Chris Cooper's Blog, page 122

Lessons From Live Events: How to Generate ROI Through Action

Andrew (00:02):

You can generate a huge return on investment on a live event if you take some tips from Chris Cooper. On this edition of Two-Brain Radio, Coop’s all about making connections and taking action that will pay off big time after a seminar or a conference.

Chris (00:14):

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Chris (00:29):

Hey, everybody, it’s Chris Cooper. I love going to summits and workshops and live events. There are a lot of reasons. Number one, I just love being around people and kind of gaining their energy and, you know, harvesting the energy of the speakers, but also the people seated next to me or seated at the table. I love collaborating. I love brainstorming, but more than anything else, I just love feeling like I’m not alone out there. You’re an entrepreneur if you’re listening to this podcast, and you know that sometimes it’s really, really hard to find people to talk to. You don’t want to bring your work home with you, and you certainly don’t want to complain in front of your spouse or your kids.

Chris (01:18):

And when you’re out with your friends, you don’t want to talk about work because they’re probably not entrepreneurs. They don’t really understand it. Even on social media, it is very hard for entrepreneurs to meet and talk to other people who are at that same level and have the same context on things. Most of the others in our lives are consumers and they see products and services and pricing and value through the eyes of the consumer. But we’re on the other side of that equation. And so it’s hard to find other people who have our viewpoint. And that’s what I love about summits. I love feeling that connection with people. It’s really, really, really easy to get a positive ROI from a summit or a workshop event. But a lot of people don’t do it. What they do is they show up, they get fired up and excited and then they go home and they quickly just get drawn back into the mundane details of their day to day.

Chris (02:14):

They don’t change anything. They don’t make any new decisions. They don’t try any new thing. And so they don’t get a financial ROI. Now, maybe it’s still worth it to go and attend and feed off the crowd’s energy and stuff. But especially in times like these, it is crazy important for you to get an ROI on the ticket price of a summit or the travel at a cost, or even to bring your team. So every year we host our Two-Brain summit for one reason: to give gym owners the chance to be inspired by people that they could never meet otherwise, and to learn the top things that they need to know right now. For example, you really need to talk to Jocko Willink. You need to hear what he has to say about the crisis and the shutdowns gyms and the surge of new clients coming back in and the change, the upheaval that probably went through your business in the last years.

Chris (03:06):

And how do you lead forward from here? Well, if you want to attend a Jocko Willink event, you’d probably be paying around 1200 bucks per person. But you will also need to hear from Lisa Nichols, who has a very different perspective, but she’s there to give you energy and inspiration and to get you fired up and to make you believe that, yeah, I can do this, but if you wanted to attend a Lisa Nichols event, you probably have to go to Barbados or Bahamas or wherever she’s headquartering right now. And you probably have to pay about 900 bucks a day. You can’t hire Seth Godin at all. It took a lot for me to get him to summit last year. But these are the people that you need. So how do you interact with them? Well, that’s why I put the summit together. To bring these people, these expensive top-line thinkers, these powerful influencers, to gym owners, so that you have access to them.

Chris (04:01):

Now I’m gonna tell you about the lessons that I’ve learned from attending big summit events in person or online. But the point here is really to get you some motivation and action to get you a measurable financial ROI that goes above and beyond just the power and inspiration of being around these people. So here’s the first lesson: one new action, any action, pays for the seminar. Pays for the workshop, pays for the summit, pays for the whole weekend. So most people show up to these events and they bring this blank notebook, right? Or like an iPad or whatever. And they scribbled out every note that they can just like they were in high school, like they’re studying for an exam, but you’re not. What you’re doing is you’re trying to take action. So instead of leaving with just a notebook full of notes and so many bullet points and drawings and doodles, that they don’t make much sense,

Chris (04:53):

I want you to leave with an action that you can start as soon as you get home. So you don’t need to learn everything from every speaker. You don’t even have to take notes. All you have to do is take one action after the event, and that will pay for the entire event itself. So our 2021 summit is 399. We kept the price low because it’s online and virtual, but we also have in-person meetups around the world. And if you’re on our website, you can see what these meetups are and you can register for a meetup. It doesn’t cost any more to go to a meetup instead of attending online. What some people are actually doing too, is they’re like renting a hotel room or a beach house, or they’re closing up their gym for the weekend. They’re bringing their staff in and they’re having this staff event with the summit.

Chris (05:38):

They’re kind of hosting their own little mini regional, but just for their staff. And that’s what I’m doing. So we’ll bring our staff together into the Two-Brain workshop. We’ll have food brought in. My staff will get to meet and interact with Jocko Willink, Lisa Nichols, Todd Herman, Bonnie Skinner, Laurie Drummond, and me of course. And we’ll make this a big bonding experience to pull my entire staff forward. I’m taking this route this year because more than ever, it’s more important for me to lead and mentor my staff, empower them, get them fired up. We’ve all been through a lot. And so has our staff. They really need this message too. So here’s what to do to get a great ROI at any event, including ours: bring a notepad and keep that notepad close, but just listen. Instead of being a secretary and taking notes so that you can cram and memorize for an exam, just wait until you’re inspired by something.

Chris (06:34):

Then write that down and write down exactly what to do. Now. All of the speakers that we bring to summit, come with an exercise, a workbook, a playbook, something that you’re going to do. You’re not going to sit there and listen, you’re going to participate. You’re going to leave with action. But that said, maybe there’s something that a speaker mentions in between the lessons or during the Q and A, or maybe there’s an insight that you gained from somebody else at your table. Maybe somebody else speaks up and says, Oh yeah, you know, I did exactly that at my gym. And here’s how it went. And you want to write down those notes, you know, that’s a $10,000 lesson right there. And so you want to have something to write on. Absolutely. Now, as soon as you’re inspired to do one actionable thing, you might want to jot that down, tear the page out, stick it in your pocket, or you might want to leave.

Chris (07:28):

Now I learned this lesson from one of the biggest founders of a software company in Canada. And this guy, when Rim that made Blackberry went under, he bought up a lot of their office space. He hired a lot of their staff and he built this online business. And I won’t tell you exactly what business he’s in because that’ll give this person away. He’s a pretty famous multi-billionaire. And he told me that he always loved going to summits, but as the pressure on his time increased, he found that he really just didn’t have time unless he was gonna take an action after the summit. So what he would do is he would book his hotel room for the entire weekend and he would get his ticket to the summit. He would show up at the summit with a notepad and he would listen until he found one action he could take.

Chris (08:18):

And as soon as he figured that out, he would write it on the notepad. He would stand up. Even if the speaker wasn’t done talking yet, he would go to his hotel room and he would act on that idea right away. And because he had the hotel room for the whole weekend, he had time to just activate and work in peace and quiet. And he found that he got a lot more results that way. Yeah, maybe he missed some speakers, but he could always go back and see them later. What really counted was the action that he took. And so what he told me was at first, he felt like this kind of FOMO, like, Oh, I’m missing out. Lisa Nichols is speaking downstairs and I’m not there. Cause I’m up here working on this thing that Jocko told me, but he would get a much greater ROI if he was solely focused on doing that one thing.

Chris (09:03):

If he tried to just learn from everybody and take notes, he’d be less likely to act on any of it, especially that first speaker, because by the end of the weekend, you’ve got so many amazing ideas that you’re not sure which one to act on. And so sometimes you just get paralyzed, right? So I get it. You feel like to get your ROI, you have to listen to every speaker, but if you signed up for the summit, you’re going to get a recording anyway. So I just want to give you permission if you’re super inspired by the very first speaker or the second speaker, and you say, Oh, I’ve got to do that. I got to take action on it. Walk away from your computer, go take action, do that thing. And then you can come back and watch the rest later if you want to.

Chris (09:46):

Now it is really, really easy to get an ROI from a summit event. The hard part is making yourself take action and actually do this stuff. Now at some live events, the best stuff happens between the messages when you’re around amazing people, you learn from their mannerisms and you learn from their presenting styles. Sometimes they’re unrehearsed comments, like the throw away lines, the unscripted answers to questions, the little jokes, they can change your life. So here are some of the lessons that I’ve picked up at live events that I couldn’t have gotten from books or courses or YouTube. And they might not have even been like the primary subject of the speaker’s talk. The first was Colin Powell. So years before the Iraq war, I was in Chicago and I just happen to like, get these amazing tickets to this summit event. I was a pretty low level staff person, just outside Chicago at this resort.

Chris (10:44):

And it was like, Oh, the CEO couldn’t make the event. And then the department head, couldn’t make the event and my manager couldn’t make the event. And so two of us got these crazy tickets and there were people speaking like Zig Ziglar. We had, Colin Powell, as I said, Margaret Doyle nd Bob Dole was like running for president or something at the time. I can’t even remember. This was so long ago. Christopher Reeves was there in a wheelchair. It was his first public appearance after getting paralyze, from being thrown by a horse. I mean the lineup was just incredible. And one of the top lessons that I learned was that you never present a problem without presenting a possible solution. And this came from Colin Powell. And at the time a lot of people actually thought that he was gonna run for president.

Chris (11:35):

And from the stage, he said, here are the problems facing America right now. And that’s OK, here are the potential solutions. And that was really insightful to me because the problems he was talking about were like nuclear conflict and pollution and the environment, all kinds of stuff, crazy stuff, scary stuff. And as he presented them, he said, these are big problems that need big solutions, but that’s OK because we are going to solve them. Here are some of the options. And that really stuck with me. And I’ve tried to teach it with every staff person I’ve ever hired first, but also when I’m talking to anybody, I’ll acknowledge the problem. If they present me with one, and then I’ll say that’s OK. And that immediately pivots the entire conversation toward finding a solution instead of reacting to the problem. OK. Another great lesson that I learned was from Seth Godin.

Chris (12:34):

Now I’ve seen him speak live about three times, actually had the opportunity to miss him in person. I kinda missed it. I was in the stage at the Archangel summit, I think around 2018, maybe 2017. And I was so engaged in some of the speakers that my cell phone just died and I didn’t charge it up. You know, back then the battery life on a cell phone was super short. And after a very full day, I went to the airport with my wife. We were sitting, waiting for our flight and I plugged my phone in and charged it up. And there was this message on my phone. And it was from Dan Martel, my future mentor, I hadn’t ever met him before. And it was just this voicemail. And it was like, Hey, Coop, it’s Dan here. My CrossFit coach told me that you were in the audience would love to meet you.

Chris (13:23):

I’m thinking about investing in a CrossFit gym. Can you come backstage, just knock on the green room door and ask for me, you know, come back, meet Seth, meet Gary Vaynerchuk, let’s get a coffee, talk about CrossFit gyms. And of course, I mean, that was my big chance to meet Dan and Seth and I missed it. And so I called Dan back right away and he’s like, Hey, come back. You know, we’ll go to dinner, but you know, my wife and I were eager to get home and see our kids. So I didn’t get to meet Seth there. But later on last year, actually with a lot of turmoil going on with COVID, Black Lives Matter, the CrossFit handoff, I mean, there were so many things changing in the average gym owner’s life that I thought, OK, we all need to tell a new story.

Chris (14:09):

We need Seth because watching Seth didn’t really teach me how to market, didn’t really teach me how to build an audience. What it did was it taught me how to tell stories. All of Seth’s presentations are usually short, 30 to 40 minutes. They’re incredibly sticky. He tells a different story every time. He has a very refined script for each presentation, but they’re always different. They always resonate with the local audience. He had jokes about hockey and canoeing when he spoke in Canada. And I’m sure he has different jokes somewhere else, but he obviously puts a lot of time and care to make it look like his presentation is off the cuff. And that presentation lasts because you tell stories. This is the number one lesson that I’ve learned from Seth over the years. And it’s probably the most important one, is that stories stick. Even if somebody is calling you names, if somebody is competing with you, if somebody is doing something different and saying that your way is wrong, ultimately, it’s the story you tell that people will remember.

Chris (15:15):

And if you tell a better story and you keep telling a better story and you tell it for long enough, eventually everybody else will fade away. This is something that I learned from Seth in 2005, and it’s a constant ongoing epiphany for me when it just keeps happening over and over in my life. You know, people who I wish were not in my space eventually go away. Dave Tate later told me that business is a battle of attrition. All you gotta do is outlast everybody else. And the way that you outlast everybody else is through better, stickier stories. And Seth has really taught me how to do that. Another amazing lesson that I’ve learned at a live event was from Henry Rollins. Now, if you’re not familiar with the Henry Rollins story, you should go look it up. I mean, this guy, he was just a punk kid.

Chris (16:07):

He loved listening to like black flag, you know, heavy metal, hard rock stuff. And, um, he knew their stuff so, so, so well that eventually they invited him to be in the band and he would just like show up and try out and stuff. I think he might’ve been a roadie for the band for a while. And there’s a great story about how he built his audience. Basically it was through direct mail marketing. So what would happen is he would get people to sign up and give him their mailing address when they bought stuff from his live shows. And then he would like write a letter every single month, like a newsletter for the band. And he would direct mail it. Like he’d put stamps on it. He would mimeograph it. That’s an old form of like a photocopier. And he would mail it to everybody on this mailing list.

