Category: Rex Roundtable

A brief talk with Eddie Tock – REX Roundtables CEO  

Recently, I had an opportunity to discuss the benefits of joining a REX Roundtable when dining with a club manager. The club manager has been in the fitness industry a number of years and runs a facility that is second to none. He has done a fantastic job in keeping membership high, providing an unmatched membership experience and enjoying non-existent turnover. So why should he join REX Roundtable?

The short answer is that most industry events and conferences, in every industry , not just fitness, focus on the operational side of the business only – what REX Roundtables call the 1^st Agenda. Most businesses have opportunities & challenges in the 2^nd – culture, strategy systems- agenda and 3^rd – Leadership Development – agendas that greatly affect their 1^st agenda decisions. The attached document explains it in more detail.

REX Roundtables has over 125 club owners and executives from all over the country sharing BEST PRACTICES   – they meet 3x per year for 3 days in a Mastermind group. The idea is that the REX Roundtable “ROI is one of the highest investments” an owner/GM can make!

Based upon my conversations with Eddie Tock (REX Roundtables CEO  eddie@rexroundtables.com (914) 643-3207 ) he shared with me the following:

Currently, owners and club executives have the opportunity to join a group of like-minded individuals who want to grow their business. Each meeting they cover the following:

• Strategy issues for the business to help with blue ocean strategies, growing pains and differentiation;
• Marketing that helps get more clients;
• Comparing key business numbers to benchmark best practices;
• Discovering how to keep members longer;
• Outside the fitness industry consumer trends that are relevant.

Listen to members talk about REX on http://www.rexroundtables.com/rexweb/main.cfm

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POS2mziGKIY
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FI2YZ1_k9Y&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THnZDI2qdf8&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

If you have a desire to learn more about REX Roundtable, I encourage you to talk with Eddie as to how you can become involved in the “one of a kind” organization.

Exclusive for the Soapbox

We hire people for what they know, and we fire them for who they are. It turns out if you hire someone without the right skills or experience you can train them… If they have a good attitude.  If you hire someone with a bad attitude, your chances of changing that are close to zero. Business is in the business of training people how to do things. Business is not in the business of character development.

The Savior Syndrome

Most often when someone is hired with the wrong attitude, their leaders try to save them.  At the least this goes on for months sometimes years. And during that time those engaged in the saving process are wasting their time and not devoting sufficient time to the staff who could benefit from a little coaching and encouragement.  Keeping a bad apple in the barrel is a powerful message to the rest of the apples that bad attitude is acceptable. It can also tell other employees that you really don’t care much about them if you leave someone like this in the organization.  In one organization I had the CEO make a list of all the impacts of a significant bad Apple who was leading a department. We then went back and added a dollar value in terms of wasted time, frustration and workarounds by other executives and staff.  It totaled half a million dollars in an organization with about $10 million of revenue.  He ‘moved on’ shortly afterwards.

To avoid bad apples your mantra must be to hire for attitude, and train for skills. Let the author know if you’d like some more ideas on how to hire for attitude. The rest of this article will focus on avoiding the two worst attitudes in leaders.

Continue reading “Avoiding The Double D Bad Apples” →