Chris Cooper's Blog, page 125

Building Your PT Business: The Right Staff

By Joleen Bingham, Certified Two-Brain Fitness Business Mentor

Finding and hiring the right staff to deliver personal training can be difficult for microgym owners. Staff members need to be experienced, they must have the right mindset, and they must deliver exceptional service. 

In “How to Add 10K in Personal Training Revenue in 30 Days or Less,” we give you the exact tools to find a trainer. 

But how do you identify the best personal trainer for your specific gym?

Ask yourself the questions below.

Key Staffing Questions for Gym Owners 

Do they align with your vision? 

The worst thing you can do is hire a trainer who doesn’t line up with the gym’s mission and vision. I have made the mistake of hiring someone who wasn’t on our page, and we lost clients and a significant amount of revenue fixing the problem. Make sure from the beginning that your potential hires know your vision but, more importantly, can tell you how they align with it. 

Are they professional? 

Do potential coaches show up on time? Dress in a presentable manner? Use appropriate language? These elements might be bare minimums, but you would be surprised at how often they are ignored in the fitness industry. Your trainers are a direct reflection of your business, and when something isn’t up to your standards, the trainers aren’t blamed—the business is. 

Do they have a “growth mindset”? 

Have prospective coaches continued to learn beyond their original certifications? If you’re hiring brand new trainers, you can ask how they plan to grow. Do they have ideas on how to help grow the business? 

Do they deliver exceptional service? 

This one is hard to measure completely in a simple interview. However, during our process we have each applicant deliver a personal training session to one of our best clients. We evaluate the prospective coach from the first introduction to the session wrap-up. 

Where do they see themselves fitting in with your business? 

Every person you hire should enhance your business’s toolbox in some way. What do they bring to table that no one else can? It could be something simple—perhaps they have availability no one else has. Or maybe they bring specific expertise—like postpartum fitness or gymnastics training—and can help you offer more to your clients.

Put in the Effort

Hiring the right trainers is a lot of work, but doing it will make all the difference. If you get the right people in place, your PT program will grow, and you’ll have great retention because satisfied clients will keep coming back for more.

The post Building Your PT Business: The Right Staff appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

What if Every Client Spent $12,000 at Your Gym?

Mike (00:02):

Knowing the lifetime value of your clients changes everything. It’s not about making people into dollar signs. It’s about measuring the value you provide, making smart financial decisions and changing the way you look at clients. We’ll begin right after this.

Chris (00:15):

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

Mike (00:49):

Welcome to Two-Brain Radio I’m Mike Warkentin and today we’re examining lifetime value of clients or LTV. This figure is a function of two things: average revenue per member, and length of engagement or ARM and LEG as we call it. At a chain gym with $20 memberships, you’d have to keep a client for 41 years to get to an LTV of $10,000. Many Two-Brain gyms are scoring well over 10K, but they’re doing it with ARM numbers over $300 and length of engagement scores over 30 months or some combination of that. All this means that you can make a hundred thousand dollars per year or more with just 150 clients. If you don’t believe me, download the free guide, how to make a hundred thousand dollars per year. The link is in the show notes. Jonathan Beckner of Move Functional Fitness in Decatur, Georgia has a huge LTV.

Mike (01:33):

He was one of Two-Brain’s leaders in March, 2021. The top gym scored over $14,000 and Becker’s biz almost hit 12,000. Jonathan. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here today.

Jonathan (01:43):

Thanks for having me.

Mike (01:45):

Let’s get in. Let’s dig into it. I’m excited to talk about this one. I know this isn’t a number that you think about a lot, but we’re going to kind of dive in and just see what we can learn from you because you were one of our worldwide leaders, so you must know something about it. So we’ll figure out what that is. And we’ll talk. I know you focused on retention. Give me some idea of how long members generally stay at your gym and how do you make that happen? What are your keys for retention?

Jonathan (02:05):

Sure. You know, if I knew exactly what that was, I’m sure that number would be a whole lot better, but right now our average length for membership is around 58 months. So just under five years.

Mike (02:22):

That is excellent.