Chris (16:57):

And when he got a letter back that said return to center, he would scratch that name and address off his mailing list because it was obviously fake. And then he would mail everybody else on the list the next month. And this is how he built his audience. It wasn’t just a matter of him having amazing music, or when he later formed Rollins band, having like the best band around, he’d built an audience through what we would call newsletter marketing, or we would do with email right now. And so I was really, really excited to see him speak at the Rainmaker conference in, I think it was either Denver or Boulder around 2014. And so, you know, I’m standing around and I’m waiting to go in and there’s a speaker on stage and they’re talking about something to do with software. And so I just went outside to get a breath of air because you know, it’s Denver, and walking in up the street is Henry Rollins and like one person, right?

Chris (17:52):

Probably somebody from the event who picked him up at the airport or something. And there’s a lot of people outside on the sidewalk and nobody is walking up to them. Now, if you’ve ever seen Henry Rollins before you, you would not mistake somebody else for him, or you would not look at them and think like, Oh, that’s not Henry Rollins. It’s just a lookalike. He has a very distinctive look. So he’s older now, but as he’s walking up this sidewalk, I’m like, wow, how is this guy not getting mobbed? And so I just walked right up to him, stuck up my hand and said, Hey, Henry, I’m Chris. I’ve been a fan for a long time. And he said, Hey, Chris, I’m Henry, are you here for the show? I said, yeah. He said, that’s great. I’ll see you out there. And he walked in, he took the stage.

Chris (18:37):

He was the keynote speaker. And when he got on the stage, I had a feeling that a lot of the people who were younger than me in the audience really had never heard of him. I mean, he got like, you know, a good round of applause, but it wasn’t like fan applause. You know what I mean? So he gets up there and he starts telling a story and it’s like, you know, here’s this time I got arrested for inciting a riot. And here’s some pictures. And like, here’s me living out of the van with three other dudes in the band and you know, here’s me backstage. And my forehead’s all bloody because I, you know, headbutted this other dude or whatever. And he had these crazy stories and the people in the audience just gradually woke up to like, wow, this is a father of the heavy metal movement. And a lot of people in the audience were like, Oh, I know that song. Or, you know, the CrossFitters in the audience were like, Whoa, get some go again. That’s him. You know, by the time his talk was over, everybody knew who he was and he couldn’t even fight his way off stage anymore. It was amazing.

Chris (19:41):

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Chris (20:17):

So here’s this guy, you know, white t-shirt black jeans. He’s got, you know, a little bit of a tattoo sleeve, back then that was pretty rare. He doesn’t scream. I’m important. He doesn’t have this, this gaggle of social media cameras around him. He’s not quote unquote an influencer in the modern sense, meaning he probably doesn’t have 20 million Instagram followers. He probably doesn’t know what Tik Tok is, and he’d probably hate it, but he’s an influencer in the truest sense. He’s an influencer because he’s done it. He’s been there. He’s lived through it. He has an amazing story to tell that he could share with the audience that they will love. That’s what an influencer is. The modern term of influencer seems to be tied mostly to like how many people can I get to buy this perfume. If I talk about it on my Instagram story, how many people will show up if I start a room on clubhouse, but that’s not what a real influencer is.

Chris (21:15):

A real influencer changes the culture, a real influencer strikes deeper. They alter the foundation of what we believe and think and know, and they do that by telling a story that’s true, that’s impactful. And that they’ve seen with their own eyes, or they’ve lived through. You might be familiar with Henry Rollins’ stuff. You know, if you watch the early CrossFit videos, get some go again is on like every second video. But if you really dig deep into Henry Rollins and you listen to stuff like, I know you, just Google Henry Rollins I know you, and listen to that poem, or maybe you’re more familiar with, the iron by Henry Rollins. I mean, that used to be printed in every micro gym, somewhere on the wall. You know, the iron never lies to you. 200 pounds will always be 200 pounds. That was a battle cry for a lot of us.

Chris (22:10):

But where did that come from? It came from telling a consistent story. It came from gathering his clients or his followers, his fans’ mailing addresses, and sitting down and writing them a love letter every single month. And then scrapping names off the list and writing it again the next month. That’s how this guy built an audience. He didn’t have a giant record label behind him. He didn’t have social media at all. And he built an audience by writing to them. He built fans by telling an amazing story so well over time that every person in that audience said that’s me. And that’s an amazing lesson that I picked up from Henry. Gary Vaynerchuk. So when I went to another Archangel summit, actually in Toronto, archangel’s the biggest summit in Canada, and that’s why I mentioned a few different iterations of it here. One of the headliners was Gary Vaynerchuk.

Chris (23:04):

Now I was there to see Seth and Seth is very different from Gary, but at that time, Gary was at the peak of his popularity. A lot of people loved his, you know, F bombs and yeah, yeah. Stand up for this thing and pro entrepreneurial stance. For good reason. And people were super pumped to hear from him. The problem is that even at that point 2015, 2016, 2017, he really wasn’t saying anything new. He was saying it louder. He had a bigger audience. Every second word was an F-bomb. And he would show up on stage in like a slouchy hat, old jeans, like he just was just, you know, whatever, I’m here. The problem is that his early messages, which by the way, were made popular by Seth Godin. His early messages were nothing like that. His early messages were consistent. They stuck with the audience.

Chris (23:59):

Gary Vaynerchuk became famous on YouTube because he kind of inherited this wine store from his father. And every day he would go on YouTube and would just pick a random wine, usually a pretty cheap one off the racks. He’d get on camera and he’d say, OK, let’s talk about this wine today. And this one would go really, really well with chicken, especially if it was a little bit spicy. And he was the first one to do that. And he took wine from being this, you know, kinda snooty, nobody’s an expert except for the experts. And he made wine accessible to his audience and he made people feel like they could be confident about buying wine and it exploded his wine store. And then after that, he turned into like Gary V and he started VaynerMedia. And I really respect that he did that.

Chris (24:49):

But if you watch the early videos, they really make you want to go buy wine. He talks to you like he’s talking to a friend, the F-bomb is just, it doesn’t even show up in like the first 200 videos that he does. Sometimes he’ll turn and talk to his mom off camera. Like you really feel like you know the guy. And so the best thing that I learned from Gary is to be true to your own roots. So instead of getting caught up in the hype of like who I need to be when I’m on camera or who my personality is, you really need to stay tuned to who you are. And that’s how you’ll build your first audience. Later on when you get super famous and you want to show up to events, don’t forget where you started and don’t try and pivot too much because when you pivot away from your base, you’re groundless. From Lisa Nichols, I actually learned a lot.

Chris (25:39):

So I was at an event, Lisa was not the headliner. I was there to see Todd Herman, who was already my mentor at that point. Seth was speaking again, of course. And there were a couple of others. I was really, really interested in meeting. Lisa Nichols though, was brought onstage, as kind of like the post lunch headliner. So her job was to fire the audience up. I knew that her work had been featured in the secret and on Oprah. And I kinda thought that she was going to be one of these when you wish upon a star, magic will happen. Your dreams will come true people. I really thought that. And so, you know, taking a shot at myself, I was not prepared to pay full attention. I had a lot of my staff with me. I had my teenage daughter with me and I thought, you know, maybe this will keep us from falling asleep.

Chris (26:26):

Within 10 minutes, she had the entire room on their feet. They were clapping. The people at the front were crying. They were dancing with her and there was no music. She was just like snapping her fingers. And everybody in the audience, including me was yelling. Yes. Yes. And you’ll find out why “yes, yes” is her slogan when you attend the summit. It’s irresistible. And what I realized in this room full of like seven or 800 entrepreneurs, some of them were already Lisa Nichols super fans. What I realized is that it doesn’t matter what gets you excited. It doesn’t matter what gets me excited. It doesn’t matter if it’s like Jocko that wakes you up in the morning because you’ve got this stern discipline to get up at 4:00 AM. Or if it’s Lisa Nichols, who gets you fired up at 10:00 AM, you know, because you just believe in positivity and the future and things that you can’t grasp.

Chris (27:22):

It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you get excited to continue your mission of entrepreneurship. So you might get that inspiration from Bonnie Skinner at the summit. You might get it from Jocko. You might get it from Lisa. You might get it from Todd. You might get it from Laurie or even from me. But the point is that different people will get inspired by different things. And what matters is not the source of the inspiration, but the execution of that inspiration. That’s what we’re all about as entrepreneurs. And that’s why I love Lisa Nichols now. All right. I want to talk about another benefit of attending live summits. And this is the one that kind of seems obvious, but here’s how it’s manifested in my life. I often say that I have tremendous who luck. That’s a phrase that came from Jim Collins’ book, the right people just tend to fall into my life at the right time.

Chris (28:14):

And while I, you know, I just said, I’m not a big believer in like the secret and putting your goals out to the universe. I do believe that luck is where opportunity meets preparation. And the key to opportunity is that you have to be open to it. You have to be looking for it. And when you’re looking for opportunities, you find them. There’s a lot of them out there. And when you’re looking for help, when you’re looking for the right people, you will find them. There’s no one right mentor, who’s going to just swoop in and change everything. There are probably four or five, right mentors who could really help you right now, the key is being open to finding them. And the same has been true for me with like staff business partners. I tend to find the right people when I need the most, because I’m open to finding them.

Chris (29:05):

It’s not serendipity though, because I believe in producing my own luck instead of waiting for chance. So to increase my odds of finding the right people at the right time, I attend live events, like the Two-Brain summit. I attend even online events where I know I’m going to be put into breakout rooms and mixed up with other people. And I’ve been doing this more and more. In fact, in the last 12 months, I have attended more live events than ever before in my life, even though I couldn’t travel. I like the speakers every time. Every time I like a speaker, I take something away that pays for the event every time. But the primary value that I get is in the connections that I make, even online, when I’m put into a breakout room with four or five other people, even if my business is way ahead of theirs, or even if my business is way behind theirs, I make valuable connections that I lean on down the road.

Chris (29:58):

There are so many examples of this. Two nights ago, I was invited to a summit and it was hosted by somebody in Australia. Honestly, they didn’t promote it very well, but about 130 of us showed up for this event. And I got put in a room with two brand new entrepreneurs. And, you know, both these guys, they’re both guys. They were super excited to have made like their first $10,000 in business. And, you know, the previous month, all my businesses combined, generated about a half million dollars. So financially I was way ahead of them. But what talking to them gave me was excitement. It was fresh eyes. And one of them said, you know, I’m really focused on Instagram and that’s all I’m doing. And I’m just building my audience on Instagram. And now I’ve got this and I just made a $10,000 sale.

Chris (30:49):

And I said, you know, I never think about Instagram. We do everything on Facebook. We do a lot on YouTube. We do a lot with Google ads, but I never spend time on Instagram. I never think about it. And so talking to somebody who’s brand new showed me what could have happened if I took a slightly different stance when I started the company. Now at this point, I’m not going to go try to be Instagram famous, but I have staff for that. And so if I can line this person up with some of my staff and say, what did you do? Can we collaborate? Then my business can grow. I can empower my staff. And so when you’re at a live event, the people that you meet are important. If you have your staff, the people that they meet will also fire them up. And if you’re taking your staff away, building a stronger connection between your staff will also serve to strengthen the foundation of your entire business.

Chris (31:43):

OK? So, peer support is really awesome. The second is leaders. Sometimes somebody will be speaking from a stage and you’ll think this lesson is great. You know, they’re teaching me how to do a better organic Facebook ads. That’s great. The worksheet’s great. I can execute on it, but what I really need is for this person to just jump in and take over. So for example, sell by chat is getting a ton of hype in the coaching business right now. And a lot of fitness coaches are using it. Business coaches are using it. And I was attending a seminar by somebody who does sell by chat. He gave us exactly his step-by-step pattern. We’ll put that into the Two-Brain curriculum, as soon as we’re finished testing it. But by the end of the seminar, I said, I don’t need the script. I need this guy.

Chris (32:34):

So I hired his team to come in and try some sell by chat experiments for gym owners. And you know, after a couple of months, we’ve got some results. We’re going to try things a little bit differently. We’re going to present them back to you. But sometimes the best thing that you get out of these summits is the connection. And just finding somebody and saying like, yeah, that person can help me and actually hiring them. So the ticket price is one thing, hiring them as something else. But what the ticket price does is it gets you onto their welcome mat. It gets you an open door, it gets you a connection. And so it might just open up the entire world to you, even though, you know, after the summit, you’re making another purchase. You’re never attending a summit to be sold. Every summit has sponsors and vendors because speakers are crazy expensive.

Chris (33:24):

I mean, our total bill for the summit is like $150,000 just on speakers. So everybody has sponsors and vendors and they are great. You know, a lot of the times you’ll find somebody who can really help you, but when you go to a summit and somebody’s speaking from a stage and you’re like, OK, this person’s a sell by chat expert, always ask yourself, is it better to learn this technique, try it out for myself, figure it out. Or is it better to just hire the person? And you know, that’s an opportunity too. You might not do that, but it’s still an opportunity that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t go to that summit. All right. So the last thing that I want to bring up here is connecting with your own team members. You can use events to strengthen your bonds. And when we were able to do live summits in Chicago, a lot of gym owners would bring their entire team.

