Chris Cooper's Blog, page 120

Fairy Dust or Facts? Why Two-Brain’s Data Can Save or Supercharge Your Gym

Mike (00:02):

You can base business decisions on a gut feeling, a hunch, fairy dust, or a wing and a prayer, or you can make decisions backed by hard data. Today, Chris Cooper will explain how Two-Brain Business uses data to help clients grow their gyms at lightspeed.

Chris (00:17):

Chris Cooper here to talk about Level Method. When it comes to owning a gym, it can be really tough to show your members their progress and keep them engaged long term. Level Method provides experienced gym owners with a visual step-by-step fitness progression system that’s fun, engaging and easy to use. With Level Method, your clients can reach their fitness goals faster and safer than ever before and become raving fans of your gym. Go to levelmethod.com to find out more. I use this product in my gym, it helped with my conversion from my on-ramp program into ongoing group coaching, and it’s also boosted my retention over time.

Mike (00:50):

This is Two-Brain Radio. It’s Mike Warkentin, and I’m here today with Two-Brain founder, Chris Cooper. I’m a writer. So I like words and I hate numbers, but I like profit a lot. So I always want to hear about the data Two-Brain collects. This industry-leading data set allows Two-Brain mentors to ignore useless tactics and point gym owners to tested data-backed strategies that bring real results. So Chris, you recently announced two incredible stats, almost 25% of gyms that logged metrics in our growth program increased revenue by a hundred percent or more in the last year. Almost 50% have grown by more than 50% or more in the last 12 months. So tell me about the system that supplies these incredible numbers. And when did you know that it was needed?

Chris (01:31):

Yeah, and so years ago, when I started mentoring gyms in like 2012, I realized right away that all I could share was my own experience.

Chris (01:43):

So I had like this N equals 1 data set basically. And that experience was helpful to a lot of people and, you know, 26,000 people bought the book about that experience. And a lot of people, hundreds asked for mentorship based on that experience because they were having a similar experience. But the problem with any N equals 1 experience, mine or anyone else’s is that really it doesn’t carry any more weight than somebody else’s experience, could be the complete opposite. And so right away, I started looking for kind of a dataset, you know, how did this work for you? Is that thing actually real? Or am I like susceptible to advertising? You know, did you take this challenge course, did you do it on Facebook? And I also realized that as entrepreneurs, a lot of gym owners just don’t have a background in statistics.

Chris (02:34):

And so it’s hard for them to really say like, which one of these strategies should I use that person who I know like, and trust is advocating no Facebook marketing, this person over here, who’s brand new, but very exciting and young and seems successful is saying, yeah, you need to be advertising on Facebook. And you know, this person is saying like, don’t give discounts. That person is saying, do give discounts. And as we scaled up and we started to talk to more and more people worldwide, I realized like we need to have an actual data set that we can point to and say, this isn’t just my experience. It’s not my opinion. It’s the truth as measured by numbers. That was a huge problem in the industry was that a lot of people were getting by on the power of the personality, but they had no numbers to back it up.

Mike (03:21):

So they’d say, I think that we should do this, or we must do this, but there was no data behind that. It was just kind of like what they thought or what worked for them, which created some huge mistakes for some people who went down the wrong path.

Chris (03:32):

Yeah, for sure. And unfortunately, you know how it is in the industry, right. Everybody’s kind of an alpha. So when they say this is the thing, they have the utmost confidence that it is the thing, even though really like, they only have their own experience to draw on, which is sometimes limited. You know, for example, let’s take what gym management software should I use. Very simple question. Right. But if you ask that to a hundred gym owners, 80% of them have only tried one, so that you’re not getting like any kind of comparison there.

Chris (04:05):

And they’re either going to say, it’s amazing. You should do it because they’re internally invested in its success. Or they’re going to say, it’s horrible. Never use it. They’re never going to; it’s very rare that somebody can say I’ve used, Wodify and Zen planner. And I prefer Wodify because. And so we were looking for that in all honestly, Mike, like all along, I thought this data’s gotta be out there somewhere. I just don’t have access to it as a micro gym owner. So when we were borrowing money to buy our first building, that’s something that the lender wanted was industry stats. You know, Chris, you don’t have contracts. How can you predict how much revenue you’re going to have next month? And I’m like, well, here’s our retention data. And they would say, OK, well, how does that compare to the rest of the industry?

Chris (04:52):

And so, you know, like some places have some data, some have very, very little and most people measure it differently. So I went to CrossFit HQ and you know, I was working for CrossFit at the time. And a lot of people at HQ would gather for breakfast at this little cafe right in Santa Cruz. And we were sitting out on the patio and with me is Bruce, the COO at the time, is Jeff, the CEO at the time, Sevan is there, like Greg’s not there, but a lot of Greg’s the inner circle is. And I said, you know, one thing that could really help affiliates right now is if there was a standard dataset, all you guys have to do is collect it and leave us to interpret it. You don’t have to tell us what to do. And of course, like they didn’t want to tell affiliates what to do, because they would take ownership of affiliate success or failure if they did that.

Chris (05:44):

But, I just said, you know, produce the dataset. And Bruce, I’ll never forget this. He says, that’s a great idea. We’re never going to do it. Go ahead. And yeah, I mean, honestly, Mike, I left that meeting super frustrated, like, I’m looking to you guys for leadership. And you know, you’re not going to do it. So then I said, OK, well somebody has to do it. I can’t find anybody else that’s better positioned in the industry than us. We’re going to do it. And so we went down this road with a company in Idaho to try and build a system. I spent $75,000 on that. We got nowhere, we went somewhere else and tried to build another system. And, you know, I spent about 65,000 on that one got nowhere. And then finally, Mike Lee, who is our chief information officer said, you know what, I’m just going to rough it in. He’s got some programming chops, but he’s not a software engineer.

Chris (06:42):

He’s just incredibly smart. Yeah. And so he kind of roughed in this app over a weekend. I was like, wow. You know, that’s pretty awesome. And so we started investing more heavily and today we’ve put about a quarter million into it. We have two full-time people working on it and that’s Two-Brain.app that houses both our dashboard and our roadmap now, which is like our internal curriculum library.

Mike (07:08):

So what you’ve got here is essentially the first micro gym data set ever. And it’s always growing based on the metrics that we track every month. Correct.

Chris (07:17):

Yeah. And that’s really the core of our data. Like, you know, we have a lot of influence over what Two-Brain gyms do. We don’t have full control, you know, it’s still their business. We’re not a franchise, but we can really influence what they’re doing and we can see exactly how they’re doing it.

Chris (07:34):

So for example, every month we pull the metrics for the top 10 gyms in about a dozen different categories and we track revenue, but we also track how much is the owner paying themselves? What’s their retention, what’s their average revenue per member, et cetera. And from there, we can identify who’s doing it best. And we can identify people who have made rapid improvement. And so we interview those people every single month and we say, what are you doing that’s new or slightly different. And then we take those answers. And we say, if everybody did this, would everybody get better results? And so what’s happened. And this has taken me a long time to come back to your original numbers is that Two-Brain gyms are not just getting better results, but they’re getting better and better results faster as we go along. Because we just keep taking that distillate of the data and saying, OK, this person is getting success with Tik Tok.

Chris (08:30):

How are they doing it? What are they spending? What’s their SOP. And then turning around and teaching that to a small subset inTwo-Brain. And then if it works, we teach it to everybody.

Mike (08:39):

Our internal data, obviously you say it as influenced by the tactics that we give to our clients. And those tactics are tested, but they still influence the data. But then we have things like the state of the industry publication. And we’ll put the link to that in the show notes for our listeners, that data set outside Two-Brain. And that starts to give us some real insight into gyms as a whole. So our data collection is like, is getting pretty robust.

Chris (09:02):

Yeah. So couple of things happened there. We had a really great relationship with some gym management software coming into 2020. And those relationships really solidified in a couple of cases.

Chris (09:14):

Like Wodify where I really liked the leadership that they were showing through COVID and we would talk every couple of weeks and they would share our stuff and we would try and help out their audience as much as we could. And when it came time to data, they said, we want to participate. And so they gave us their data set anonymously. Like I can’t say CrossFit 1, 2, 3 is doing this much in revenue, but what they could do is give us averages. And we did that with a few industry partners like Arbox and Wodify and expanded that out to 6,500 micro gyms worldwide, making it the largest data set ever collected in the fitness industry. But most importantly, it’s data that matters to micro gyms. That data is not skewed by, you know, numbers from globo gyms, like 24/7 fitness or whatever it’s called 24 hour fitness.

Chris (10:05):

It’s really specific to us. Yeah.

Mike (10:07):

And that’s important because those aren’t the same. They’re both gyms like a micro gym and a 24 hour fitness are both gyms, but they’re not, it’s like comparing like a, you know, a Chihuahua and an English Mastiff, right? Like they’re just not the same thing. And they need different food and training and blah, blah, blah, leave the metaphor there. But the idea now is that you’ve got all these numbers. And so now, like the point here is that you can now with great confidence, tell gym owners what’s going to work with a high degree of certainty, right? Like your mentor is no longer have to guess and use their own intuition or their own experience only. They can now say that, OK, look, I know you want to invest heavily in tick-tok however, we tested that extensively. We didn’t find that any gyms got a return. Now that’s not to say you won’t, but you probably want to try something else. Like this data is like really the backbone of our mentorship program now.

Chris (10:55):

Yeah, that’s right. And, and the mentors each have their own lens on it because they all have varied experiences. And we try to match people with the best mentor. But the mentors job is not really to identify, you know, everybody should do Tik Tok ads. Their job is to say, what’s right for this client right now, what should their top priority be? And then help the gym owner manage that change. So sometimes managing the change means, teaching them how to do it. And so, you know, we have big curriculum for that and SOPs and like step-by-step guides, but a lot of the time it’s like supporting them through it. And a rate increase is the biggest example. So, here’s where the data would come into that. For example, somebody says, I need to raise my rates. I didn’t realize that my ARM, the amount of money I’m making per client is so low. It’s only $120 a month. I just never sat back and figured out like what all these discounts, grandfathered rates and all this stuff was costing me. And I see from your data that the average gym is actually about 30 bucks more a month than me. OK. I feel validated in raising my rates. I’m actually lower than average. And I thought I was just slightly higher than average. So I’m going to raise my rates. How do I do it? Well, then we turn to the curriculum and we say, OK, here’s the actual letter to send out. Here’s the checklist you have to complete before and after you raise your rates, here’s the math that you need to go through to figure out what you should be raising them to all at this shot.

Chris (12:27):

And then here’s the timeline to set it all up so that you have the best possible rate increase that you could. Now that process again, has been tested by data. So we look at the gyms who have completed it using this exact letter, this exact timeline, this communication plan, this much increase. And we can confidently say, you’re going to keep over 85% of your members. And you’re going to make more money. Even though you might wind up with a few fewer members during a rate increase. Now imagine doing that. And you’re on an island and you’re not connected to data. You’re not connected to other gym owners. And you’re not connected to a mentor that proposition at best becomes a wild guess. And that’s what makes it scary because you know, you’re just jumping off the cliff and you’re just kind of hoping it all works out.

Chris (13:20):

Maybe you take some solace knowing that, oh, people really like me, but you’re going to quickly find out that you’re not selling to your friends. You’re selling to your clients. And a lot of people that you think are your friends will quit over five bucks. So this data proven method gives you confidence to do the hard stuff, but it also shows you what you can avoid. So for example, we usually run about three tests at a time. One of the tests that we were currently running is clubhouse. Now in January, clubhouse looked like the coolest new thing. Well, the reality is.

Mike (13:55):

FOMO alert. Everyone was all over that.

Chris (13:57):

Exactly. Yup, exactly. Personally, I didn’t like it, but I didn’t want to just say it’s bad because Chris doesn’t like it. That’s not how Two-Brain works. So instead what we did was, five mentors said, yeah, we’ll test this.

Chris (14:10):

And we set out the parameters. We will say that clubhouse is successful if this happens, if you convert at least three new clients in three months, because let’s face it. If you’re spending an hour a day on clubhouse and you’re getting less than three clients in three months, there’s better places to spend that hour that will get you more clients.

Mike (14:31):

And we have data that proves that too.

New Speaker (14:33):

Exactly. And, that’s where it comes down to, right? It’s like, OK. I went on clubhouse for three months. I spent an hour a day. I got a new client. Therefore it works. But the reality is you could have gotten five clients if you had done something else. Your time is finite and you have to use it in the best possible way. And you can’t guess, and you can’t do everything. So what we found was that while engagement is pretty easy to build on clubhouse, you know, as a new platform, you’re going to get a ton of followers.

Chris (15:04):

Conversion is really hard. Now, do we ask why is conversion hard and why do we optimize it? No, because it’s like, conversion is close to zero on clubhouse. We’re not going to go any further down that road. You know, we might look at a different platform. OK. Tik TOK. And so at first, when people were saying, yeah, Tik TOK, it’s, it’s awesome. It’s so much fun. And their advertising, nobody had a proven strategy to do it. And so we didn’t talk about it for the first year it was around. And then finally somebody showed up and said, yeah, I’ve got this thing. Here’s my data. Here’s my metrics. You know, I’m getting these leads. And we said, oh, that’s interesting. You’re getting success. Let’s test this with five other people and see if it extrapolates. So is this a replicable system? And you know, that test is still ongoing and we’re always running these tasks like right now, high ticket coaching is one of them. I mentioned clubhouse already, and we just finished up a third test too we’re running. And then we’ll batch up like three more.

Chris (16:03):

It’s Chris Cooper here. Your gym’s programming won’t attract new clients, but it can help you keep your clients longer. Good programming includes benchmarks, novelty, skills, progressions, leaderboards, you know all that stuff. But great programming contains something more: a link between each client’s fitness goals and the workout of the day. Your coaches need to tell your clients more than what they’re doing every day. They need to explain why they’re doing it. Gym’s whose coaches could explain the why connection had a 25% better retention rate during lockdowns. Imagine how that translates into better retention when things are back to normal. Now, I want to solve this problem for gym owners. Programming is the service you deliver to your clients. So I partnered with Brooks DiFiore, who had one of the highest adherence rates in the world for his group classes at his gym to build twobrainprogramming.com. We built this for Two-Brain gyms and we give them free access in our mentorship program. But I’m now making this available to the public. Programming proven to improve retention and cashflow in your gym. Visit Two-Brain programming.com to get it.