Jonathan (02:23):

And you know, we’re in a situation where we’ve been open for 13 years, we opened in 2008, we were a really early affiliate in the Atlanta area. And you know, a lot of those early adopters had such a passion for CrossFit and it became part of their identity. And, you know, that was a benefit to us and probably 25% of our membership joined in the first five years of our current membership. And so we’ve retained those, you know, for eight years or so, up to 13 years, we still have some of those original members. And then beyond that, we’re probably keeping about 10%, from beyond that per year. And, I think the biggest thing for retention for us has always been community. And, you know, I know every gym talks about community, but, you know, we’re in a pretty unique situation as a CrossFit gym and that’s we get to curate the culture here. And so you get the right people, as far as coaches, you get the right people, as far as members, throw in some competition, you know, throw in some challenges and people just want to stick around.

Mike (03:44):

You’ve hit on a couple of very interesting, and you know, one of the things that you have to do to have a high lifetime value is you have to have average revenue per member that’s in a good spot and you also have to have length of engagement. And the key to length of engagement is that you have to be around long enough to keep those members. So just think as a business, that is a key to length of engagement, but that said there are some long-term businesses that have very high churn and very poor retention. So, you know, you said that, you know, you’ve been around for a long time. You’ve kept some members for 13 years. That’s a huge deal like 13 years, even if we’re talking early adopters, 13 years at the same business in the fickle fitness industry is a huge accomplishment. So congratulations to you for having some of those members for a really long time. It’s really interesting. I’ve talked to a few other gym owners about this as well, and they say the same thing. You have to stay around. And that’s the sign of a healthy business that survives. Has your length of engagement gone up over the years, or have you tracked that to enough to know.

Jonathan (04:38):

You know, I haven’t tracked it enough to know. I would imagine that it went up for a little bit, probably through, I don’t know, 2017 or something like that. It was probably on its way up, maybe even a little bit earlier than that before it started to dip.

Mike (04:55):

What do you think made it dip?

Jonathan (04:58):

Just, we’ve gone through some changes, you know, the typical growing pains that a lot of CrossFit gyms go through with coaches leaving or a large group of members leaving at the same time, or, you know, that type of thing happens.

Mike (05:13):

Still talking like 50, was it 58 months? You said?

Jonathan (05:15):

Yes.

Mike (05:15):

So that’s a really, really good number we’re talking over, you know, over four years at that point, that’s, you know, almost five almost. Incredible number. And, you know, Chris Cooper’s been talking about length of engagement and targeting, like getting people to like over 10 to get that 14, 14-month range, you’re at five years. So that’s a really solid thing. So no matter what, even if your length of engagement dipped a little bit, you’re still at a really good spot. And again, that’s a huge contributor to lifetime value. You talked about community. So an interesting thing is like I was old school, like you were, you know, community was a big deal. And I used to try and sell that. Right. And we’ve kind of figured out with Two-Brain that people don’t necessarily come to a gym for community. Like it’s not a good sales pitch because what they’re really looking for is like weight loss or increased strength or confidence or fitting into a grad dress or whatever it is. And, but on the other end of it, community is a huge retainer. Do you agree with me on that?

Jonathan (06:07):

Absolutely. People definitely don’t come to us because they think they’re going to make friends. You know, I mean, I guess some people do, you know, some people are referrals or maybe they are looking for, you know, just a place to hang out, but, yeah, they’ve got some other idea of what we offer and as long as we are in agreement on we can fulfill that offer, then our next goal is to get them kind of stuck in the community. And I think about it kind of as like a web of connectivity where the coach is, you know, maybe one point of contact, but the member’s not going to stick around because of the coach. They need other points of contact. And so my goal is to get them introduced to as many people as possible who are in the gym who are long-term members, have them look forward to coming to the gym, because if they’re not having fun, they’re not going to come back, you know, and just have all these different points that keep them kind of stuck in a good way.

Mike (07:14):

Yeah. And it’s like multiple points of contact, you know, it’s like, a spider web, no spiderweb is strong with one strand, but you get a whole bunch of them, then it holds onto some stuff. And that’s kind of exactly what you’re saying, where the more points of contact you have from your business and through the people in your business to a member, the more they’re going to stay. And again, I actually put on my website at one point, Oh, we have friends for you here. I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but I thought it was so fun. Like all my best friends are working out together, but I didn’t realize until working with Two-Brain that that’s not why people came, no one comes for that, but they will stay for that. And to the point where now we moved our gym online completely and shut down our physical location and our old members, a lot of them are still working out together and they’re just going to parks and stuff like that. So it’s really cool. And that community was something that we all created together and is now continuing, you know, beyond us. So I think you’re on the right path there. I have to ask with COVID and restrictions and so forth. How do you deal with that? Can you like, can you still generate that community or how do you keep everybody linked together when you’re in a crazy situation?