Chris (34:15):

We had a second stage just for the coaches. The coaches would spend time over there, and then they’d all go out to eat together, or they would do bowling or whatever in the Rosemont area of Chicago. There’s so many amazing opportunities. And I can’t wait to get back there in 2022. But what a lot of people are doing right now is renting like a beach house and taking their staff there for the weekend, building a strong community feeling there. It’s really hard to build your team or your culture when you’re just working all the time. So taking them away for a weekend, going to the beach, going to the golf course, going for a hike, whatever, showing them your vision, and then working together on that common goal that is priceless. Getting everybody on the same page, working in the same direction, irreplaceable.

Chris (35:04):

It’s one of the things that we do first in the Tinker program, exposing them to famous people is a gift they’ll never get anywhere else. So when I told my gym staff, Hey, we’re all going to the summit this year. You’re all going to get to hear from Jocko and participate in the Q and A do the exercises, they were fired up. They couldn’t believe that they had this opportunity. And so that’s one of the things that we forget. Like we get mentors, we go to summits, we watch these videos. Our staff would love to do that, but they don’t have the opportunity. Here’s our chance to give that to them. And I’ll tell you a secret between you and me and the microphone here. Jocko’s getting my staff there. They’re fired up to hear from Jocko. Some of them are Todd Herman fans because I I’ve handed out his children’s book to them, and a lot of my staff know Bonnie personally.

Chris (35:53):

So they’re super jacked to hear from her, but what I’m most excited for is for them to hear Lisa Nichols. When I took my entire staff to Archangel and Lisa was on the stage and everybody’s standing up and chanting and yes, yes, yelling and dancing. I looked down the row and I saw my 12 year old daughter. And I thought, I am so grateful that I brought her to this event. This is what I want her to experience in her beautiful young little life. And, you know, I’m so glad that I brought her here. I am really excited to share that with my staff. My staff has been through a very tough year. We kept all of them, which is awesome. All of them kept the faith. They delivered, over delivered to our clients. Even through 14 months of shutdown in Ontario. Now they deserve to be inspired by somebody as incredible as Lisa Nichols, that they would never have access to any other way, except through me.

Chris (36:56):

And so that’s the gift that I’m really giving them. I’ll be watching, I’ll be learning, I’ll be participating. I’ll be excited, but I’ll always be keeping one eye on my staff and smiling, knowing that I’m giving them the best possible gift that they couldn’t get anywhere else, that like, I couldn’t buy for them for any amount of money. And that’s the connection that I’m hoping to make, is to strengthen my staff by showing them how important they are to me and that they’re worth investing in. So that’s the lessons that I’ve learned in between talks at the summit. I hope you got something out of this. You can email me, chris@twobrainbusiness.com at any time to ask questions, I’ll be happy to answer them, but I really hope to see you at our 2021 summit. These are the speakers that you need right now. These are the lessons that will grow your gym. More importantly, you deserve it. You deserve to be there. You deserve to have some interaction with these people, either virtually or at a live regional meetup. And you can get details from that in the show notes you can link to the site.

Andrew (38:00):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Be sure to subscribe for the best of the fitness business. For more from Chris Cooper, join the Gym Owners United group on Facebook/ Chris regularly posts articles, instructional videos, and advice in there. It’s the only public group he’s in. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, join today.

 

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Maybe Your Staff Isn’t the Problem: 5 Ways to Lead

By Dr. Brian Strump, Certified Two-Brain Fitness Business Mentor

Most gym owners I’ve met said they opened a gym because they enjoy coaching others and wanted to help people get healthy. Not one said, “I love leading people, growing staff, managing personalities and dealing with all the intricacies of running a business.” 

It makes sense then, that most gym owners struggle to build a team or create an environment conducive to long-term careers for their staff members. 

People don’t leave companies over money. They leave over management. If you’re a gym owner and you struggle to keep and grow staff, there’s a good chance that you are the problem. The good news? You can change that.

The great news? I’m going to give you five ways to do it. 

Create a Shared Vision

If you want staff to stick around, they need to know what they are working for beyond their paycheck. Sharing the short- and long-term visions for your company will keep the right people with you and encourage others to leave if they do not align with the company’s direction. You need to create an exciting future that others will want to be part of, and you must inspire them so they are confident in you and willing to struggle through the difficult times.

Focus on Growth and Opportunity

I think many gym owners unwittingly stunt the growth of their staff members because they are scared. They’re worried that members will prefer the coach to the owner or, worse, that the knowledge they share will allow a coach to leave and start a new gym. Avoid becoming the “icon” in your business. Allow team members to shine as well. “What if I train my staff and they decide to leave?”—if this sounds like you, you might want to ask yourself this question next: “What if I don’t train them and they decide to stay?”

Offer the Opportunity to Create

Most people experience work as a cog in a machine. They punch a clock with the expectation that they can do little to control outcomes. As the owner, you have the ability to prevent staff members from developing this mentality. You might need to admit to yourself that others will often have great ideas to grow your business. At the start, your business might be your “baby”; however, if you want your business and your team to grow, you need to loosen the reins on your best staff members and allow them to have a hand in creating the future of your business.

Exemplify Your Culture

The culture of your gym starts with you, the gym owner. How you treat your staff is how your staff will treat your members. Are you mad that staff members walk over a piece of paper towel on the floor instead of picking it up and putting it in the trash? They likely watched you do the same thing. Are you frustrated that your staff members aren’t excited when coaching? Chances are they learned that from you. If you want your staff to show more empathy to members, follow through on what they say they will do and give you more than you expect, you must show them how that’s done. Lead, and they’ll follow.

Remember That You’re Driving the Bus

You’re in charge of the direction of your business. You need to fill your bus with the right people and get them in the right seats. Don’t try to force a good staff person into the wrong role. He or she will get frustrated and you’ll end up resenting the person for a job done poorly. Find roles in which staff members will flourish and then put the right people in those roles. That’s a win for them, a win for the clients and a win for the business. Most importantly, if you find that a person doesn’t or shouldn’t have a seat on the bus anymore, remove the person swiftly before others reduce their performance to the same level.  

These strategies will help you develop a team that’s eager to work hard, help others and produce a positive long-term effect on your business. 

Good luck!

The post Maybe Your Staff Isn’t the Problem: 5 Ways to Lead appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

CrossFit Games Semifinals: Get Ready for Online Chaos

Here’s a confession: I don’t think I can always tell when an athlete’s chest hits the bar during pull-ups.

This is not because I’m dumb, careless or inexperienced. It’s because it can be really, really difficult to evaluate high-speed athletic movement in real time.

Hell, it can be hard to evaluate pictures of athletic movement at times.

I recall getting a chest-to-bar question wrong repeatedly on CrossFit’s Judges Course a few years ago. Not because I don’t know what “chest to bar” means but because camera angles play tricks on your eyes.

Judging workouts is incredibly difficult, and mistakes are common. I’ve made them.

So have you.

I’m aware that some will disagree with me and knee-jerk to defend their judging skills. But I don’t think their arguments hold any protein shake.

My counterpoints to the “perfect judge” argument come from:

The MLB, where umpires are always under fire.The NHL, where refs are always under fire.The NBA, where refs are always under fire.The NFL, where officials are always under fire.

These are the top leagues on the planet, and officiating controversies are a daily occurrence. Human error is simply part of almost every single sporting event.

I bring this up as the online CrossFit Semifinals start today and continue next weekend. You can see the schedule and the workouts here.

3, 2, 1 … Hit Record and Say the Password!

With Games spots at stake at these online events, even a single missed rep can be very costly—and that puts a ton of pressure on judges. They must hold athletes to precise standards during the test, but their work will then be checked in video review, and mistakes will result in penalties for athletes.

The penalties can be kill shots. Live, you might miss a wall-ball target for a no-rep but push a little harder to make up the lost ground and beat a rival. Online, you can only hope you did enough because errors spotted after the fact can’t be corrected. You could literally do the whole competition and finish in a Games spot only to lose it because video review showed you and your judge missed a few reps.

Added to that pressure: CrossFit has a password system to ensure athletes complete and film the workouts in certain “windows.” You can read all about that here. And there are precise media guidelines that indicate everything from camera placement to distance between equipment to athlete orientation in relation to the camera. Example on Page 2 here.

I’ve been a judge and a video person at many events, and I can tell you getting it all done to A+ standards will be challenging. I definitely expect some mistakes: bad reps, dead batteries, overflowing memory cards, power failures, missed emails and submission windows, and maybe even a little straight-up cheating. Remember the surreal, ultra-bold Trevor Bachmeyer looped-video incident from 2017.

I’m sure a missed rep or two will slip through. They always do, and we’ll likely be treated to some lively debates on squat depth, lockout and movement standards.

And someone always comes up with a workaround no one thought of—like the dude hanging by his legs to rest during a set of “max total pull-ups” in the Affiliate Cup at the 2009 CrossFit Games. (Dave Castro spotted it and took care of business instantly.)

All in all, it’s going to be a fascinating two weeks of competition.

And I think the best competitors will get through to the Games.

I’m not saying “best athletes” on purpose. The best athlete could get eliminated by a bad judge and crummy media team. But the best competitors will have their judges and media as dialed in as their nutrition.

The post CrossFit Games Semifinals: Get Ready for Online Chaos appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Why Jocko Willink and Lisa Nichols Are Headlining the Two-Brain Summit

Mike (00:02):

Why should you attend the Two-Brain Summit online or in person on June 19th and 20th? Chris Cooper will tell you in just a minute.

Chris (00:08):

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Mike (00:32):

This is Two-Brain Radio. It’s Mike Warkentin and I’m here with Chris Cooper. It’s been a crazy year of masks, travel bans and government restrictions. With some parts of the world still in lockdown, the annual Two-Brain Summit will be held online or in person at one of 17 regional locations around the world where restrictions allow. Here’s the cool part. When owners purchase a ticket, their team members get access to special coach’s content. Staff can watch several keynote speakers as well as presentations on how to coach better and build a career in fitness. On the owner side, the lineup is stellar, and I mean stellar, it’s headlined by retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, and the dynamic and inspirational Lisa Nichols. She will blow your mind. I’m not kidding on that. Two-Brain founder, Chris Cooper, is also on the bill and he’s here to tell us why he knows these speakers will give gym owners exactly what they need to recover and thrive in 2021. All right, Chris, this has been the most challenging 18-month period in the history of the fitness business. In a period like that, what’s your overarching goal for this year’s summit?

Chris (01:29):

I really want to get people inspired. I mean, we’re very, very close to the finish line right now. We know from gyms that have reopened that there is a surge coming. There’s every reason to stay in the game, but really it has been a slog, as you said, and people are just getting burned out. And I think in some cases they’re giving up too soon. In other cases, as they’re about to experience this big growth. More than ever gym owners need to understand leadership. And what happened in the earliest phases of COVID, you probably remember was like the clients who were least attached to our gym, they faded away as soon as we pivoted. The coaches who were not quite on board, they’re gone now. And so many gyms have kind of brought themselves down to this skeleton crew or just the core. And this is the time that they’re going to start scaling up again. And so I wanted them to hear messages of inspiration and hope, but also leadership. And so that’s how I chose the speakers for the summit this year.

Mike (02:26):

Yeah. Because when I look at the lineup, there isn’t necessarily, aside from you, the two keynote speakers are not gym business experts, per se. They’re certainly leadership experts and they’re great at, you know, inspiring and things like that, but they’re not, it’s not like, you know, they’re just dedicated to the gym industry and that wasn’t by mistake, right?

Chris (02:44):

Not at all. I mean, you know, Jocko is somebody that I listened to and started paying a lot more attention to when things got down to their worst. And that’s always my trigger for who do we invite to the summit is who am I leaning on now? And Jocko was one of those guys, you know, in extreme ownership. You remember a year ago, you and I were writing these daily briefs at like 4:00 AM in July. And I mean, that was about as bad as it got, and Jocko was the person I just kept coming back to. And that was kind of that bedrock voice that kept saying, just keep going. And his phrasing, Oh, things are bad? Oh, things can’t get worse? Good. You’re surviving this. You’re going to survive for one more day and that’ll prove that you can do anything.

Chris (03:35):

Lisa Nichols, she’s just my gift to the fitness industry, man. I mean, you know, you and I are not the rah rah, hallelujah, you know, bleed it out to the universe kind of guys. And when we saw Lisa a year and a half ago in Toronto and the crowd was so engaged and they’re on their feet and they were like, we can do anything. I mean, that’s the kind of energy and belief that I want to bring to everybody at the summit. And I said, you know, I don’t usually have two big keynotes. I already had Jocko lined up. I already had Todd. And I said, I just can’t resist. Like I have to bring this gift to the fitness industry. And that’s Lisa Nichols.

