I suppose my first clue should have been the purposeful misspelling of the business's name! Behind every botched spelling is either an owner who has no clue how to run a business, or simply can't spell. Either is concerning.
First a little history, three of us signed up for private training sessions three times a week with the business's "owner" Richard. Richard is a competitive bodybuilder. You won't have to ask him, trust me he will tell you. His approach to training is I am a "competitive bodybuilder", there are two ways to do things, his way and the wrong way. I suppose the only issue with that is you had a 30 something, a 40 something and a 50 something , None of whom were aspiring to be Mr. Kentucky.
One guy dropped after a couple of months when he felt like he wasn't getting the sort of results he wanted. When he took his concerns to Richard the response was "this is how I do things". The other gentleman dropped off for a variety of reasons leaving only me to continue.
I was finally handed off to CJ. CJ is a solid trainer-I got results and progressed better than I had under Richard. Or under any other trainer for that matter. As best I can tell CJ is the only one who really accomplishes anything on behalf of the business. There is also Brandon the boxing coach who is not only very talented but just an all-around nice guy.
So what's the issue you might ask. Well that's where things get complicated. Richard is in the middle of "competition season" . Again you won't have to ask him, he will tell you. That is when he shows up to his own gym. You could look for him in his office but you would struggle to find him since it looks like somebody blew up a Kinko's, a supplement supply shop, and a storage closet and then piled everything on the floor. Richard is basically an absentee owner. Which is to say right now he is more interested in his pecs and delts than he is running his business. Understanding how you're billed is a nightmare. I got charged regularly but I never received a bill or an invoice. Worse, I never really understood the billing process. Basically you commit to a number of times a week that equals a monthly amount and everyone is billed on the same day whether the month has four weeks or five weeks. Richards explanation was it all sort of works out in the end! I travel a lot for work and sometimes would miss one or two weeks at a time. His suggestion was I could do some "online sessions" or if I remembered how many days I missed I could try and schedule some make up sessions. If I wasn't able to do that, oh well. Unfortunately all of this puts the onus on the client as opposed to where it belongs.....on the business. I made several suggestions for workarounds. Unfortunately that fell on deaf ears.
If that was the only issue you could almost blow it off. Unfortunately, there are a laundry list of issues. The gym is always dirty. Never once in my entire Time at the gym did I ever see anyone do anything more than use a Clorox wipe to clean some thing a client had just put down. Half the times the place was either ice cold or roasting hot. They are lacking certain basic pieces of equipment like a weight belt, a flat bench or mats to stretch on that don't look like they had been used as a dogs chew toy. I raised a few of these issues with the owner and was told "yeah, that's not gonna happen, we won't be getting that". Crap and supplies are piled up wherever they happen to get unloaded and sit in the same place for months at a time.
Like I said they have a couple of really good trainers but the business is a joke and the owner isn't particularly interested in deviating from how things are done or in some cases not done! read more