Jonathan (08:16):

Yeah, it’s definitely been more challenging, but I do have to say, and I don’t know if you know this, but we started Two-Brain January 1st, 2020. And so, and I was thinking about this earlier is we did a whole lot of things early on in that year with the expectation that it was going to be an extremely important year for us to grow and this and that. So we bought a whole bunch of new equipment and we started mentorship and, you know, we were getting through, we had just finished the kind of on-ramp series with Two-Brain. And so all of these, our vision and our mission and our values and all these things were just like top of mind. And we were just in high gear ready to go.

Jonathan (09:07):

And then, you know, the pandemic hits and we’re like, Oh crap. But we were super prepared for it. Just because we were, like I said, we were already running at high gear. And, had you asked me, you know, if you had told me in December that the pandemic was going to happen, I probably would have saved that money. Not bought the equipment, not, you know, joined a mentorship and just, you know, tried to weather it out or something. And we definitely wouldn’t be here had that happened. So it’s like all these things I put into place unknowingly saved us, for sure. And you know, we’re still kind of kicking along through 2021. Yeah. That’s a little bit of an aside, but you know, going into the pandemic, we switched everybody immediately over to, or assigned people rather to, personal coaches, so, right.

Jonathan (10:03):

So we would deliver online coaching daily, be in daily contact with everyone. And then, we just tried to ramp up our social media presence and our Facebook groups and things like that. Just to keep people engaged, we did a bunch of trivia nights and bingo and some challenges. And I started a weekly newsletter, just to kind of like stay in contact with all the people that I wasn’t personally coaching. And so I would provide them with, you know, here’s what we did during the week. And here are some cool PRs that people hit, you know, these people are having fun and just trying to keep people connected. I started a podcast as well. Again, just for that same reason, just to have some sort of personal connection with all of our members. And so, uyou know, it’s just, you try to build the community where you can.

Mike (10:57):

So you’re putting in a lot of effort there and like, that’s what we’ve heard from our gym owners in lockdown, or who have been locked down and/or not been able to run their businesses, staying in touch with members in creative ways is essential. And, you know, the Two-Brain plan was exactly like you said, assign personal coaches to deliver the workouts to clients every single day. Right. It wasn’t zoom classes, some gyms used that and that can work, you know, in certain things, but the better plan was contacting members and maintaining that personal relationship. So you’ve done that, but then you’ve even gone further with different kinds of, you know, the podcast, the newsletter, the online stuff that really keeps people engaged. Are you guys locked down right now or what’s Georgia’s situation?

Jonathan (11:36):

No, we were actually only locked down for probably six weeks though. We actually closed for eight. And, that was early on, that would have been in April of last year. Not bad at all. But there has been, you know, that definitely put the brakes for obvious reasons on a lot of people’s expectations of going to the gym. And so as far as retention goes, we definitely lost some members last year and we definitely didn’t retain all of our new members that came on. And I was just looking at the number and it’s not a fun number to look at.

Mike (12:21):

Which one is that, is that total members or?

Jonathan (12:24):

No, the number of members who, who joined this last year, who are no longer with us, you know, and this year it’s so far so good. It’s a lot better situation. I think people are feeling better about getting out and joining gyms and, you know, we’re certainly trying to do our part to make it easy for people to come in.

Mike (12:45):

Yeah. It’s unprecedented times and it’s different in every place like there, you know, up where we are right now, we’re in Ontario, Canada still under a stay at home order. We’re in the middle of like a 42 day stay at home order. And like, there are gyms in Toronto that have not been open, I think for nine months kind of thing. Like it’s just incredible. And then there’s other ones that have been everything in between from no lockdowns to endless lockdown. So everybody kind of makes their own path through that. And I’m glad to hear things, you know, you were set up at least had some momentum to get through the period that you had to get through. And we experienced the same thing with members. You can’t fault people for being scared during a pandemic. You can’t fault people if they lose their jobs and things like that. There’s just so many circumstances that relate to retention that could become out of your control. So all you can really do is create the tightest bonds with the clients who can and want to be there. And then you go from there. Right?