Mike (17:12):

So it’s not about necessarily if something works it’s how well does it work? And does it work better than the other tactics that we have so that mentors can say exactly what you said, based on our testing and based on our metrics, this is likely not going to give you the return that something else would, or our testing revealed that this just doesn’t generally work, but in your unique circumstance, given these parameters, you’re very similar to this test result. It might work for you but you need to test and you need to track your data and then analyze it. And if the results don’t work, you need to pivot, right. So like it really becomes a systematic approach. The thing that I’ll throw at you, Chris is like, when we went through a rate increase on the Two-Brain plan. I was terrified. And I had no idea. Like I set my first rates by guessing I set my second rates that I was going to increase by guessing. But then we actually went down was Jeff Burlingame was our mentor at the time. We calculated it on based on what we wanted to make and all the other things that are on our checklist. And the coolest part was we understood that we couldn’t raise by more than 15%. Now you can. But Jeff told us based on Two-Brain testing, that 15% was probably the max that you want to do in one shot. Because if you go higher, the results tend to be negative. And so I’ve talked to many gym owners on the podcast who have had the same experience where, you know, they want to increase, but they’re only gonna increase by 15% or they’re gonna make a plan to go more. But the idea is that the data showed them a mistake that could be clearly avoided. Right? So if I had done just on my own, I would’ve guessed at the rates. I would have increased by too much. I would have lost a bunch of members and we’d be in trouble. But because the data was there, I got optimal results and lost very few members and made more money. So like the data, it really is a financial win, right?

Chris (18:57):

Yeah. Yeah. It really is like, it’s a time win too. Warren Buffett has this quote, that there’s always a better place I can put my money. So as much money as Warren Buffett has, that amount is finite. So he’s not going to put that money into an investment that’s going to yield them 3% because there’s other investments that are going to yield 8%.

Chris (19:19):

And that’s where he’s going to put it, right. While the top resource that a gym owner has is their time. And that is very finite. If you’ve got one hour to invest in the growth of your business a day, you want to put it in the place that’s going to give you the greatest return on that time. And so while Instagram ads might technically work, that is not the optimal use of your time. It’s going to slow down your progress and that multiplies over time, you know, as you go on. So if you’re focusing all your energy in something, that’s really, you know, it’s getting you one new client a month and you could be focusing your energy on something that’s going to get you five new clients a month. Well, you’ve just slowed down your progress by five years. And that’s why, you know, we tend to focus on retention, then sales and then organic marketing and then paid marketing because each of those layers multiplies the one above it.

Chris (20:13):

But that’s I know beyond the scope of this conversation.

Mike (20:16):

Let’s look at this then for gym owners who aren’t part of Two-Brain, yet, there are some out there that are listening. What metrics should they focus on right now? Just to kind of start thinking about this stuff. And then for Two-Brain clients, how should they determine which of the many metrics they need to improve right now?

Chris (20:31):

Yeah, there are really six metrics that matter. And we used to teach like 20 metrics. And then we brought that down to 10. But if you want to really see like how somebody’s is doing, there are really only six that matter. And those are also leverageable. So if I was not in Two-Brain, I’d probably be focused on ARM, which is a measure of how much your clients value your service. That’s average revenue per member per month.

Chris (20:56):

And most gyms, in our survey and our data set of 6,500, most gyms were making less than a hundred dollars per month per member. Now the price might be 115, but they’ve got some grandfathered rates or they’re like trading a coach a membership, or they’ve got some family discounts or whatever. And so each client is actually only paying them $95 a month, which is like $4 every time they show up.

Mike (21:18):

That’s borderline unsustainable.

Chris (21:19):

Oh yeah, man. Yeah. We’ve been there. Right? We’ve all been there. It was unsustainable in my case. You too. And so, so like, if you just focus on that first, that number will multiply across everybody else. Now there are different tactics that you can use to increase ARM. You don’t have to raise your prices, or you can only raise your prices on incoming new members for now. Or you can start selling personal training, or you can add a nutrition coaching practice, or you can move to the prescriptive model.

Chris (21:49):

Like there are some easy wins here, or you can change your payment processor. You know, there’s some easy wins here that you can do before you have to do the really big wins, like raise your rates. So I said that that’s the one that I would focus on if you’re not inTwo-Brain, but the other five aside from ARM are net owner benefit. How much you’re paying yourself. There are strategies like profit first that will help you pay yourself more without getting more clients. Next is how many clients you have, right? That’s a multiplier. And then the next one is length of engagement, which is a retention metric to tell you how long the average person stays in your gym. Churn is not a useful metric for increasing your revenue or your personal pay. It tells you, you know, how many people are leaving in the average month, but it doesn’t tell you who they are or how long you can expect them to stay.

Chris (22:39):

So we use LEG. Another one is what percentage of your revenue goes straight out the door to expenses like your rent, your lights, your loan payment on your equipment.

Mike (22:50):

Guys, if you are not in the Two-Brain family and you want to get access to this information, including a diagnostic tool, you want to go to Two-Brain Business and you want to click on free tools. At the bottom of that section, you’re going to find how to make a hundred thousand dollars per year with 150 clients download that PDF. It’s got a guide that you can look through. It’s got a bunch of scenarios and examples and tactics that you can use. Check that out. It’s a super important guide. It’s totally free. Chris, put it together to help you if you’re not in the family. So Chris, now we’ve got Two-Brain clients who have a grasp of metrics. They understand all these things, and they’ve got this roadmap that you’ve created with like, I don’t know, 600 or whatever it is now, tactics that they can use. How do they figure out what metric to do now or to address now, and then what the hell to do with it?

Chris (23:35):

Yeah. So this is half mentorship and half metrics. So what you’ll see on the roadmap is this graph of your progress, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how are you doing it, paying yourself on a scale of one to 10, how high is your average value per client, your ARM on a scale of one to 10, et cetera. And it’s immediately obvious from the second you log in where your weaknesses are. You know, I could be a seven out of 10 on length of engagement, meaning I’m keeping people around. And I’m a 3 out of 10 on ARM. They’re just not paying me enough. So from those looking at those two, you can say like, well, your biggest opportunity is to increase your ARM. And then from there, uthat opens up like, you know, a whole bunch of different tactics to increase your ARM. And depending on where you are in your entrepreneurial journey and a bunch of other things, your mentor will say, OK, here’s the two choices that we have for this month. Which one do you want to do? And then you pick one and then the mentor says, OK, let’s walk you through it. Do you know how to do it? Here’s all the resources that you need to do it properly. Do you know what the obstacles are? Here’s my experience and what the obstacles might be, and here’s how to overcome them.

Chris (24:44):

And now next month, we’re going to measure your progress and look at your next kind of weakest link.

Mike (24:49):

So it’s, I mean, it’s kind of incredible to look at it and you just think about like one aspect of that, like average revenue per member per month. And you’d sit there. If you, if you weren’t, didn’t have the mentoring, you’d be like, what do I do? But if you do have the mentor, the mentor can say, OK, look, we want to get you to 205 to start you’re right now, you’re at 150. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do exactly this. And let’s say one of them is we’re going to start selling a high value hybrid program that involves group training and personalized programming in PT sessions. And we’re going to price this at 275 or whatever the rate makes. I’m just making that up. But whatever the appropriate rate is for the business and all of a sudden your ARM is probably going to rise because you’re going to start selling this brand new thing. And when that starts working, then your mentor can say, here’s the next thing we’re going to do. And it’s going to be, you know, adding on nutrition consultations once a month to, you know, group classes or something like that. And all of a sudden you start generating all this momentum and then it’s the next thing, the next thing. And the cool part is that when you get that, you know, you’ll see that graph. So ARM, all of a sudden your ARM’s in a great spot. It’s not the lagging metric anymore. Your lagging metric is now length of engagement. And so now your mentor can say, here is what I want you to do right now to make the greatest increase in your retention. You do that and you hammer away. And so rather than overwhelming process through the eyes of the mentor, who has the, you know, the experience and the data, the mentor can now it’s basically like sniping things on a target range, right? You’re like this, that, that, that next metric next, next, next. And all of a sudden, you’ve got these gyms that are growing dramatically. And the data that I gave you at the very beginning of the show that you quoted incredible growth over short periods. So the question here, Chris is why can gym owners grow so quickly? Like the stats that you gave us are incredible. You know, I’ll tell people 25% of gyms that log metrics and growth increased revenue by a hundred percent in a year. Like that’s kind of unheard of. How does it happen?

Chris (26:48):

Well, it’s a snowball effect and it’s like compounding interest.

Chris (26:54):

You improve one metric. You move on to the next metric. But meanwhile, ARM is still high. It doesn’t drop when you stop paying attention to it again. So if I go from focusing on ARM to getting more clients next month, every single one of those new clients will be paying a higher ARM. So the effect just snowballs. And then if I focus on like retention the next month, every one of those clients will be paying a higher ARM and staying for two extra months, which means that, you know, I’m losing clients less fast. My overall growth is happening. The alternative to this snowball plan is what most people do. And that is they only change their marketing. So they do the new challenge and it stops working. And then they bring in Facebook advertising and that replaces what they were getting from the new challenge.

Chris (27:45):

And then it stops working. And so then they bring in Instagram reels and that replaces, you know, what they were getting in Facebook. And then that stops working. And so they’re constantly on this treadmill of doing new things, learning new things, taking a few months to get it, spending money and not growing. The alternative is to break the business down, use metrics like the six that we mentioned earlier, identify your weakest link and fix that. And then that will multiply every other metric that you have. So if I improve leg from 12 months to 13 months, then the value of every single client just went up by eight and a half percent. If I include my, or if I increase my ARM from 200 to 205, then every client is worth $5 more per month. And if you think about like, what difference will that make to my family?

Chris (28:39):

You know, if I’ve got 200 members I’m making another $5 per member per month, what difference will a thousand dollars actually make to my family? That tells us that we’re on the right track instead of what difference with 30 more members make to my family, you know, you really have to see like where the biggest opportunities are and you have to do the things that are going to grow your business over time instead of just constantly replacing your marketing.

Mike (29:03):

So I’m going to, I guess I’m going to pull the curtain back here just a little bit and show everyone who’s pulling the levers, but you know, not to de sexify the whole gym guru, industry, but it’s really less about having these like grand ideas that work for everyone and being, you know, all I know and I think, and so forth and being very passionate about it, it’s actually very analytic. Am I right? Like, you’re just, you’ve got mentors now who can rely on numbers and data. And that’s not to say they don’t rely on their experience, but it’s the data that drives this whole thing. And so entrepreneurial-ism is, is less about, you know, this like make your wings on the way down and, you know, learn to fly as you’re falling and it’s more about like learning from the mistakes of others, finding the stuff that’s gonna make a difference and doing that faster. So you don’t have to waste all that time.

Chris (29:48):

Yeah, that’s it, man. And that’s really important to me. It’s the thing that really drives me all the time to create better content is gym owners wasting time. Now you mentioned like there are other business coaches and consultants out there. And you know, I do think that they help people most of the time, but the problem is what they’re selling is novelty.

Chris (30:07):

So what that means is that, you know, if I want to sell gym owners on like the newest thing, you know, Pinterest ads, OK. Then I have to produce a Pinterest ads guide really, really quick, your complete Pinterest ads guide, click here to download. And then I have to sell them on my program. The way that I win at that and sell a lot of business consulting is to be the first, not the best. It’s just the first, OK. Brand new clubhouse comes out. I’ve got to have the clubhouse guide for gym owners fastest. The problem is when you’re selling novelty, you don’t have time to test. And so while we won’t have the first clubhouse marketing guide for gym owners, we will definitely have the best, or we’ll say, you can skip this one. And to me, you know, building a legacy and helping gym owners build multi-generational businesses, it’s less important to be the fastest and more important to be the truth.

Mike (31:06):

And really the second you publish the Pinterest marketing guidance out of date, right? Like that’s the whole trouble. And we’ve done this so many times thinking about planning social media guides, and so forth. It’s so hard to stay on top of things because everything changes so quickly. But teaching someone tell a story lasts forever, and that will apply in any media that’s available. The last question that I’m going to ask you is this, so what are your future plans on data collection and microgyms? Cause I know you’re always thinking big and you’ve got your eye on the horizon. So what’s next with all the data that you’re going to keep collecting and how are you gonna apply that to helping gyms build that multi-generational wealth?

Chris (31:41):

So an interesting thing happened when we published that state of the industry guide at the end of 2020, the first thing that happened was about three other software platforms, big names that everybody would recognize said, we want to be part of this.

Chris (31:55):

You know, there’s nobody that’s going to be able to do this on their own because we’re all competing with one another. We need a central hub, like Two-Brain to kind of pull things together in a report in an objective way. So, next year that data set will be even larger. The other thing that’s got to happen now is we have to start going deeper into the data. So for example, we know what the average mean, average CrossFit, unlimited prices across the world. We know what it is in America. What is it in Atlanta? You know, and we’re starting to be able to get that now, too. We can dig into data better. We can say, you know, what is the average price if you’re in Manhattan? And the majority of your clientele are between 20 and 30 years old, we can say, what is it?

Chris (32:42):

If you are in Sault Ste. Marie, and you have a 2000 square foot gym, how is that different than if you have a 6,500 square foot gym, what is the right size gym for my area? And these are the numbers that we’re starting to collect now. So in the future, we can be even more prescriptive saying like, you know, the best model in this location is that. This is super important to me because every gym is different and I want to keep it that way. I don’t want to have a franchise, even though we get asked for this about five times a month, what I want to do is let every gym owner be a true entrepreneur, learn the stuff, have the data that only the big chains get and make decisions based on that. Now, the reason that orange theory and F 45 and Barry’s bootcamp, the reason these guys spread is because they collect data and they make decisions based on data.

Chris (33:33):

And they change what they’re doing based on data. Every time somebody buys a membership at F 45, there’s somebody at headquarters reviewing that sales script, reviewing that sales person’s close rate and saying, what if we tweak this thing? And then they test, and then they improve. And it’s the data that smoking all these little micro gyms. Each of us until you know, we built this hub was out there, kind of on an island, making guesses, thinking about our N equals 1 dataset, leaning on people in Facebook groups whose experience and motivation might be misaligned with ours. Let’s put it that way. And finally, you know, maybe we’re better off seeking their opinion. Maybe we’re worse off. That just can’t happen if micro gym owners are going to be successful, we need a central data hub. We need all the tools that the franchises have, but we want to maintain the freedom of self ownership instead of being a franchisee.