Mike (04:18):

So we’ll circle back to those guys. We’ll get into them and just a touch more detail. But the question I’ll ask you here is the summit is priced at 399 and that’s US. And it comes with unlimited access for staff to the coaching side online. You’ve talked about ROI and use and finding ways. So there’s gym owners right now that are saying I’m coming through COVID and finances are tight. Why should they spend four hundred bucks right now? And how are they going to get that money back from the summit?

Chris (04:42):

There’s literally nothing else that you could spend 400 bucks on that, you know, you can get a faster ROI on, in the fitness industry. Working with a mentor, that ROI snowballs, and it gets leveraged to become bigger and bigger and bigger. And you get an exponential ROI on mentorship. You get a fast ROI on summit for a couple reasons. Number one, it’s direct action. And we’ve carved out time for you to work on things. So it’s never like here’s a speaker get fired up. Here’s the next speaker, you know, it’s, here’s Jocko, here’s his message. Here’s his activity. So you’re working through something, you’ve done something before the next speaker, Todd comes on the stage and then Todd talks about how to set up a 90-day sprint and you work through that sprint and then the next speaker comes on the stage. So it’s really all about, you know, maximizing your time. It’s like compressing a year of possibility and action into two days.

Mike (05:41):

And that’s interesting because a lot of summits that I’ve been to you sit in a giant conference room or a, you know, a theater auditorium and you just sit and watch and watch and you take your bathroom break, then you watch and watch and watch. And by the end of it, you’ve got so much stuff in your brain. You can’t remember half of it and you haven’t done anything. You’ve actually written about this and saying that, you know, you left summits to take action on a great idea right away. But instead of, you know, getting people to do that here, you’ve actually built in the time into the proceedings so that people can now literally take action with their teams after the summit speaker goes, correct? Yeah.

Chris (06:10):

When we built the summit lineup this year, I wanted people to say, I would be crazy not to do this. And so, you know, we’ve added every possible feature that we could, it is being delivered online. So if you’re somewhere like me, that’s still locked down, no problem. You can still attend, participate and get the work done. If you’re in a place where you can have gatherings, you can come to one of our regionals or you can host your own. And this was something that the Two-Brain mentor Brian Strump did last year. He rented this beach house. He took his staff there. They went through the summit together, did the activities. And when they left that summit, every staff person was empowered. And it was like having five mini Strumps working. And dude like that has paid off. If you look at leaderboards for who is getting the most value for their time, who is making the most money, who is getting the most out of their staff, like Strump is there. And last year’s summit was a massive pivot point for that.

Mike (07:10):

Five mini Strumps would be a pretty epic thing, I’d like to see those guys running around fixing spines and running gyms, all wearing nano ones. And if you’re listening, click the link in the notes for the summit. You can find the 17 regional locations if they’re close by to you and you’re allowed to travel and so forth by all means, get there in person. If you can’t, hit it online with us and you will still be able to interact and work through stuff. Let’s dig in Chris to, we talked a little bit about, tell me a little bit about Jocko. You said you’ve leaned on him in tough times. I know you’ve had some chats with him in advance of his presentation to the summit. He’s an inspiring character, what’s he going to do for gym owners?

Chris (07:51):

The one thing about Jocko is that you think you’ve heard his core message and then he says something else that’s really profound. And if you read a lot of leadership books, the leader will have like one good concept that they’re going to hang their hat on for the next five years. But after you read “Extreme Ownership,” you think like, Oh, there were actually a couple of good concepts in there. And the biggest ones were, you know, I need to own this. And then you read his second book, “The Dichotomy of Leadership.” And you’re like, this guy’s actually pretty frigging deep. And you know, so the key is that you read his two books, you get a lot of knowledge, but you also get perspective. What you don’t get is a takeaway, like go do this right now. And so what I wanted to do with Jocko was bring him onstage.

Chris (08:38):

Actually treat this as almost kind of like an interview. Like I’m prompting him a lot in our conversation this year, so that we make sure everything’s relevant to gym owners, but then we can turn and say, go do this. And I don’t think that you can get that from any of his books. It’s something you would normally have to work with him in person to get his echelon front staff like mentoring package. I mean, that’s like an $80,000 experience that you’d usually, you know, and we’re just going to give it to people for 350 bucks. You really cannot get this out of Jocko any other way. Now I will say that we’ve had a couple of preliminary conversations. I don’t want to give anything away, but some of the stuff that he has said as a gym owner who made it through COVID who got COVID himself, some of this stuff is way better than anything that’s in his books. And he’s getting ready to share that with gym owners in June.

Mike (09:32):

So he’s actually a gym owner, a lot of people don’t know that.

Chris (09:35):

CrossFit affiliate.

Mike (09:36):

So that’s pretty, so, you know, again, as a military guy, an ex military guy, people think of him as, you know, the writer and the soldier and so forth, but he’s actually a business guy with echelon front, but he’s also a business guy running a gym.

Chris (09:49):

Yeah. He owns a gym. He has good systems. He understands SOP and so the interesting thing was I thought he was going to come on and talk about the stuff that he talks about in extreme ownership, and he casually touches on it. And then I thought, OK, well, he’s going to talk about some of the stuff from dichotomy of leadership. And he leans on those stories a little bit, but what he has planned is very specific to gym owners and it’s way more than just the rah rah own it. It’s like, here’s exactly how you deal with it. Here’s, you know, man, it’s hard to not get specific, but there’s some stuff that he said to me right away that in the weeks since our last conversation has improved my cycling, has improved the metrics at the gym. I get up out of bed with like energy at 4:00 AM and I’m like fired up. And, yeah, I won’t give that away, but he shared it with me and he’s going to share with gym owners on the 19th.

Mike (10:46):

I’m going to guess that he probably doesn’t have a problem kicking lients out of his gym. He’s one tough dude. I imagine when there’s a tough decision to be made, he probably makes it and goes.

Chris (10:56):

It’s interesting, like in a dichotomy of leadership, he talks about that and how it is really, really hard to fire another SEAL because they have given up everything to be a SEAL and you’re firing them from their career, but also from their identity and how hard that actually is, but what to do when you can’t avoid it anymore, you know, but more than anything, like the topics Jocko’s going to cover are why this is the best time ever to own a gym. It blew my mind.

Mike (11:23):

I’m fired up about that. And then Lisa, I haven’t had the privilege of seeing Jocko speak in person, Lisa Nichols, you and I saw 2018 or 19 in Toronto at the Archangel summit. And she stole the show. There were a number of really great speakers there, a whole laundry list, you know, and she was just a show and she had the entire place screaming. And there were people that were screaming and excited even before she even like, started into it. By the end, it was pretty much all of us. Tell me about, again, I don’t think she’s about gym ownership necessarily here, but why is her her words? Why are they gonna inspire gym owners now?

Chris (11:59):

I mean, Mike, you and I had very similar upbringings, right? We were around old farmers a lot. And my father, his favorite saying was, you can wish in one end and piss in the other and see which one gets full first. And, you know, he was not a big, like, make your dreams come true kind of guy. And so I’ve carried that kind of skepticism with me my entire life. And so when they introduced Lisa at Archangel, it was like she was featured in what was, the secret, that book. And I’m like, Oh man, here we go. She’s been on Oprah six times. I’m like, Oh, OK, whatever. And then she gets up there and she starts telling her story. And she’s a better storyteller than Seth Godin. And he’s my hero. I don’t say that lightly. She starts telling her story.

Chris (12:45):

She starts telling you that you can do this too. And you believe it. And I have never experienced self-belief as strongly as I did in the hour that Lisa Nichols was in front of us, honestly, it was therapy. It was like enabling, activating. It felt like everybody’s birthday party. It was just crazy. And, you know, as I said, like, she’s going to fire people up. She’s going to make you believe that you’ve got everything that you need to do it in a way that I never could. And, she’s really just my gift to the fitness industry this year.

Chris (13:21):

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Mike (13:47):

She’s dynamic. Like she’s just such a speaker. Like she really can hold a crowd and there’s lots of great speakers out there, but she did such a good job of making the engagement with the participants so natural and spontaneous, rather than some of the stuff that felt a little scripted. Of course, she’s got her, you know, she’s got her whole thing rehearsed, but it was such a dynamic presentation. And I’m sure on video, even online, it’s still going to translate because her energy is just palpable.

Chris (14:11):

Yeah. I would not be surprised to get pictures and texts of people like dancing or hugging at our regional events while she’s speaking, when you and I were closer to the back than to the front and stuff, but even back by us, the energy was so palpable. And, you know, I the thing that kept going through my mind, Mike, was like, I am so glad I brought my daughter to this event. And Avery would have been about 14 at the time. And it was just like, awe inspiring for her.

Mike (14:39):

Lisa is something you have to see to believe. So we won’t go into that more than just saying, like, you guys got to come and see it. And if you want a taste, check her out on YouTube or whatever you can, wherever you can find her, she is a force and you’ll want see her. Todd, you’ve had a close relationship with Todd Herman for a while now, tell me about what he’s going to do with the alter ego effect.

Chris (14:58):

So Todd is actually going to talk about his best program, which is 90-day year. So Todd’s most popular book is the “Alter Ego Effect.” That’s what made me seek out Todd. We’ve had a great relationship. We’ve hung out a few times in Manhattan. He’s actually back in Canada now, but what he’s going to do at summit this year is talk through the power of a 90-day sprint. So Todd’s biggest business coaching program is the 90-day year. He puts thousands of people through a 90 day year program. It totally changes how much action and results they get in their business, and he’s going to teach it to us. So this is like one of the most enabling workshops that gym owners could possibly attend. And it’s just included in there.

Mike (15:42):

He charges probably more than 400 bucks for the 90 day year program. I’m guessing.

Chris (15:47):

The entry level for this program is about two grand. When you get up to the kind of stuff that he’s doing, which is like, you know, third tier, which is what our gym owners need, honestly. I mean, you’re looking at easily $25,000 a year to go through this program.

Mike (16:04):

So basically at the summit, gym owners are buying the accelerator, right? They’re just going to step on the gas and crush a ton of stuff very fast. And he’s actually going to help people work out and create plans, correct.

Chris (16:15):

Yeah. So they’re going to work on their 90-day plan. And the amazing part is that after they’ve been at the summit, they can just, you know, email that plan to their mentor if they want, and their mentor will hold them accountable to it. So it’s even more powerful than just doing it on your own, which is what Todd usually does. What he usually has is a program where he teaches you how to do it. He helps you break down your 90 day goals, eliminate objectives and all that stuff. And then there’s some kind of group accountability in the Facebook group. And it’s so powerful that that’s worth like 20,000 a year because people get an amazing ROI on it. But we’re actually going to pour like gasoline right on that fire. Because if you work out your 90 day plan, first, your mentor is going to hold you accountable for attaining it. And second, I’m going to teach you how to activate your staff to achieve even more and get them working on that plan.

Mike (17:06):

I’ll skip ahead. I was going to leave you to last, but you hinted at it. Tell me about it. Cause I’ve had, I’ve taken a look at some of your workbooks and resources that you’re gonna use at the summit. Tell me about how we’re going to pour gas on that fire with the stuff that you’re doing with staff activation.

Chris (17:20):

You know, it’s hit me through COVID a lot, just through my own businesses in the last six months, that what really has to happen here is I need to take a step backward and really lead these people. And something that I’ve been guilty of my entire career is advocation instead of delegation. So, you know, I built my gym up to the point where it was paying me really well. I wasn’t coaching any classes and OK, I’m going to hire a general manager. Here you go. Here’s the playbook, peace out. And like, not talk to them for a year when really my role there should have been to mentor the general manager. And, you know, I went through a couple of GMs. Now I’m on my third. He’s doing a great job, but a lot of the times he’s just had to guess at stuff.

Chris (18:07):

So if I had been mentoring him this whole time, you know, his life could have been a lot easier and the gym would probably have grown faster. You know, even within Two-Brain, like I should have been mentoring my team more. And now that I’ve started doing that, I’m seeing the results, everything’s scaling faster, everybody’s having fun and loving their job again. And so I realized like, it’s really my duty to help people activate their staff by mentoring them. The first thing that they need to do is figure out how to give their staff focus, guidance, resources, and then eliminate barriers, just like we’re doing for gym owners. So what I’m going to do at summit is teach gym owners how to mentor their staff.

Mike (18:51):

It’s great because Todd is going to give you, help you put together a plan and you’re going to have the structure and the accountability built in. And then what you’re doing is going to, you’re going to help people push harder, right? So instead of just, you’re pushing the cart by yourself, now you’ve got your staff and your staff is gonna, you’re gonna delegate teach them and help them grow and move faster. So by pouring gas on the fire, you’ve now got a bigger fire going and you’re pouring more gas on.

Chris (19:14):

Yeah, I’ll give you an example. So I mentioned Strump earlier, he did the staff retreat thing last year. And, so he’s been working on staff empowerment. And if you say like, wow, why is your gym growing? Even during COVID shutdowns? He can point to a couple of examples. Well, you know, Buffy who is my GM, she was going to a client’s house and they were working out in their driveway and sooner or later, you know, within two weeks they had seven of her neighbors joining her for this class in the person’s driveway,

Mike (19:44):

It’s gone viral. So to speak.