Jonathan (13:32):

Absolutely.

Mike (13:32):

It’s such a crazy time. We’ll get into little bit more into lifetime value here. And you said before the show that it’s not something that you’ve tracked a whole lot, does knowing it now give you any insight at all? What do you think about it?

Jonathan (13:45):

I was thinking about this earlier and the best I can come up with right now is that this number is kind of a statistical representation of my value to someone, or the value that they see in my services. And so, you know, that it’s actually maybe a sense of pride, even that someone believes in me this much, that they’re willing to give me this much money over this amount of time. You know, and so I think as far as a metric, that’s a pretty cool thing. To be able to put a number on how much value someone sees in you.

Mike (14:27):

Yeah. And Chris has talked about this, Two-Brain Founder, Chris Cooper, obviously has talked about this so many times about constantly delivering value and a lot of us, especially, I mean, I’ll ask an old school question in a second, but when I started out, I was so new at fitness and I was so nervous for anything. I did not have any perception of what my actual value to a client was. And I was almost like just, I couldn’t even ask for 157.50 a month for unlimited membership. Right. Like it was a struggle for me. Like, do you remember when you started back in the day, do you remember what your basic membership price was?

Jonathan (15:00):

We actually started at 150 and we gave a million discounts. You know, so you could probably get that down to $110 or something. Right. If you were the right type of military, a teacher or something like that, you know, you could probably, student as well, you know? But yeah, 150 was kind of the number around Atlanta. And of course we started with what everyone else was doing for quite a while.

Mike (15:34):

What would your average membership cost be right now?

Jonathan (15:40):

$175.

Mike (15:42):

So you’re moving up with your average revenue per member.

Jonathan (15:44):

Yeah. And you know, we honestly, when we started, we didn’t even really offer personal training that much either. We would do a handful of sessions every once in a while, but, you know, our main offering was group. And now our personal training packages start $360. I think.

Chris (16:06):

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

Mike (16:39):

Do you have a sense of what percentage of your business now is personal training, or do you even know the exact number?

Jonathan (16:44):

I don’t know the exact number, but it has increased probably, it probably increased three X last year.

Mike (16:53):

So the reason I ask is that I’ve talked to a number of gym owners about this, and it all relates back to like average revenue per member, and lifetime value. And a lot of them have talked about personal training. There was a lot of us who, you know, I didn’t even know, shamefully, that you could do personal training in a CrossFit setting. Right. I was just completely, it did not occur to me because that’s not what anyone did. Right. But when people are adding in personal training, either just straight up personal training packages, like you’re talking about or hybrid packages that are group and personal training, what they’re seeing is clients are loving it. They’re getting better results and their revenue is increasing. So it’s like a win for literally everyone in the business. Have you seen that?

Jonathan (17:32):

Yeah. I think for us, most of our people who come in for group typically don’t do much personal training, but people who come in for personal training, that’s really all they want to do. So for us, we’re seeing kind of a split. And then I get the occasional client who wants to do both who’s maybe got a competition they’re working on and they, you know, they want to do some private training to work on a few things or they have some specific goals that just aren’t getting covered you know, during our group classes.

Mike (18:10):

Yeah. So for you, it’s less hybrid stuff and it’s more just group or personal training. So that works just because you’ve got, like you said, you’re selling, what was it like $350 personal training package.

Jonathan (18:20):

Yeah. And, sometimes up to $1,200.

Mike (18:23):

So there you go. That’s a huge high value service. And if your lifetime value is $12,000, you know, you sell 10 packages to one client, there you go. That doesn’t even take you years to get to. Right. In some cases potentially. OK. So that’s a really interesting one because lifetime value, like if one client buys $12,000 from you in one purchase, that’s $12,000 lifetime value right there. So it doesn’t have to be stretched out over years if you’ve got the right value in your packages and services. So that’s really interesting how you’re doing it there. When you know that a lead might spend $12,000 in your business over the next, you know, call it 50 months or whatever, we’ll call it. How does that affect the way you handle leads and brand new members, or does it affect that at all for you?