Chris (34:30):

And that’s where we’re going.

Mike (34:31):

My name is Mike Warkentin. I’m a recovering whimsical entrepreneur. I used to make decisions based on my gut and based on nonsense and whatever I felt like since I started working with Two-Brain I now make decisions based on data and the data doesn’t lie. Chris, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight with us. The state of the industry guide is in production as we speak, and that is going to be out. It’s a huge project, but it is coming out at the end of the year. And we’ll tell you exactly how to get it so that you can get this information for yourself. Chris, thank you so much.

Chris (35:00):

Thanks Mike.

Mike (35:02):

I’m Mike Warkentin and that was Two-Brain founder, Chris Cooper. Before you go be sure to join the Gym Owners United group on Facebook. Chris is in there all the time, dropping data and sharing strategies. You won’t see him posting in any other public Facebook group. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook. Join it today and I’ll see you in it.

 

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Joe Biden Cuts Field at CrossFit Games?

The first test of the 2021 CrossFit Games will be getting to Madison.

With pandemic-related lockdowns popping up all over Australia at press time, it seems likely that Joe Biden’s Jan. 25 Presidential Proclamation will remain in force in the United States. This is bad news for a host of athletes who will need to get to Madison, Wisconsin, before the Games start on July 27.

Right now, Biden’s order declares that people may not enter the United States if they were present in certain countries in the previous 14 days. The list of countries includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Brazil, the 26 countries in the “Schengen Area” (pretty much all of western and central Europe), and others.

Policies at the Canada-U.S. border—the longest undefended stretch in the world—remain in flux as of press time, but they were generally more painful than European border procedures even before pandemic restrictions hit. That situation certainly won’t improve in the next month.

Games fans will note that many qualifiers hail from Canada and the countries listed in the proclamation, so international competitors will most definitely deal with difficulties well beyond the usual annoying red tape from passport offices. See: Sam Briggs, regularly, and others.

Now the clever among us will see a “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” solution to all this: Competitors from countries listed in the Presidential Proclamation can travel to a country not included in the restrictions 14 days before heading to the U.S.

Simon Wilson-Storey, a Brit who plans to compete in the Masters Men 50-54 division of the Games, confirmed this plan on Facebook:

This is creative and legal, but it’s also inconvenient and expensive. Two weeks in Dubai sounds pretty great until the Visa maxes out and you still need to buy some Badgers gear on State Street or rent a watercraft for a rip around Lake Monona.

And this says nothing of any procedures competitors must follow to get home from America’s Dairyland.

Editor’s note: On the evening of June 30, international competitors received an email informing them that they had been granted a National Interest Exemption travel waiver by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Athletes are now under pressure to fill out their paperwork fast, and they’ll be subject to background checks and a negative COVID test. Read the story in the Morning Chalk Up.

And Then There’s The Dave

All in all, the 2021 competition season feels a lot like “Tron” meets “The Hunger Games” meets “The Amazing Race.” It’s been a wild mixture of online and in-person competition, travel restrictions and logistical nightmares for those offered as tribute to the top echelon of the Sport of Fitness.

I feel badly for the competitors who have to deal with chaos in addition to The Dave Castro’s mental and physical tests. I’d suggest U.S. athletes have a bit of an advantage over someone who has to eat and sleep on the road for two weeks before competing. And I’m sure a few athletes won’t make it to Madison. That will suck—for them and their fans.

However, the Games have always been about being prepared for anything and overcoming any obstacle. That concept is most commonly applied to physicality, but many will be surprised to know CrossFit founder Greg Glassman often suggested the program would affect the brain even more than the body.

A Brief History of Terror

Indeed, the Games have always had an undercurrent of carefully applied psychological stress. Every year, Castro gleefully takes great pains to worry competitors and test their mental mettle.

It’s actually really fun to watch if you aren’t competing.

For example, in 2010 Castro held the competitors in isolation beneath the stadium before marching them out and announcing a test seconds before it started. It was like a scene from “Gladiator.”

I recall a uniformed U.S. Marines officer giving a briefing to competitors before they headed to Camp Pendleton in 2012. The officer listed all sorts of bad things athletes might find on their swim and trail run: sharks, riptides, snakes, unexploded ordinance and so on. You didn’t have to be a super-spy to figure out the speech was designed to mess with competitors’ minds—and it definitely did.

Another year, I sat near Rich Froning when he speculated that a Games event would involve an airplane, a number of athletes, and a number of parachutes that did not equal the number of athletes.

In 2016, TDC airlifted the competitors from L.A. to Northern California without warning. Once back at the ancestral home of the CrossFit Games, Dave warned competitors about poison oak, snakes and mountain lions at The Ranch in Aromas. But the retired Navy SEAL told them not to worry because he’d be up on the trails with a handgun.

About 100 other examples exist in Games lore.

Winning the CrossFit Games has always involved a great deal of stress, and the 2021 edition will be no different. In fact, it will likely produce some great off-the-field stories that we’ll talk about in 10 years.

If the last two years have done anything, they’ve taught us that it’s always wise to be prepared for the unknown.

That’s true in competition, but we now know with certainty it’s also true in business and in life, too.

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Maximizing Your Return On Time

In this series, I’ve been telling you how to maximize the investments you’ve made in your business. Some of those investments are financial, and they’re easier to measure. But your time investment is equally important.

It’s harder to quantify your return on time (ROT)—unless we consider you an employee of your own business.

Here are 10 ways to increase the value of your time:

1. Increase your return on time. Every employee in your business should create either more revenue or more time. The return on an employee’s time should be 2.25 times his or her pay. Some roles don’t generate revenue but do generate time for the owner, who generates the revenue to validate the role.

2. Focus on the things that pay you most.

3. Stop doing the things that pay you least.

4. Move to higher-value roles.

5. Work less often. Cut out one day per week.

6. Work shorter days.

7. Get everything out of your head.

8. Be more focused. The average employee produces at 30 percent capacity.

9. Take more vacations. One of our 2020 Summit speakers, Cameron Herold, recommends 25 days per year.

10. Listen to Andy and Mary Boimila talk about their work-life balance on Two-Brain Radio.

The Time Bandits—and How to Stop ThemSmall Talk

Get a door that closes. We think it’s our duty to be available to our staff at all times. But really, it’s our duty to train them not to need us. And if you’re not doing your work as CEO, they’ll be the first to suffer. Do everyone a favor and close your door.

If you really need to, make a little sign that says “can’t talk. Text me” and hang it from the knob.

Email

Todd Herman told me this: “There’s nothing in your inbox that will move your business forward. The only things in there are people asking you to do something for them.”

I set up my laptop to block notifications by default—to start without the Mail, Slack or iMessage icons in the dock. There are no little red circles demanding attention in the morning. I turn those on later, when Focus time is over.

You don’t need to set up an auto-responder saying you check email twice per day. Those are annoying. Everyone is busy. No one expects an immediate reply to an email. Answer them between your productivity windows.

Calls and Texts

Someone else should be answering your phone. Forward your phone to someone else during your productivity windows.

Don’t give out your cell phone number to anyone except family. And don’t open message apps like Slack before your Focus window in the morning.

Social Media

Hire someone else to manage it for you. Yes, your company needs to be on social media. But no, it shouldn’t be you. Two-Brain Media manages all social channels for Two-Brain.

Fatigue

If you’re tired, burned out or distracted, you won’t get anything done. Making many decisions creates fatigue. Stress creates fatigue. Lack of fitness creates fatigue. Eating sugar, being dehydrated, losing sleep—they all create fatigue.

Instead of fighting through three hours of distraction and half-assed effort, you’ll actually get more done if you take a 15-minute nap or exercise for half an hour. You’ll come back sharp and actually accomplish something that moves your business forward.

Guilt

As a CEO, your primary role is to think. And the larger your business grows, the more time you have to spend thinking. That can mean more time behind closed doors, more time hiking or cycling or meditating to get into Flow State. And because these things appear to be recreational, it’s easy for your family or staff to think you’re “off.”

It’s important to explain these principles (and your responsibilities) to the staff around you. Remember: They have no context on leadership. They probably think you’re a millionaire who leaves at 3 p.m. to ride a bike for fun, leaving them to do the work. Tell them what you’re doing and how it benefits them. But don’t let the feeling that “they need to see me working hard!” distract you from doing the work that actually helps the team.

Remember: You’re not judged by how many hours you put in. Your success will not be determined by your martyrdom. You have to produce.

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Choosing the Best Mentor

Who’s the best mentor?

It depends—classic mentor answer!

Choosing a mentor is tough. You want the right mix of empathy (they’ve been there) and accountability to keep you moving forward as an entrepreneur.

A mentor’s first job is to diagnose your largest problem and then show you the best solution right now. But that’s the easy part. We use tools like the Two-Brain Dashboard and the Two-Brain Roadmap to make the diagnosis and prescription clear.

The hard part is implementation.

Our teachers have taught us that knowing the answer is the solution to any problem. But that’s not true. Knowing that you should raise your rates won’t make you profitable. You need to take action.

Most people fail to take the hard steps (and risk!) to change. Most of us are paralyzed by fear, myths (“legacy rates”), inertia … . We need someone to break big problems into small steps and stay with us while we execute on one thing at a time.

You’ve seen the “personality tests” like Myers-Briggs, Kolbe and StrengthsFinder, I’m sure. Those are interesting but don’t give us specific answers. Below, you’ll find an exercise to help you figure out the kind of mentorship you need right now.

Six Steps to Finding a Mentor

Start with a blank page. Draw two vertical lines down the page to make three columns.

At the top of the first column, write “Wins.”

Second column: write “Coach.”

Third column: write “Lever.”

Step 1

I want you to think back to a time in your life when you were proud of yourself.

What was the thing you had just accomplished? Was it sports related? Did you win the big game? Strike out a key batter?

Or was it something you accomplished in school—finished a big project? Earned admission to college? Completed a piece of art?

Was it fitness based? Did you PR on something or win a competition?

Did it happen in the military? At home? At work?

Did you achieve sobriety? Were you accepted into your church?

List these things in the first column, under Wins.

If you thought of more than one instance when you were proud of something you accomplished, great! If you can only think of one time, that’s pretty normal.

Step 2

Still thinking about the accomplishment that made you proud:

Who was your coach?Who was your model—who were you trying to emulate?Who was the first person you told about your victory?Who was the person you were trying to impress?

There could be more than one person.

I know that in every instance, you had a coach, a teacher, a mentor or a model to follow. List their names under the second heading, Coach.

Step 3

Look at your list of names in the second column. These are the people who have mentored or coached you to successful action in the past.

Beside each name, write down the person’s coaching or leadership style in the Lever column. You don’t have to be formal; just write down the first word that comes to mind. Was the person an authoritarian? A listener? Was he or she more Socratic (he or she asked questions until you came to the answer yourself?) or more of a drill sergeant?

Write down only one to two words beside each name.

Step 4

Now go down your list of names and levers and look for the commonalities. Which names and levers appear more than once?

You’ve probably been guided by different types of people. I sure hope that’s true! But you might notice some commonalities among many of your best guides.

Highlight those common “levers.”

These are the attributes you want in a mentor. These are the things that will make you take action.

Your next task is to find an expert with those attributes.

Step 5

Find an expert.

Ask yourself, “What exactly do I want to achieve next year?”

Then dig deeper: Ask yourself “why?” at least three times.

For example: “I want to grow to 300 gym members next year.”

Why?

“So that my gym makes more money.”

Why?

“So that I can make a greater income and work less.”

Why?

“Because my husband and kids deserve to live without a budget and see me more often.”

Next ask, “Who has already achieved (that specific thing)?”

You want to identify some people who have achieved your specific goal—not necessarily the people who have done it the way you think it should be done.

This is a key point: In the fitness industry, we often chase after the tactical “experts” instead of the people who are actually successful. We think “300 members is the way to make more money!” so we pay the marketing expert to help us get 300 members instead of the person who will make us successful at our real goal. This results in people who aren’t actually successful themselves making money as “experts.”

Great example: unsuccessful gym owners selling “marketing secrets.” Maybe they’re good at marketing—but their gyms still failed.

List two or three people in your industry who have achieved your real goal.

Step 6

Call the top expert.

The only way to find out if the expert can get you results is to call.

Ask how he or she would approach your problems.

Ask how the prospective mentor has personally overcome your specific challenges (that’s a dealbreaker a lot of the time!).

Does the person possess the “levers” (the attributes) that have gotten results for you in the past or is the prospective mentor just selling a tactic?

Your best mentor might not be me. It might not even be one of the many professional, certified mentors on the Two-Brain team. But there’s only one way to find out: Book a call.

It’s free, and we might choose each other.

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Maximizing Your ROI: The Expense Audit

You can’t cut your way to wealth.

But you can improve the return you receive on your investments in space, equipment, staff and tools.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Print out a list of monthly expenses ordered from highest to lowest.

2. Look at each expense and ask, “Do I make money from that investment each month?” If your spend isn’t bringing a return, first look for a way to make money from it before you eliminate it.

For example, ask your bookkeeper, “How can I leverage your service better right now?” I’m sure they will have an answer; I’m also sure few people ask.

Ask your mentor, “What’s the best thing I can do to get the most value from your service this month?” He or she will tell you (I wish everyone asked me this question).

Ask your landlord, “What other areas of the property can we use?”

Ask your coaches, “Do you want more opportunities right now or are you happy with your life?” All staff people should generate 2.5x what they’re paid or buy you the time to create that revenue for the gym. If a staff person wants more, provide “intrapreneurial” opportunities. Download our “Intrapreneurialism 101” guide here.

Ask your cleaners, “What else should I be doing to make the atmosphere welcoming here?”

Ask your website provider, “How can I improve conversion from my site to a free consultation each month?”

Watch John Briggs talk about cash-flow management here.

Sometimes, of course, you will want to cut an expense. But you’re smart: There’s a reason you signed up for that service or software in the first place. Chances are, you don’t need to cancel—you just need to optimize.

