Hire the One Who Sends the Certified Letter

Hire the One Who Sends the Certified Letter

In 2008, Dan Brown was a personal trainer at a big-box gym who decided he was done. He got into graduate school at Purdue and wanted to coach on the football strength staff. So he emailed the head strength coach.

No answer. He called the football office. No answer.

So he sent a handwritten letter by certified mail, the kind you have to sign for, saying: "I just want to work for you for free."

When Dan finally showed up in person, the coach didn't look up from his Sudoku. "Yeah, I know you are you're the one that sent me the certified letter." Then he laid out the deal. He didn't hire people from big-box gyms. He hired guys who played Division I football. But: "cause you're persistent. I will let you come work for a semester for free. And then if I don't hate you, you can come back the second semester."

Dan's answer: "what time you want me here?"

I've known Dan since 2012. When I was getting ready to open my gym, I drove to the north side of Indianapolis to learn Olympic lifting from him, because you have to go where the knowledge is. He's the founder of Lift Lab, a USA Weightlifting Level 2 coach, and he's owned multiple gyms. He's taken lifters to the Arnold and American Open by the dozens.

His path onto a Big Ten staff is a lesson in how to find coaches, how to grow them, and what to protect on your floor.

Watch what they do when nobody's paying them

Dan set up cones for months. He gave the staff his class schedule so they always knew where he was. Between groups, he sat on a stack of plyo boxes in the field house for an hour or two and waited for the next one. Nobody talked to him.

About 60 days in, the head coach finally said, come sit in my office. Then, in his words, "I just gradually started getting more and more responsibility."

By his third year, the same coach who didn't hire big-box trainers had Dan "doing the programming for the football team on the Olympic lifting side of it."

Two lessons for owners. First, the résumé you think you need may not be the one that matters. The coach who keeps showing up when it isn't paid is telling you more than any certification will. Second, look at what the head coach did. He noticed what Dan was obsessed with, "always looking at these like Russian training manuals," and pushed him toward it. Your best coaches get better when you point them at what they already love.

No phones on the floor

One detail from Dan's Purdue years every owner should steal. His boss had a rule: no cell phone in your pocket on the floor while you're coaching. Dan's phone stayed in the office all day. The only exception in three years was when his wife was close to her due date.

"So for however many hours a day, I was just dialed into this thing."

Walk your floor this week and count the phones. Your athletes and parents are counting too.

Relationship speed is the job

Purdue's weight room had every kind of athlete. Some came from neighborhoods where violence was normal. One punter's family was wealthy enough, Dan joked, that the kid could have bought his house.

"The most critical point in coaching is how quickly can I establish a relationship with this person."

That's true in your gym too. A new athlete walks in, and every one of them needs to be able to relate to your coach, and your coach to them. Dan's volume at Purdue made him fast at it. Your staff gets fast at it the same way: reps, and paying attention to each person who walks in.

Don't marry the program

Dan has strong opinions. He'll argue Olympic lifting over powerlifting all day. Then he said this:

"coaches get too wrapped into, to be honest, like the structure of the program."

Outside the barbell sports, he thinks the style is "largely irrelevant because you need to give them a stimulus." Get them stronger and faster, and give them the chance to actually run, with good mechanics. "If you just think about how many kids or adults or whatever, just don't have the opportunity to run, how they ever get any better at it."

For owners, that's a hiring and marketing note. Families don't buy a method. They buy a stronger, faster kid who can apply it in their sport. Dan put it this way: "my mind has to be number one, and then my physical abilities become number two."

The community is the bigger lesson

Purdue once sent Dan to Westside Barbell for a few days with Louie Simmons. They ate at the same restaurant three times a day and he asked Louie everything.

What did he bring back? Not much in the way of programming. "The biggest lesson is just like the The mindset and the commitment and cult commitment to train that you had cultivated." The question he took home: "how do we get all these guys on one page on one belief?"

If you read our post onWestside's Tom Barry, you'll recognize it. The programs get copied. The community is what's hard to build.

When you don't need the money

One more from Dan, and it's a hard one for owners. He trains one high school athlete for free, out of his garage. Why free? Because when nobody's paying, nobody can buy a shortcut. The athlete does it Dan's way, mobility work included, or he doesn't train there.

I told Dan on tape what I've heard from Tom Barry at Westside: when you need the payment, there's a conflict of interest. You might give the athlete more of what he wants so he keeps paying, instead of what you know is best.

You can't run a business for free. But you can run it so that no single check decides how you coach. Price it right, hold the standard, and be willing to lose the family that wants it their way.

Parents and failure

Dan has coached a lot of youth football, and he said the quiet part out loud: "the parents are afraid to let the kids sit with the failure." And often they measure failure differently than the kid does: "They're usually measuring how much time do my kid play in the game."

Your coaches will face that conversation every season. Decide as a staff how you'll handle it before it walks in the door.

Now what?

Three questions for your next staff meeting:

1. Who on your staff, or your waiting list, keeps showing up when nobody's paying them?

2. What's your phone rule on the floor, and does every coach follow it?

3. If your biggest-paying family asked you to change your standard tomorrow, would you?

If those answers bother you, that's worth a conversation.Book a Game Plan Sessionand bring your numbers.

And if you want to see where one of your own athletes stands across all six blocks — Mindset, Knowledge, Teammates, Training, Nutrition, Recovery — thefree Athlete Builder Assessmenttakes 8–12 minutes.

Win the Day. Stay Relentless.

— Jim Beebe

Watch the full conversation with Dan Brown — Episode 9: https://youtu.be/moptMFcawXg