Coaches Keep Making
Host Dan Cotton breaks down why gym owners who excel at cheer often struggle most with the business side, walking through the four costly habits he sees again and again in cheer-focused owners.
When the Cheer Expert Overrules the Business Mind
In this episode of the Cheer Biz Podcast, host Dan Cotton dug into a pattern he has noticed repeatedly among gym-owning partnerships: one partner handles the business side, the other handles the cheer side, and when tension arises, the business partner usually backs down. Dan explained that this instinct, while understandable, is often exactly backwards.
The dynamic came up in a recent conversation Dan had with his business partner Danielle after they met with a group of gym owners, all structured as partnerships between a business-minded operator and a cheer-focused one. Time and again, the cheer-focused partner would push back on decisions by insisting the business partner simply didn’t understand how the industry works. More often than not, Dan said, it was the business partner’s instincts that were actually right.
That observation set up the core of the episode: four specific mistakes that cheer-focused gym owners tend to make repeatedly, often without realizing the financial damage they’re doing along the way. Dan was quick to add that the reverse conversation is just as valid; business-minded owners can just as easily undervalue what makes a program great at cheer. But for this episode, he wanted to focus specifically on where cheer expertise, left unchecked by business sense, tends to lead owners astray.
Overspending on Choreography and Music
The first mistake, Dan said, is overpaying for choreographers, specialists, and music. Cheer-focused owners tend to funnel the bulk of their budget into landing the best possible choreographer, booking follow-on visits, and scheduling specialty clinics, all in pursuit of the most competitive routine possible.
Dan was careful to note that this isn’t a knock on choreographers themselves. A choreographer’s fee reflects far more than the two days they spend in your gym, he explained. Travel alone can turn a two-day visit into an effective five-to-seven-day commitment once prep time, travel days, and follow-up work are factored in.
The problem shows up when a small gym with a team of 11 athletes, which naturally caps how much choreography budget is available, hires a choreographer who charges a flat rate regardless of team size. Add in a Summit cleanup, an NCA cleanup, and a stunt-focused clinic on top of a custom music package that can run well over $5,000, and a gym can blow past its budget before the season even starts, especially if those add-ons never make it onto the cost sheet charged to athletes. It might be a great decision for the team’s competitiveness, Dan said, but it’s a bad business decision if the gym isn’t also protecting its profit margin.
Extra Practices That Aren’t in the Budget
The second mistake is scheduling extra practices or running late sessions without budgeting for them. Dan was clear that occasional extra practices aren’t inherently a problem, but a pattern of added practices and no-consideration late nights creates two distinct issues.
The first is athlete burnout. A “we don’t leave until we get it right” mentality has its place occasionally, Dan said, but overused, it wears athletes down and risks pushing them out of the sport entirely, which runs counter to the goal of keeping kids in cheer for the long haul.
The second issue is financial. Gyms typically budget coaching pay around a standard number of practice hours. When hourly coaches add practices on their own initiative, even with the best of intentions, they’re effectively setting their own pay raises. Dan described how a position budgeted at $500 a month can quietly balloon to $1,000 a month once extra hours pile up. On top of the cost, unpredictable scheduling frustrates parents who are already juggling work and other commitments, and that frustration is another quiet driver of athletes leaving the sport.
Tight Ratios and Unpaid Crossovers
The third mistake Dan outlined has two parts, both tied to how teams get built. The first is an overly rigid approach to team ratios. Dan acknowledged that ratios, score sheets, and rubrics are valuable coaching tools, but he pointed out a troubling trend: coaches capping enrollment at specific numbers, like stopping at 11 athletes because adding a 12th would disrupt the ratio, and continuing that logic all the way up the roster.
He pointed to a stretch a few years ago when nearly every small team that won D2 Summit had exactly 11 athletes on the roster. It looked like a formula for success, but it was brutal for gyms financially. Elevens are notoriously difficult to run profitably: less practice-time revenue, less room to grow, and a lot of overhead spread across very few paying athletes.
The second part of this mistake involves crossovers. Coaches will cross athletes over to as many teams as possible to boost competitiveness, but frequently without charging appropriately for it. Dan walked through the math: a team of 20 athletes budgeted around 15 unique enrollments, but if nine of those spots are unpaid or under-charged crossovers, the gym may really only have 11 athletes paying full tuition, choreography, music, and competition fees. Most competitions only charge a marginal crossover fee, sometimes as little as $10 for the whole weekend, so if a gym doesn’t build appropriate crossover charges into its own budget, it can end up significantly upside down by the end of the season. Crossovers aren’t the problem, Dan said. Failing to charge for them is.
Putting Teams Ahead of Everything Else
The fourth and final mistake is prioritizing competitive teams above every other program: classes, parties, open gyms, and more. Cheer-focused owners tend to funnel every resource and every scheduling decision toward team success, sometimes at the expense of the very programs that feed those teams in the first place.
Dan explained that novice, prep, and rec programs are what funnel new athletes toward elite teams down the road, and revenue from classes and parties is often what keeps the doors open in between. When those programs get treated as an afterthought because the owner’s full attention is on the competitive squads, the gym loses the pipeline and the revenue base it needs to sustain itself long term.
Weighing What’s Good for the Team Against What’s Good for the Business
Dan described his own decision-making framework: in a perfect world, a choice is good for both the business and the team. When it isn’t, he weighs whether the business can absorb the cost because the payoff for the team’s experience is worth it, or whether the negative impact on the business is too significant to justify. When it’s overwhelmingly negative for the business, the business has to win out, because without a healthy business, there’s no gym for the team to train and compete in at all.
Building the Business Side When You’re the Cheer Person
Dan brought the conversation back to something personal: what happens when there’s no built-in business partner to balance things out. That was exactly his and his wife Tori’s situation when they started their gym. Both were cheer people first. Dan came from a background in police work, and Tori came from elementary education, but neither of them started out with business expertise.
What changed things, Dan said, was investing in mentors and coaching, and using that access to get into rooms with smarter business minds and other cheer professionals doing things well. The more they surrounded themselves with people further along on the business side, the better they became as gym owners.
That’s the thinking behind the Cheer Biz Accelerator events, which Dan and Danielle launched last October and have continued running at Dan’s own gym. The events have largely sold out, with one spot remaining in November 2026 for owners who want an in-person, eyes-on-your-business experience directly from Dan and his team. Additional events are planned for December, January, February, and March of 2027, with a likely pause in April around Worlds season, putting the total at six or seven events for the year. For gym owners without a business-minded partner, or even those who have one, Dan said pairing with a coach who understands both cheer and business can make the difference between an industry-standard decision that quietly leads a gym astray and one that actually sets it up to thrive.
Join the Conversation
Dan closed the episode by thanking listeners and encouraging gym owners to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast. For anyone ready to dig deeper into the business side of running a cheer gym, the Cheer Biz Academy offers access to a next-gen coach who can work directly on your business strategy. And whether or not you make it to an in-person Accelerator event, Dan invited every listener to join the Cheer Gym Owners and All-Star Cheer Coaches and Owners groups on Facebook, where the community shares resources, feedback, and support for building gyms that are great at both cheer and business.