Chris (19:46):

I mean, OK, yes, Buffy is incredible, but everybody has a Buffy or, you know, a close to Buffy person at their gym. Everybody has that idea, but nobody knows how to do it. And it’s because nobody’s mentoring their staff, giving them like access to people like Jocko and Lisa and Todd, and then giving them a playbook and resources. And so what we’ve just started doing is allowing gym owners in Two-Brain, for example, to put their teams in their own coaching program so that they get access to like practicing sales reps and growing their personal training and like growing the pie for the whole business, getting access to the roadmap resources. And once they’ve got that, Holy moly, there’s like five leaders in my business growing my business, you know, and it’s really powerful.

Mike (20:35):

And guys, along that side, if you’re listening, the coaches side is going to have speakers such as Mike Watson. Josh Martin is going to be there. And the idea is they’re going to teach your coaches how to lead better sessions, program better. Shawn McQueen will also be there. That’s in addition to what we’re talking about here on the owner’s side, you get both for the same price. And the coach’s side. I’ve had the privilege of watching three of those videos already. They are spectacular. You’re going to see some really, really great stuff about how to retain clients longer, how to be a better coach. Josh Martin is doing a great recording right now that’s going to blow your mind. You also get the two or the three keynote speakers with that, that your staff will watch. But that’s online. Back to the owners track. We talked about staff, Laurie Drummond is going to talk about finding and hiring some of those people. Tell me a little bit about why she’s on the roster.

Chris (21:22):

Laurie one of the most interesting people in the world really. I mean, she trains special forces units in countries. I guess I probably can’t mention the specific countries, but in more than one. She’s like a professional spy really. And so countries hire her out to come in and train their special forces units. She has a gym called Ultra CrossFit in Australia. She lives away from the gym six to eight months of the year. The gym grows without her. And it’s because Laurie is amazing at identifying people and what motivates them. That makes her an amazing leader, a formidable opponent and a great teacher.

Mike (22:03):

I’m excited. We had a chat with her in locations undisclosed on zoom the other day, just getting her stuff together. And she’s got a great presentation plan and she’s a very dynamic speaker as well. Great sense of humor. And I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun, which is kind of interesting, you know, her persona and her sense of humor, despite the fact that she’s out there training special forces.

Chris (22:27):

Whenever we’ve been together with her in person, the group just kind of like centers around Laurie, because you don’t know what’s going to happen, but something’s going to happen. And it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun. And we’re going to come out of this with a great story. And I bet that’s what she’s going to have teams do. So if you’re bringing your team to the summit, you know, get ready for Laurie, because she’s going to have you guys doing something that’s going to leave you going away with an amazing story.

Mike (22:54):

Yeah. And if you’re listening and you want a little bit of a sneak peek into what Laurie’s going to be talking about, I interviewed her on Two-Brain Radio months ago. We’ll get the link in the show notes for you. And you can talk a little bit about hiring the persona and getting a preview of what she’s going to have you do at the summit. It’s going to be a great presentation from a great mentor. Now, finally, this one I’ve left her to last only because I think she might be the one that I’m most excited to hear from, even though Lisa Nichols blew my mind last time, Bonnie Skinner, I’ve met her last year at your place in Sault Ste Marie when the summit was there. Tell me about her. She’s amazing.

Chris (23:25):

Yeah. So a couple of years ago when we were making up the tinker program, I said, OK, well, the purpose of tinker is to create wealth. And part of wealth is like happiness, right? At the tinker level, it’s you don’t just define success by the size of your bank account anymore. It’s like, how happy are you with your life? And so, Bonnie is a local psychotherapist. I asked her these questions and she said, Oh, here’s how you get happy. Here’s how you measure happiness. And like, here’s how you decide what tools you need next. And it blew my mind. Like in two and a half minutes, she gave me a roadmap to happiness. And I mean, I had read dozens of books on this stuff, you know, great books. Bonnie changed my life. And, you know, she’s got some good videos that we use in the tinker program. She’s got some great exercises called the personal check-in. Earlier this year, I approached her and said, Bonnie, this has been incredibly stressful for me. Can we work together in your psychotherapy practice? And she said, yeah. And, so I sat down, literally she has a couch. I sat on her couch and it wasn’t like tell me about your mother. It was, let’s talk about the building blocks of entrepreneurial confidence and leadership. And, shit started to change, Mike. I mean, things have changed so much. I’ve got so much clarity from her. I’m happier in my life. My family’s happier. I’ve got better like work-life balance. And it’s not like I had trauma that I needed to release or anything like that. But what I have now is this tremendous gift of clarity and, you know, between Bonnie and Jocko, I’m a completely different leader than I was even three months ago.

Mike (25:05):

I got a chance to watch a dry run of Bonnie’s presentation for the summit. We were just going over the technical details and all that. And it was last week or the week before. And just watching her rehearse this thing, wasn’t wasn’t completely finished. I got something out of it, right? Like I was at the end of it. I’m like, wow. I thought I just paid $400 for a psychotherapy session. I felt better about myself. Exactly like you said, you know where I was like, wow, that was just a rehearsal that I did as part of a job. And I took something away from it. So guys, when you see Bonnie, she’s really going to teach you some important stuff and I’m not blowing smoke here. Cause I tend not to be the earthy kind of emotional guy about that stuff, but she really gives you some great, great stuff to take away from this. It’s actionable, it’s insightful. And it’s really going to help you become better leaders at your gym and go forward with more confidence, get past imposter syndrome and figure out that the problem that’s holding you back is probably you. And you can fix it pretty quickly, which is, it’s just a fascinating mindset change that she’s going to offer people. And you have the privilege of having her just down the hall at the Two-Brain workshop.

Chris (26:08):

Yeah. She might be listening. But the thing that Bonnie has taught me is that leadership is a fitness. And most of us, when we open a business, we think about, we’re going to coach all day where we buy ourselves a job and then we hire somebody and we’re like, Oh, we’re leaders. And it’s like walking into a CrossFit gym and doing Fran the first day, you know, and instead of that, Bonnie teaches the air squat, and then she teaches you how to do a push-up. And then she teaches you how to do a proper deadlift. And you get these building blocks of leadership that eventually turn into like elite fitness, honestly. And I have never found this stuff in books. I’ve never found it from military guys. It’s all within me. And it’s really Bonnie like pulling those blocks out of me. I think people are going to be blown away by this.

Mike (27:01):

I agree. And I love going through this, it’s why I wanted to have you on the show here to go through each of these speakers because you really see the links and how they relate to each other. And I love the concepts that you’ve got, leadership and inspiration, delegation, hiring the right people so you can delegate, getting your own self together. Like there really is a cohesive action plan here. And the coolest part is, again, I’ve seen the worksheets, you are going to watch the stuff and take action. And you’re going to make that money back probably by Sunday evening, if not Monday morning or something like that. So, Chris, thank you so much for putting this thing together. We’re online or we’re in person, please check the links in the show notes and we will see you at the Two-Brain Summit. Thank you, Chris. I’m Mike Warkentin on Two-Brain Radio. Do not miss the Two-Brain Summit, June 19th and 20th. It’s online or in person as restrictions allow. For more info and tickets, click the link in the show notes, do it now. And I will see you there.

 

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Expand Your Circle: How to Learn From Other Entrepreneurs

By Brian Strump, Certified Two-Brain Fitness Business Mentor

“We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with,” Jim Rohn said.

However, in the business world, it’s important to venture out of your specific niche in order to get the best view through different lenses. 

Gym owners always ask other gym owners about their businesses. Accountants talk with other accountants at continuing-education courses about their businesses. The mechanic talks cars and business with mechanic friends. 

The opinions of others in our field can be valuable. But the opinions are also commonly myopic. 

What Can You Learn From Others?

As business owners, we should be engaged in a constant search for feedback and growth. And we should constantly search for ways to improve operations, profitability and our clients’ experiences. 

It would be foolish to think that other we cannot learn from business owners outside the fitness field. 

I see this play out often in social media. A gym owner poses a question to a group of gym owners. We don’t notice our own blind spots in response to the question.

Yet, if you posed that same question to a group of business owners in a different field, it’s likely you’d get multiple helpful answers you might never have considered. You’re just too close to your business to consider alternatives. 

One of the most impactful books I’ve read is “The Power of Moments” by Chip and Dan Heath. It includes a number of stories about how different businesses created an unmatched client experience. Not one story was from a gym owner, yet I was able to take those lessons and improve the experience of our clients. 

We can learn a lot from those who are different from us. 

Books are great, but I’d recommend finding a group of local business owners or entrepreneurs to discuss how you can help each owner’s business move forward.  

Sometimes getting a different perspective is just what you need to improve your business.

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The Biggest Distraction: FOMO

I know, I know: The other gym owners are running ads on your Facebook stream.

I’ve seen it too: The other gurus are all on Clubhouse.

I got the invite: All your members and coaches are going to Jamie’s house on Saturday night.

How can you do all this stuff? How do you fit it all in?

Or if you already know that you can’t do all of it, how do you choose? How do you withstand the pressure to show up, mark your territory and control the conversation?

How do you beat the FOMO?

Here’s Bonnie Skinner with the answer.

No Mo’ FOMO—Developing Your Mental Fitness

The fear of missing out is typically discussed as a worry or feeling of anxiety but is better understood as your brain’s response to input overload.  

At any given moment, your brain is receiving and processing an endless stream of information from your five senses—mostly outside of your conscious awareness.

As you sit there, your brain is receiving information about the feeling of your clothes against your skin, the taste of your morning coffee and any ambient background noise, all while taking in the words of this article. To conserve energy and manage the continual onslaught of information, your brain filters the input, only allowing what is deemed relevant into your conscious awareness.

While this shortcut helps keep your brain from information overload, it also increases the risk and worry that you might miss something of significance.

This is FOMO. 

Avoiding FOMO

The best tool for managing FOMO is a clear vision. The more clarity you have about what you are trying to accomplish, the more your brain can protect you from distractions. 

Consider this example: 

You have an afternoon of sales follow-ups booked to help you reach your monthly revenue target. Your friends send a text, not so gently pushing you to meet up with them for some post-lockdown patio time. As they plead their case, you remind yourself how close you are to hitting your target (which will be a monthly record) and how good it will feel. 

You turn and look at the whiteboard with your target and you start to feel a sense of re-commitment. You tell yourself you can always go for drinks but ignoring this goal will mean starting all over again next month. You decide to focus on hitting your goals and commit to making the calls. You tell your friend (and your brain) this is where your focus needs to be. Just like that: #NOMOFOMO!

What Causes FOMO?

FOMO results from ignoring the fact that missing out is inevitable and even necessary when you are pursuing something meaningful to you. By defining what your current focus needs to be (hitting the revenue target), you give your brain permission to stay focused on what is relevant (sales calls) and release the rest (patio time). 

You might still feel a little down about missing out, but here is the truth: You are always missing out on something. 

While you are reading this, you are missing the chance to snuggle with your special someone. While you are checking your email, you are missing a comical exchange in your group chat for friends.

Missing out is only a big deal if you make it a big deal. The emotional responses to missing out come from the story you tell yourself. If your story goes “poor me—I should have been there,” then missing out will feel crappy.

In contrast, if your story is about how you are choosing to stay focused on what matters most to you (based on your goals and vision), you will be less likely to feel stuck or sad.  

4 Steps to Avoiding FOMO

1. Clarify your overall vision. 

If you have large or long-term goals, make sure your complete vision is clear. This will help your brain decide what is relevant and what might be a distraction.If parts of your vision are unclear, work with your mentor or take some time to reflect until things come back into focus. 

2. Break everything down into smaller steps. 

Break your annual goal down into quarterly goals. Break your quarterly goals down into monthly goals. Break your monthly goals down into weekly goals. Then break your weekly goals down into daily actions. Taking small steps helps your brain attend to only the information that is required in the moment, saving energy and reducing the risk of overwhelm. 

3. Accept that missing out might be necessary. 

Consciously and intentionally accepting the possibility of missing out reduces the emotional draw it has on you. By saying, “I choose to focus on X even if it means I may miss Y,” you program your brain to pay attention only to what will serve your current focus.  

4. Create space for downtime. 

FOMO might also occur when a need is continually ignored. If, for example, you have been working long days for weeks with little time to relax, distractions will feel harder to refuse. This can be avoided by building time into your schedule for rest, reflection and relaxation. No fun isn’t any fun at all.

Still Fearful?

If you have mastered the tactics above and still struggle with FOMO, it might be time for deeper investigation. To start this process, take out a piece of paper and work through the following questions until you have more clarity: 

What am I afraid of missing? Why is that important to me? Does it conflict with my goals? Am I able to find a compromise?Is there someone else I can ask for help with this? 

Your goals matter, but if they are to be achieved, you will need laser focus and a crystal-clear idea of what matters and what does not.