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How Much Does a Personal Trainer Make – The Answer and the Plan

If you’re considering a career in fitness, you’re right to ask a key question: How much does a personal trainer make?

Sure, you love health and fitness, and helping clients achieve their goals in a one-on-one setting has you jumping out of bed at 4:30 a.m. But you still need to make a living and pay your bills. If you don’t, you’ll get stressed and overworked, and you’ll lose your passion for coaching.

This happens too often in the fitness industry.

Below, we’ll tell you how coaches are paid. We’ll also tell you exactly how much personal trainers are paid. Then we’ll go over highs, lows and medians, as well as hourly rates from employers.

Even better, we’ll tell you where you can make the most money, as well as how you can increase your income and create a fulfilling, sustainable career.

How Does a Personal Trainer Get Paid?

If we’re asking how much does a personal trainer make, we need to understand the various pay structures in the fitness industry.

Here are five common ways personal trainers get paid.

1. General Hourly Wage (Plus Bonuses in Some Cases)

In this scenario, a trainer is paid a wage—usually a low wage—as a W2 employee who does personal training and perhaps other duties, such as attending a front desk, orienting clients to the facility, doing maintenance and so on.

Bonuses are common in this scenario—for membership, package and retail sales—but some gyms just pay a low hourly wage. If you’re looking to create a career in fitness, you should avoid the gyms that just play a flat rate with no opportunity to make more.

Other gyms will pay a minimum hourly wage for non-training hours but a different wage for personal training. The training rates often vary according to trainer qualifications, experience and volume. 

Pro: The trainer is guaranteed an hourly wage and can sometimes make more through bonuses or commissions.

Con: The hourly wage is generally low—often minimum wage—and trainers must be good at selling and reselling packages.

Resource: “Working at Equinox: ‘It’s Very Hunger Games’”

Key info from the article: “Upon hiring, Equinox trainers begin a process called ‘ramping’: roughly 15 to 20 hours a week putting away weights on the gym floor, plus some additional hours of educational sessions, all paid at or slightly above minimum wage. During those floor shifts, trainers are expected to pitch their services to Equinox members working out in the gym. As they start accumulating clients, trainers can convert floor hours into better-compensated training sessions — $26 an hour for beginner trainers and as much as $62 per session for more experienced employees.”

2. Flat Rate Per Session

This common method is straightforward: A business pays a staff or 1099 contract trainer a flat rate for each session he or she coaches. This coach would just do training and not other gym tasks unless they were specified in the contract.

What’s hidden in this method of payment is the fact that the exact time to coach a session is in addition to the time spent preparing for the session or corresponding with clients outside sessions. So if a trainer is paid $40 for a 60-minute session, you can’t just say that personal trainer “makes $40 an hour.”

How much time does a trainer have to spend preparing for a session? It varies greatly and is influenced by the trainer’s skill, experience and systems. Some experienced, very organized trainers with huge workout libraries can create a three-session weekly training plan for a long-term client in five minutes. An inexperienced trainer working with a brand new client might take an hour or more to create that same plan.

In some cases, trainers are also responsible for admin tasks such as booking and billing, so that time should be considered as well.

When reviewing flat-rate data, be aware that the rates include all tasks associated with delivering a session—not just coaching a client during the session.

Pro: Trainers can earn more than minimum wage.

Con: Trainers generally have to find their own clients and must spend time doing related tasks outside the actual coaching session.

3. Space Rental or Percentage of Revenue

“Renting a chair” is common in the salon industry, and some gyms will use a similar system: They’ll allow trainers to operate their businesses inside the facility for a flat “rental fee” or perhaps for a percentage of revenue. Each option has advantages.

The flat rate is obviously good for trainers who have a ton of clients and don’t want to give up more and more money as they grow. The flat rate also guarantees the gym owner a set income even if the trainer doesn’t see a lot of clients.

Percentages can ensure a trainer doesn’t pay for space that isn’t used, and the gym owner benefits as the trainer’s income increases. This can help trainers who are just starting out and don’t want to pay a flat rate to serve just a few clients.

However, at a certain point a very successful trainer will usually calculate the amount of cash going to the gym owner and figure out if it’s too much. This can be a smart business move or a deadly trap: Some trainers think “the owner gets too much for too little” but forget to consider the real cost of running a facility. This cost can be extreme.

When running the numbers yourself, keep in mind that the gym owner provides space, equipment, utilities, insurance, cleaning, maintenance, bathrooms and showers, towel service, and more. Costs add up fast.

Pro: Rent or percentages can be negotiated to create the best situation for everyone involved.

Con: If circumstances change significantly before contracts expire, hard feelings and disagreements are common.

4. Complete Independence

Trainers who want to keep 100 percent of revenue can find ways to do it, but they’ll have to absorb some costs as sole proprietors. A price must be paid if you want to be the boss.

For example, you’ll need some equipment. That can be expensive. But you really don’t need a lot gear to be an effective coach. Many trainers spend far too much on things they never use. You only need enough gear to help your clients get fit. Check out a simple but very effective gear package here:

You’ll also need insurance, a website, a marketing plan and so on. You might also need coaching and billing software (check out our definitive review here).

The other requirement: space to train. You can use a park, a garage or even a client’s home. Just keep in mind that each has an associated cost. Training in parks usually requires a civic permit; a garage requires utilities, property taxes and maintenance; and a client’s home requires travel (time as well as transportation expenses).

Make no mistake: In this scenario, you are running a small business, so coaching is just one of many roles you’ll take on.

Pro: You are your own boss.

Con: You must cover all expenses, and your actual training time will be reduced because you must dedicate time to running the business.

5. The 4/9ths Model

While this Two-Brain Business model could be included in Section 3 above, it has some features that separate it from the simple percentage-of-revenue model.

In the 4/9ths Model—common in Two-Brain Business gyms around the world—a trainer is paid 44 percent of the training revenue, while the gym receives 55 percent. (Gym owners using this system generally dedicate 22 percent of total revenue to fixed costs and 33 percent to profit.)

The trainer is rewarded by generating value that allows him or her to charge premium rates and by booking lots of sessions. The gym benefits as well as successful trainers please clients and generate more revenue.

The key feature of the 4/9ths Model: This is an active partnership. The gym owner provides a captive audience of clients and works to promote the trainer’s services, offered in an insured, fully outfitted facility. Many owners also provide significant support and mentorship so the trainer succeeds. The trainer has access to the gym’s booking and billing software, marketing platforms, social media channels, facility and more.

A Career, Not Just a Job

In this arrangement, the gym provides so much value to the trainer that the 55-44 split works perfectly and both parties are happy.

Two-Brain gyms strive to provide great value to clients and create careers for coaches, so they generally don’t sell PT at rock-bottom rates. Instead, they find clients who will pay a premium for great service, which allows a coach to make a great living.

You can see what some Two-Brain gyms pay coaches in the graphics below. Of the 120 owners surveyed, 98 pay between $30 and $39 per session. You can compare that to rates at other facilities below.

This bell curve shows the vast majority of Two-Brain gym owners in our survey (98) generally pay trainers between $30 and $39 per session.A total of 66 Two-Brain gym owners in our survey pay trainers $30-$34 per session. 32 owners pay $35-$39 per session.

Even better, gym owners can often provide opportunities for trainers to generate higher hourly rates through group specialty programs, small-group training, and additional coaching in areas such as nutrition, recovery and mindset. In some cases, these programs can allow a trainer to make excellent money.

Simple example: A coach runs a four-week, eight-session pull-up program priced at $125 per person. The gym owner helps the trainer promote the program, and 10 clients sign up.

10 x $125 = $1,250

$1,250 x .44 = $550

$550 / 8 = $68.75 per session

Don’t underestimate how important these high-value opportunities are. If you’re expecting to train clients 40 hours a week, you’ll probably burn out. A Two-Brain gym owner using the 4/9ths Model can provide lucrative alternatives to an endless string of back-to-back training sessions.

How Much Does a Personal Trainer Make: Industry Data

With the payment structures above in mind, it should be noted that personal trainers can really charge as much as clients are willing to pay. We aren’t talking about gouging. We’re talking about value and results.

For example, you’d probably agree that a personal trainer who helps a client accomplish a lifelong goal is underpaid at $20 an hour. Would you pay $50 an hour three times a week to avoid sickness—or would you pay more? Would you pay $200 an hour if you could dial up a trainer who would show up on demand at your office with all equipment, a post-workout meal, and an afternoon snack designed to help you meet your body-composition goals?

It’s not about price but value.

It’s a mistake to look at “what everyone else is doing” or “what the market will bear.” A better plan is to figure out the rate you need to charge to live the life you want, then create a service that justifies your rate. You might have to work hard to do it—but Two-Brain mentors help gym owners and trainers do this all the time. The result? Happy clients, happy gym owners and happy trainers.

Now, here’s some industry data.

Personal Trainer Wage Stats: United States

All funds in this section are in U.S. currency.

Median: $62,377Bottom 10 percent of trainers: $30,866Bottom 25 percent of trainers: $45,010Top 25 percent of trainers: $76,636Top 10 percent of trainers: $89,618

(Source: Salary.com)

Low: $28,000Average: $48,434High: $83,000

(Source: Glassdoor, based on 3,716 salaries)

Personal Trainer Wages by Company: U.S.

LA Fitness: $26 per hour (938 reports)24 Hour Fitness: $18 per hour (321 reports)Life Time: $37,051 (annual, 280 reports)Anytime Fitness: $19 per hour (276 reports)YMCA: $19 per hour (244 reports)Equinox: $26 per hour (232 reports)Crunch: $28 per hour (195 reports)Orangetheory: $41 per hour (119 reports)Planet Fitness: $13 per hour (113 reports)

(Source: Glassdoor)

Hourly wages at select U.S. fitness employers.2020 median pay: $40,510 per year, $19.48 per hourNumber of jobs, 2019: 373,700Job outlook, 2019-2029: 15 percent (the field is expected to grow at a rate much faster than the 4 percent average rate for growth in all occupations)Employment change, 2019-2029: +57,600 jobs

(Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Personal Trainer Compensation and Benefits: EquinoxTier 1: Approx. $35,000-$70,000Tier 2: Approx. $50,000-$92,000Tier 3: Approx. $62,000-$118,000Tier 4: Approx. $70,000-$130,000Tier 5: Approx. $88,000-$160,000

(Source: Careers.equinox.com; range reflects 95-160 sessions per month)

Resource: Reddit.com

Key info: “They SAY you can make 70k a year. Right now on a staff of 20 trainers I’d say MAYBE 3 of them are making that kind of money. The rest of us are struggling paycheck to paycheck and living at home. … Equinox is a company where you either do incredibly well or incredibly poor. … If you never hit 95+ sessions a month, you will never get off the floor and never hit bonus. There is a high turnover rate because not everyone is making the money they tell you they can be making.” —clydebarretto

Assorted Roles and Compensation: LA FitnessPersonal trainer: $9-$31 ($16 average)Operations manager: $11-$25 ($16 average)Fitness instructor: $11-$37 ($19 average)Fitness trainer or aerobics instructor: $13-$40 (estimated)

Source: Payscale.com

Assorted Roles and Compensation: Planet FitnessMember service representative: $8-$12 ($10 average)Personal trainer: $9-$22 ($14 average)Fitness instructor: $9-$31 ($15 average)

Source: Payscale.com

Assorted Roles and Compensation: 24 Hour FitnessPersonal trainer: $9-$34 ($16 average)Customer service representative: $9-$18 ($12 average)Fitness instructor: $12-$46 ($22 average)

Source: Payscale.com

Personal Trainer Wages: Canada

All funds in this section are in Canadian currency.

Bottom 10 percent of trainers: $14.20Top 10 percent of trainers: $48.42Median: $21.46

Annual salary range: $30,000-$100,000

(Source: Payscale.com, based on 391 salary profiles)

Average annual hourly rate: $26.17 (low: $20, high: $43.38)Average annual salary: $51,038 (low: $39,000, high: $84,581)

(Source: Talent.com, based on 288 salaries)

Low: $30,000Average: $53,355High: $93,000

(Source: Glassdoor, based on 371 salaries)

Personal Trainer Wages by Company: CanadaGoodlife: $22 per hour (179 reports; Payscale.com used 176 reports to come up with the same average, with a range from $9 to $46)Orangetheory: $41 per hour (27 reports)Fitness on the Go: $70 per hour (21 reports)Fitness World: $20 per hour (20 reports)LA Fitness: $30 per hour (17 reports)Anytime Fitness: $24 per hour (14 reports)Snap Fitness: $31 per hour (9 reports)Equinox: $30 per hour (12 reports)Planet Fitness: $16 per hour (6 reports)9Round: $17 per hour (6 reports)

(Source: Glassdoor)

Hourly wages at select Canadian fitness employers.
Free Business Plan for Personal Trainers

So how much does a personal trainer make?

The answer: It varies. A lot.

We’ve given you a wide overview of the industry, so you’re aware of different compensation structures and general wages and salaries in the gym business.

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The plan has critical info on credentials, running a PT session, program building, program delivery, small-group coaching, scaling your business and adding new revenue streams. Read that document and put your plan together.

Now, when someone asks you “how much do personal trainers make,” you can answer with this:

“As much money as they want to make.”

The post How Much Does a Personal Trainer Make – The Answer and the Plan appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Revenue Leader Reveals Reasons for Success: Nate Beveridge

Mike (00:02):

How did a five-time CrossFit Games athlete find time to become a revenue leader in the gym business? Nate Beveridge shares his secrets right after this.

Chris (00:10):

Back to the show in just a minute. The people at Incite Tax know you’re working long hours to improve health for the world, but it can still be hard to turn a profit. You just can’t focus on your mission without money in your account. So Incite founder John Briggs wrote “Profit First for Microgyms” and created a system that increases your cashflow so you can be home for dinner with a thriving fitness business. Bookkeeping, profit first, cash flow consulting, taxes, whatever your financial needs, Incite can help. Join their free five-day challenge at profitfirstformicrogyms/five days to get a snapshot of the financial health of your gym. That’s profitfirstformicrogyms/five days.

