How to Train Your Gym Staff on Your Software

Zach Forrest opened our August webinar with a question worth sitting with: if you disappeared tomorrow, would your front desk run without you?

For most owners the answer is no. And it is almost never because the staff are careless.

"Procedure adoption fails when only one person knows the procedure. When only one person, you, knows the procedure, there's nothing for anyone else to adopt."
— Zach Forrest

That is the whole problem in one sentence. A process that lives in your memory is not a process. It is a single point of failure with your phone number attached to it.

I have been running gyms for twelve years, Arioch Fitness first and now X4 Elgin alongside it, and I spent a lot of those years as the only person in the building who could do half the admin work. Not because I wanted it that way. Because I never wrote anything down, so there was nothing to hand anyone.

Here is the system that fixed it.

Who on your gym staff needs access to what?

Before you train anyone on anything, decide who is allowed to do what. Do it in the software first, because training somebody on a task their role cannot perform is a wasted session.

Staff access in PushPress Core is cumulative. Three roles matter day to day, and each one inherits everything below it.

Two things here surprise almost everyone.

Coach sits above Front Desk, not beside it. A coach can do everything a front desk person can, plus pay-rate configuration and calendar sync. If you have been picturing front desk as the higher-access role, it is the other way round.

There is no "Owner" role. Owner is Admin. Admin is the only role that opens Reports and Settings, which is where financial summaries, payroll totals, payment gateways and integrations live.

Two more details worth knowing before you start handing out roles. Control Panel and Staff App login is a separate toggle from the role itself, so you can give a coach a role purely so payroll calculates and still switch off their ability to log in. And role assignment is capped at your own tier rather than restricted to it: a Front Desk user can only create other Front Desk users, a Coach can create Front Desk or Coach, and an Admin can create all three.

Access is not the same as duties

The table above is what the software permits. What you actually ask each person to own is a separate decision. Here is how Zach and I split it.

Coaches run the floor and own the member experience. Checking members in, checking themselves in so payroll calculates, scheduling privates, swapping or substituting on the schedule, adding notes to member profiles, and pulling up workout history so they can coach the person in front of them properly.

Front desk owns sales and the requests only a staff member can complete. Retail and inventory, whether that is supplements and shirts or uniforms and gis. Pausing plans. Updating a card or bank account on file. Selling a plan. Anything at the point of sale the kiosk cannot handle on its own.

Owner or admin keeps the money and the reporting. Financial reports, weekly and monthly revenue, high-level attendance so you can see which class times are dying and which are overflowing, past-due billing runs, and cancellations.

That last one is a judgment call, not a rule. My coaches are fully capable of pausing a membership and I let them do it. Cancellations I keep closer, partly because it is a bigger escalation and partly because PushPress sends the "plan cancelled" system email to Admins only. Keeping cancellations at my level means I always know when one happens.

I also make members put pause and cancel requests in writing. A member telling a coach "I'm out of town next Friday until three Fridays from now" is genuinely ambiguous, and an email removes the guesswork before anybody touches the account.

How do you build your task list without starting from a blank page?

Once you know who needs what, you need a list of the tasks each role actually performs. Do not sit down with a blank page and try to remember. You will miss most of it.

Instead, carry your phone and leave yourself a voice note every single time you do something in Core or the Staff App. "Pulled the at-risk report." "Charged an open invoice." "Did retail inventory." Do not filter, do not organize, just capture.

Do that for a full week. A month is better.

It feels ridiculous for the first two days. I will be the first to admit I am not naturally a pull-out-my-phone-and-talk-to-myself person. Then you get into the groove and it stops feeling like anything.

At the end of it, drop the notes into whichever AI tool you use and ask it to group them by role and by frequency. You will get most of your task list back organized, in one sitting, and you will not have had to remember a thing.

From there you need somewhere to keep it. A Notion table or a Google Sheet is fine. What matters is the columns: task, how often it happens, which role owns it, the date you trained someone on it, and the date you verified they can run it unassisted.

Those last two columns are the ones that get skipped, and they are the ones that make this a system instead of a list. If you would rather not build it yourself, we put the whole thing into a worksheet — The Delegation Audit — with ten of the most commonly hoarded tasks already filled in.

If you want the broader version of this exercise beyond software tasks, our guide to prioritizing an endless task list covers the same capture-then-sort move applied to everything else on your plate.

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What is the Tell, Show, Do, Check training framework?

Tell, Show, Do, Check is a four-step method for teaching a procedure: Tell the person why the task matters, Show them the task end to end in the actual software, have them Do it themselves while you watch, then Check the result against a standard you defined before the session started.

It is borrowed from how trades and the military have taught procedures for a long time, and it works just as well on gym software as it does on anything else.

Tell

Explain the why before you touch a screen. Not just the clicks for pausing a plan, but why you require the request in writing, what a pause does to their billing date, and what happens differently if you cancel outright instead. Context is what lets somebody handle an edge case without calling you. No context, no autonomy.

Show

Walk the whole task in the real software, from the screen where it starts to the confirmation where it ends. Narrate every click. Go slower than feels necessary.

Do it on a test account, not a real member. Zach keeps one at Work Ethic called TestJoe Athlete, and every procedure his staff learn gets practiced on Joe first. Set one up now if you do not have one. A profile with no recurring plan registers as a non-member in PushPress, so it will not count toward your MRR or pollute your reporting.

Record the session while you are at it. A Loom or a Zoom recording attached to the written procedure is what your staff member watches in three months when the task comes around again and they have forgotten it.

