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Gym Staffing Model: How 3 Staff Members Run a $100K/Month Location

Chris Travis keeps facility staffing near 30% of revenue and still pays competitive salaries. Here’s the structure behind it.

Author

John Franklin
October 16, 2026

What’s up, Gym World?

Most gym owners assume bigger revenue means a bigger team. Chris Travis has built a gym staffing model that works the other way around.

His oldest Seattle Strength and Performance (SSP) location generates about $100K a month with two or three staff members. Operating expenses run about $35K to $36K, leaving roughly a 50% margin even after overhead. Chris has five locations open, two more on the way, and over 1,100 members.

Watch their conversation here:

From Amazon to 1,100 Members

Chris spent about a decade in corporate tech at Amazon before he got geeky about strength training, left to be a personal trainer, and opened his first gym in August 2020.

At Amazon, he thought in functions: product management, program management, software development. This thought process heavily influenced him when he opened his first gym.

How This Gym Staffing Model Works Day to Day

Chris built each gym around three functions:

  • Sales

  • Membership experience

  • Program design

Each location has a maximum of three staff members, and each person owns one function while also coaching. For instance, the program design person coaches for a four-hour block, then spends the other four hours updating client programs and collecting coach feedback.

💬 Chris pays competitive salaries, covers 100% of benefits, and offers a retirement plan while keeping facility costs at or below 30% of revenue.

Why Staffing Costs Stay Fixed as You Grow

As a location grows from $50K to $80K a month, Chris’s staffing cost only moves with the normal yearly pay adjustment.

His oldest location has the following:

  • Revenue: about $100K a month

  • Operating expenses: about $35K to $36K

  • Margin: about 50% after overhead allocation

💬 Chris could run one location and call it a day. He keeps building because he wants to create careers, and he calls himself a builder at heart.

Staggered Sessions: 250 to 300 Members Per Gym

Chris’s model is individualized small group training in pods of six, built on a one-on-one consult with every member. A typical small group gym tops out around 150 to 160 members, but SSP gyms scale to 250 and sometimes 300.

Each facility implements a staggered start for coaching. Sessions run 45 minutes, and busy locations start every half hour. Clients warm up on their own for 7 to 10 minutes before they reach the coach, so the earlier group is finishing up by then.

💬 Chris says coaches often worry quality will drop. In his experience, most clients want a good workout at a time that fits, and you can coach coaches to handle a bit more capacity.

Keeping Programming Consistent Across Locations

To keep programming consistent across each location, Chris has specific requirements:

  • Templates that carry most clients through their first year

  • New four-week cycles, with most members training twice a week

  • An approved exercise library coaches can’t program outside of

  • A progression and regression sheet covering about 90% of base exercises

These conditions let members have at least 12 months of programming laid out, with proper progressions, and they can be reproduced across multiple locations.

What Happens When a Coach Is Out

Lean teams raise an obvious question about sick days and resignations. At SSP, a corporate team sits above the facility teams. Most can coach, and none have regular floor hours, so they provide built-in coverage.

💬 For another look at this kind of backup structure, check out how Ben Supik’s centralized team keeps his locations covered.

How to Use This Gym Staffing Model With One Location

Chris’s first question for a single-location owner is whether they still want to coach.

  • If you want to coach: Coach part of the time alongside one or two full-time coaches.

  • If you don’t: Two people could split the work, one on membership and operations and one on the exercise side, and you step in for PTO and sick days.

According to Chris, adding a GM layer only makes sense once a gym has about 350 to 400 members, six figures a month, and five or six people underneath.

Why Chris Spends on PR Instead of Meta Ads

Chris spends $5K to $6K a month on a PR agency and says the placements in outlets like Men’s Health and Insider have boosted his SEO. Most of his 30 to 60 qualified leads per month come from organic search; his advice: set clear KPIs and deliverables with any PR agency.

TL;DR

To create a gym staffing model like Chris’s:

  • Build roles around functions (sales, membership, programming), not job titles

  • Give every full-time staff member a second job as a coach

  • Keep facility staffing at 30% of revenue or below

  • Stagger session starts to fit more members per coach

  • Use an approved exercise library to keep coaching consistent

  • Build a backup team that can coach when someone is out

Opening a gym is no small feat; however, Chris demonstrates a unique and highly efficient way to run his gym.

Send this to someone who wants to open a gym while keeping things small and still be profitable.

cheers,

j