Chris Cooper's Blog, page 114

Growing Your Hedge: The Key to Your Wealth Platform

You’re an entrepreneur. And no matter how great your business is, it’s a higher-risk investment.

Maybe you outperform the stock market year over year. Maybe you’ve seen constant growth through wartime and peacetime. But if you want to build your platform, you still have to balance your portfolio.

Think of your primary business as a cornerstone in your wealth platform. It generates revenue (and it probably makes you feel great, too).

In the Tinker Phase, your goal is to grow your platform. That means adding more blocks.

Other Tinkers have added:

A second or third location.Stocks or index funds.A different business.Overfunded life insurance.Buildings.Crypto and more.

To launch a long-term legacy, you need to start with a platform of wealth.

Here’s my platform, as an example. This won’t work for everyone:

Gym.Two-Brain Business.Index funds.Commercial buildings.Other companies.

While most of your time and energy is probably spent growing your bricks-and-mortar business, it’s a good idea to have some more conservative “hedge” investments. As my CFO told me, “Your business is your higher-risk investment. Balance your portfolio!”

Here are some ways to do it:

1. Kick off a “hedge” revenue stream, like online coaching. Make your primary skill set more antifragile to risk.

2. Set up one cash-flow asset. I gave a bunch of examples in “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief.” My cash-flow asset: my buildings. They pay me rent for as long as I own them.

3. Set up one compounding asset. I choose index funds (but I also have a mix of retirement plans and educational savings plans for my kids).

4. Set up a strategy to defer taxes as much as possible. Invest through your business when you can instead of investing money that’s already been cut by taxes. Talk to your accountant or CFO. If you can invest 20 percent more because you buy with pre-tax income, that will have a massive compounding effect.

I’m not an investment advisor. Don’t take this as written-in-stone advice. But your business exists to make a profit (even if that’s only your secondary goal behind changing lives).

What do you do with that profit? Use some of it to grow a hedge.

We have great conversations about platform-building in Two-Brain’s Tinker program. Check it out here.

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Give Yourself a Raise: Why Your Gym Can Afford It

You can earn more from your gym—in fact, you can earn more than you need.

Here are the top-earning gym owners in the world for July 2021:

The numbers above represent what these entrepreneurs took home from their gyms—not the total revenue earned by the gyms.

Paying yourself more requires more revenue and more profit, of course. But it also requires discipline. I know hundreds of gym owners whose gyms are growing, but they never give themselves raises.

In fact, this month I’ve seen many graphs of gyms that have doubled in revenue, but the owners aren’t taking more money home. They’re just sitting on thousands of dollars in their bank accounts for no reason!

At Two-Brain, we track net owner benefit (NOB) to make sure gym owners upgrade their incomes when their gyms grow. Here are some of our tactics:

1. Use a “pay-yourself-first” strategy, like Profit First. Maybe you don’t need five or seven separate bank accounts, but you can still use the fundamental principle to earn more. Simply write yourself checks for every second Friday for the next three months. Postdate them. Take them to the bank and deposit them in advance. Now you know the money is coming out of the business, and it’s up to you to make sure the money is in your account. (Hint: you can do it.)

2. Every quarter, give yourself a raise. Write a larger amount on the postdated checks. How much? 10 percent is a great start. But $50 per check is still good because you’re still going up. Just don’t wait until the business is “ready” to pay you more because you’ll always just spend the money on something else.

3. Pull money out of your business instead of leaving a big lump sum in your bank account. All you need is access to cash and credit to cover two months’ expenses. Anything else is just a security blanket—your business will never go to zero revenue overnight (COVID proved it!). You don’t have to take the money as personal income. You can reinvest it somewhere else if you like. But your business doesn’t need the money sitting around, and money in your account is more exposed to lawsuits. Might as well get it out of there and get it working for you!

4. Move some of your personal expenses to the gym if you can. If your gym can cover the cost of your phone, for example, then that increases your net owner benefit. And because you’re paying that bill with pre-tax income, you’re probably saving money on it—bonus!

5. Invest in mentorship. Your business pays for mentorship, but you reap the reward. So while the investment is purchased with pre-tax income, you’ll make more money to take home. That’s because good mentors don’t focus on client headcount or gross revenue but net owner benefit—how much you make. Trust me, there are a dozen ways to increase net owner benefit without getting another single client.

The key? Remember to give yourself a raise.

Behave Like a CEO

As your business grows, it makes more money. But often the business just eats up all the new revenue—it doesn’t flow through to the owner. I’ve seen gyms with $1 million in revenue and broke owners, and I’ve seen gyms with $100,000 in revenue pay their owners over 60 percent of it.

If your gym is growing, you’re a good CEO. Do what a good CEO would do: Ask for a raise.

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Addition by Subtraction: Increasing Value by Doing Less

You don’t need to be at your business all the time.

In fact, you become more valuable as an owner when you spend less time in your business.

Instead of doing all the things, it’s really important to invest your time in things that will actually grow your business.

Here are the steps to doing that:

1. Choose one hour that you will dedicate to growing your business each day. Block this hour in your schedule every day from Monday to Friday. I’d pick the hour after your workout or the first hour of the workday. But don’t use this hour for showering or eating or taking meetings—those things won’t grow your business.

2. Use the hour to systemize your gym, set up goal reviews or referral programs, take a call with your mentor, create content for publication, set up advertising funnels, call former clients, learn about selling by chat, or do anything else that will help you grow.

3. Do not use the hour to revise your current handbooks, design a new logo, fix your website, run staff meetings or improve anything you’re already doing.

4. Do not spend the hour on social media, combing Facebook groups for gym owners or posting to Instagram.

5. Set a clock, but turn off your phone. Stay focused on tasks (usually one per day) that grow your business for the full hour.

Listen to my podcast “No More Disposable Days” for more ideas.

Perform an Objective Audit

Next, audit the time you spend.

For two weeks, track your time spent by the roles you fill in the gym.

Also track the “time bandits” (read more here).

Find the lowest-value use of your time and hire someone else to do that role.

Reinvest the time saved in a higher-value use of your time.

For example, replace yourself as coach of the noon class. Then, from noon to 1 p.m., shut your office door and build marketing funnels on Facebook.

Finally, take vacations to test your business.

Put your business under stress and see what breaks. Expose your gym’s weaknesses.

Take three days—Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Go away. Don’t check your phone or email. Return on a Sunday. Go into the gym for three hours. Fix any problems that your staff couldn’t solve. While you’re fixing problems, record the solutions in your staff playbook. Solve the problem forever.

Just as your client needs a coach, you need to step out of your business and view it objectively. You can triage problems only after you see them clearly.

And if you don’t make time to grow your business, you’ll spend all day working in your business instead of working on your business. That can be rewarding in the short term, but if you wanted a coaching job, you’d be working for someone else, right?

The post Addition by Subtraction: Increasing Value by Doing Less appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Chris Cooper on Competition and CrossFit’s Affiliate Playbook

Andrew (00:02):

Welcome back to Two-Brain Radio. Are you threatened by that gym down the street? Chris Cooper offers his views on competition as CrossFit LLC prepares to release its affiliate playbook and resource set.

Chris (00:15):

Hey guys, it’s Chris Cooper. Your members are buying supplements somewhere, so they should buy them from the person who cares about them the most: You. And you should work with my friends at Driven Nutrition. Jason Rule and the Driven team put customers first, every time they’ve got a ton of products with high margins and they’ll even train you so your retail program adds revenue to your business. Kirk Hendrickson from Iron Jungle CrossFit says Driven Nutrition has some of the best support I have seen from any company we’ve partnered with. To make more money with supplements and retail sales, visit drivennutrition.net. Now back to the show.