Mike (00:50):

This is Two-Brain Radio. I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. We track data relentlessly over here, and revenue is a super fun category because everyone likes huge numbers, especially with a good profit margin. In April Nat Beveridge of Hybrid Athletics was one of our revenue leaders and he’s here today. So Nate, you recently qualified as a masters athlete at the CrossFit Games and you posted this on Facebook. “I committed to my kids that I would take three years off to grow our business and spend family vacations together. Then when I turned 40, I would give it another shot.” So it looks like you accomplished your goals, but here’s the big question. How did the time off contribute to your revenue number and would it be this high had you focused on the Games for the last three years?

Nate (01:27):

So for the first part there, how did it contribute? Definitely taking that step to focusing on the business a little more, give a little back story. I had a business partner previous to that time. We both kind of had the goals at the time that our gym would be somewhere that we could work out. You know, we wanted to make a playground that we could train for the Games and make the Games and that kind of stuff. And we were very successful in our first bunch of years doing that.

Nate (01:56):

Yeah, we had, you know, a team go to the Games three years in a row and then we just missed and then we kind of transitioned to get ready for masters type stuff and then both qualified in masters. And then at that stage, we kind of diverged in our goals and plans and stuff like that. And I wanted to turn the company into more of a business, still provide an awesome space for people to train, obviously, and have an amazing community, but I wanted to deep dive into creating something that my family could live from, not just kind of scrape by, right. So we separated, I bought him out of the company at the time, and then that’s kind of right after the Games when we decided to turn it into a business and actually get some systems in place and try to grow the business.

Nate (02:41):

And so I still worked out regularly. I still did some local competitions and things like that. I would compete in the Age Group qualifier, but my training focus switched to, you know, I did class once a day, if that, and, just became a regular CrossFitter right. And my years of experience helped still for me to be able to compete as much as I wanted to, but I spent more of my focus on building systems and hiring staff and developing the staff. We didn’t ever do really a lot of advertising, but just being in the community, being around, having conversations and those kinds of things, and just like, you know, nose to the grindstone, doing work, tracking some more metrics, actually paying attention to things. And after about a year of doing that on my own, and seeing Chris Cooper’s face, seeing his mug on Instagram and things like that.

Nate (03:36):

And I think maybe you started working there. And so I saw it a little more, Sean Woodland did a few things and I kind of was like, OK, this Two-Brain things looks like something I want to look into. And then like anybody that got into gym owning just to have a, you know, that was my full-time gig, but it was like spending money was like trying to get milk from an almond. I realized you can do it, but it’s a lot of work. So I wasn’t big on spending money. But then once I did invest in Two-Brain, I saw the value of it immediately. It’s tremendously helpful and helped kind of reiterate the things that I already thought I knew and was coming along with. And so through my own experiences and all that, and then all the things that I learned through Jeff Larsh was my mentor at Two-Brain and talking to Coop and all the different things, yeah, developed systems. And so had I been training just for the Games, it’s a really difficult thing to do. It’s a lot of time and effort and you have to prioritize something and it’s kind of like, you can only burn so many candles at the same time. Right. So I think if I had not reset and planned on really focusing on the business, I definitely wouldn’t be at where I am right now with the revenues and the way that our business has grown as much.

Mike (04:58):

An interesting question. I asked it to Kate Rawlings, Kate Spinner now who competed the Games many years ago. And I asked her if she would be able to do it. She said no. With her focus on training for the Games, it was so all encompassing. She said she wouldn’t have been able to do it. And I’ve asked other Games athletes, I haven’t had a chance to like ask Rich Froning, you know, Hey, how tough is it to train for the Games and run your gym? But I don’t know how much, you know, Rich is involved in the actual details of his gym. And he might be like dialed right in. But I know the training is obviously a big focus for him. So it’s an interesting thing. And I’ve thought about guys like Ben Smith too, like at CrossFit Krypton, Ben top Games level athlete, running a gym is tough.

Mike (05:34):

You know, like, you know, it takes a ton of work. So I was really curious to see you kind of boomerang back where you hit the Games for a number of years, took some time to really focus. And I loved reading your story on Facebook, listeners, check it out on Facebook, if you have the chance and then to see you get back to the Games with high revenue numbers. So let’s dig into that a little bit, share as much data as you feel comfortable with, but I’m curious, like how diverse is your revenue stream? Do you have like 30 different programs, three big different programs, or what do you do? What are your top contributors to that?

Nate (06:01):

We do a lot of personal training. So that month, I believe we were on the leaderboard for April, May. Right. And then I think I talked to Coop about this too. And one of the questions he had was whether that was an anomaly month than we thought it would be. It would continue. It’s actually it was probably our lowest month of the year, that just happened to be the month that you guys tracked for. It did happen to be also one of those months that hits with like the extra four days of the month, are like, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And so they were the lesser days. And so, March and May were better months in terms of more busy days. Our busiest days are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So revenue stream wise, we have a ton of personal training.

Nate (06:48):

We’ve always pushed that as our, and I don’t want to say push it even. It’s always just been something that we’ve talked about as the key to the fastest growth. Like you sit with a person and you say, if you want to get somewhere the fastest, one-on-one personal training is your best way to get there, nutrition, coaching and so on. So forth. The example I use is with my kids, you know, I put them in a group swimming lesson and there’s eight kids and some of them are fooling around and the instructor has to spend all their time dealing with those kids. And my kids don’t get as much attention and they don’t maybe progress as far. Whereas I put them in a private lessons, it costs me more, but they progress twice as fast. And in the long run, it actually costs me less because of the progress that they make in those private sessions.

Mike (07:32):

You’re buying time, essentially. Totally.

Nate (07:34):

And so you look at a group session, even with 10 people in an hour, that’s six minutes per person. And if you purchase a full hour to yourself, that’s 10 times as much time, 60 minutes, and you’re probably not paying 10 times as much money for that private session. Right. So you’re paying your minutes essentially. So our personal training has been very big, especially, with the pandemic and with things being closed and stuff we weren’t able to do group fitness. And so all we could do was personal training. It was a bit of a boon in that people that maybe hadn’t done personal training before, decided to do a little bit of it because they didn’t have other options at the time. And some of them decided to stay on with it as we’re now, I guess next week, we’re allowed to start running classes again.

Nate (08:22):

People have grown into realizing the benefits of personal training. So that’s always our biggest lead that’s, it’s always, since I started changing things three years ago, it has overtaken our class membership revenue, for sure. Sowe’ve got PT would be our highest revenue and it was, I want to say it was in the 52% range of our overall revenue last month. And then classes, classes are pretty low right now because of the COVID rules and regulations that we’re under. We also have a youth program that used to be run as a big class, but we’ve actually switched it over to small group, personal training sessions as we move forward into reopening so that we find we get way better results with the kids. It can be slightly more specific to each kid rather than, you know, 10 kids in a general fitness group.

Nate (09:17):

We run four kids in a semi-private session. They pay 50% more than they would normally pay, but they’re getting way more results because they’re getting a lot more hands-on attention. It also allows us to program that a lot better because with a drop-in based group fitness, like kids’ fitness, you have no idea what kids are coming and what physical levels they are. And so you have to be a really, really, on it coach. I was able to run that myself in the past with lots of experience, but it’s really hard to adjust day to day. So the new way we’re running, that is a better revenue stream for us. It’s a better result stream for the kids. So it all works out that way. We have a sublease that has physiotherapy and massage in our space. And so that’s another revenue stream.

Nate (10:04):

That’s offset some of our rent. We employ at front desk service that is all there. It’s like full business hours. We have somebody on the desk. And so the physiotherapist shares our desk. So they pay us a little bit of a wage, which is just a pass through, I guess, because they basically pay for X number of hours for those front desk staff. We have our nutrition program, which has expanded recently into we run a live zoom session for corporate groups privately. It has just begun in the last month and a half. So we’ve run three of those sessions and you get a, like a two hour cooking session live on zoom with you and 10 friends. Our coach is fantastic in front of the camera, she’s super on the fly, able to make adjustments and changes.

Nate (10:51):

And you cook a meal and do meal prep all at the same time. So she’s that all spurned out of some of our members, just not knowing how to do meal prep. And we started a zoom zoom video for that, and it became a super cool project for her where she can make some really good money on that side of thing. And then the company makes some revenue through there. The other one is we also have purchased an InBody scanner in the past six months, and we started using it to do corporate packages. So we have our first one was with this company that we have, a local construction company. We helped them to build a, this is an amazing company. If you can find someone like this, guys, this is what you need is we help them to build a facility in one of their warehouses, which is a real great gym facility, kind of, I guess like Khalipa had with some of his groups, Jason Khalipa.

Nate (11:42):

So their staff all gets free access to that gym. I do some personal training out of there for the owner and his son and his wife and their vice president, and then they also pay us to run two classes, two nights a week out of there that allows their staff to come in for classes in their facility. And we just provide a coach that’s over there and the programming and stuff like that. So that revenue stream has been good for us in terms of diversity there, where we have some classes being coached over there. We do programming for them. We’ve run the challenges. This current challenge actually ends next week. I’ll be retesting them on the InBody scanner. We had 93 people from their company sign up for a body fat percentage challenge. We provided 10 weeks of workouts, nutrition information, and like a mindset video and a mobility video each week to help them along the way. And then that’s uniquely scalable down to, you know, six to 10 people can run that challenge as a group of friends. And it’s a lot of the same information, right? We’ll personalize it a little bit to each group, but a lot of the groundwork, the heavy lifting is already done for other corporations once we start to get that rolling. So that’s another stream that we’re hoping to build into.

Mike (12:57):

That’s a little more diverse than some gym owners that I’ve spoken with. So, but essentially it boils down to, you’ve got your group training, you’ve got your PT, you’ve got nutrition, you’ve got kids and you’ve got a sublease. And then you can kind of tack onto some offsite, PT group training, nutrition stuff, and so forth, but it’s still about like five different streams or something like that. But the interesting part is that you said that PT is your highest one, is that correct?

Nate (13:22):

Yeah. By far, yeah.

Mike (13:23):

By far, so that’s interesting. And we won’t beat the COVID thing to death because it’s been going on for so long, but it is worth noting that, you know, you’re cranking up really good revenue during a pandemic when you’re not even able to operate the way you would normally operate. Do you see that number jumping up once restrictions go away and you’re able to group classes again?

Nate (13:42):

Definitely. I would say our group class revenue is at about, I think last month it was maybe 55% of what it was on average pre pandemic. So that number will jump up. I think a small number of that will be from people that switch back. So we have a handful of personal training clients that’ll maybe go back to class. So we’ll lose a little bit of training revenue there, or perhaps people that are doing more days a week of personal training than they used to might drop a day or two. And they might do, you know, two PTs and three classes a week instead of three or four PTs.

Mike (14:19):

Yeah.

Nate (14:19):

Right. So some of those might drop off. But I don’t see, I think I projected yesterday when I was thinking about it, like maybe, a five to 7% drop in personal training, maybe 5% of what’s happening right now, but then that same revenue be offset by the, not just those same people increasing their group membership, but we’ve got obviously, you know, I think we lost, like I said, 40 to 50% of our members through the pandemic from group fitness that are kind of, I feel like most of them are just waiting in the wings for everything to reopen and be able to sign back up. So those people are there. They’re hot leads obviously because they’re previous members that are ready to go to sign up again. But we’re also through our GLM website getting leads every single day for new people.

Nate (15:07):

And I think as soon as things do start to open, there’s a lot more cognizant people of health and fitness and being healthy to fight off things like COVID-19 and the flu and the cold and just anything like that. So they’re all ripe and ready to get into fitness. And then the fact that, you know, upersonal training is more personalized. You can control the variables a lot more. You’re not in a globo gym where you don’t know who’s been there, who’s touched what, how much it’s been cleaned, all those things. It might feel safer to some people. So I think people are when they do start to come back, the growth that we have rather than being people looking for the lowest common denominator and the cheapest price, they’ll be looking for better service.

Nate (15:55):

And I think that’s where maybe why our personal training has grown so much over the years is that we’ve just really prided ourselves on providing the highest level of service in that possible. So we have that, like I said, we employ our front desk staff. So when you walk in, you’re greeted by someone, we have a towel service, we’ve got really nice, like, hotel quality bathrooms, like really fancy tile and all that stuff. And then you come into the gym and it’s like hard-work space, but we wanted to marry that boutique type feeling in the front with the hard work in the back, you know, like a mullet, right?

Chris (16:31):

We know that getting clients results isn’t enough to make a great business or a great career, but it is the foundation. If you’re not getting your clients results, none of the other stuff matters. Your marketing plan, your operations plan, your retention plan, your systems, how much you care about the clients. You need to get them results. What does it take to get a client results? Long-term behavior change, short-term habit change. It means learning skills like motivational interviewing, peer-to-peer programming. It means focusing on things like adherence and retention instead of novelty. And I built twobraincoaching.com with my partner, Josh Martin, to teach coaches how to do this. More than ever before it is critical to get results for your clients. You need to charge a premium fee. You need to provide high value to warrant that fee. And what is most valuable to the client? What do they care about the most? The results on the goal that they choose. Twobraincoaching.com has programs set up to help your clients achieve those goals. We will train you and your coaches to deliver personal training, group training, online training, nutrition coaching, and coming soon, mindset coaching, in a way that’s simple for you to adopt, it’s legal everywhere. And it’s super effective. These courses were built by experts with years of experience getting clients results. Twobraincoaching.com is a labor of love for me, and I know you’re going to love it too.

Mike (17:59):

Yeah, exactly. Like a mullet. With Games season coming up, we can’t talk about mullets enough for some of the competitors that are on the podium in recent years. Let me ask you this. When you’re talking about some of the amenities and some of the really sweet features at a gym, they come at a cost. Do you keep a close eye on profit margin? Because again, gross revenue doesn’t really mean much if your expenses are equal to, or above that. So with the amenities that you provide, you keep a real sharp eye on the profit margin?

Nate (18:25):

Definitely. I definitely adhere to that thought that it’s great to have a million dollar company, but if you’re only making 3% profit, you know, $30,000, if you can make $50,000 on 300, well, that’s a lot less work for the same amount of money. Right. So we want to make sure that we’re not, just throwing money after emptiness, right? So I try to track how much we spend in each area and what it’s going to and see if there’s a return on investment. So thinking of like advertising, even, we haven’t really done a whole lot because we continue to grow at a rate that we can. I mean, I’m having to hire staff all the time. We’re having a hard time handling the growth that we currently have. So I can’t imagine if we did throw money after advertising, besides doing like local golf tournaments and, and donations to auctions and supporting charities and getting out in the community and stuff.

