A Fitness Business’ greatest asset is its culture.

Culture is everything.

Your culture is your brand. It’s what you want your business to be known for. It’s embodied in every interaction within and without your business.

In a fitness business, your culture is driven and guided by your core values, the things that are most important to you. Think of your core values as a simple set of guidelines. Though they may be simple, they stimulate complex behaviours that benefit everyone in your community.

These core values provide a roadmap, a compass that will help to direct your day-to-day actions, the behaviours you undertake, and the decisions you make. They aren’t just a reflection of what you already do, but a guide towards what you need to strive to do more of. Walt Disney said that “Once your values are clear, decisions are easy.”

At Range of Motion Business Mentoring, we teach that culture doesn’t happen by accident but by design and intent, so these core values will also each have systematic processes in place to ensure you’re adhering to them. You can build and strengthen your culture by deliberate design. Designing, nurturing and fostering culture takes deliberate effort, but it’s worth the effort.

Your culture isn’t your physical location. It’s not your product or service. Your culture is how your business makes people feel when they’re interacting with it. How they feel when they arrive. It’s the way people feel when they leave. It’s how people were treated when they were there, and in all the interactions they have with you. That’s your culture. It’s the reason your clients are your clients.

So how do we define your culture? How do we work out what it is, and what we want it to be?

Culture is driven by a set of Core Values. Your Core Values are the things that are important to you, and to the business. Now usually, the Core Values of a business will almost exactly mirror the Core Values of the business owner or operator, just as a business is a reflection of this owner/operator. And in the same way, your business will attract people like you. It will do this, because the people who value what you value will want to be a part of that community.

Defining your Core Values is not an easy process, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Chances are, your clients already know what your Core Values are, so that’s where you should start, with your clients. Ask yourself which clients the business currently has that you’d like more of. These will be the people who are your ‘biggest fans’, they attend all your events, and they contribute to the financial success of the business. We want to emulate these people – we want more of them. Offer to take these ‘ideal clients’ out for coffee – all of them together. Explain why you’ve chosen them – that they’re the kinds of people you want more of. Then ask them why they keep coming back and what they love about your business. Then sit back, shut up, and take notes. Write down key phrases, key words. Chime in to keep the conversation flowing when you need to, specifically to ensure that everyone gets a chance to speak (otherwise you end up with Core Values important to extroverts only). Over 30 minutes, you could easily have over 100 items on your list.

Then go through the same process with your staff.

This gives you your raw data. The next step is collating it into groups.

For example, you may have the words/phrases, ‘goal driven’, ‘outcome driven’, ‘growth mindset’, ‘professional growth’, ‘celebrate achievement’, ‘strive to be better’, ‘constant evolution’, ‘purpose’, ‘accomplishment’ written down. Though these are slightly different, they all fit into a similar category (incidentally for Range of Motion, these points, and many more, lead to the Core Value: ‘Pursue and Celebrate Growth and Achievement’).

You should find that all the notes you’ve made from this process can be fit into somewhere around six categories, and you might have anywhere from 10 to 30 words or phrases under each. These categories provide the topic for each Core Value, then the final step is to refine the key ‘essence’ of each into one simple, succinct, easy to understand statement. This statement is your Core Value.

For example, Range of Motion’s Core Values are:

• Pursue and celebrate growth and achievement.
• Provide a caring, safe, inclusive and supportive environment.
• Forge meaningful and significant relationships.
• Be accountable and responsible for building habits of excellence in ourselves and others.
• Purposefully impact individuals, communities and generations through individualised care.
• Evolve thinking through the sharing of science-based knowledge.

Once you’ve identified your Core Values (which by definition should be brief), it’s a good idea to write a position statement (a couple of paragraphs) on each. This allows you to elaborate on what that value means, and why it’s important to the business. This can act as a reference for staff, as well as an explanation for clients.

As we’ve already mentioned, now you have your Core Values, they will allow you to do two things:

• Drive choices and decisions on a day to day basis (i.e. “Which decision best supports our Core Values”).
• Act as a guide to how we should behave and act.

Culture doesn’t happen by accident, and we can use our Core Values to deliberately design a culture. Here’s how that works.

• You’ve already defined your Core Values. For example, one of Range of Motion’s Core Values is “Pursue and celebrate growth and achievement.”
• For each Core Value, list ways in which your staff and clients can live, demonstrate and exemplify that Core Value. There may be as few as five, and as many as 50+. This is a list of practical actions and behaviours.

In order of priority, either:

• Undertake a one-off action to set wheels in motion to promote that core value (using the Core Value example above, this might involve erecting an ‘achievement board’ that staff can use to share their clients’ achievements with the rest of the community).
• Automate an action or behaviour (e.g. having a recurring post in your automated social media system that talks about the importance of a growth mindset).
• Systemise and schedule an action or behaviour (e.g. set a reminder every Friday to share a photo of the achievement board once a week on social media).

Launching your Core Values to your community is an important step. You should make a big deal of the announcement, to demonstrate that this is an important part of being a client of your business. A series of emails over a fortnight (with associated social media posts to your internal Facebook client group) is a great way to get the information out. Start with the announcement that your Core Values have been completed, describe the process that went into creating them, and announce the final list of Core Values. Then, every second day, email (plus Facebook) one of the Core Values to your clientele, with the position statement describing that value, and a list of three ways in which people can live that value. For example, for Range of Motion’s Core Value: “Provide a caring, safe, inclusive and supportive environment”, an example of an action that someone may demonstrate to align to this value may be: “Dawn sees Jess, a new face at ROM. She introduces herself, learns Jess is a bit out of her comfort zone, and takes her under her wing. She sends her a Facebook message that night to see how she went on day one.”.

There are numerous strategies that can be employed to ensure these Core Values are kept at front of mind, and don’t just become a gimmick. Strategies we’ve had success with include:

• Awarding a trophy three times a year to the person within your community who has best exemplified each Core Value. Your clients will vote on this (Range of Motion uses a form on the website that clients can access), and the staff will make the final decision. Make a big deal of the winners through all internal and external social media channels, and have photos of the winners on the wall until the next set of trophies is awarded.
• Have the Core Values on the wall within your facility, so your clients are constantly exposed to them.
• Share and reiterate your Core Values in major communications with clients, such as any internal newsletters.
• In Staff Professional Development events, brainstorm ways in which the staff team can promote, reward and embody the Core Values.

Culture defines the client experience. The experience is the true product you’re selling – not a workout, or weight loss, but an experience. The experience is the product. Your Core Values define your culture. And the actions you take and behaviours you demonstrate, uphold your Core Values.