Chris (00:47):

Hey everybody, Chris Cooper here. And today we’re going to be talking about competition. This is something that I’ve really struggled to get my mind around since the dawn of time. You know, I started up my gym in 2005 and the first thing I said to one of my partners was I’m going to take the personal training clients from every other gym in town. I’m going to put them out of business. And my partner said, Chris, you don’t need to put them out of business to have a great business yourself. And still it took me probably 15 years to really get that. And so after I did the podcast with Eric Roza a couple of weeks ago, there were a lot of great discussion points in our private Two-Brain business group, which are highly curated. And I participate in there all the time. And one of the greatest questions came from Kali.

Chris (01:31):

And, I’m going to read it to you almost verbatim here. I just don’t want to disclose exactly who Kali is, but I thought, you know what? This could help people understand the nature of competition and overlap and intellectual property and what actually makes them special by talking about what I’ve learned about what makes Two-Brain special. So Kali said, Chris, I really enjoyed the episode and the insight despite not being associated with CrossFit or its affiliates, but I was really curious about Chris’s internal gut reaction as he hears Eric talk about frameworks and tools that CrossFit is developing and rolling out to support affiliates that are a little bit similar to Two-Brain and what Two-Brain has already built, developed, and successfully implemented. If CrossFit can do that well, and they have a direct pipeline to their affiliates without extra marketing, couldn’t that eat some of Two-Brain’s market share, and it had my wheels turning with curiosity.

Chris (02:24):

So Kali, thank you so much for such an amazing prompt. It’s a great question in a group full of amazing questions. It stood out and it was one that I was hoping, I guess, unconsciously, that somebody would ask. And the reason I’m sharing the answer here is because I think it will help you, the listener of the individual gym owner, with this concept of who is my competition and how do I actually embrace these other gyms that are opening up in my town and selling the same thing or doing it, you know, with overlap. So first off, my mission at Two-Brain is to make a million gym owners successful. So if CrossFit’s playbook that Eric mentioned in the podcast or any of their other tools helps a few more gym owners achieve that goal, then everyone wins. I achieve my mission. They achieve their mission and you, the gym owner can achieve your mission too.

Chris (03:15):

Right? That’s good for everyone. But, and this is my second point, knowledge isn’t the problem. So even if an affiliate playbook is bang on, step-by-step and perfect in every single gym worldwide, it won’t really help anyone because free knowledge is not the problem. Lack of information is not the problem. It’s all out there. And if free knowledge was a threat, then I would be my own biggest competition. So I own mentorship practice for a reason, knowledge doesn’t get results, action gets results. I would love if everybody took our free tools on our website and turned that into the money to pay for mentorship. And that’s literally why we publish this stuff so that you can use it, generate some revenue and then upgrade to mentorship. But I promise you that happens very rarely, even though we keep making better and better and more actionable content with checklists and worksheets, and step-by-step do this right now.

Chris (04:11):

Very few people take action on that knowledge, because there’s just way too many things that you could do. There’s too much knowledge out there. And it’s hard to start separating yourself from coaching classes and actually building your business. So it’s action. That gets results. And that’s what mentorship is all about. So third, I know what it takes to publish data driven advice. It is crazy, crazy hard. It is crazy expensive and you have to be a hundred percent committed to doing it forever. It has taken me now four years to build our dataset that we have at Two-Brain Business. It’s cost me well over a million dollars. We give it away for free in our state of the industry guides every single year. And we give away free data every week on our blog. And I talk about it sometimes on this podcast, but you can’t get it fast and things change over time.

Chris (05:03):

You have to be committed to maintaining that data set and upgrading it all the time. So Eric Roza and I have spoken about this a few times in the past, and even in our very first conversation, this question, like why does Two-Brain have a dataset that CrossFit HQ doesn’t, has come up, and when you’re listening to the interview and he said, yeah, it would be good to have some data. I mean, you know that that’s basically what he’s referring to, right? What home office is going to be publishing with these playbooks is actually a collection of anecdotes. Like what worked for me stories. And these are like a bunch of N equals one examples, right? That’s the stuff that I was publishing in 2010 and it is helpful. Absolutely. It helped people back then and people who bought my first book have commented on that.

Chris (05:51):

But the problem with N equals one is that nobody, none of us individually have tried everything. So we can’t actually say like, this works better than that, right? We need to have a broader proven dataset. The problem is that since we’re all a bunch of type A personalities, we’re all 100% convinced that the thing that we did is better than everything else. So if you look at any conversation about gym management software, everybody has a really firm conviction about what’s best, but we can’t all be right. Right. Like the problem is that none of us have tried Zen Planner, Wodify, Mindbody, Train Heroic, all of them. So what we have to do is actually track like satisfaction, comparative data. Who’s using this. And instead of giving you my opinion, every year, we publish a gym management software ratings guide. And that’s based on the feedback and data that we get from hundreds and hundreds of gyms, sometimes thousands of gyms in some of our stuff, right?

Chris (06:49):

But if you take that disagreement and you extrapolate that out to something like on-ramp, which most gyms are now using, and you listen to Eric’s answer, he says, well, we know that some gyms use OnRamp and some gyms do it one-on-one and some do it as a group. And some gyms do a free trial first, and then you have to go in on ramp and some hate it. They don’t want to do it at all. Well, that’s what CrossFit’s playbook is going to say that some gyms use one-on-one and some do a free trial first and stuff. My job is to say, this is the best. And here’s why the data supports doing it this way. So for example, I can say that if you use a one-on-one on-ramp consisting of five to 10 sessions, your front end revenue will go from whatever your monthly membership is to about four and a half times that much money. I can also say the clients who go through a one-on-one on-ramp program lasting between five and 10 sessions have an average LEG of around 11 months compared to a client who doesn’t, who just does a free trial, who has an average LEG of under seven months. So a client who goes through one-on-one on-ramp is likely to stick around for an extra five months, even if they pay a lot more for it. All right. So that’s how it’s different.

Chris (08:06):

Back to Two-Brain Radio in just a minute. Chalk It Pro is a fitness app designed and built by gym owners for gym owners to solve annoying problems that make running a gym hard. It’s an all-in-one app that manages your members, including remote members. It also takes care of programming and it will help you keep clients engaged for longer. Use Chalk It Pro to increase value and build your bottom line. Add more personal training and remote coaching clients. Build a thriving community through social engagement and save loads of time on the backend. Do all this with one app, not three or four. Get your free trial at Chalkitpro.co

Chris (08:41):

So the fourth thing is, and this is related, that best practices change all the time. Some of the stuff that I said in 2012 in my books, that’s outdated now. Some of it isn’t even correct. And we can update our roadmap every so our roadmap is like our collection of courses in Two-Brain. Every month we have a meeting where we update content and say, OK, this has been proven to work a little bit better. This tweak in the sales process or when the sales person says this thing, the close rate goes up. Or when we run this ad with this picture, the click-through rate goes up a little bit, you know, whatever. We’ve actually literally made 393 updates in 2021 so far, but home office can’t update their playbook, not like that, not without a firm commitment to data, right? So what you’ll see in 2021 is helpful, but it’s probably exactly the same thing you’re going to see in 2025 and fifth, the best Two-Brain clients actually come from people who have seen others’ material.

Chris (09:41):

So a lot of Two-Brain clients have worked with like Gym Launch in the past, or even one of the smaller coaching businesses. But even if they haven’t, I love it when people in Two-Brain say to me, I watched that guy’s videos, but the Two-Brain stuff is on a different level. Like he just kind of seems like one of these biz bros where Two-Brain seems more professional and you know, I’m not here to poke fun at anybody or anything like that. You know what I’m talking about in your gym, right? You can be the gym that knows the most about movement. You can be the most highly certified technician, or you can be like the fun gym, or you can have the best competitive team, or you can be like the warm and loving gym. But if you have all of those, what happens is you get the best clients from all the other gyms.