Nate (19:18):

We don’t do a lot of paid newspaper, print, all those kinds of things. So I do definitely follow the profits. At the same time, I am very much, fulfilled by knowing that I’m providing, especially during this past year with the pandemic and everything, providing a living wage and a quality job and position for we now have 17 employees and I have a full-time coach that’s going to make probably a hundred thousand dollars this year. And other coaches that are becoming full-time and making good living wages. So that really fulfills me as a business person and a human as well. So I feel really good about that, but at the same time, I do need to watch profit margin because I’ve got a family and four kids and all kinds of goals for the future to be able to grow this place and help more people. Cause that’s the ultimate goal.

Mike (20:20):

Profit margin numbers make you happy. Like where’s your sweet spot there? Are you targeting like, kind of like in that 30% range or is it different for you?

Nate (20:28):

It’s tough. The way that I’ve adjusted some of my tracking and the like trying to take the money out and stuff like that, it’s different. We’ve been paying ourselves differently this year than we have in the past where we maybe made greater profits but we didn’t pay ourselves as much trying to watch lines of stuff. Right. But, I think probably in that, 20 plus percent, but in the 20 to 30% range, I think if you’re making more, a greater percentage than that, then perhaps there’s room for re-investment, to create growth and to help other people and maybe prop up your coaches and stuff like that and help them along the way. But that’s probably a safe marker to look for to see. It’s also whether you’re tracking how much you’re doing too. Right. Like if it looks like I’m making 30% profit, but I’m only paying myself $40,000 a year and I’m working 90 hours a week, I’m not really making that much profit. Right.

Mike (21:26):

Yeah. It’s such an important one because I always, I never want to tell people, oh, revenue is the be all and end all, because sometimes there are gyms out there, like you said, with million dollar revenue and they’re making like, they’re splitting like $20,000 among six partners at the end of the year, you know, and that’s not good. So I put that in perspective and you brought up a good point about massive hours, even if you’re making like, you know, good profit, but you’re putting in 90 hours, that’s not fun either. So that, you know, going back to your original statement about spending time with your family, that’s that net owner benefit that Chris has been talking about in some of the writings recently, let’s talk about how you did it. So Jason Cohen over at Locomotion Fitness, he’s down south in Charleston. He recently put a YouTube video up on our channel and subscribe guys, if you have not done so already, he identified key decisions that helped him get past a bunch of revenue sticking points. So over the last year, Nate, were there any specific spots for you that like just big moments where this speed bump was you clearly went over and revenue started to speed up?

Nate (22:23):

I guess the catalyst of pausing my Games training a little bit and buying out my partner and really diving into it. That was a huge giant change for things.

Mike (22:37):

It sounds like that was a mindset shift for you really where it was like you wanted to run a business. Is that right?

Nate (22:42):

Definitely. Like we just had different ideals and where we were trying to go with it originally, it was like, yeah, let’s just build a gym that’ll run itself and we’ll have a place to work out for free basically and make a little bit of money along the way. And I think what happened was I wasn’t, because my partner didn’t want to do a lot of work that way. And that’s totally cool. Like a lot of people get into owning a gym because it can kind of run itself. You don’t have to grow much. You’re happy with the level that it’s at and it just kind of floats along. And so I was kind of sitting in that regard too just letting it happen cause it’s like, well, I don’t want to do a ton of work. Like you said, if there’s six partners or two partners, you’re splitting the money. So every extra dollar you earn, you’re only making 50 cents on that dollar. And so that was a mindset shift where I was like, OK, look, I’m going to now. It’s just me. My wife is my partner. But we’re shared everything. So every dollar we make is coming towards us. So yeah, definitely. We’ve got the four kids in there, the oldest one’s 17. So he’ll be, I mean, they all work for us a little bit in some capacity.

Mike (23:45):

That’s good. I love that.

Nate (23:48):

Totally. And that’s , I mean, if they want to get into the business, that’s great. There’s no pressure there though, but they all seem to love working out and being around this stuff and that’s really cool, but so that was a big mindset shift, I would say then joining Two-Brain Business helped adjust things a little bit more and kind of clarify a bunch of pieces and understand those things. I recently, I guess I got recently within the last maybe nine months, we had gone through a couple—of my wife was our manager on the front desk, and then we hired someone else to take it over. It didn’t work out perfectly there, but I transitioned one of my coaches into taking over as that service desk manager area. And she’s sliding over to GM soon. That was big in terms of her skill set and things that she was able to do to free me up to do a little bit more, you know, there’s just different angles and different pieces and it’s hard for one person to be doing all millions of things.

Nate (24:44):

And I still personal train and coach quite a few hours a week because I enjoy that. But that was another big shift there, but there wasn’t a lot of like, oh, wow, this is a mindset shift or big changes. I think my background coming from personal training only, essentially with my first few years in the business that was already there as a mindset, that personal training was a big thing. And it’s kind of just grown and grown from there. We have one great coach, I mentioned, that’s going to make a hundred thousand dollars this year. She’s been with us for, I guess, three or four years now. And she’s definitely been a huge addition to our team and she’s very helpful and, just such a caring, awesome person. And we all, I think all of our staff does personal training with each other as well. And so that bleeds out to the membership, seeing like, oh, well, if it’s good enough for you guys, then that’s good enough for us, right? Like if the best way for me, I work with Kelsey, our nutrition coach and she’s my nutrition coach. And so if me as a Games level athlete, every coach needs a coach. And so if I’m showing that even I can use coaching, then our members see that like, oh wow. If they think that it’s valuable, then it must be valuable to us as well.

Mike (25:57):

I always thought that, you know, and it was always important to me that our people in our gym did our programming because I saw what happened when they didn’t, because all of a sudden it looks like the chef who’s not eating at your restaurant. You know, what’s wrong with the meal? You know, it really doesn’t set a good precedent. So I love what you’re saying there, because it really helps people understand that if you’re doing it, it’s good. Because I’m not saying you can’t do this, but I’ve seen gyms and I’ve talked to gym owners who, you know, they they’re adamant about, you know, our programming is great and stuff, yet they do specialized outside programming. It sets a really weird optic for the membership. And I’m not saying you can’t do it, or shouldn’t, I’m just saying, if I was in the membership, I’d be like, why aren’t you working out with us? You know, it’s interesting.

Nate (26:41):

Definitely. I mean, so I follow our class programming myself. I do all our programming. We don’t follow an outside programmer right now. I just find, I know our climate, I know our weather, I know our members, I know our equipment, I know our space. I know how many people are coming in each day and I can, I can adjust for all those variables and factors. And then the fact that I’m also following the programming, I know that like, oh, wow, Monday really hit those shoulders a lot harder than we thought it was going to. We need to adjust Thursday a little bit to figure that out. Right. So that helps. But then at the same time, like you said, people will see that, oh yeah, he’s doing the same workouts that we are. It gives them a number to shoot for at the same time.

Nate (27:23):

If I’m doing them a little faster, a little heavier or whatever it happens to be. But it also shows that I think it’s what’s best for general physical preparedness. And that’s what CrossFit is. Right. And so why would I be doing something else? I’ll just say, I’m going to add at this point in my training for the Games, I’m adding a little bit more of the higher skill stuff, a little bit longer things, things like that that I might not do in a general class, I do a lot more muscle-ups than our classes do. But generally speaking. Yeah, definitely. Right. So I’m trying to prep for those things and not everybody needs to prepare for those things as a general physical preparedness program.

Mike (28:00):

Yeah. You’re at elite level of the sport. It becomes a little different at that point, but you’re a bit of a unicorn in a lot of ways where there aren’t too many guys, like you running around around who’ve been at the Games five times. So that totally works out. Let me ask you this. Revenue generating plans for the future, you hinted at some of them already with some of the corporate stuff you’re doing. Are there any specific areas that you’re really focusing on growing that we haven’t talked about already?

Nate (28:22):

Our nutrition piece that we have, so that dinner and a meal prep thing, we’ve just begun. So we’re looking at growing that from not only being, like a corporate type purchase, so you pay, you know, whatever, it’s $500 for a one-time two hour zoom session with the coach and they walk you through it and you ask questions and it’s a super awesome experience. We’re looking at running that as maybe a subscription, so maybe we record them and then you can rent, rent a DVD kind of thing, like rent a zoom link for a weekend. And now, yeah. Right. So you don’t get to ask the questions per se, because it’s not live, but you can still follow along. And, whether that becomes a paid subscription, external for everything else, or it becomes part of the nutrition program, you get one of these per month, if you’re in our nutrition program and that changes the rates or whatever.

Nate (29:16):

That’s one side of it. There’s a lot of growth in the neighborhood here in terms of like, developments and housing projects and stuff. And so, we’re looking at getting into the welcome baskets and things like that. So, that’ll just be regular growth, I guess, in terms of number of members and things like that. But putting the thing in where you’re like, you know, you buy a new condo up the street and you get a free personal training session at Hybrid Athletics just down the hill. So it gets us in front of some more eyes that way. We’ve been developing our youth hockey program for a couple of years. It’s a big sport here in Canada, obviously, and all sports in general. My son plays basketball. And so we’re growing in that regard as well, but developing our off season, work with the young athletes we get into the schools locally.

Nate (30:04):

So I’m trying to develop that relationship to where we can get into the schools, because schools are understanding that high-performance PE is an important piece of what people are looking for nowadays. So my son does 7:00 AM, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, in the gymnasium. And whether they’re in lifting weights or they’re shooting hoops, it’s part of a PE program that they do. And they bring us in a couple of days a year. And so we’re looking at having that grow to a larger scale so we can get into more schools and be in there more often. And then that becomes revenue generating through not only the sessions that we do in the school and maybe professional development days, but also exposure to those youth athletes who then come into our programming and they’re looking to make, you know, division one scholarships or whatever it is. They want to get some extra training with a personal trainer, it’ll grow those side of things. Right.

Mike (30:56):

So it sounds like you’re, you know, you’re generally focusing just on acquiring, high value members for your programs, but then also creatively reaching out into the specialty areas to create some new and, you know, very creative offerings. Like, I love the idea of some of the stuff that you’re doing with the corporate programs, the online zoom nutrition, and really focusing on that. How much would you want to maintain? Like, is it kind of like group PT, you kind of maintain where you’re at and grow on that specialty side, is that kind of the focus or have I got that wrong?

Nate (31:25):

No, that’s probably probably correct. Like, obviously we had to do a lot of soul searching and thinking through the pandemic and like making decisions on nobody knew what it was gonna be like when they come out the other side. Right. And so is space going to be at a premium, are we always going to have to separate and create a 10 foot divide between each person? Can we only fit X number of people in our facility in the future? And so we had to look at like, what does it look like if we only do personal training and don’t do group, what does it look like to have smaller classes? So you have guaranteed hands-on more, and it’s higher rates, like all the different things. I think that we’ll end up going back to the same alignment we had before.

Nate (32:06):

We never really had more than 10 people in a class for the reason of coaching and hands-on service. There was the odd class that had more. We do have registered classes now, so we’ll be capping that at 10 once we’re allowed to have that. But we kind of came to the consensus that we’ll never really get rid of the group side of things, because a lot of our personal training, a lot of it’s just straight personal training. But a lot of it’s also driven by, I do classes four days a week, and I really want to get better at this one specific skill or a little bit of this skill and that skill. And so I’ll do once a week personal training to continue to work on that. Right. So the community is just, it’s great in the personal training development, everybody’s always around, but I think having the classes running simultaneously and having people to do some PT, some class, it just creates a little bit more of the community feeling.

Nate (32:56):

But at the same time, like we don’t, I know there’s the Dunbar number and 150 and stuff. We’re kind of in that range. And that’s probably where we want to stay. We don’t want to grow too much beyond that number to where you just become a number. Right. We want, like, my wife has stepped back a little bit from being on the desk and in the gym as often, she has a second job that she does outside of here. And I’ll sometimes talk about a new member and she gets upset with herself that she doesn’t know who they are. Right. And they’re brand new. So it’s not like she hasn’t known who they are for six months, but she was always used to knowing every single person. And so she’s really worked back into having that feeling of knowing who everyone is.

Nate (33:40):

And obviously there’s like morning people, afternoon people, they might not know each other or whatnot, but it’s nice to have that community feeling that everyone knows each other. Everyone feels safe, again, not to harp on the pandemic thing, but when you were coming to our gym during that time, you knew that everybody who was coming cared about you and would have the wherewithal to be like, you know what? I got a little bit of a sniffle today. I’m not coming to the gym. I’m not gonna put my friends at risk. Whereas if you don’t have that tight knit community feeling, you might not feel as safe in a public setting with people that you don’t know or whatever.

Mike (34:13):

Yeah. That makes sense. Here’s the last one I’m going to ask you, when you go to the CrossFit Games this year, is your gym going to grow and thrive in your absence more so than it would have been previous years?

Nate (34:24):

With me not being here. Yeah, I think so.

Mike (34:27):

Like, at the competition floor, can you kind of rest easier knowing that you’ve got the systems and everything in place now where you can take that time off?

Nate (34:36):

Definitely. Yeah, definitely. I have really great staff that really have bought into the culture and the values of our system and our plan. And like I said, I try to hire good humans and then we can make you a better coach. I can’t make you a better human. So we hire good humans and we help to make them better coaches. My GM, Allie, is fantastic. And so having a person in that role will definitely help. I do understand that there probably be some fires that I would normally have snuffed out before they started. And there’ll be, you know, we’ll see where the holes in the boat are having me be away, but that test is awesome because for the long term, it’ll really help me to be able to plug those holes and know where we need to get to one day have functional retirement or be able to step back and not have to be hands-on with all the different little things that occur on an everyday basis.

Mike (35:38):

I love it. I’ll be cheering for you at the CrossFit Games, but more than that, I’ll be cheering for Hybrid Athletics to keep driving up revenue while you’re gone competing. So, Nate, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story about how you drove up and got on our April leaderboard. Thank you.

Nate (35:51):

Awesome. Thanks so much, Mike.

