In the “Episode” posts I’ll try and recount the steps I took toward opening a Box. Considering I haven’t officially opened yet it’ll be an ongoing process.

I remember a lecture Glassman gave once about a guy they called “The Bad Trainer.”  He spoke of a trainer near him in Santa Cruz who was just the worst trainer they knew.  He was annoying, inattentive and full of himself.  Anyway, one day he wanted to bring one of his clients by CrossFit HQ and put her through a workout.  Glassman reluctantly agreed and had Nicole Carroll observe with him.  As he put her through this workout Glassman and Carroll couldn’t believe what they were seeing.  The guy missed every movement fault possible, couldn’t accurately keep track of her reps, and regularly left her alone to complete the WOD by herself.

Afterwards, as Glassman and Carroll were about to chew him out for his piss poor coaching, the athlete approached them.  ”This workout program has changed my life,” she said, “I was on the verge of getting evicted from my apartment because I was having trouble climbing the stairs.  Then I started doing CrossFit and I’ve lost weight and I move better than ever.”   That’s when they realized “the magic is in the movments.”  It ended up taking them down a few notches.  Great coaches though they are, the CrossFit movements have something about them that are amazingly effective and can make even an idiot look like a hero.

Thank God for the CrossFit movements because when I started a summer camp for high school kids I was a BAD TRAINER.

The first flicker of the genius businessman in me lit when I was coaching high school kids.  I had been slipping in CrossFit WODs every now and then (Fight Gone Bad was a favorite) and the kids definitely knew CrossFit and wanted more.  I figured: why not use the school’s facilities to provide a service to kids who were already interested in the product (not to mention parents of rowers have moo-lah).  No costs + all profit= good business.  Unfortunately good business doesn’t equal good coaching.

I didn’t get anyone hurt or anything like that, but I just didn’t have a full appreciation for what I should have been doing.  I could think of workouts, I could scale them, but there was something missing.  There wasn’t the fierce urgency to provide the best quality possible.  Looking back now, it had everything to do with the inability to fail. Like I said earlier, I had no costs, no overhead, no debts, it was pure profit.  There was no risk of failure.  I began to see the kids as simply as a burden.  I had already turned a profit, why do I need to train them.  They became a hassle rather than the life blood of a business.  The risk of failure forces businesses to constantly adapt and improve in order to avoid that scary F-word.  Without it, businesses become stagnant and out of touch.  Any business that cannot fail probably deserves to.

Again, the training wasn’t bad by any means.  The business grew as the summer months went on.  More kids joined; more kids got fit.  But I know now that I could’ve done better. Obviously you can’t expect to perfect something the first time you try it; but you MUST realize what you’ve done poorly and you MUST get better.  Never assume you’ve figured it out.  If you refuse to grow and adapt, you will die.  Ask Darwin.

I plan on providing the same service next year, and I will do an infinitely better job. Hopefully I will take the lessons learned and apply them.  Otherwise I deserve to fail.