Optimizing your mental fitness means making sure your brain is working with and not against you. For more information on sharpening your focus and developing the six pillars of your mental fitness, check out www.yourmentalfitness.ca.

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The Goldfish (Or How I Learned to Be OK With Bottom-Feeders)

Your staff members want to do their best work. To do it, they need to work with clients who are excited to be coached, who show up with “batteries included” and who can afford to pay for the services they need.

That means you’re not trying to attract everyone to your microgym. And you might not want to keep everyone who’s at your gym right now.

Perhaps you already know that.

But it’s still easy to be distracted by “the competition.” It’s easy to slip into worry about their rock-bottom rates, their proximity to your gym and their habit of seemingly copying everything you do.

Look, it’s easy for everyone to talk about an abundance mindset and “rising tides raising all boats.” But it’s hard to resist the rage you feel when someone actually talks badly about you, leaves you a poor review or steals something you’ve built.

I dug deep into these feelings with Bonnie Skinner, my psychotherapist. And she told me about the goldfish.

The Evolution of Your Best Clients

Think about why you started your business: to help great people change their lives. You wanted to feed them, guide them and watch them grow. This is the reason people buy fish tanks. And they put beautiful fish in those tanks: gold ones, flashy red ones, shimmering silver ones and jet black ones. These are the clients you want.

But not every fish in the tank is beautiful. Some of the fish are bottom-feeders: They vacuum up the algae and the fish poop and all the other stuff you don’t want in the tank.

These fish serve an important purpose: They let the most beautiful fish swim in clear water. They let you focus on the fish you love most.

Bonnie’s Insight

Here’s how it works in practice:

“Bonnie, I get it,” I said. “But I hate the feeling of people being led astray by these bottom-feeders! People sign up for pyramid schemes because of them. They’re tricked into expensive ‘challenges’ and waste their money. They’re lured by garbage like ‘training masks’ and other myths. That keeps me up at night!”

“Chris, do you really do your best work with people who fall for obvious tricks?” she asked. “Do you want people who will be easily pulled away by slimy salesmen? Who will quit your gym to try the next new thing instead of sticking with the thing that works?”

“Honestly, no,” I said. “I do my best work with really smart people.”

“Then let the bottom-feeders do their job.”

“I feel like I’m abandoning people to their fate,” I replied.

“How did your best clients learn to question salesman? How did they learn to not fall for the schemes or believe the lies?”

“Well, like me, they probably fell for someone’s pitch, and they learned the hard way!” I laughed.

“That’s how everyone learns,” she explained. “Some of your future best clients aren’t ready to be your best clients yet.”

Focus on Your Fish

Bonnie is one of the most empathetic people I know. And she’s right: We don’t get to control who’s in the tank. We can only feed and care for our fish.

Playing a 30-year game means giving yourself permission to be patient. I know that I’ll need 30 years in business to fulfill my mission in Sault Ste. Marie: Positively affect the lives of 7,000 people, 150 at a time, with each staying for at least 14 months.

And that means I’m willing to wait for people to make their mistakes. I wish I could shield everyone from pain—but gym members aren’t one-and-done. Old members come back. Potential members who fall for the latest scam are actually better new members later—because smart recognizes smart.

Feed your fish and let the ocean do its thing.

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Are You too Busy to Grow Your Business?

Your business might actually grow better without you.

Many of us face obstacles every day. But most of those obstacles are internal, not external. Fear, overwhelm, lack of focus—those are the obvious ones. But anger, jealousy, FOMO—when we’re overtired and underpaid, our worst qualities rise to the surface. They affect our ability to grow our businesses.

In this series, I’m going to take you deep. I’m going to share the top lessons I’ve learned by unpacking these qualities for myself. I’m going to lean heavily on Bonnie Skinner of B. Skinner Coaching and Psychotherapy to help.

Here, I’m going to talk about the first barrier: overwhelm.

In the next post, I’ll tell you about distractions and the “goldfish concept” (it’s not what you think).

After that, I’ll share a tactic that will help you beat FOMO forever.

Finally, I’ll tell you how to stop projecting your goals, fears and limits onto everyone around you (including your future clients).

Overwhelm: Are You Productive or Just Busy?

Let’s start with overwhelm, because that’s what my last two books are really about.

There are six things you can do to build your business:

Pay yourself first.Improve operations.Upgrade the team.Keep clients longer.Get more clients.Sell better.

If you’re not actively improving in one of these areas every day, you’re not making progress. You’re just busy.

If you’re improving in one area every day, you’re maintaining.

If you improve in two or three of these areas every day, you’re growing.

Don’t worry about doing more than that. But definitely worry about the balance among the six.

For example, if you spend all your time worrying about marketing but don’t have a retention plan, you’re not building your business. If you spend many hours training your staff but 10 minutes on your sales process, you’ll have great coaches who don’t have any clients.

Answer This Question

Here’s the test: If I called you tonight at 8 p.m. and asked for the one thing you did today to grow your business, what could you show me? And I mean this literally. Could you point to a number on a sheet somewhere or draw me a picture that would show what you did?

Your days are full. Mine are, too. But most of the things we do just keep us busy. So every week I look at the six strategies listed above and think of one thing I can do to measurably improve in each area. Then I plot the actions into my calendar first. They are my priority.

Some of these things are automated now: I have staff to help with sales, marketing, team development and retention. So I ask them, “What’s your plan this week?” As the entrepreneur, my job is to mentor my staff to take specific action to grow my business. The true value of mentorship is speed, and speed is achieved by removing obstacles, distractions and other drag.

Keep it simple. Stick to the basics. But act on your priorities. You’ll avoid overwhelm and make measurable progress.

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Gym Owner Jocko Willink: Make Connections NOW

I learned something from Jocko Willink this week:

Gym owners need to focus on connecting with people right now.

Willink, the owner of Victory MMA and Fitness, a retired Navy SEAL, and the author of “Extreme Ownership” and “The Dichotomy of Leadership,” will be speaking at the Two-Brain Summit on June 19 and 20. I had a chance to see a short preview of his talk, and he said gym owners have a real opportunity to grow because people are focused on health after the pandemic.

The rest of Willink’s talk is incredible—but I won’t give it away.

I’ll just say I’m a media guy and business owner, and Jocko’s observation immediately helped me refocus in both areas.

Government Aid: Too Little, Too Late?

Over the last 15 months, gym owners have spent a lot of time trying to talk to the government—either on their own or through larger entities such as CrossFit LLC, IHRSA and so on.

That’s all good, and the collective work recently resulted in the tabling of the GYMS Act in the U.S. on May 13. Senators Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) and Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) introduced the proposed legislation in the U.S. Senate.

Short summary: If passed, the act would supply up to $30 billion in grants to help the fitness industry recover from the pandemic lockdowns. An eligible business could receive a maximum of $25 million.

Take action: The Community Gyms Coalition has a page that will help
Americans ask their elected officials to support the act.

I hope the GYMS Act passes, but I’m not hopeful based on the fact that the Health and Fitness Recovery Act of 2020 didn’t pass.

And I don’t know how much money would actually get past the big chains to reach microgym owners if the GYMS Act did pass. Community Gyms Coalition reported that almost two-thirds of the 315 local, independent gym owners surveyed said they are not benefitting from existing federal COVID-relief programs.

Gym owners in other nations aren’t doing much better—such as in Canada, where gyms still aren’t allowed to operate in many places, and relief programs just don’t do enough to balance out months of forced facility closure.

Don’t get me wrong: Fitness groups should definitely talk to politicians even though governments have clearly prioritized just about every industry over the fitness business.

But gym owners need to focus on talking to people. They need to work to save themselves in case help never comes.

Jocko Willink reminded me of that.

One Member at a Time

Governments might listen to gym owners and fitness groups—after they listen to energy producers; builders and manufacturers; airline CEOs; hoteliers; owners of casinos, entertainment venues and professional sports teams; retailers; restaurateurs; and providers of one-on-one services, such as hairstylists and estheticians.

That’s a long list, and most fitness entrepreneurs don’t have a war chest that will allow them to be patient.

But people will listen to gym owners much sooner—because most of the world just had an all-timer of a health scare.

Jocko Knows Best

Willink is right: Health is top of mind right now, and gym owners can capitalize on that. Some are already doing it, and I’ve been utterly thrilled to talk to them on Two-Brain Radio. (Here’s another success story.)

I’m not ignorant enough to think everyone in the world is going to race to the gym to lose weight and create a buffer of fitness that might help them get through an illness. Many people will never work out. Not ever. But that’s always been the case.

What’s new is that a huge number of people are concerned about their health right now—and gym owners can help them preserve it. All owners have to do is connect with these now-receptive people and show them the path.

The other edge of that sword? If more people join gyms and experience their value, more voters will scream when the government treats gyms unfairly. And even if a government chooses to prioritize retailers over gym owners, it still tends to notice when a lot of voters are angry.

But that’s beside the main point.

People are listening right now, and a lot of them have money to spend. Gym owners need to talk to them.

It just might be the best time in history to find the members you need to make the living you want. And our data says you can make $100,000 a year with just 150 members (we’ll tell you how to do it in our guide here).

If you’re a gym owner and you’re railing against the government right now, I won’t tell you to stop—especially if you’re still in lockdown.

But I’d encourage you to make time to talk to your audience and tell them how you can improve their health. Do that at least once a day.

If you do, I think you’ll have all the members you need very soon.

To hear what else gym owner Jocko Willink has to say about the industry,
register for the Two-Brain Summit on June 19 and 20.

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Leaning Into Uncomfortable Stuff: Noah Abbott on Mentorship

Mike (00:02):

Not making a hundred thousand dollars from your gym? The Two-Brain RampUp program is designed to help you create the foundation to do just that. Today on Two-Brain Radio, gym owner Noah Abbott will tell you what RampUp did for his business.

Chris (00:14):

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. It’s a total game changer that creates powerful moments that you’ll never forget. I use it at Catalyst, it improved my conversion and my retention. Go to levelmethod.com to find out more.

Mike (00:48):

We’re back on Two-Brain Radio. It’s Mike Warkentin here. We’ve got another success story for you. Noah Abbott finished our RampUp sprint in late February, and he’s here to tell us how his business has changed. So Noah, welcome to the show. Can you give me some broad strokes right off the topic? How dramatically did your business change during the course of the RampUp?

Noah (01:06):

Broad stroke wise, I think some of the changes are still being borne out. I think some of the financial stuff is certainly improved, but it will continue to improve, but I think intention and intentionality has been the biggest change.

Mike (01:22):

So a mindset thing?

Noah (01:22):

I think mindset and I think sort of it translates both in the way that I interact with my staff and then the way that me and my staff interact and direct with our membership, I think has changed a lot from sort of something that was just sort of, kind of informal and sort of like we did things when we wanted to, because they seemed like fun at the time or a cool idea to something that was more planned and thoughtful and really trying to kind of answer specific questions. And I think that has really been the most helpful part.

Mike (02:02):

I’m going to dig into that with the clients in just a sec, but let me ask you first, you mentioned that the way that you interact as an owner with your staff has changed. What do you mean by that?

Noah (02:10):

Well, I was a coach for a long time before I was a gym owner and I always think of gym ownership as kind of split into two big pools, right. The people who started as owners who decided, Hey, I love this stuff and I want to open a gym. And then people who started as coaches and got the sort of understanding from a coaching side first, before they went to be an owner. Right. And I was one of those coaches. I was one of the latter, somebody who coached first and I think it’s a blessing and a curse in some ways. I think I’m very sympathetic to my coaches and to trying to do right by them and to trying to be sort of like close knit and responsive to them. I think sometimes it can be a curse because I think often it makes me as an owner sort of afraid to do things that I think might ruffle feathers or, you know, even just kind of things that would change sort of the status quo because I can sometimes remember being a coach and feeling frustrated by the things that the owner of my gym did, even for no reason other than the fact that I didn’t have, you know, either like a full view of the picture or something like that.

Noah (03:27):

Many of those things after I became a gym owner, I was like, oh, I get why he did that now, you know? Oh, that makes sense. So, I don’t know if that totally answers that.

Mike (03:38):

It does. And I was very similar. The question I’ll ask you related to that is, you know, so you have to, as an owner, you have to make tough decisions. You have to change things. You have to communicate your vision to your staff. Are you in a better position to do that now? An, I’m going to say, I bet you have a playbook and SOPs in place now, am I right?

Noah (03:55):

Yeah. They’re still evolving. But yes, it definitely helps. And we’ve, you know, hired a bunch of new staff recently and it’s been a lot easier to get them sort of up to full speed versus before where we did it very much as this sort of like learn by osmosis by being involved in the gym for a long time. And if maybe we were hiring somebody who hadn’t been a member before or something, it would be pretty challenging. So yeah, playbook’s definitely helped. But I’ve always wanted to be very transparent with my coaches. And I think I was worried that by doing something, by doing some things that were more sort of like concrete on the business side, my internal worry at first was it that would, you know, that could be a challenge from the transparency side and I was wrong. I mean, I think I was able to maintain transparency. And in fact, that explaining things often, you know, with coaches was what kind of like brought them on board for it.