Mike (35:54):

I’m Mike Warkentin with Nate Beveridge on Two-Brain Radio. Please subscribe to this podcast for more episodes. Now, before you go, be sure to join Gym Owners United group on Facebook. FOMO alert, the smart kids in the gym biz hang out in there and we need your voice. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook. Join it today.

 

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Maximizing ROI on Mentorship

The value of mentorship snowballs over time.

The changes you make with your mentor will echo for decades—throughout the life of your business and your career.

Imagine making an extra $10,000 per month for the rest of your career. That’s what our top gym owner is doing right now by generating return on investment (ROI) in mentorship. Here’s the list:

Now, you’ve probably heard stuff like this before:

“I got $12k new MRR this month!”

That’s “monthly recurring revenue,” and you know it won’t last. One marketing tactic, though powerful in the moment, usually runs its course in three to four months.

Or maybe you’ve heard this one:

“I had 40 people commit to a year-long contract this month!”

And you know that 70 percent of those people won’t actually pay out their full contracts. Trust me: It happens in gyms—and with the many “biz coaches” out there.

But knowledge compounds. Leadership compounds. Experience compounds.

Here’s what our top ROI earners said they do to maximize the return on their investment in mentorship:

Rely on mentorship to provide accountability.Use mentors as filters to avoid overwhelm and lack of focus.Use specific Two-Brain resources at the time when they will have the greatest effect on an area of focus.Sign staff up for Two-Brain’s Team Training.Block off CEO time to ensure focused windows for implementing tactics from the Two-Brain Roadmap. Hire staff to allow more time for high-value action.Use Career Roadmap sessions to connect with staff and create buy-in by ensuring gym goals reflect staff goals.Solve the “icon problem” through staff development.Teach all staff members to sell and create redundancy so growth doesn’t slow if a staff member leaves.Invest and Grow

Every time you fix a painful mistake, you ensure you won’t repeat it.

Every time you upgrade your team, you ratchet up your value.

Every additional month you keep a client is a month in which they’ll see more progress, refer more friends, and contribute more value to your community and your bottom line.

All these things multiply one another. That’s the value of mentorship.

In the next post in this series, I’m going to teach you how to get a better ROI on everything in your business—your team, your software, your space. And in Part 3, I’m going to tell you how to pick the best mentor for you (it might not be me).

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The Shake Weight Is Still Out There—and It’s Stealing Your Clients

Just think about how fit we’d all be if we’d truly harnessed the power of “dynamic inertia.”

Those of you who know your fitness gimmicks—or watch a lot of late-night TV—will recall that dynamic inertia was the gainz-driving force behind the Shake Weight. It supposedly offered the cure for flabby arms and sagging shoulders.

In reality, it was total BS.

I have vivid memories of the Shake Weight—and not just of the gloriously entertaining wink-wink parodies it triggered almost instantly on “Saturday Night Live,” on “South Park” and in literally every gym in the world.

I recall being at the Arnold Sports Festival in 2011 and seeing an impossibly jacked fitness model hawking the Shake Weight (see Page 4 here). And I know I saw it prominently featured in one CrossFit gym’s large collection of “novelty items,” which also included the Thigh Master—which is still available, BTW.

For entertainment purposes only, I present two lists:

Fitness Gimmicks: 15 Unforgettable (& Ridiculous) Exercise ProductsThe 10 Most Embarrassing Fitness Gimmicks Ever

Alas, the Shake Weight’s time was short—even when the product evolved to feature variable resistance in a Pro model. Consumer Reports, WebMD and others debunked the suggestive fitness solution as less effective than traditional implements and movements.

I bring the Shake Weight up for two reasons:

The Shake Weight and comical products like “The Frog” are not gone. They’ve just evolved and changed form.People are regularly taken in by empty promises in marketing.

As a gym owner and fitness expert, it’s your duty to educate people so they don’t waste their time and money.

Experts and Lies

I won’t name and deride current worthless fitness gimmicks.

But you don’t have to look far to find snake oil.

And neither do your clients and prospective clients.

Some products might actually work to a very small degree, adding 0.5 percent to an athlete’s performance. At the super-elite level, maybe that increase is the difference between gold and silver, and the product should be considered.

Literally anywhere below that level, the product is a hundred times less important than working out consistently and eating vegetables regularly.

And most of the products are utter and complete nonsense. Everyone knows it—except for a huge number of helpless people who desperately want to get fitter but don’t know how to do it.

That’s where you come in as a trainer or gym owner.

You need to provide real knowledge—to your clients and to prospective clients who are looking for help.

Last week, I gave you five blog ideas. This week, I’m solving your content problems for all time.

Helpful Content for Clients

If you’re ever hard up for something to write about on your blog or social media, do one of these two things:

A. Tell people exactly how to get real results.

B. Explain why fitness gimmicks are not effective.

Here’s the truth: As stupid as most ridiculous fitness products are, people spend money on them.

I guarantee that someone in your life has fallen prey to some marketing ploy and purchased a gloriously ineffective powder, mask, mouthpiece, wrap, cleanse, device or workout system. And these are people you know—people close to a fitness pro.

Outside your circle of influence, misguided people are desperately throwing credit cards at hucksters who are taking orders at an unbelievable pace.

That means people are wasting money—and have money to waste. You can prevent people from being fleeced and grow your business at the same time.

It’s a big win for everyone because your services actually get results. And you deserve to make money for having real solutions.

Do This—and Don’t Do This!

Here’s a media principle that will guide you from now until your retirement:

Anytime you can’t think of anything to publish, put the lie to some silly trend or ineffective gimmick.

If you want two lifetimes of blog ideas, take some advice from Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper and answer common fitness questions for your audience.

But here’s the secret: Don’t mock a dumb product and the poor people who use it. That will just come off as mean. It will shame users and turn them off to your message. And don’t just say something is “stupid.”

Instead, use your knowledge as a true fitness pro to explain why a certain type of product is ineffective. Provide evidence. Then tell your audience exactly what to use or do instead. Compliment users for being willing to invest in their health, then give them real solutions. Be kind but direct.

As Chris has said repeatedly, it’s just not enough to say “don’t do this.” Anyone can do that. Even the snake-oil vendors.

To have an effect, you need to answer two questions: “why?” and “what else?”

You already have those answers. And they’re obvious to you. But they aren’t so obvious to the general person.

So state your case—over and over.

If you do, you’ll help people and you’ll help your business.

The post The Shake Weight Is Still Out There—and It’s Stealing Your Clients appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Chris Cooper Answers: “Should You Change Your Marketing Plan?”

Andrew (00:02):

What are the keys to good marketing, and should you change your plan regularly? Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper will tell you right after this.

Chris (00:09):

Chris Cooper here to talk about Beyond the Whiteboard, the world’s premier workout tracking platform. Beyond the Whiteboard empowers gym owners with tools designed to retain and motivate members. We all know clients need to accomplish their goals if they’re going to stick around long term, and Beyond the Whiteboard will help your members chart their progress. They can earn badges view, leaderboards, track their macros, assess their fitness levels, and a lot more. Your job is to get great results for your members. Beyond the Whiteboard’s job is to make sure your members see those results and celebrate them. For a free 30-day trial, visit BTwb.com today.

Chris (00:42):

Hey everybody, it’s Chris Cooper here and today I’m answering questions about marketing that some of you have been kind enough to ask me through email. So first thank you with trusting me to answer your questions. We send emails to about 29,000 people every single day, over 40% of you open these emails and read them every single day, which is tremendous. And many of you, dozens of you every single day, write back. And sometimes when I get the same question over and over and over, I know that this is something that will matter to a lot of people. And so I record it as a podcast instead, or we create a free guide for people to help them. So the first thing that I want to start with is a great email that I got a couple of days ago. And he said, Chris, which marketing strategy do you teach?

Chris (01:29):

Because I’ve been using this Facebook marketing strategy and it’s not really working anymore. The thing about mentorship is that we teach all different types of marketing. Maybe I’ll back up a little bit. The core of your business rarely changes. You sell fitness coaching. The method of your business changes sometimes, but not frequently, maybe every five to 10 years, you might find a new method that works better and change your method, the delivery, and your sales process. These get upgraded over time and you see small incremental changes, but you never really completely change everything. The core marketing fundamentals, these don’t ever change either. Things like getting referrals, um, going out and meeting new people face to face. These things never go away, but advertising does change. When I started a gym, I was buying pages in the yellow pages, right? Ads in the yellow pages. People were still buying billboards.

Chris (02:27):

People were getting into like geurilla marketing and they were actually staging car crashes and stuff like that to get attention and like driving tanks down the middle of streets to get attention for airlines and Coca-Cola and stuff like that. That’s gone now. And it’s been replaced by digital marketing. The old marketing or the old advertising required a lot of creativity. You had to like grab people’s attention. But now everybody’s attention is so scattered and scarce that you have to use data. So where once you used to be like a great ad person, if you had the most creative ads, now you’re a good ad person. If you can disseminate data, figure out what’s working, tweak your ad and redeploy. You have to be more of a scientist than an artist now. And that’s how we approach advertising. We look at data from all the gyms in our data set.

Chris (03:16):

We say, what’s working right now. Where is it working? How is it working best? And what can we expect from it? So when I get questions like, should I switch to Facebook or Instagram or Tik-Tok? The answer, and I’m sure this is disappointing as always, it depends. So first I want to walk through how we approach marketing, and then I’m going to answer some very specific questions about different platforms and methods. In general, when we teach marketing, we start with the easiest wins. So upgrading the value of your current clients, offering them more value. Then the next step is to recapture former clients. When people quit your gym, it’s not a breakup. It’s rarely even a goodbye forever. These are people who actually know like, and trust you, and they want to come back. If you’ve got a good strategy for it, then we turn to nurturing leads who are already on your list.

Chris (04:06):

So people who are interested in your service, but they don’t have any sense of urgency. They don’t know why they need this right now. And usually that means like your email list, or if you have a public Facebook group, it’s people who are in that group. Then we set up a referral process that we call affinity marketing. Now sometimes by this fourth step, I’m going to be honest, we can get a gym to 150 members and a hundred thousand dollars in net owner benefit. And the gym owner says, you know what? That’s good. At my gym Catalyst, we haven’t run ads in about six years because we haven’t needed to. We ran ads for a little while. We brought people in, we kept them for a long time. We generated referrals from them and that’s the key to good marketing. When you bring somebody in, that person should be able to turn into two or three people.

Chris (04:52):

If you’ve got these other systems in place. But most gym owners actually skip over these initial steps because they are attracted to the novelty and the sexiness of like Tik ToK ads or Clubhouse. When really, if they focused on just getting the fundamentals right first, having a good referral plan, having a good plan to recapture former clients and upgrading the value of your current clients, they might not need to run ads at all. Now there’s a difference between marketing and advertising. So we’re going to refer to marketing as talking to your friends and advertising as talking to strangers. OK? So after we’ve worked out a referral plan and the other steps that I just mentioned, we moved to organic digital marketing strategies, like direct response. So one of the sexy strategies right now that you’ll see a lot is sell by chat. And really there’s no proven template for sell by chat for gym owners yet, but we’re working on that and sell by chat works well on different platforms, depending though on your presence there.

Chris (05:53):

So for example, I personally don’t have an Instagram presence. If I started an Instagram account and then started doing sell by chat, it might be successful because I’m present everywhere else. And I’ve got this big bank of content. If you’re just starting out as a brand new gym, people have no scope of reference for what you’re selling. You don’t have a bank of content. You’ve got a brand new Instagram account. Sell by chat won’t work very well for you. You have to have already established trust to use sell by chat. Tik Tok is another great example. If you’re looking for like a really younger clientele who are quickly attracted to a very short message, who aren’t really looking for expertise, but might be looking for a lot of fun, tik tok can work. And we’ve got some gyms who are proving that it can work.

Chris (06:40):

However, that’s not a good fit for my demographic. So my demographic is still best represented on Facebook. Some of the mentors do their best work with DMs on Instagram. It really depends on your gym. And so a mentor’s job is to audit your gym and say which marketing platform is going to be the best for you for doing organic. And then the final step in advertising is paid ads. Which platforms should you use? It’s the one in which you works best organically for your gym. So if you’re getting good traction organically on Facebook, by all means, invest in Facebook ads. If you’re getting good organic traffic on Instagram or Tik Tok, or even LinkedIn, invest in ads on that platform. Paying for the platform, doesn’t make it effective. It should already be effective and paying for ads should just dump some gas on the fire.

Chris (07:33):

So after we identify what’s working organically, then we add juice by running ads. So that’s really step six or seven in most cases. And every lead who comes in through those ads should be able to generate multiple new clients because they go through all this other stuff, referral process value, upgrade that kind of stuff. And of course, none of this matters unless your sales process is strong. So we also measure set rates, show rate, close rate. And in fact, we train gym owners on sales first, so that every new client that comes in is a real opportunity. I’ll give you an example of where this goes wrong. You hire an ad agency, they charge you 1800 to $3,500 per month to run ads on one, maybe two platforms. They’re not from your gym. They have no incentive to optimize lead quality. So their goal is book as many free calls as we can.

Chris (08:32):

Well, you’re going to get unfiltered leads. You’re going to get cold leads. You’re going to get people who are just completely unaware of what you’re selling and they’re not prepared to buy. And then you put those people into your sales process. And even if your sales process is great, you’re closing like 10% of leads because these people are just not ready to buy from you. And a lot of those leads are unlikely to stay for very long. If your sales process is not great, you’re probably not going to sign up even 10% of these leads. And then what happens? Well, you’re using a lot of time selling and getting rejected over and over and imagine what that does to your ego. It’s like asking nine people out on a date and getting shot down every single time, every single day. Imagine how that affects your confidence as an entrepreneur.

Chris (09:19):

So your sales process is super important and you need to build that before your marketing strategy, which changes. But before you build your sales process, you need to have a retention strategy because if your sales process is strong and your marketing is strong, but you’re only keeping people for seven months, which by the way, is the industry average across 6,500 gyms, then you won’t be doing anything except sales and marketing and worse, you will not be keeping people long enough to change their lives. So you have to build a retention system first. And what is foundational to that retention system? Consistency and delivery. Your coaches have to deliver to the exact same standard that you do or better. Your staff has to deliver to a consistently excellent standard all the time. If you don’t have those things in place, then you’re not going to fool anybody. They’ll come in, you’ll sell them.