Chris (10:27):

And I try to provide all of those. So being the best isn’t enough to have a great business, but it’s still critical. And so it’s really important. Like if you’re going to be mentoring people, you need to be the best at collecting data, at sharing experiences, at curating the group of people who are working together at collecting best practices and having like a testing process. Right? And that’s not something that Home Office can do, but that’s not something that most franchises even do. You know, I personally mentor enough franchisees who have massive businesses that I can say to you, most franchises don’t even do this stuff, but a mentorship practice can, right? So let’s talk about what mentorship means. So on the podcast, Eric talked about peer mentorship and that’s awesome. You need to be around peers, right? People who are going through this at the same time you are, in parallel to you, but we’ve all been in mentorship programs, maybe in our home towns, or we’ve been in like peer mentorship, Facebook groups, like the affiliate owners group, or affiliate owners only, or whatever they’re called.

Chris (11:39):

Now, these can be productive. And I really hope that they are, but sometimes people misrepresent their success, right? And like the loudest people usually do most of the talking. So you don’t always know what you’re getting without curation. We curate for the best, because we have the ability to do that. So while mentorship might apply in both situations, it’s different. When you have a paid mentor, you have that person’s attention, you have their focus and you’re benefiting from the community that they’ve curated as well as the knowledge and experience that they’ve curated over time and the data that they’ve actually collected too. So, I mean, I’m sure you you’ve been in one of these groups, I’m not picking on the fitness industry or CrossFitters in general. This happens with every community in the world. Now, if you are a contractor, there are free Facebook groups for contractors and you get in there and you say, Hey, what invoicing software do you guys use for your roofing jobs?

Chris (12:39):

And you’ll have five different people give you five different ideas. And they’re all equally like committed this as the best to each one of those ideas. And they’re going to fight each other on it. And one of them is eventually going to say, I own a $10 million roofing company, listen to me. And you have no way of actually checking that, right? You don’t really know who you’re talking to. And so free mentorship or peer mentorship, sometimes it’s really hard to pick the pearls out of the rocks. I’ll put it that way. Seventh, you know, we don’t actually want everyone. So I do hope that Eric achieves his goal of a hundred thousand CrossFit gyms. That’s awesome. As a mentorship practice though, I don’t want a hundred thousand clients. So we have filters instead of low barrier front-end offers. Between us. I sometimes think like, we’re very, very close to 1,000 Two-Brain gyms worldwide.

Chris (13:32):

That’s enough to change the world. Let’s just stop here. And then somebody will say, yeah, but what if there’s one more Kali out there? And I say, good point. Let’s just keep looking for the Kallies. So I’m going to share this with you because you might be facing it in your own hometown too. If people are throwing rocks at you or criticizing, sometimes if you go in a Facebook group, what you’ll find is that there are people who like attack Two-Brain’s ideas or attack me or attack some of the mentors. And what you need to understand is that that is their marketing. They gain clients by being not Two-Brain. So maybe they say like, oh, there’s an easier way to do it than what Two-Brain is doing. Or, you know, they might even even go worse. Like, you know, you can get clients faster or you would make more money if you did this or whatever, I don’t even want to get into it.

Chris (14:22):

But what you need to understand is that the reason they attack Two-Brain is because they don’t have any ideas of their own. In many cases, they attack Two-Brain because they couldn’t even make their own gym successful or describe how they did that. And so their platform is like anti-Two-Brain, right? OK. And this might be happening in your town too. Let’s say that you’re a CrossFit gym. There are probably people whose marketing message includes CrossFit will hurt you. Not because they have a better idea, but because they want people to come to their bootcamp, yoga, Pilates, whatever, instead of doing CrossFit and you know what, that’s fine because you want the smart people who will actually dig in and say, is this true? You want the people who will actually try it out for themselves. You want the people who are not easily tracked easily fooled. And Bonnie Skinner,

Chris (15:19):

who’s a psychotherapist here at Two-Brain HQ, she gave me this concept of the goldfish and I’ll link to a blog post that I did about the goldfish. Basically, if you want to have a fish tank, that’s beautiful and clear unless you look at like the most beautiful tropical fish in the world, then you’ve also got to have a bottom feeder in the tank. You need somebody that’s going to go around and like suck up the poop. Right? And what happens is when you have a public Facebook group and people are giving advice, if people are attacking you, the only people who will be attracted to your attacker are the clients you don’t want anyway, they’re the people who are easily fooled, who just see what they want to see, who will not dig deeper or bear with you or give you the benefit of the doubt.

Chris (16:05):

These are not the clients that you want anyway. And so when you say like, you don’t want everyone, that’s not just you trying to be a generous, abundant-brained person. It’s really the truth. And the people who think that they’re competing with you are actually doing you a massive favor by attracting away the clients that you don’t want. It’s better that they attract that client away and keep them away from your gym than to let that person come into your gym, find out they’re not a great fit three months or three years later. And have them raise hell when they go out. OK. So finally, more CrossFit gyms does mean more clients for Two-Brain. About 70% of our gyms are CrossFit gyms. Even after the big de-affiliation happened last year and the best owners out there might take a while to get to Two-Brain, but they will eventually.

Chris (16:51):

Now here’s how this applies to your gym. More gyms in your town means more people getting introduced to fitness and more gyms that are exactly like yours. More CrossFits, more Orangetheories, more bootcamps, more yoga, more studio, whatever. What that means is that they are creating new potential students for your gym. If they can find new people and get those people interested in yoga, but you run a better yoga program. Then what they’re basically doing is finding and recruiting and training new clients for you. And the best will find you. And that’s what we find with gym owners. That’s what we find with CrossFitters. All you have to do is be the best. And when you’re the best, you will attract the best. You will not attract everyone. You will repel the worst, but you will attract the best, they will graduate up to you. These are the lessons that I’ve learned at my gym. These are the lessons that I now apply to Two-Brain Business. And I really hope that they help you out with your gym business, too.

Andrew (17:54):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. If this episode helped you, don’t forget to subscribe for more shows.

Chris (17:58):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. If you aren’t in the Gym Owners United group on Facebook, this is my personal invitation to join. It’s the only public Facebook group that I participate in. And I’m in there all the time with tips, tactics, and free resources. I’d love to network with you and help you grow your business. Join Gym Owners United on Facebook.

 

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Earn More for Your Time: July 2021 Two-Brain Leaderboard

What are you worth to your business?

I know you’re probably a good coach, but what’s your value as a CEO?

One of the ways to measure that value is your effective hourly rate (EHR)—what your business pays you as the owner per hour worked.

Hopefully, the number is higher than what you’d make as a coach somewhere else.

Here are the top gym owners, ranked by EHR, for July 2021:

There are two ways to improve the value you receive from being an entrepreneur:

Pay yourself more money.Work fewer hours.

These are the reasons you opened a business: to have greater control over your time and greater leverage on your income.

In this series, I’ll tell you how to pay yourself more and work fewer hours.

The post Earn More for Your Time: July 2021 Two-Brain Leaderboard appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

5 (More) Blogs in 5 Weeks to Build Your Audience

We just completed our first Storytelling Workshop, and it was inspiring to see what focused entrepreneurs could do with precise instructions.

Chris Cooper and I taught business owners how to create media fast, and we were blown away as we put them on the clock and pushed them to create a mountain of content in just one day.

Early in the workshop, we told them to start small if they were feeling intimidated by media production, and I’ll say the same thing here. Start small. But start today.

To help you out, here are five ideas for blogs.

If you have trouble producing content, keep it simple and just “get it done.” If you love creating, feel free to go big: Add some pictures, dig a little deeper, create social-media assets to promote the blogs and so on.

Do Exactly This

1. Block off “publishing time” on your calendar every week for five weeks. You will use this time to produce and publish the five blogs below. If you don’t schedule this activity, it won’t happen.

