Smart gym owners work hard to establish a company culture. It’s crucial for customers, employees, and the business’ image in the community. 

Protecting your culture is just as important as building it. And sometimes that means seeing management challenges through a different lens, like when to remove a team member or a client from the environment.

Those decisions are sometimes difficult but always necessary for the greater good.

Threats Can Come from Inside or Outside

Consider these two scenarios. 

In one, the employee who’s supposed to open the gym at 5 a.m. oversleeps a few times, requiring you to scramble and face an upset crowd of members waiting to get inside. The first time, you pick up the slack and end up working two full shifts in a single day. The next time, you have to wake up another employee and ask her to rush down and handle it.

This might look like a simple employee problem, and it is. But it’s also a culture problem. This is NOT how you want to do business – with customers, employees or your culture.

In another, you have a male customer who repeatedly makes sexist comments to the young woman who works at your front desk. It’s disrespectful and uncomfortable for her, and it’s inhibiting her ability to do the job. She’s unhappy and feels trapped. Others are noticing.

What’s your responsibility here? Should you keep taking the customer’s monthly dues and tell your employee to ignore it? Or do you tell the customer to find another gym and show everyone what’s important to you and your culture?

Culture Shows What You’re All About

Your culture reflects your values. Those values must include things like reliability, professionalism, meeting (and exceeding) expectations, and treating clients and coworkers respectfully.

Your culture determines not just who comes to you as a teammate or customer. It determines who stays. Who’s happy. Who spreads good news about you in the community.

It’s a huge part of retention – of clients and of good employees.

You can’t grow without protecting it, even when it comes to making difficult choices about difficult people.

But when you see those bad actors in this light, it can give you that extra guidance that you’re making the right decision to show them the door and protect those who remain.