Chris (10:12):

They’ll sign up for your gym. And they won’t like it, or they won’t be able to use the bathroom or the bathroom will be dirty. Or the coaching isn’t great, or they get injured, heaven forbid, or maybe the classes are way too big and they’re packed and they’re not getting any attention or maybe nobody’s reviewing their goals with them. And so they don’t really know if they’re making progress. So, you know, peace I’m outta here. See, before you can really have good marketing, you have to have amazing replicable systems that don’t depend on you. Then you need to have a solid retention plan to keep people engaged. Long-term then you need to have sales systems and referral systems. Then you can add things like organic marketing lead nurture. And then finally, only then should you add advertising. Now, this was a long description and we usually address advertising last in our process.

Chris (11:04):

So that it’s most effective when you do get there. And when you do, we’ll give you hundreds of images and emails and texts that you can just copy. We’ll give you processes and checklists and worksheets for sell by chat and lead nurture after somebody’s booked an appointment, chat and email, and you know, every, every possible thing that you could think of, we give people hundreds of these things, but the 850 gyms are building their own marketing plan with their own marketing mentor from Two-Brain, not running the same lead magnets or pictures or anything else, because if you don’t learn how to do this stuff yourself, when your advertising eventually stops working and it will, you won’t know what to do next. And so this takes me to the second question that I got this week. And this is actually just a fantastic question that we hear all the time.

Chris (11:56):

So this person said, Chris, we can pay Two-Brain to learn how to do this stuff, or we can pay a company to do the Facebook and Instagram marketing for us. We’re not really sure what to do. And this is a really great question because most gym owners are weighing the decision on money. They can only afford one or the other, and time. Which one is going to make this happen for us. And I would love to say that there is a marketing agency out there that doesn’t take any time that you give them their money. And it’s like a money machine and more money comes back. But that doesn’t happen. Even when you invest in the best marketing agency in the world, they’re going to need a few months to gather data. And then maybe the ads do start working and you get a great ROI for three or four months.

Chris (12:43):

And then lead cost goes up, lead quality goes down. You’re not keeping the people, you’re not closing the people. And you have a couple of months where you’re really not getting a good ROI. And then you say, OK, I’m going to cancel. And then you start all over and it takes you two months to find the next thing. And so you’re spending all this time starting to try to get traction and figure out like, should I be advertising on Tik Tok, Instagram, and then you find another agency. And so really you’re running ads effectively about six months out of the year.

Chris (13:12):

Chris Cooper here, have you got a website designer, a marketer, a landing page software, a calendar, a CRM, and a form builder, communication platform and connecting software? You can get rid of all of it by switching to Gym Lead Machine. I use this platform along with 60% of the Two-Brain mentorship team. The average gym owner saves over 300 bucks a month with Gym Lead Machine and they’ll waive the thousand dollars set-up fee for Two-Brain Radio listeners. Switching is easy and you can go live in a week, visit gymleadmachine.com to watch a demo and book a sales call.

Chris (13:44):

The alternative to that is to start with the foundation, get the ball rolling down the hill, gathering some speed. And then when you have that foundation of good ops, good retention, good sales process, good organic marketing, you can swap out the advertising pieces really, really quickly. You can pivot. You can even hire an agency if you want to at that point, but you’ll know exactly what kind of results you should expect. You’ll have some metrics to say, Hey, look, you know, this isn’t working or, Hey, this is working really well. I’ll give you an example.

Chris (14:18):

So Two-Brain experiments with this stuff a ton. We often invest 10 or $15,000 testing ads for our gyms, because we want to be able to say, conclusively, this works or this doesn’t. We want to be able to say do this, but it’s equally important for me to be able to say, you don’t have to waste your time on that thing. It’s not going to work for gyms. So when we were testing sell by chat, we already knew what our set rate was. We already knew what our show rate was. We already knew what our close rate was. So testing sell by chat allowed us to identify and manipulate only one variable. We’re only testing this one thing. So the first thing that happened when we started testing sell by chat, which by the way is just like a DM strategy on Facebook or Instagram.

Chris (15:05):

The first thing that happened was we booked more calls. OK, great. You know, mission accomplished, right? Except that our close rate went way down and our show rate went way down. So we had our sales staff sitting on the phone, missing calls, having people no show and fewer and fewer people signing up. So we went back and we said, OK, you know, we’re $3,500 into this. Now let’s commit to doing another month, but let’s change the script to filter people better. And so our book rate went down. Fewer people booked free call. Our show rate went up though. And our close rate went up. OK. So we’ve got a handle on this. What if we do this thing to cue people better. And we invest in another $3,500 for another month to test something else. If you don’t know what your set show and close rates are, you don’t know if it’s actually working.

Chris (15:53):

You don’t know if the problem is your ads, or if it’s you, or if it’s like your staff, or if it’s the agency, you have no idea. And so you’re always just jumping from guess to guess to guess trying to figure it out and never actually getting there for us. We can easily say sell by chat works or doesn’t work. We can easily say Tik Tok works or it doesn’t work after a very short trial because we know what all of our other metrics are. We know how many people should be getting on calls. We know how many people should be showing up and how many should be signing up. And so if a platform isn’t performing, that’s obvious and we spend way less money. In fact, the money that we save over time more than pays for the ads that we buy, which are very minimal.

Chris (16:35):

So everybody in the Two-Brain program has a primary mentor to build their business. But we also have them work with a marketing specialist as they go through ramp up and they do some one-on-one calls to tailor their marketing to their gym. The problem is that paying somebody else to do your marketing won’t help you long term, In a few months, you’ll have to start all over again with researching what the next thing is, finding the expert in that space and then hiring them where we do this for you. We run tests on everything. And then we set up a marketing plan from the bottom up. Client upgrades and then client recapture and then client referral, and then organic and then ads so that every new client in your gym generates a couple of clients in your gym and stays around longer. So I’ll give you an example from my own gym, Catalyst.

Chris (17:20):

If you’ve been listening to this podcast a long time, you’ll remember that years ago, Tommy Hackenbruck and I talked about this thing that he called the new you challenge, and this was an initial six week, Facebook marketing offer that gyms used to generate a lot of up-front front-end revenue. And it worked for a couple of reasons. It worked because the gyms who used it already had a lot of local trust in their communities. It worked because they were selling something that was way more expensive than anything that sold before it worked because of the term challenge, which was very novel at the time, you might remember that there were all kinds of like cold water, dunking challenges going on and all kinds of stuff. And it worked for Catalyst. It worked the first time we had about 18 people sign up for the challenge.

Chris (18:05):

The second time we had about 11. And the problem was though that we didn’t have a plan for after new you challenge, stopped working and you know what, maybe new you challenge is still out there somewhere. Maybe it’s still working. I apologize. I haven’t heard of it in about two years. So we said, OK, what do we do now? Well, so we hired a Facebook ads company. We thought, OK, Facebook advertising works. We just need to learn how to use it, or we need to use it better. And so we started paying $3,200 per month, but when their ads didn’t return an ROI, that was it. We canceled the service. We wrote off the $10,000 we had spent. And we had to start over. We hadn’t gained anything. We hadn’t even moved the ball down field. We didn’t know how to run Facebook ads ourselves.

Chris (18:45):

We didn’t know what to use next. We didn’t know why they didn’t work. So we still didn’t know what to do, right? So there’s this like two month gap where we tried to figure out what the next step should have been. And I don’t want other gyms to go through that. There’s no way that every microgym should have to spend $10,000 each to figure out this thing doesn’t work. We should be able to do that for you. And so as a central body in the microgym community and the CrossFit affiliate space, we can do all that testing for you, show you what works. And then when we prove that it works, like in the case of Facebook ads, we can say, here are the images you need. Copy paste. Here are the texts that’s working. Copy paste. Here are the emails and the texts that you can use for lead nurture, copy paste.

Chris (19:28):

Here are some great pictures for your nutrition program on Instagram, copy paste. And all these things have been tested and proven. So while the ROI on advertising first peaks, but then shrinks over time, the ROI on mentorship snowballs over time, it gets bigger and bigger. The next thing is somebody asked my favorite question. So I’ll give you some context. On this years ago, somebody said, Chris, when you’re talking to your doctor, you never ask, what should I do? Instead you should ask, what should you do? And so I got this amazing question. I think it was from Cody this month. And it was Chris, what do you do for marketing? Because we teach all these different methods in Two-Brain somebody wanted to know like, what exactly I do. Now. Catalyst has been around for 16 years. This is almost our 16th anniversary. We don’t do Facebook advertising.

Chris (20:18):

We don’t need to. And the reason is that over the last many, many years, we have built this foundation of care and knowledge in our community. So there are other great gyms in my community. Absolutely. They’re amazing Two-Brain gyms in my community, even like a block away from mine, they have their own culture, their own community, their own feel. And we love to collaborate with them and talk with them. But my gym has been around a long, long time. And so what generally happens is that people start their fitness journey at a big chain, like the YMCAs or Good Life. And they try their best and they maybe get some initial results. Maybe they even do some personal training, but eventually they’re interested in fitness, but they want something more. They’re not sure why they’re not getting results. And so they come to us and they get coaching.

Chris (21:06):

And when they think about fitness coaching in Sault Ste Marie, they generally want to speak to the people who have been around longest. There’s also maybe one degree of separation in our town. So if I don’t know you, I probably know somebody else who has been to Catalyst over the last several years. Now, of course we didn’t start with this trust on day one. We had to build it and I couldn’t talk to everybody. And I couldn’t wait for everybody to come in my door and meet me. So what I had to do was start publishing. I had to become my own publisher. And so at first I would write on our own blog. And then I started writing for local news sites. I had this column about health and fitness, and that started attracting people to me, but some of those people weren’t signing up.

Chris (21:48):

So I had to continue the conversation by using email marketing. And so I would say, if you want more, just click here and I’ll email you once a month. And what I started to notice was that every time I sent out an email, I made an average of $320 because people would call me and say, yeah, I want to sign up. Or I want to sign my kid up, or I want to do this thing or that thing. And so I said, well, what if I just did this all the time? And so I gave one of my clients to one of the trainers to buy myself two or three hours of time every week to work on email marketing, because that’s what was working. And that’s still what we use today. Catalyst has a massive email list, probably about between seven and 10,000 people on there.

Chris (22:30):

We send out emails two to three times a week because that’s enough. And that’s all we do. Everything else is referrals. So we do affinity marketing. We’re really, really good at relationships. We’re really good at saying to our client, you’re doing a great job. I know this is a stressful time of year at your accounting firm. How can I help the other accountants in the firm? And then showing up, doing a talk, inviting people to train with us. We’re really good at that. The key to being good at that is that we don’t wait. Early on in my career as a personal trainer, I learned like my clients love me. They’re inviting me to their kid’s wedding, but they’re not referring any clients to me. So I need to take the lead on that conversation. And that’s what affinity marketing is. So what we do at Catalyst is just basically that we do email marketing.

Chris (23:18):

We do a ton of storytelling. So we share client stories on our site and on social media. And that’s it. Catalyst doesn’t have a podcast. Catalyst, I believe has an Instagram channel. I’m not on it. My younger coaches do a good job, but we post maybe three or four times a week. Mostly we just tell stories and share knowledge. The secret that I shared with my coaches 10 years ago is that I want my clients at Xatalyst to know more about fitness than any other coach in town. Because if they know more than the other coaches, they don’t have a need to go to any of the other coaches. And so we teach all the time. How do we market at Two-Brain? And so this was another question that I got this week, which was awesome. He said like, what’s your lead nurture sequence?

Chris (24:01):

And the answer, I’m just going to whisper it here. The answer is, if you’re listening to this podcast or you’re responding to my emails, you’re in our lead nurture sequence. Our lead nurture sequence is super simple. Give you the tools to make the money to pay for mentorship. Knowledge is free, right? Like I can tell you what to do. And we’ve published books and guides that you can download for free off the site. Sometimes we go on Amazon and order books for people, like we sent out 63 books to Australia this month, just because there was a group of gym owners who are struggling there and they needed help, especially like Victoria. But the thing is that knowledge, it tells you what the answer is, but it’s not the answer itself. So for example, I can tell you, yeah, you need to raise your rates.

Chris (24:48):

But that knowledge is not enough. Number one, most people won’t do it 90% of the time. They won’t. Number two. They don’t know how to raise their rates with minimal pain. Number three, they have nobody to talk to or support them through that challenging time. And so we have a mentorship company because we want to help you manage these changes. It’s not enough to know like, OK. I only need 150 clients to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. Right? How do you do that? And how do you increase client value? So our lead nurture sequence at Two-Brain is really, really long. When people sign up for our email list or join our Gym Owners United Facebook group, they either sign up for Two-Brain within six days, or it takes about six months. And so if you’ve been listening to this podcast for six months and you haven’t signed up for Two-Brain, hey, you’re due.

Chris (25:38):

If you just found us and you’re starting to listen to this stuff, take all the time you need, you know, use the resources to make some money, download the Broke Gym Owner’s Guide toMmarketing, make a thousand bucks and invest that in mentorship and then watch the results snowball. The key is to have a big picture perspective, is to be objective. If you want your business to last 30 years, you have to have somebody that can see out that far. And when you’re down in the mix of everything and coaching new classes, it’s very, very tempting to say, I’m just going to abdicate the responsibility for my marketing. I’m just going to hire an agency to do this for me. But the reality is at some point, to have a longstanding business, you have to elevate yourself enough to take the long view. In our next episode, I’m going to talk about how to automate your business. How do you use services like, uadvertising agencies and VA’s and automation software in your gym to buy you some time. I’m going to walk through the steps that you need to do to make that happen. But the bottom line is that you need to learn how to do all these things yourself, or you’ll never know what’s working and you’ll always be chasing the next expert, the next tactic, the next shiny object. Have a great week.

Andrew (26:57):

Thanks for listening Two-Brain Radio. Please subscribe for two great episodes every week. For more industry insight from Chris Cooper, join the Gym Owners United group on Facebook. Chris is constantly posting articles, instructional videos, and advice in there, and these resources will literally help you make more money. That’s gym Owners United on Facebook. Join today.

 

The post Chris Cooper Answers: “Should You Change Your Marketing Plan?” appeared first on Two-Brain Business.