 2. Make some notes on each topic right off the top of your head in “week 0,” and add to your notes any time an idea pops into your head. That way you’ll already have some thoughts together when you sit down to create.

3. Write 300-600 words. Don’t feel pressure to go long. The point is to publish consistently, so be brief and to the point.

4. Write and publish the blog to your website each week, starting next week. Then send it to your mailing list as a newsletter. Then use your social-media platforms to tell people to come to your site to read the blog.

That’s it. Hit your calendar and block off time to publish right now, then read on for the blog ideas.

Week 1

Subject: Check out what’s coming in fall! (If you don’t have anything scheduled, shine a spotlight on an existing program you want to grow; e.g., “Fall is the perfect time to make quick progress with a personal trainer before the holidays!”)

Audience: Prospective clients and current clients. You want to expose prospective clients to the things your business offers, but you also have an opportunity to sell more to current clients.

Goal: Generate revenue through sign-ups for fall events and programs.

Key point: “These fall events/seminars/workshops solve these very common problems.”

Link and call to action to include: The URLs for your landing pages for fall events and associated services. “Click for more info!”

Protip: Make sure you mention the “pain points” that your service will remove. It’s all about solving problems in fall.

Week 2

Subject: Can I get fit before Thanksgiving and Christmas?

Audience: Prospective clients.

Goal: Explain what’s possible between now and the holidays if—and only if—people start working now.

Key points: You find out exactly what clients want to accomplish, then put together an exact plan for the next few months. Be sure to give examples of realistic goals and describe the paths toward them—group classes, PT, nutrition coaching, etc. Apply some urgency by explaining that people who wait to start are losing time to make progress. If they have goals, now is the time to address them.

Link and call to action to include: The URL for your booking page. “Book a free consultation now!”

Protip: When promoting this blog on social media, ask for comments and DMs about current goals. Respond to all comments/messages and direct the conversation toward a free consultation.

Week 3

Subject: The 3 best foods for fall (and 3 to avoid).

Audience: General community.

Goal: Give people some seasonal ideas on what to eat and highlight your nutrition services.

Key points: Use the season change to highlight great local produce that’s now available. Be sure to mention other local businesses, farmers markets and so on. Then talk about three seasonal things that might not be ideal in excess: like a sugar-filled pumpkin spice beverage.

Link and call to action to include: The URL for your nutrition-coaching page. “Work with a nutrition coach!”

Protip: Don’t shame anyone or make fun of food choices. Just point out things that might be OK as a treat but not preferred as part of a daily routine.

Week 4

Subject: Three quick basement workouts for busy parents.

Audience: General community.

Goal: Generate some website traffic by helping parents get a workout in as they try to balance work with child care, back-to-school activities and any pandemic-related issues in your area.

Key points: Something is better than nothing! Assure readers that a 10-minute workout can be effective, and help stressed parents find motivation to get moving. Lay out three short, simple workouts they can do at home with no equipment or very common items. Be sure to give an easier and a harder option for each workout.

Link and call to action to include: Your email address. “Contact me for more workout ideas!” Supply another workout and direct the conversation toward a free consultation if you get messages.

Protip: Set busy people up for success with simple movements. Leave the Turkish get-ups out and get people moving rather than searching for instruction videos.

Week 5

Topic: Client spotlight.

Audience: Special client and prospective clients.

Goals: Make one of your best clients feel great and offer some social proof to people who are thinking about contacting you.

Key point: Pick a person who represents your client avatar and sing the client’s praises loudly. Tell the client’s story. Talk about when and why the client joined, recent successes, commitment over summer, attitude, habits, goals for fall and so on. Make the person “real” for your audience.

Link and call to action to include: URL for your client stories page. “Click for more stories!”

Protip: Be sure to make it clear how this client solved problems and accomplished goals in your business. You want similar people to take similar steps.

Do It or Delegate It!

That’s your five-week content plan.

Use it on its own to get into the habit of publishing or add these ideas to your content plan to increase output.

Final protip: Send this article to a staff member and ask him or her to follow the plan to increase authority and grow your audience.

The post 5 (More) Blogs in 5 Weeks to Build Your Audience appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

No Disposable Days: How to Stop Spinning Tires and Get Things Done

Mike (00:02):

Are you so busy you can’t seem to get anything done? Chris Cooper is here with the fix. He’ll tell you exactly how to take action and move your business forward every single day. Stay tuned for Coop on Two-Brain Radio.

Chris (00:12):

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Chris (00:29):

`Hey, it’s Chris Cooper and we have all had these days. You get up at 4:30 in the morning, you grab a coffee, you head to the gym, you coach the 5:00 AM or the 6:00 AM class. Maybe you coach a couple in a row and then you start to get down to work, but your brain is tired. And so you grab another coffee and you check social media. And before you know it it’s time for the lunchtime class. And after the lunchtime class, you need to work out. So you hammer it hard and then it’s three or four o’clock and you gotta pick up your kids. You gotta be home in time for dinner. Maybe you’ve got some personal training clients coming in, and then the next time you check your watch, it’s like 9:00 PM.

Chris (01:16):

You’re mopping the floors. You’re headed home. And on the drive home, you say to yourself, what did I actually accomplish today? Is my business better than it was last night at this time? Or did I just fill up another day of my life? I had this same recurring feeling for years and years and years that I had my head down, that I was working hard, that I was providing the best service that I possibly could, but I wasn’t actually doing any better. And it took me about four years to look back and say, Hey, I’m not earning any more than I was back then. I’m not any happier. In fact, I’m more tired. I’m more in debt. I’m fighting more with my wife. I’m, you know, I’m just as stressed as I was back then. Things are not getting better. I’m just repeating the same days over and over and over.

Chris (02:06):

And the phrase disposable days entered my mind because time is a non-renewable resource. Money is a renewable resource. That’s fine, but time is not. And every day that you spend working in your business without moving that business forward, it’s hard to see that as a productive day. Yes, you’re out there changing lives and that’s your mission. And that’s the impact that you’re going to have. But if your business isn’t going forward, it’s going backward, just like your fitness. So today I’m going to tell you how to have no more disposable days, how to create time for yourself to do things that will grow your business, move your business forward even a little bit. So that at the end of the day, you can say, yeah, this is a little bit better than it was yesterday. That doesn’t mean getting a new client every day. But it does mean doing one thing, putting one brick in the wall so that you know that you’re moving forward.

Chris (03:01):

You’re not sliding backward and you’re not wasting time. Now, way back in 2015, I was writing two books at one time. One was called “Help First,” which is my overarching marketing philosophy. And there was a lot of strategy and tactics in that book too. But as I was writing it, what I realized was if you don’t have time to walk down the street and meet your neighbors, you don’t have time to do goal reviews with your current clients to get referrals. You don’t have time to set up Facebook ad campaigns. Then you’re kind of screwed. You can’t take these steps that will actually grow your business. So, and these are just marketing steps. A lot of people were saying, Chris, I’m working a 12 hour, day, 14 hours a day already. I know you’re telling me exactly what to do. I don’t have time to take action on any of it.

Chris (03:45):

And this is still a problem that’s true to this day. People enter our RampUp program and we say, OK, here’s exactly the first step you have to do. Here’s exactly how to do it. Here’s a template. Fill it out. And two weeks later they say I haven’t done it because I don’t have time. And so we realized a couple of years ago that the first step that entrepreneurs need to take is to create time in their day, to do the things that will grow their business. And now this is the first part of our RampUp program. But I want to share with you a strategy called the 10 hour CEO. And I published this in Two-Brain Business 2.0, that’s a book that I wrote while I was writing Help First, because I realized if I don’t help you get the time to do this stuff, you can’t do it.