Mike (05:04):

Yeah. See, I’m an emotional guy and I’m very hesitant. Like I like to please people as well. So being the heavy, you know, who would have to change policies and procedures or even reprimand people is very tough for me. The thing that changed all that though, was the playbook. And you know, Chris Cooper’s talked about it in the Two-Brain blog, being able to just say, we’ve made this decision in advance about what’s going to happen when this happens. And then looking it up in the playbook and going with that, it takes the emotion out of it, takes the gray area out of it. And that like a real boon for me because things changed at that point where I could become more of a business owner than just the guy who happens to pay the rent. Has that been your experience so far, even though it’s fairly fresh?

Noah (05:40):

I mean, it wasn’t the playbook that did it for me. I still think that like, I maintain a level of communication with my coaches that like, you know, it’s still hard for me to say like, well look, it says it here. That’s how we’re doing it. I still want to be collaborative. I still want to take their, you know, them into account. But I think the biggest thing for me is sort of explaining, and especially after this last year, especially after the pandemic and things like that, you know, in some ways made it easier to explain things as this, like this needs to happen, right? It’s not because I want this to happen and it’s not because I’m doing this to sort of like elbow you out of something or, you know, increase my bottom line at the expense of yours, this needs to happen so that the gym will thrive.

Noah (06:27):

And that making these decisions, even if they’re either changing the way that we do things in just like a kind of like uncomfortability of the new, or whether it’s, you know, changing, you know, revenue share or the way that you’re paid or whatever that is, that the ultimate goal is this will be better for everyone. And I think being able to explain that and, you know, have them trust in my vision, which is in some ways me trusting in you know, Two-Brain’s vision, or Two-Brain kind of like greater architecture, was what let that happen.

Mike (07:02):

So it’s more of a communication thing for you, like where you’re communicating your vision to your staff.

Noah (07:07):

Yeah. I think that for me is still like priority number one. I think, you know, the SOP is for us a little more logistical than anything else. And it’s still evolving. It’s still, you know, I think not—we’re pretty tight knit and we’re pretty like, you know, small and kind of like people know the deal before they get started. So it’s more of a reference right now than it is like a Bible. And you know, eventually it may get there. And I think that’s probably a step eventually for me to kind of like take another step back is just say, you know, the more we flesh out the, you know, some SOP on things to be able to say like, Hey look like, I don’t need to show you how to do this. This is all right here.

Mike (07:53):

I understand that from your mentor, Ashley Haun, that you revamped your intake process. You alluded to that a little bit in the previous part where you were talking about how you interact with clients. Tell me a little bit about that process and how it’s changed now.

Noah (08:07):

Yeah. So we already did intros, things were just like a little scattershot. They were a little all over the board. There wasn’t a great consistency of process to how we did things. And so we kind of tightened that up and a lot of it was stuff that I had already implemented some of it. Like I read Help First probably like two years ago or something. And that was probably the first big change I made to some of the processes. You know, I came from an old school, what I consider like a CrossFit 1.0 gym, like one of the early adopters. And, you know, it started in 2010 or something like that. So I was very used to this sort of like you come in and we’d do like a free class with a whole bunch of people once a week.

Noah (08:58):

And, you know, if you’re experienced, you just take a couple classes and then like that you basically, if you like it, you sign up on your own. And there isn’t a lot of followup. So, you know, shifting to a model where there was much more of like, in some ways, you know, and this shouldn’t mean that pejoratively, but like, you know, me as a gatekeeper of those kinds of things, and as a sort of like, you know, a gatekeeper and like a tour guide, right. So, you know, instituting like everything starts with an intro. Especially, you know, I think talking about new people first, you know, brand new to this kind of fitness. We already did like a version of an NSI. But it, you know, it had a workout in it and things like that.

Noah (09:43):

So, you know, we cut the workout and, you know, nothing changed or in some ways, like it actually made things easier. Being more prescriptive was certainly something that, you know, I started working on and I’m still working on, you know, I think that’s something that’s still kind of like a work in progress to have a point where it’s like, here’s what I think versus like, Hey, let’s come—I’m a big collaborative decider and a big kind of like take everybody’s temperature person sometimes to a fault. So I think in some ways still working on, you know, being the sort of like, you know, voice of authority and saying, here’s what you should do. So yeah, getting those just like more in line and then getting everything to kind of talk to each other a little better as far as like, you know, automation of systems and things like that.

Noah (10:27):

We had it in some degree, but certainly like tightened that up. And then most recently we’ve switched, for experienced people, which we get a good number of, going from the like very low effort on our part, like, Hey, just jump into class a little bit and see how it goes to, you know, start with an intro, start with sitting down and talking. Often I do that like before a class with people now and kind of like talk and be like, if you want to take this class and see how it goes, go for it. But then it gives me like a really good follow-up point. So just again, kind of like tightening some procedure up there.

Mike (11:05):

That’s interesting coming from a coach perspective at an old school gym to running your own, I love it because I was one of those old school gym owners, and now we run an online thing. So our business has evolved as well, but I love hearing about how you transitioned into that ownership role. So tell me, why did you choose to sign up for RampUp? Like you’ve obviously been involved in CrossFit for a long time? Tell me, first of all, I guess how old CrossFit Lumos is and then why you decided to get into the Two-Brain family.

Noah (11:31):

All right. So Lumos is a little over four years old. We started in, we technically opened in February of 17. I moved from New York City to Austin, Texas, and opened a gym with basically no membership. I knew I wanted to move. I knew I wanted to open a gym. So I was like, ah, it’s a great idea to combine them both. Not a great idea. Or not the easiest way to do it. Now, I was lucky. I actually had a number of clients who had been clients of mine in New York who are here and are still members of mine. So, you know, I had built a level of like kind of some networking and some trust that helped, but the beginning was very lean. So even though we’re four years old, I think we’re like really more like three years old. And then, you know, one of those years is a pandemic year. So I don’t know, we have some like weird stunted growth. You know, we like, you know, had an iron deficient diet when we were—

Mike (12:35):

So why did you take the Two-Brain supplement in a pandemic year?

Noah (12:38):

So, this last year has certainly been, you know, challenging and an issue. You know, it required some flexibility and things like that, but in some ways we were able to kind of at least get through the beginning of it OK. You know, we had a lot of, I think something we’ve always done well is built a lot of trust with our membership. So we had a lot of, you know, we had a decent enough core that kind of stayed on even when we were like, you know, transitioning to all online, transitioning to online and maybe like a park workout here and there where we were like shouting at each other from like a hundred feet away. And so, you know, we had that core stay with us and that plus, you know, reduction in a lot of costs for some time, you know, we got a grant that helped a lot.

Noah (13:32):

And so we actually had some like extra cash and we were in this, I was in this point where like my day to day was in some ways less, you know, I didn’t have quite as much work on my plate cause I was still coaching a lot. And there was just like less general gym administration to do. So I was like, you know, I need to use this time to do something. And I’ve known from the beginning, I never considered myself a business guy. That’s still not what I consider myself. I was a federal law enforcement officer before I was a gym owner. I consider myself more of like a sort of community and creative side person. So I always knew that was a weakness. And I knew that, you know, I’ve grown up playing sports and being in a, you know, sort of like academy environment and things like that.

Noah (14:18):

And I knew I was somebody who, you know, responded well to having, you know, I did a lot of academic stuff. I knew I was somebody who responded well to having somebody who I had to produce work for, somebody who I had deadlines for and expectations and things like that. Because at the end of the day, when you’re an owner, especially when you’re a solo owner, really the only person you answer to is yourself. And I can be pretty easy on myself sometimes. And so, you know, putting in a level of oversight was important.

Mike (14:53):

So accountability and structure from a mentor you thought would kind of help you be a little bit less easy on yourself and move you along, keep the business moving.

Noah (15:03):

Yeah. And somebody also just to kind of encourage me to lean into some of the uncomfortable stuff, you know, or to say like, Hey, I know you feel crazy about doing this. Do it and, you know, trust me. And most of the times there’s been something like that, it’s worked out and it’s, you know, the call after has been like, yeah, that was fine. I thought it was going to be really hard and it was fine. You know, I think there’s definitely some times where Ashley and I have talked or I’ve, you know, there’s been stuff in the Two-Brain curriculum where I’ve said, Hey, look, this isn’t a fit for me or this isn’t a fit for my community. And I think Ashley has always been very supportive about like, yeah, you know what what’s right for you from a culture perspective, and has always been like, you know, take what works and, you know, leave what doesn’t, but at least try stuff. I think has been a big thing.

Mike (15:55):

That’s one of the things that Chris has tried to do when he set this up is find the very best of everything and get all the data. And we have so many gyms that we’re tracking, so much information, then creating systems, procedures, and strategies that are on the Two-Brain roadmap, where you can select, and everyone is not going to do every strategy on the roadmap because there’s literally hundreds of them. So you can select the ones that work for your specific gym and the mentor’s job is to figure out exactly which strategy to use at exactly which time. So I’d love to know, you mentioned a couple of hard things that, you know, turned out not to be so hard necessarily, but you needed a bit of push to do. Can you give me an example of something that you were maybe hesitant to do that Ashley suggested and then what happened at the end?

Noah (16:33):

The easiest and I think it actually sort of blends both of the things we’ve talked about, both a kind of something I was hesitant to do. And then something also where I was like, you know, I want to do this slightly differently and where we were able to kind of like square both of those circles. If you’re like, Hey, give me something else, there’s certain something else. When I first started our pay model was based off the pay model in my old gym, and it was a 70/30 split on private stuff going to the coach, very coach focused. Yeah. And that had worked really well for me as a coach. And it worked well, I mean, certainly from a financial aspect. But it worked well for the gym in general because the sort of like culture and expectation there was that the coaches would basically do everything themselves.

Noah (17:28):

Right. So I created tons of, I mean, this is part of what led me to saying, I think I could own a gym, was I was creating tons of programs on my own. I created, you know, I stood up a kid’s program and created a gymnastics specific program. And these were all things that I was sort of like, you know, ideation, execution, logistics, all of that. I was handling myself. And really the gym was, was in some ways, just sort of like providing the space and like a little bit of support. And that was the idea. And it worked pretty well. It wasn’t working for us. It wasn’t working for anyone really. We had basically no private training clients. We had no real nutrition business. We had, no, we had you know, the concepts that we wanted to do it, but because the revenue share was off.

Noah (18:18):

And because I as an owner was very hands-off with it, nobody was doing anything. I was saying, Hey, look, there’s good money here if you want it. My coaches were kind of basically, you know, saying, without saying, we don’t know how to do this, or, you know, we don’t know where to get started. And so nothing was happening. So, you know, we switched models. Now. I didn’t switch to four ninths. We switched to a 50/50 split, which, you know, is, is almost the same from a financial standpoint as four ninths. At the end of the day, it wasn’t a huge thing. And it was a, you know, I think for me, it gave me sort of some of the mental space and the feeling that like I was still, you know, I don’t know, things were still fair with my coaches or something, whatever it is, I think it was an easier sell to them.

Noah (19:10):

And so I sat down with my like main, you know, PT and nutrition coaches and explained, Hey, this is what we’re going to do. And you know, this is what we need to do. And that, you know, the idea here is that I will be doing a lot more support to make sure that you have business. To make sure you know, my job now, and the reason that we’re changing the split is that now all you have to really worry about is doing the coaching. And I will, you know, the gym will handle the building. We will handle, you know, marketing things and getting the word out and getting people signed up and we’re gonna work hard to get you stuff. And so we did that and, you know, it’s changed hugely and dramatically.

Chris (19:52):

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Noah (20:31):

I mean, you know, sometimes it’s one of those things where it’s hard to say, it’s like, oh, well what started this? Why now do we have tons and tons of PT clients? And I mean, tons might not be the right word. We’re still a small gym, but you know, probably, you know, 500% more than we did before we switched the model and things like that. You know, and this coincides with, you know, doing better intros, this coincides with doing goal review stuff, right? All of those are part of it where all of a sudden, you know, we’re doing affinity marketing where all of a sudden now, instead of like, oh, I, the owner, have one private training client, and that’s all we’ve got at the gym. You know, my PT coaches have, you know, four or five private training clients each, my nutrition coach has, you know, ongoing clients.

Noah (21:21):

And we also do this kind of thing that we devised that we call a nutrition cohort, which is like periodic small group nutrition, private training kind of thing. And it just, you know, it exploded. I had a coach who joined my gym, who came from another gym to work with me during the pandemic and said, Hey, I’ve basically been the head coach at this gym. I’m not happy there anymore. And I’ve heard, you know, you’re a good person as an owner and that’s what I want. And I said, that’s great, but I really don’t have anything for you right now. He wanted to be full-time. And I said, you know, I’ve got some hours. I don’t have a lot of PT. I don’t have a lot of this. You know, I’m worried that we can, you know, make it work for you. But if you trust me, I am going to make it work for you. I will make it happen. And now we’re at the point where it’s like a legitimate thing where he’s got a full roster, where he’s getting big paychecks and stuff like that. So that’s been a big change. And I think it started to change when we changed the model.

