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- Expand Your Gym? Avoid These 2 Costly Mistakes First
What's up Gym World?
This week's episode is a little different. No case study, just Mateo and Kilo Chris answering questions pulled from the Kilo Crew Facebook group.
One question stuck with us more than the rest: when should you expand your gym, and when is it just a distraction dressed up as ambition?
The one skill with the best ROI for gym owners
A Kilo Crew member named Bryce asked: what's the one skill gym owners could learn that would deliver the biggest ROI, but almost nobody actually sits down and learns it?
Mateo’s answer: take an improv class.
Not because it's fun (though it is), but because so much of what a gym owner does is performance.
Coaching is performance.
Sales is a persona, held together by conviction and the ability to sit in an awkward pause instead of rushing to fill it. And with the industry's shift to short-form video, communicating your beliefs about coaching or nutrition on camera is a performance skill too.
💬 Chris, who trained as an actor before coaching, added the part most people skip: the real benefit wasn't camera confidence. It was learning to let a pause sit instead of overreacting. In sales, that pause is often where the prospect gives you what you actually need.
Improv also forces you to find your authentic voice by playing pretend. You try on a character and discover the gap between who you're portraying and who you actually are, and that gap is worth knowing about before you try to project a brand.
💬 Ben Supik started in a tiny space with just benches and dumbbells and still pulls in seven figures annually when fully booked. That kind of number comes from the person running the gym, not the equipment inside it.
When should you expand your gym?
Most gym owners think growth means more members, more services, more locations. When does adding more actually start hurting the business?
Mateo's answer: when you expand your gym before you should.
That threshold depends entirely on your goal. Want a portfolio of 10 to 20 locations to eventually sell? That's legitimate, but it takes a specific skill set. If that's not the goal, the real question is simpler: are you expanding to take home more money, to create opportunities for your coaches, or because a shiny opportunity showed up and you talked yourself into it?
Mateo shared that he opened three locations at once, reasoning that they had spare equipment, coaches ready for a new challenge, and a playbook they could copy and paste. The equipment and the coaches worked out. The copy-paste assumption didn't. Client acquisition wasn't the hard part. Retention systems and SOPs were, and those need to run without you before you expand your gym again.
Just because someone on a podcast has five locations doesn't mean that's the default path for you. A gym owner with 30% margins at one facility is already an outlier.
Stacking cash at one great location can beat chasing a second one for the sake of momentum.
The gut-check before you expand your gym
Chris asked a follow-up: when an opportunity looks great on paper but your gut says something's off, how do you tell the difference between fear and instinct?
Mateo pointed to a real example: a gym owner considering a sweet lease deal three thousand miles away, with a stranger as a 50/50 partner. Great lease, shaky everything else.
💬 A great lease is one line item, not a business plan. If that's the only real reason you're considering it, that's worth pausing on.
But, decisions rarely come down to one person's gut when partners are involved. Mateo remembers there were hiring calls where his gut said no and he said yes anyway, usually out of immediate need. That tension between instinct and urgency doesn't fully go away. It just gets easier to name.
TL;DR
The highest-ROI skill most gym owners skip is learning to perform, whether that's an improv class or intentional practice on camera. It sharpens coaching, sales, and content.
Before you expand your gym, get honest about why.
A sweet lease isn't a strategy. Your systems need to run without you first.
And when your gut says no but the spreadsheet says yes, believe your gut a little more than usual.
For more on growth done right, check out Tim Carroll's approach to buying real estate before expanding.
Until next week,
j