Chris (04:28):

And then you can’t grow your business. And then every day just looks like a carbon copy of the one before it, and you don’t get anywhere. So here’s what I want you to do over the next 10 weeks. You can pull out your calendar and you can block off here’s one hour next week when I’m going to work on this one thing that Chris is telling me. Now I’ve updated this process. If you’ve read “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief,” I gave you the strategy that I currently use, which is to create two windows of time during your day in which you work on focus tasks, like operational tasks, things that maybe you’re not super passionate about, but move the business forward. That’s your focus window. And then your ship window is working on more creative tasks, getting stuff done that’s more advertising or just creative or improving yourself as an entrepreneur.

Chris (05:16):

OK? But for right now, whichever strategy works for you blocking one hour a day, blocking one hour a week, blocking one hour a month. I don’t care, but block some time to work on your business instead of in your business. So I’m going to do this week by week. If you can do this daily, that’s even better. Week one, take one hour to write down your perfect day. So start thinking about what kind of lifestyle you’re trying to create here. For most people listening to this podcast, the central question to the lifestyle is how much money do I need to earn? Now, this is super crazy important because if you don’t have this target, you won’t head anywhere. You have to have a specific goal and you have to anchor that goal. So let’s say for example, that you said, OK, well, you know, 70,000 a year, I’d be happy.

Chris (06:07):

Now you have to anchor that goal emotionally in your psyche. So you have to ask yourself, what will a $70,000 a year income mean to my family? Or you might ask it a different way. What would another $20,000 a year mean to my family? Or you might break it down. What would an extra thousand dollars a month mean to my kids? Wow. That’s a really great anchor. And you need to take some time alone to do this. So don’t do it while you’re driving in your car to church on Sunday with your family, don’t do it while you’re working out. Don’t do it while you’re sitting in your office in your gym, take an hour somewhere by yourself in week one, and think about exactly what do I want this gym to give me? Now, this might be a painful exercise because you might say, geez, I’ve had this same goal to make a hundred thousand dollars a year for four years, and I’m no closer to it.

Chris (07:00):

And that’s OK. In fact, that line of thought is what led me to find a mentor in the first place to accept that, Hey, what I’m doing isn’t actually getting me there. So I need to do something different. In the second week, you need to create two hours for yourself. OK? And what you’re going to do here is think about the services that you offer and your audience, your market, the people who want to buy your service and do those things align. So for example, you might do that seed client exercise from Mike Michalowicz, which you might find your three best clients. You might take them for coffee individually and say, you know, what was your goal when you came to my gym? And what you’ll probably find is that you are trying to sell a method instead of trying sell a result.

Chris (07:46):

I’ll give you a great example from my own life. When I was a CrossFit gym, I was the most evangelical local CrossFit trainer, coach, gym owner in the world. I told everybody how amazing CrossFit was. The problem was I didn’t tell them, oh yeah, CrossFit can help you lose weight. Oh yeah. CrossFit can help you run faster. Oh yeah. CrossFit will probably fix that lower back pain. Their goal was what they cared about. My method was what I cared about, but there was no connection between them. And so what you want to start with is learning about what goals your best clients have and are the services you’re offering in line with getting them to those goals. So my best clients all had weight loss or feel better performance goals. And really they would have done better to do personal training in almost every case than a group class.

Chris (08:38):

They could still do my method, CrossFit, but they should have been doing it one-on-one. And most of my best clients had figured that out on their own, but I wasn’t getting more people like them because I was focused on the CrossFit way, which was like group classes, which I had wrong anyway. So when I learned like here is my actual audience, here is what they benefit most from, I started talking about coaching. I started talking about accountability and having an appointment every week and routines and habits. And eventually some of those people chose to do it with a partner or a trio or go into a group class. But what I didn’t do was try to force people into my method or my perception of what CrossFit was at the time. And I see people making this exact same mistake in yoga, in Pilates, you know, in every gym type you can think of, you need to understand who your market is and what they want.

Chris (09:32):

And once you have that, it’s like, you’ve got the first foothold on the base of the mountain. But until you understand that, you know, you’re just throwing yourself against a brick wall. The second hour in the second week, you’re going to have a staff meeting. So you need to meet one-on-one with your staff, ask them, what do you want? Just like you just asked your clients. And then say, OK, well, here’s how we can do that. And maybe you talk about intrapreneurial opportunities. Maybe you talk about best practices. Maybe you deliver your staff handbook. If you already have one. In the third week, what you’re going to do is start getting your business out of your head. You’re going to break down the roles and tasks in your business. So that means break down all the different hats that you wear into individual roles. So one hat that you wear is like cleaner.

Chris (10:18):

So let’s take out a blank sheet of paper and let’s write cleaner at the top and let’s write down exactly like how you clean things, the order, what soap you use, what time of day you do it, every single detail. So if you were hit by a bus tonight, you could hand somebody this slip of paper and they would do it exactly the way you do it. OK. Get it out of your head. The cleaner’s the really easy one, but you want to do this with group coach, personal trainer and nutrition coach, get all these things out of your head. It’s tough. It takes time. And we give people templates to do this in our RampUp and Growth programs, because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But if you are following a DIY path for now, I understand, use a blank sheet of paper and get every single thing out of your head.

Chris (11:03):

We’re still on week three. So the second hour that you’re going to do is take these roles and tasks and create job descriptions with them. So all you’re really doing is saying like a cleaner, does these things, a coach does these things. And what this is going to help you do is avoid the future problem, where you just hire all your friends to give them a job, or you hire your best clients. And you know, you count on them to be like volunteers or a host of other staffing mistakes. If you want to solve staff problems in advance and staff problems are the number one problems in any business, you have to get them on paper first. OK. Then turn them into evaluations. So all you do is you say like, OK, here’s the cleaning checklist, add a scale of one to 10 to each item.

Chris (11:50):

Did you put soap in the pail? Did you spray down the bathroom shower stalls? Did you mop the floor? Scale of one to 10 on each thing. OK. Session three. I want you to go off by yourself and think about the top market or service opportunity that you’re not currently doing. So some people will say, oh yeah, well, we offer personal training at my gym, but nobody takes me up on it. OK. So think about that. Like, if nobody’s taking you up on it, then that’s a massive opportunity for you. About 20% of your revenue should be coming from personal training and/or nutrition coaching. So if your revenue went up by 20%, what difference would that make to you and your family? Would that solve the perfect day problem? Would that fill the gap for the revenue that you need to have your perfect day?

Chris (12:37):

And if so, then let’s really get focused on that. OK. And make that our priority. In week four, I want you to spend four hours. And the first thing you’re going to do is consolidate the best practices at your gym. So these are your standard operating procedures. You know, what time does the group class start? What radio station do you listen to? Wwhen do you use the Bulldog or Viper scrubber or whatever, how often do you clean your external walls and sign, write down all this stuff. Now, again, this is a huge playbook, but it has to completely replace you. You have to get everything out of your head. If you think that your staff will do things exactly the way that you do it, because of common sense or something else, you’re telling yourself a fairy tale, nobody can read your mind.

Chris (13:20):

You need to create a playbook as if you were about to franchise your business. So that’s your first hour, start thinking about that. Second, write staff contracts. So now you’ve got these job descriptions, you’ve got this task list. You’ve got sample evaluations. You can write contracts with your staff, including the breakdowns of all the roles that they’re hired for. Now. You’ve got staff who are probably wearing a couple of different hats. They’re a group class coach. They’re a personal trainer and they’re doing your social media. Well, that’s three different hats and you should be paying three different rates for those things. And they cobbled together these different hats to make a career because you don’t need to pay somebody a salary. In fact, what usually happens is if you pay somebody a salary at this stage in gym ownership, they will spend 40 hours a week doing something, but you’ll have very little to show for it.