Mike (22:25):

Yeah. And that’s an interesting thing because I was the same way when we ran our gym, we would say, OK, you can create any program you want. And we had, you know, we figured out whatever revenue plan there was in place at the time before we were working with a mentor and it was very difficult for a lot of coaches to create content or to start up those programs. And it made perfect sense to me when we got working with Two-Brain to put in place that four ninths model, because I had problems. I was the same as you where I’ve thought, oh, the coach is doing all the work. But when I really realized what the gym was providing, it was an active partnership. In that I’m going to help you market this. We’re going to do all these different things to generate programs, that made a lot of sense to me.

Mike (23:00):

And the four ninths plan worked for the coaches and it worked for the gym and it really made sense. And you’ve obviously made a small adjustment to that, but only we know we’re talking five or 6% that makes you feel like you were at a good spot, but also reflects the way your gym operates. And, you know, Two-Brain obviously gives you that flexibility. But you’re creating careers now. Is it safe to say that both the coaches and the gym are making more money as a result of kind of the programs that you’re putting in place? Like you said, no PT to a lot of PT?

Noah (23:24):

Absolutely. I mean, I think—I was on a call with Ashley and she said, you know, our goal now is to get your coach revenue numbers up. And I was like, oh really? And she was like, yeah, it means more is happening at the gym. I was like, yeah, that makes sense. So, you know, that’s definitely happened. I think the big thing for me, just to like to backtrack it a little bit, and one of the big kind of learning points has been I’ve tended to be somebody—I’m very, self-reliant, I’ve always been, you know, I used to shout at my parents not to bother me if they asked me to help with homework or something, I’m a kind of like, I want to figure it out myself person. And I would extend that to my coaches in this way, where sometimes I think I would just assume they knew how to do things or assume that they would take care of things.

Noah (24:10):

And then it would set me up to be either disappointed or angry when it didn’t happen the way I wanted it to. And I think a big thing that, you know, my mentor Ashley has shown me. It’s like, you have to show them. I mean, you you have to walk them through the first time. You have to be part of that process. You have to, you know, and in some ways it doesn’t give you the out as an owner to be like, ah, it didn’t work out the way I want to. You know, you’re more involved now, but it works better. So, you know, I think that was part of it. It was this sort of like, Hey, let’s, you know, let’s think about this program and I’ll meet with you for an hour and we’re going to sit down.

Noah (24:48):

And I sometimes forget that I’ve been doing this for over 10 years and that I have a lot of experience, you know, I’ve run a billion nutrition challenges. I’ve done all sorts of workshops. I’ve done, you know, XYZ certification. So I sometimes forget that that’s just sort of like living somewhere in my brain. And that, you know, a coach who’s been doing this for a couple of years doesn’t know that, you know. I think it’s an easy thing to overlook and, you know, being pushed to work on that was really, really helpful.

Mike (25:20):

Yeah. Chris has talked about that many times where no one can read your mind, but you forget that a lot of times, because you know how you would open the gym and you know that how you would coach a class. But if you don’t put that stuff down, you can’t expect people to follow, you know, your internal standards. And I was definitely guilty of this where I thought like, oh, people should know that this should be done or this should be cleaned at the end of the night. I had, you know, but that was my own, you know, OCD nature where I would do that stuff, but it’s not obvious to everyone else. And it wasn’t until we started putting checklists in place that things started shaping up and being done properly. So I thought for me that structure, because I am a structure guy, but I’m an internal structure guy. Communicating it was a huge deal that changed our business because no one could figure out why I was mad. You know? Do you have any growth metrics or anything like that? You wouldn’t mind sharin? How’s the business doing post RampUp and sort of what’s changed?

Noah (26:10):

I mean, we’re back. I mean, I think probably the most interesting thing, and this is sort of rough, but I mean, we’re back to basically our best membership number at any point. You know, from sort of number of memberships sold, we’re actually slightly under it, but we’re far past it in revenue. And we’re a small gym, you know, from a sort of square footage standpoint. So there is always this kind of issue of a, you know, maybe the numbers that we thought at some point of people that we could have at the gym are not realistic just from like a, you know, how many people do we have before we’re kind of falling out the doors capacity size, and being able, you know, now with our average revenue per member being that much higher, and it wasn’t bad to begin with.

Noah (26:59):

I’ve never been afraid of being like a higher price option. But it’s gotten even better from there. And so being able to, you know, I mean, we’re doing more revenue month over month than we have, pretty much any time and we’re still kind of building membership back. So I would say that’s a big thing. I mean, and then just building the membership back, I mean, happened very quickly. It happened, you know, you know, basically we doubled our membership size since, you know, February or so. So, you know, that was big.

Mike (27:38):

How much space did you say you have?

Noah (27:38):

It’s like just under 3000 square foot total gym, the actual like training space is like 1700 square feet or something.

Mike (27:51):

The reason I ask is because Chris was blogging about this recently, where he’s looking at gyms that have good revenue and good profit and then low expenses. I’ll also ask you, like, where’s your business located? Is it like, you know, in retail, storefront high-end area, or is it a smaller, a different kind of area?

Noah (28:07):

It’s in a different kind of area. I’m actually a big believer in a non warehouse gym model. Yeah, so we took over what was a barber shop and a veterinarian’s office. It’s actually owned by one of our members who was a client of mine in New York. So, you know, I was really lucky with that. Our overhead rent-wise is really good. Especially in Austin where rents are just like, you know, astronomically increasing. Every so often I could get, you know, a wild hair and I’m like, well, what if we expanded? And I’ll spend about 10 minutes looking at real estate and be like, oh, absolutely not. That’s crazy. So we’re in a good spot. You know, we are, you know, the owner of our building is bought into what we do. It’s a freestanding building that we don’t share with anything.

Noah (28:54):

So we have like a lot of autonomy and control over what we do with the space and, you know, our surrounding space. But yeah, I think small is very doable and works really well with this model. Works really well with this sort of like, you know, let’s clean things up, let’s get tighter and tighter procedure-wise. So that you don’t just run into that like just kind of always feeding the beast of growth with no profit and certainly like no rest.

Mike (29:30):

And that’s, you know, that’s kinda what I’m getting at is like the temptation there is to expand right. Is to always go bigger, bigger, bigger, and I’ve seen some gyms do that. And they were always moving into bigger spaces and I could never figure out they were doing it in advance of revenue. And I think they probably were where it’s like, oh, you know, we’re doing pretty good, but we might as well get a bigger space and then try and fill it. And I think a lot of times it probably cost them, right. Because they were kind of—these were gyms that I know were offering a lot of discounts and things like that. And I knew that their average revenue per member probably wasn’t that good. And Chris has written about this, where if you’re constantly chasing bigger and better and shinier, you can really always, like you said, always feed that beast where you always have to keep chucking a huge percentage of your profit away onto like rent and things like that. Whereas a lot of gyms that have been very successful have started in small spaces, driven up their average revenue per member, made their systems and procedures so tight that then they had a great profit margin. And then could say from a position of strength, let’s go a little bit bigger. And without hurting our profit too much. And I was particularly curious because I know Austin is one of those crazy areas. I was really interested in that. So now you’ve got a good number of members, but they’re at a higher rate in a small space. But when you decide to expand, you can do it from a very calculated perspective and not kind of damage the income levels that you’ve created. So what’s the plan going forward? Like, you know, going into post pandemic, we’ll call it post pandemic. I know Texas is in a different situation in some places. I’m still very much in a lockdown up here in the middle of Canada, but what’s going forward for you? Like, is expansion a long-term plan or short-term plan? Or what are you guys looking at next, in this next period before as you go into 2021 post pandemic in Texas?

Noah (31:07):

I mean, I think it dovetails well off like what we were just talking about gym size. I mean, I was in a gym there where they expanded, you know, sort of like leap of faith style. It worked out because they run, I mean probably the best gym product I’ve, you know, or among the best gym products I’ve ever seen. They do a phenomenal job, but I know the owner of that gym had many sleepless nights when he doubled his square footage. And I think like tripled his rent month to month.

Mike (31:38):

And that’s in New York, right?

Noah (31:39):

That’s in New York. He took on a big—and there weren’t members yet to fill it. I think the big thing would be, you know, whether it’s our expansion or any gym considering it is not do you want to just do the same thing but bigger, but do you want to do something different? Would be a big thing about expansion, right? Is this like, does your space no longer work because you also want to add a different kind of class that needs different, you know, equipment or whatever it is, that would be a reason or you want a different, you know, set up or something like that. But just being like, oh, we just want a bigger spot I think means there’s still more, you can still get more juice out of the orange before you do that.

Mike (32:20):

That’s such a good statement. I love that, I’m going to steal that one,

Noah (32:24):

Go for it. For us, as far as going forward, I always talk to my coaches. One of the first things I tell any coach when I hire them, because I know I’ve heard all the horror stories in the industry is like, is I want to support you. And if you ever want to do something on your own, if you ever want to own a gym on your own or this or whatever, I hope that you talk to me first and I will help you. Right. I will help you. I will partner with you, you know? And you know, and then treating the coaches in a way that they would actually want to do that. Cause you can say it, you can say that and you know, at the time of their hire, they can say, oh, that’s really cool.

Noah (33:02):

But if, you know, if the way you treat them is not in line with that, I don’t think it works very well. So we’ve had, I’ve had some conversations with some coaches about potentially doing that. I think that probably for me would be what I would look to is building another gym of a similar size down the road versus building, you know, the same gym bigger, and you know, empowering my coaches who, you know, know how to run things either to take over, you know, operations at the current gym as I go and stand up the next one, or if it’s, you know, they’re moving, you know, 20 minutes outside of town, you know, have them do that and assist them and basically, you know, replicate processes, replicate what’s worked, share, you know, a big thing is like sharing some like branding stuff and things like that.

Noah (34:01):

And building kind of brand language into it. So that’s, you know, there’s been some sort of some early conversations about that with some people, we got a little further with one of my coaches and then, one of them, one of their spouses got a kind of like can’t resist job offer somewhere else and had to split town. So that’s something we’re looking for, you know, looking towards, you know, now things here in the US are getting, you know, more and more open. So it’s looking like we can start doing some things like a seniors program is something that’s always been near and dear to my heart. So we’re starting to get going and building that out. And those, you know, that population was very reticent, even when we were keeping things pretty like pretty safe and controlled, you know, I think anybody over 55 was like, there’s absolutely no way I’m going to a gym until, you know, I’m sure I’m safe. And I respect that.

Mike (34:59):

Love it. I love the idea of potential expansion by replicating a small space and a small community elsewhere. And it’s really cool because, we’ll put in the show notes, there’s a link to the guide where Chris is talking about how to make a hundred thousand dollars from your gym and it’s not to say you can’t go big, but 150 clients is kind of a sweet spot. And especially when you’re in a high rent area, you know, a smaller gym might work really, really well to do that. So guys, if you’re listening out there and if you’re a gym owner who’s thinking about expanding or a gym owner who’s or an entrepreneur who’s thinking about opening a gym, get that guide and take a look at it because it might help you. And I love the idea of, OK, I’ve got this thing dialed in in this small space where the rent is affordable and now I might replicate it.

Mike (35:40):

I might support a coach, help doing that in another small space where you can create that same great model by leveraging the systems and procedures that are in place. And that’s really cool because once you have those things, you can literally drop them with small changes, you know, into any different new business. And that’s what kind of makes you an entrepreneur at that point is you have the systems and procedures. McDonald’s is probably the most obvious example of that, where they have SOPs for everything, and they can open up a building literally anywhere in the world in a small period of time. So it’s cool to see, I want to catch up with you in a couple of months, or maybe a year and see where you’re at with that procedure. So we’ll chat again. How does that sound?

Noah (36:20):

Sounds good.

Mike (36:20):

I have one important question as we leave. When you guys moved into this space, did you keep the red, white and blue barbershop pole out front?

Noah (36:27):

They didn’t have a pole. It was called ideal fades with a Z. They didn’t have a pole. They did have, like, the veterinarian side was real spooky. It was a real old school vet. And we had to demo out these like old cinder block cages. And they were like, there were hypodermic needles everywhere. And the building looked like it was like in Stranger Things, kind of like brown and the lights were flickering all the time and it was real spooky, but yeah, sadly, no pole. Had that been there I absolutely would have kept it. I knew

Mike (37:08):

I knew you probably would have. So I had to ask about it. But Noah, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it. And we’ll talk to you again in a year or so and see where your business is at. I’m Mike Warkentin and this is Two-Brain Radio. 93% of gym owners recoup their investment in RampUp in less than 12 weeks. If you want to learn more about the program, book a call with a certified mentor via the link in the show notes. And now before you go, join the Gym Owners United group on Facebook. You can literally ask your gym business questions in there and get answers from gym owners, certified Two-Brain mentors and Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper himself. It’s the only public group where Cooper offers his insight. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook. Join today and I will see you in there.

 

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