Do

Hand over the keyboard and let them run the same task on the test account, start to finish, while you watch.

Let them get stuck. Do not jump in unless they are about to do something that cannot be undone. Working through the confusion is how it sticks. Watching you do it a second time is not.

Check

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that makes the other three worth doing.

Decide what "done correctly" looks like before the session, then verify it after. Did the membership status actually change? Did the note get added? Did the billing date update? "Looks good to me" is not verification. A completed checklist is.

"You're never gonna get good at training your staff unless you actually schedule time to practice training your staff."
— Zach Forrest

So put it on the calendar. Give the person a heads-up on what you are covering — "Thursday at three, we're doing front desk stuff, plan for forty minutes" — and treat it like any other appointment. If it is not scheduled, it does not happen.

What are the three ways owners sabotage their own training?

Even owners who genuinely try to train their people fail for the same three reasons.

No documentation

If the only record of a procedure is the session itself, you are running that session again in six months for the next hire.

It is worse than repeated work, though. Without documentation you cannot hold anyone to anything. I once told a front desk person she owned membership sales. She said yes. In my head that meant a walk-in gets signed up right there, card on file, first paid class tomorrow. In her head it meant a nice conversation and "come back tomorrow and we'll get you set up."

Neither of us was wrong. We had just never written it down, so we were both working off a different definition of the same sentence. And when it came time to talk about how it was going, I had nothing to point at. You end up saying "you're doing great, revenue is up" and assuming that is her, which is not feedback. It is vibes. She does not feel seen and you do not actually know.

Every task you train on needs a written procedure. A five-bullet page is infinitely better than nothing. If you want a structure for the whole set, our gym operations manual guide lays out the ten sections most gyms need, and part one of the Gym Growth Blueprint covers where staff procedures sit in the wider system.

No verification

Training without a check is hope.

The check is not about catching people out. It is about confirming that what you explained landed the way you meant it. Misunderstandings compound quietly, and a ten-second checklist surfaces them before they turn into a billing problem.

No authority

This is the sneakiest one, because it looks like nothing is wrong.

You train someone to handle sign-ups, then you happen to be standing there every time a walk-in comes in, so you handle it. They never get the reps. Never get confident. Never take it on.

The version I see most often is smaller than that. I have walked into gyms where it was baking all day and asked why nobody touched the thermostat, and the answer is that nobody knew they were allowed to. If my electric bill goes up a hundred bucks because the AC ran, fine. That is a much cheaper problem than members training in an oven.

Give people the guideposts and let them decide inside them. Anything outside the guideposts comes to you.

Do not wait until you have it perfect

You will not finish this. That is not a reason to skip it.

Roles change as your team changes, and the software changes too — the exact clicks to sell a plan today may look slightly different in a year. Do not let that stop you from writing it down now. Nothing here is set in stone for the next ten years, and a procedure that is eighty percent right and written down beats a perfect one in your head.

For what it is worth, Zach demoed his own task database on the webinar and admitted most of his procedures are still sitting in a binder he has not typed up yet. The point is not the finished system. It is starting.

Your action plan this week

1. Today. Start the voice notes. Every task, every time you open Core or the Staff App.
2. All week. Keep going. A week minimum, a month if you can stand it.
3. Friday. Drop the notes into an AI tool, group them by role and frequency, and pick the three highest-frequency, highest-risk tasks for each role. Or skip ahead and use The Delegation Audit.
4. Before you train. Set everyone's role in Core so nobody learns a workflow they cannot run. Here is how to manage user roles.
5. Set up the test account. One fake member, no plan attached.
6. Book the sessions. Two thirty-minute blocks on the calendar, one per role, and tell people what you are covering.
7. Write it down after. Five bullets and the Loom, stored somewhere your team actually goes.

Start with whatever hurts most when it goes wrong. That is usually billing and cancellations.

For getting brand-new people set up in the system in the first place, our CX team wrote Training Your Staff using PushPress, which walks through profiles, roles and app downloads for each role.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Tell, Show, Do, Check method?

It is a four-step training sequence: explain why the task matters, demonstrate it end to end in the software, have the person perform it themselves while you watch, then verify the result against a standard defined before the session. The check step is the one most people skip and the one that determines whether the training held.

How do I train staff on a procedure they only use once a month?

Monthly tasks are the highest-risk ones to document, because the reps come too far apart for memory to hold. Lean harder on the written procedure and attach a recording. A test account helps here too: the person can rehearse the whole thing on a fake profile before touching a real member, which means they can answer their own question instead of waiting on you.

Should my coaches handle sales or membership changes?

That depends on your staffing, not on a rule. In PushPress, coaches have the same day-to-day access as front desk, so the software will let them. The question is whether you want the same person delivering the class and then asking for a credit card. A dedicated front desk lets the coach just coach and hand off cleanly. If you are a smaller gym with part-time coaches and no front desk, train them on the sales conversation and consider paying them for sign-ups after intro classes.

Who should be allowed to cancel a membership?

Most owners keep cancellations at Admin level, and there is a practical reason beyond caution: PushPress sends the "plan cancelled" notification to Admins only, so keeping the action at your level means you see every one. Pauses are a different story and are safe to delegate. This is a policy choice, not a software restriction — front desk and coach roles can process both.

How long does it take to train a staff member on gym software?

Budget thirty to forty minutes per session and cover two tasks in each. A front desk role usually takes three or four sessions to cover properly. It is far more effective spread across a few weeks than crammed into one long onboarding day.