Chris (14:14):

You’re better to pay them by task and put that into a contract. The next thing is, you’re going to, after you’ve decided like, OK, the personal training is my biggest missed opportunity. You’re going to invite two to three clients to try that out. Just say, Hey, you know, test this. What did you think? Fill out this evaluation form on me. Was this a valuable service? Would you like to continue? OK. And then finally start evaluating your staff. So in this fourth week, staff evaluation is great. Not because you want to criticize or condemn them, not because you’re trying to punish them or yell at them, but because you need a standard, right? You need a baseline, a starting point, ask them if they agree with the evaluation, take notes by all means. But when you leave that evaluation meeting, you should both be settled on opportunities for improvement and opportunities for growth.

Chris (15:06):

In the fifth week, I want you to get five hours. So five hours to work on your business over the course of the week, it could be an hour a day. Whatever. The first thing that you’re going to do is get a spreadsheet. So download a cashflow forecast or tool, or start pulling metrics out of your gym management software. The metrics that you want, you want total revenue, total clients. You want ARM, average revenue per member. You want LEG, length of engagement. That’s your retention metric. You want to know what your profit is. OK. And how much of your revenue goes to payroll and how much goes to expenses. If that’s all you get, then that’s awesome. If you have time, pull out your set rate, how many appointments for new clients get set every month, your show rate, what percentage of those people actually show up and your close rate,

Chris (15:55):

what percentage of people who show up actually sign up for your service. These are great diagnostic numbers that will help us later on.

Chris (16:01):

Cooper here with a word about Arbox. This business management platform is designed to take you from a fitness expert to a successful gym owner. Arbox offers a full suite of tools, including a dashboard and report with the top metrics that we prioritize at Two-Brain Business. With a glance, you can see length of engagement, average monthly revenue, new versus lost members and more. Arbox will also help you drive engagement with a members app that allows clients to interact with their friends. So here’s the special deal for Two-Brain Radio listeners. Save up to 50% for the first year using Arbox. Visit arboxapp.com/tbb to register to a free 10 day trial and schedule a demo with one of Arbox’s experts.

Chris (16:48):

The next hour in week five, you’re going to spend finishing your staff evaluations. Session three will be trialing a client on your new service and session four will be starting to put your staff handbook together. So all these SOPs you’ve been writing, put them into one spot, a binder, get an incident report form from Affiliate Guard. Write a table of contents, shoot videos, take pictures, make sure that people can understand it or see things through your eyes if you want them to deliver on your business. Session five, a staff meeting, you’ve done evaluations. Now what you want to do is bring people together into a room, your staff and give them inspiration, OK? Clarity. Here’s where we’re going. Assurance. Here’s why I’m so confident that we’re going to get there. Leadership. We’re going to have to do this hard thing, but I am going to do it first, and movement.

Chris (17:39):

We’ve already done this thing successfully. And now the next step is X. OK. In the sixth week, you’re going to spend six hours. And the first thing you’re going to do is finalize your staff handbook and then print it out. Now I’ll tell you this, your staff handbook is never done, but most of my staff handbook hasn’t changed since about 2010. There are some things that have changed. Like when we switched software, we put SOPs for using that software in it. But by and large, we run off the exact same playbook that I developed when I got my first mentor in 2010. And we’ve been running off that playbook now for over a decade. And that playbook is what allows me to do podcasts like this instead of coaching classes at my gym. Session two, you’re going to promote your new service. Session three.

Chris (18:25):

You’re going to forecast future ARM, LEG, revenue, client, head count, et cetera, session four. You’re going to start looking at your intake process. So if most of your clients have this goal, then what do you need for them to do in your intake process to get them ready for success in your gym? Your on-ramp program is not like a money grab. It’s not an upsell. Your on-ramp program is the way that you quickly prepare people for long-term success. So you have to balance that. Like how fast can you get somebody ready? And what do they actually need to know to be successful in your gym later? It’s this is not an access gym. You’re a coaching business. So if somebody is going to be prepared to go into group classes, for example, they probably don’t need a step-by-step instructional technique, breakdown, analysis, audit of their burpee.

Chris (19:20):

But they do need to know how to deadlift safely and consistently. And you should be able to say, yeah, you can do this nine times out of 10, you have a perfect deadlift. You are ready for class. They need to know how to do an air squat. And they need to be able to demonstrate that they can do that safely and consistently because when they get in a group class and you’ve got 12 others to worry about, you can’t be doing like squat therapy with every single person, right? So that’s what your on ramp should really entail is like what is required to get somebody ready. Now, the other thing that this might require is what habits do they need to form to set them up for long-term success? And that’s why a lot of gyms now have an on-ramp period that’ll last up to 90 days.

Chris (20:01):

And we have a step-by-step planning guide for this in our RampUp program called the first 90. Session six. Get one more role off your plate. So either hire a cleaner or a client success manager, client success manager is the person who’s going to do the things that are important that you keep forgetting to do. It’s birthday cards. It’s calling a person when they don’t show up, it’s orienting a person on your gym when they start, it’s sending a welcome package, all that stuff, all the stuff that seems nice. Seems awesome. You’d love to do it. And you never do, but you should because it counts. A CSM will pay for themselves when you calculate retention. And that’s why I had you calculating. Now week seven. I want you to dedicate seven hours to growing your business. I want you to identify your mavens.

Chris (20:49):

So these might be your seed clients, but now I want you to tell their story. So while they’re sitting in front of you say, wow, what would you tell yourself if you could talk to the person you used to be, what advice would you give yourself? Hold up the camera. Record them. Use that on social media and your website. Session two, identify a PR board and start introducing bright spots into your groups. Session three, look through your revenue history for the last 12 months and identify the lowest point. OK? When is that for me? That’s August because everybody goes to their cottage. So I need to build something in that will allow me to generate more revenue in August. That’s why we created the Catalyst Games in September, because if people are training for that goal, September 7th, they’re going to keep coming to the gym in August.

Chris (21:36):

They’re also going to pay for that event, which is going to generate a little bit more revenue in August. OK? The fourth thing you’re going to do in week seven is write a corporate intro letter, create a gift certificate for one free personal training session, leave a blank spot for the expiry date, et cetera. Session five is try and figure out the next big revenue opportunity to help your clients get their goals. So that’s probably nutrition. You can sign up at twobraincoaching.com to get somebody in your staff certified. It could be you or somebody else. When they’re certified they’re insurable. And as the first step to launching a nutrition program. Session six, start putting together a newsletter. You need to start having conversation with your clients and your future clients. You can do this through sell by chat, but an email newsletter is what got me here.

Chris (22:21):

Number seven, publish your first client story. Now what you’ve got going on here is a foundational grasp of your business. You started with the triage tasks of replacing yourself, right? Giving yourself like a safety net. Then you started standardizing your service. So clients will know that they get the same amazing experience when they come in the gym, whether you’re there or not. Then you started looking at low-hanging fruit for increasing revenue. Then you improved your retention. Now you’re looking at how do I improve my sales? Which means usually how can I offer more value to the clients in my gym? So, Hey, you’re doing group classes. What about a personal training session once a month? You’re doing group classes, but your weight’s not dropping. I recommend a nutrition plan. OK. Increasing value. But in week eight, we’re going to start thinking more like a CEO.

Chris (23:18):

We’re going to think longer term, we’re going to start planning so that we’re not constantly in this triage state. So by this point you stopped backsliding. You’re actually making some progress. You’re becoming a CEO and you’re planning ahead to grow your gym. It usually takes about eight weeks. And honestly, our ramp up program is 12 weeks for a reason. It takes 12 weeks to do these steps and to have them start compounding, to build the habits of real entrepreneurship and real gym growth. This is why we start and operate in this order, in our RampUp program. Other programs are going to start you with marketing. But the problem with marketing is it’s a loop. You do something with marketing, it works, you get some new clients. And then six months later that marketing technique no longer works. Those clients are already gone and sometimes they’ve taken your best clients with them and you’re still working crazy hard.

