The People Who Showed Up

The People Who Showed Up

A few months ago I was in Chicago at a conference. Industry event. Gym owners, coaches, the usual scene. Late in the trip I was having a pint with a friend of mine. He is a gym owner too. We have known each other since about 2022.

We were chatting away when he said something that landed sideways with me. He said, "You know what I have always found interesting about you? Right back to when we first met. It is how genuinely you care about your coaches. You actually want them to succeed."

My first instinct was to wave it off. The polite Irish reflex. "Ah, you know yourself, just doing what anyone would do." But I caught myself, because something in the way he said it made me actually sit with it for a second.

Why DO I care that much? Where did that come from?

By the time I flew home a few days later I had worked it out. The answer turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected. It is not really about me. It is about the people who showed up for me at various points along the way, mostly at moments I would not have known to ask. And the version of me that runs a gym today is essentially a person trying to repay that debt forward.

So this article is partly for our members and prospects who might want to know what kind of gym they are walking into. It is partly for the gym owners I work with as a mentor now, who probably do not realise they are at the end of a long chain. And it is partly for the version of me from about ten years ago who could not pay his rent on what coaching paid him.

The Coach Who Could Not Make a Living

Wind back a number of years. I was a coach. Not a gym owner, not running a business. Just a coach trying to make a living from doing the thing I loved. Which, in the fitness industry in Ireland in those years, was almost impossible.

The maths was brutal. You could fill your week with sessions and still not earn enough to pay the bills. The industry assumed coaches were either side hustlers, recent graduates living at home, or people who would burn out and become something else. There was no career structure. There was no progression. There was no security.

I loved it anyway. That was the cruel part. The work was great. The clients were great. CrossFit specifically was great. I had found something I genuinely wanted to do for the next thirty years, and the industry was telling me, in pounds and pence, that I could not.

A version of me from that time was looking down the barrel of "you are going to have to leave this and do something else." Plenty of good coaches did. They are accountants and engineers and salespeople now. Many of them were better than me. They are not in the industry anymore because the industry did not make space for them.

The plan in my head, even then, was simple. If I ever ran my own gym, I was going to build it so that coaches could have a career here. Not a side job. Not a stop gap. A career. With progression, with a proper income, with the kind of stability that lets a person buy a house or start a family.

That plan would have stayed a plan if it were not for some specific people who showed up.

The Episode Goes Deeper

I am not going to walk through every individual moment and person here. Some of those stories are personal enough that they belong on the podcast, in my own voice, not on a blog post. If you want the full version, listen to the episode.

But the shape of it is this. At several points across the last decade, when I was about ready to throw it in, someone showed up. Sometimes it was a phone call I did not expect. Sometimes it was a job recommendation I had not asked for. Sometimes it was a mentor who took my call when they had no reason to. Each one of these moments was, in isolation, a small thing. Cumulatively, they are the reason I am still in this industry.

And cumulatively, they are also the reason I built WSF the way I did.

What That Built

Here is what those people, and the version of me that survived because of them, built.

WSF is a gym on paper. In practice, it is an experiment in whether you can run a gym in a way that gives coaches the career I never had. We pay coaches properly. We give them progression. We give them ownership of their work. We try to make it possible for a coach at WSF to still be a coach at WSF in ten years' time, by choice, with a life around it that is worth having.

That is the thing my friend in Chicago was noticing. It is not that I care more than other gym owners. It is that I had a very specific reason to care that goes back a long way.

The mentoring work I do with other gym owners now is the same impulse. When another gym owner calls because they are struggling with the same career problem, the same retention problem, the same "I want to do right by my team but the maths is hard" problem, I am not a consultant being clever. I am someone who was helped, trying to help, because that is the only honest way to discharge what I owe.

Why This Matters For You As a Member or Prospect

If you train at WSF, or if you are thinking about it, here is the practical version of what all this means for you.

The coach you see on the floor is not a casual employee. They are someone who has been backed to make this their actual career. Which means they show up differently. They invest in their education. They stick around long enough to know you, your training history, your strengths, your weaknesses, your goals. The retention of our coaches is the quiet foundation of the retention of our members. It is not a coincidence that the gyms with the highest staff turnover usually have the highest member turnover too.

If you have ever been in a gym where every six months you had to introduce yourself to a new coach who did not know your history, you know what I mean. We try very hard not to be that.

Listen to the Full Episode

The episode is more personal than this article. You will hear the conversation in Chicago in more detail. You will hear about a few specific people who shaped this whole thing. You will hear me wrestle with the question my friend asked and not quite land it perfectly, which is fine, because it is not really a question you can land. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

Want to Train With Us?

If you live in or around Wicklow Town and you are curious about a gym that is built like this, the door is open. Every new member starts with our Jumpstart Program, designed to set you up properly from day one.

The first step is a free consultation. We sit down, we talk about where you are, where you want to go, and whether we are the right fit.

Book your free consultation here.

And if you are a gym owner reading this and you recognise yourself in any of it, get in touch directly. Genuinely happy to talk. That is partly the point.

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