Chris (24:14):

And you’re still having high staff turnover. And all of your original problems. Money is transient, but time is a non-renewable resource. And so you have to fix the holes in the bucket before you start pouring water into it. So week 8, what you’re going to do is start getting reports from your bookkeeper, right? Reading a P&L. You’re also going to publish your second maven story and set up the third one to publish. You’re going to break down some other numbers. Like how much revenue do you get from people per visit? A lot of gym owners are shocked to find out that that person coming to my 7:00 AM class is only paying me like $5 to be there. That is crazy low. And they create a mess that I have to clean up and et cetera. All right. Then from there you can determine like, should I cancel that class?

Chris (25:07):

Because once you know what the average person is paying to attend the average class, you can say, well, how many people are usually in that class? And what am I getting paid per hour? And then you can say, is there a better use of my time? All right. So now you’re going to start booking goal reviews. So you’ve had your seed clients or your mavens and you’ve asked them what they like best about your gym. You’ve bragged them up. You told their story. It’s time to meet with them again and say, you’re such an amazing influencer. I’m so proud of you. How can I help your husband? How can I help your coworkers? How can I help that woman that you jog with? How can I help your golfing buddies? OK. You’re not even looking to them to tell you the answer. What you’re doing is you’re saying, I really think that I can help your husband.

Chris (25:54):

Can you bring him in for a session with you? I know that I can help your coworkers. What if I showed up at lunchtime and gave a seminar on battling stress? OK. You also want to identify three of your clients who work in the service industry like real estate agents, accountants, hairdressers, salespeople, and offer to post their business card in your gym somewhere as like a referral board or even better, offer to let them come in and give a seminar on their service. This is how you start sharing overlapping pools of clients. The seventh hour in this week eight, you’re going to build your first newsletter. Start getting that email going, building that email list. This email list is crazy valuable because I mean, on one side you can create retargeting audiences on Facebook and Instagram, et cetera. On the other side, your emails are conversations with your clients.

Chris (26:43):

If you let that conversation die, they will start pulling away from you. You need to keep that conversation going, even when they’re not right in front of you. Session eight, you’re reviewing your staff handbook at a staff meeting. All right, week nine, I’m going to go through these ones quickly, set up a referral board, send your newsletter one to everybody on your email list for now, find three more mavens, get them up for an interview, get their story and start working through referrals with them, hire a replacement for yourself in the lowest value use of your time. That could be cleaning, but it could also be like three classes a week. You need to buy yourself time to grow your business. And if you’re constantly delivering your service, that’s not going to do it. I’m sorry. Then you want to start training a replacement in higher-value roles like coaching.

Chris (27:31):

And there’s ways that you can do this. We have an advanced theory course that we give to people in RampUp so they can do it in house. But Two-Brain Coaching also has certification and training programs for coaches, both one-on-one and group. Then approach three service industry professionals and offer them a reward coupon for their clients. So this isn’t like a discount. It’s like, Hey, I’m going to give you a pack of three personal training sessions, give it to your best client as a reward. So thank them for buying that great new house that’s close to our gym. And as a special, thank you. Here’s three personal training sessions at your favorite gym. This is one that actually worked really well with me because we had a real estate agent named Troy who was really big on rewards. And we worked this program for about a year and a half.

Chris (28:17):

And eventually he said, this is working so well for you. I want to give your clients a massive prize so that they think of me when they’re buying a new home. And what he did is he bought and paid for a cruise for two people and gave it away as like the top prize at catalyst games. I’m going to say 2010 or 2011. This has been an amazing relationship for us over the years. And if you can find other service industry professionals, you know, it’s great. Session seven, start your new on-ramp program with all new clients coming in, you know, make up your prices, set up your sales binder, session nine, start planning a larger scale event. Like a WOD and wine is a great one or a corporate team building challenge or like catalyst games. And now finally, week 10. You’re going to spend 10 hours growing your business this week.

Chris (29:08):

You’re going to remove yourself from another lower value role, like maybe personal training or nutrition coaching, something you don’t enjoy. You’re going to start getting equipment to film each movement so you can back up your on-ramp program, but you can also start creating and publishing content to grow your gym. By week 10, you should be there. Session three, film has many movement demos and the why as possible in 60 minutes, take an hour. Just shoot, shoot, shoot.Ssession four, send three corporate intro letters, introducing yourself and offering to give some free help. OK, help first. Session six, do some video editing, run a staff meeting launch your on-ramp create a Facebook group for your gym, celebrate your bright spots in there. And then start working on forecasting. So work backward from your target revenue to determine how many new clients, how much PT, how much nutrition you have to sell, make that plan, work backward from that goal to determine what marketing you need to do, what sales numbers you need to hit.

Chris (30:12):

That kind of thing. OK. And of course we do all this with a mentor. We break it down, we attach it to emotional goals and then we execute month after month. And that’s how you grow. That’s how things snowball instead of these fits and starts that you usually get with marketing. So my goal here was to show you that you don’t have to have like 40 hours a week to grow your business. When you start, all you have to do is take one action for one hour per week to start moving forward. And you’ll start creating momentum for yourself instead of just doing the same thing day after day. And then finally a year goes by and you look back and your gym hasn’t improved at all. You can create this kind of momentum through knowledge, discipline, but most of all, mentorship. The reason the mentorship is most effective instead of just knowledge or reading more books is because you already have too many ideas.

Chris (31:07):

I doubt I said anything here that was super, super unique that made you pull the car to the side of the road and start taking notes, right? But what mentorship gives you is a sense of discipline. Like you have to do the things, but also permission to only do one thing at a time and not do everything all at once. You know, we used to sell RampUp years ago as like a course and people would blast through this course. They’d get through it in like a week. And at the end of the course, they’d say, OK, now I know it all. How come my business hasn’t changed? The reality is that more knowledge won’t fix anything. It’s the action that you have to build. And just like you need to build habits and actions slowly in your clients, you need to build habits and actions slowly in your gym.

Chris (31:50):

But if you do it the right way, you’ll get traction. Why am I sharing this? Because today on my drive into the office, I got a call from a gym owner who really needed help. And, you know, she was talking to my sales team and I said, Hey, you know, I’m going to jump in here and I’m just going to offer to help. And she said to me, Chris, I’ve got 10 years of experience in the fitness industry. I don’t know why my gym isn’t really any better than it was 10 years ago. I’ve been on this roller coaster of one great month followed by a horrible month of, oh, I’ve got a weekend off, followed by my best staff member just quit. You know, three months of I’ve got 150 members to boom 20 just quit because another gym opened down the street.

Chris (32:34):

I’m moving, I’m working, but I’m not getting anywhere. And what I told her was something that a mentor told me years ago. You think you have 10 years of experience and 10 years have gone by, but really you have one year of experience repeated 10 times. And unless you change what you’re doing, nothing is going to change for you. That’s harsh. And it kind of hurt my feelings when I heard it the first time. But hearing that is what forced me to say, you know what? He’s right. I made the change. I started doing things differently, even though it didn’t feel natural, even though it was uncomfortable, I started making the change because I couldn’t just keep repeating that one year of experience for another 10 years. Hope this helps.

Mike (33:22):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. If this episode helped you out, don’t forget to subscribe for more shows. And if you want more tips and tricks from Chris Cooper, join the Gym Owners United group on Facebook. Chris is constantly posting articles, instructional videos, and advice. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook. Join today and be sure to send Chris a message to say hi when you join.

 

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The Missing Link in Internal Communications

By Ashley Haun, Certified Two-Brain Business Mentor

You just got off a Zoom call with your Two-Brain Mentor and received amazing action steps on the Roadmap. Or maybe you just listened to a great podcast and you are ready to take action to improve your client journey. 

You have staff members and coaches who are willing, able and assigned to perform these types of tasks with you. It’s time to get them involved because you are learning how to delegate tasks—you know you don’t need to do everything. 

But still, you wind up doing it all yourself.

Instead of passiing the task off, you think, “I’ll teach them when I have time. It’s just faster if I go and do this right now.”

That’s a mistake! If your staff can’t take action, you’re always going to feel stretched to the limit. Work will probably go unfinished, and you’ll probably resent your staff, too.

So how do you communicate with your staff, assign projects and tasks, get assignments done on time and evaluate performance? 

Check out my six steps below.

Six Steps to Delegation

Step 1—Create a Google Drive folder with your gym’s name. 

Step 2—Create different folders for each staff member and coach in your gym. Invite all team members to their folders via email. 

Step 3—Here is where you will begin to communicate with your staff via Google sheets in their folders. You might choose to have different sheets for ongoing projects, weekly tasks, monthly tasks, etc. But all communication must be done through the sheets. This helps you and your staff recognize that not everything is an emergency. With a sheet, you have a place for clear written instructions, assignment of due dates, documentation of progress, feedback, questions, etc. A sheet creates a single clear communication system that will remove the need to send 200 text messages or emails that inevitably get lost. 

Step 4—As you enter tasks, be sure to assign due dates. This is critical to getting things done on time and managing priorities. Some tasks will need immediate attention, while others can wait until more pressing matters are resolved.

Step 5—Teach your staff members to check their Google folders once or twice a day for new info, including tasks, responses, feedback and more. 

Step 6—Once a project or task is completed, staff members should mark it as “done.” You can then cross it off your master list or archive that sheet. If the task appears regularly, optimize performance of it and then have your staff create a new standard operating procedure (SOP) to govern the process. If a new SOP is created, it should be moved to a new folder so it can be added to your staff playbook and your collection of roles and tasks.

It Works—If You Use It!

The key to success with this system is to use it consistently. It will be tempting to shoot a quick text and assign a job—but that will derail the system. 

Many fancy systems, apps and companies exist to help you with task management and internal communications. However, this free system allows all my team members to work together and get the jobs done whether they are in the building or not.

The “sheets system” allows me to communicate clearly and effectively with my key staff members, and it provides structure and accountability. When I started using it, I realized it allows me freedom from the gym and helps us move the business forward a little every day.

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10-out-of-10 Retention: Client Check-Ins

By Jeff Jucha, Certified Two-Brain Business Mentor

The client journey is how you deliver 10-out-of-10 service over and over again for your clients. 

In that journey, you should have regularly scheduled check-ins with your clients. We check in with our group clients every three months, our PT clients every 30 days and our nutrition clients every 14 days. This gives us lots of opportunities to please clients while increasing length of engagement (LEG) and average revenue per member per month (ARM).

In these check-ins, we ask them the standard questions that Two-Brian gyms ask in an athlete check-in:

Are you totally pleased with your progress so far?If not, how would you like to speed up progress?

The answers to these questions can reveal a lot about your client’s recent experiences with your business.

Next, we ask:

When we first met, I aimed to provide you a 10-out-of-10 experience. Are you still getting that? If not, what would make it a perfect 10 for you?

The answers will tell you how to go above and beyond in the next one to three months. You’ll know:

Where the client would like to move faster. For example, if a client loves training with you but has not seen much weight loss, you can help through your nutrition service or habits coaching.What’s still missing in the client’s 10-out-of-10 experience. For example, making it to four workouts per week is important to the client, but the class schedule doesn’t allow it. Can we offer some one-on-one sessions or online training to supplement the group package?

The clients who have made progress toward goals while having their concerns addressed will be ready to accept your prescription even if it means adding or switching to another program at greater cost.

Repeat the 10-out-of-10 exercise as often as you like to keep polishing your relationship with clients and improving the service you provide.

Not only will you see more opportunities to help your clients over time but you’ll also retain them longer because you’re always checking in to see how well you are doing at keeping the promises you made on Day 1.

Score 10s!

To recap the process.

Ask your clients to describe their 10 out of 10.Ask for their concerns.Build plans to provide perfect 10s while addressing concerns—and deliver on those plans.Regularly schedule check-ins and ask how you’ve done in helping them achieve their goals. Be sure to address the concerns that could end your relationship prematurely.

If you follow this process, your clients will get exactly what they came for, and they’ll enjoy every aspect of their experience with the most well-informed fitness professional they’ve ever met.

The post 10-out-of-10 Retention: Client Check-Ins appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Delivering 10-out-of-10 Onboarding: Elite-Level Service

By Jeff Jucha, Certified Two-Brain Business Mentor

The first few weeks will greatly affect how long a client stays with you.

You’ve learned what a client’s 10 out of 10 looks like at intake. Now it’s time to start delivering perfect service from Day 1.

The secret: Build the perfect program around the client.

Instead of just placing a client into one of your programs, build a customized 10-out-of-10 experience using the programs you offer. Your services are tools you can use to help clients; their exact programs should be built around their needs. 

For example, I only recommend our on-ramp program to clients with a track record of success on their own.

Most new clients say something like this: “I know what to do but I just don’t do it.” So we start those clients with at least one month of one-on-one appointments and healthy-habits coaching. We might prescribe them online coaching or at-home workouts if they need them.

After you’ve decided on the program, it’s time to go next level. Write out exactly how you’ll make each individual experience a 10 out of 10. Share the notes from your consultation with the client’s coach if you aren’t filling that role.

Example:

Lisa needs help creating healthy habits and assurance that she won’t look silly in front of people. She’s concerned about an old ankle injury being aggravated and wants to start slowly. Here is how I will help Lisa during her first month:

Prescribe 15-minute walks in the morning and evening, and have her drink 20 oz. of water on top of her current daily intake.Schedule two recurring emails each week to check on these assignments when she doesn’t have an appointment booked with me.Test her ankle flexibility and talk her through each step of movements prescribed to increase her ankles’ range of motion.Introduce her to at least one coach and two clients from the gym and share something they might have in common.

This process seems simple (and it is), but most fitness professionals miss the mark on following it with each client. 

Execute and Follow Up

Once you’ve written down how you’ll deliver your client’s perfect experience, schedule a check-in. We check in at 14 days for group and nutrition clients and 30 days for personal-training clients.

At the end of our session, I’ll say, “I’d like to know how I’m doing. If I made a Google form just for you and emailed it to you, would you take a few minutes and complete it?”

Of course, they will; you’ve given them a 10-out-of-10 experience!

Then, I make a Google form with the client’s name at the top and email it. You can copy and paste common questions, but be sure to edit some of them for the client’s specific program. Here are the three that I use:

At our first meeting, I asked what would make a 10-out-of-10 experience for you. On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your experience so far?When we met, you expressed concern around [CONCERN]. Did I address this appropriately for you?You expressed that your goal was [INSERT GOAL]. Do you feel like we are making appropriate progress toward it?

Bonus: ask these two questions at the end for marketing purposes.

Could you sum up your experience with us in a short paragraph? Finally, if you’re inclined to do so, would you mind leaving us an honest review on Google? You can even copy/paste your previous response for simplicity. [INSERT GOOGLE REVIEW LINK]. 

Use as many questions as you need, but try to ensure that the form can be filled out in five minutes or less.

The Pinnacle of Service

So far, you’ve taken time to learn about the client’s perfect experience. You’ve delivered on it and shown that you care enough to ask for honest feedback. Everything you’ve done up to this point is well beyond what your competition is doing. 

To review:

Your clients do not want to make you guess. They want you to know how to be successful because that means they’ll achieve their goals.After you find out exactly what their perfect experience is, deliver on it and ask how you’re doing so you can make adjustments or capitalize on their satisfaction.

In the next post in this series, I’ll show you how to keep wowing the client for years while increasing your ARM.

The post Delivering 10-out-of-10 Onboarding: Elite-Level Service appeared first on Two-Brain Business.