Jonathan (19:06):

You know, I don’t think it does. And like I was saying, this isn’t really a number that I’ve focused on before. Maybe I will moving forward. You know, now that we’re having this conversation about it, but you know, it’s like every time, you know, we use GLM and anytime I get a notification on my phone that somebody requested info about pricing, it’s like, hooray, let’s get them in the door and talk to them. Right. So it’s just more about, OK, let’s see what they want and let’s see what we can offer. And, you know, and then it’s just, like I said, building that relationship from there.

Mike (19:44):

Yeah. It’s really interesting because you know, this is a number that a lot of gym owners haven’t thought about a lot of, but as you know, Chris has been digging into the gigabytes of data that we have, and he’s looking at stuff he’s finding things that people can do to drive up their revenue and make their businesses better. And so, as we talk about this, and this is why I wanted to have you on the show, the more we talk about this and kind of think about it, the more gym owners will start to kind of use this data to improve their own businesses. And one of the things I thought was really interesting is, um, you know, John Franklin and Mateo Lopez, the GLM guys, but also, help out with Two-Brain Marketing, they talked about like cost of acquisition. Right. So if you think about like advertising costs and things like that, do you do any advertising?

Jonathan (20:23):

Yeah, we do. We run the Facebook ads and that’s pretty much it.

Mike (20:31):

Yeah. So if you track your cost of acquisition for a member, you know, you say, Oh, let’s say, you know, I’m going to spend $50 to get a new member or something like that. Probably I’m going to guess, like, does it give you a sense of confidence in that $50 spend or whatever it might be when you think my average revenue for LTV was $12,000?

Jonathan (20:48):

Yeah. I definitely use that as maybe not the lifetime value as much as, you know, our front end offer. You know, but it’s like, OK, well, if I can just get one client out of this campaign, then, you know, it’ll more than pay for it. So, I think it’s more of just that front end offer for me versus the lifetime value.

Mike (21:11):

And I’m not sure if that’s like, if that perspective changes a little bit, when you start getting into like really big ad spends and things like that, the analogy that, you know, Mateo would always talk about on the show here was, you know, Netflix, I think Netflix spends, they know that the cost of acquisition is quite high and they’re willing to spend it because they know their lifetime value. And of course we’re talking like Netflix style advertising, we’re talking, you know, lots and lots of zeros behind the numbers. So it’s a different perspective. Whereas at the gym level, you might be able to recoup your advertising costs just on that front-end offer. So maybe you don’t see it as much, but at the same time, it is a metric that kind of play into that. And I’ve asked John and Mateo to kind of play with the numbers a little bit.

Mike (21:50):

And it’s really interesting to see, you know, gym owners saying, ah, this ad cost. And they’re like, well, your lifetime value is this, put that in perspective, you’re still profiting up until this point of ad spend, which is way higher than you’re panicking about right now. So it’s really fascinating to look at those metrics. I’ll ask you this again, we haven’t talked about this a whole lot, but I want to just see if you know, what your opinion is. If owners are looking to drive this number up, what would you recommend they first focus on?

Jonathan (22:14):

Yeah, no problem. Well, you know, like you had mentioned, it’s a multiplier, so you’ve got your ARM and your LEG to create the LTV. So, I would always focus on the value first, probably. So, you know, how are you providing value to your clients? Are you providing excellent coaches in all the ways that we know how, are you a clear communicator and making it easy for your clients to communicate clearly with you? Are you providing services that they want and need, and then you need to find reasons other than yourself or your coaches for people to stay members. So like we talked about creating that web of connectivity to keep them, you know, it could be that your services are just good enough that everybody wants to stay, but you know, the gym needs to be a fun place. It needs to be a place that people want to stay at and want to come to every day.

Mike (23:09):

Value first, that’s the best one is to just make sure that you are offering. And this, it sounds like when you say it, it’s simple, but it wasn’t simple for me. It’s like, you need to create things that people want. And for me, I think over a lot of times I created things that I thought people would want, but no one actually wanted. Did you notice that as you evolved as an affiliate owner?

Jonathan (23:28):

Oh, absolutely. It’s always, Oh, well, this is what I want to do, so let’s do it, you know, and I mean, honestly there were times where I completely ignored clients, and you know, for better or worse. And, you know, a big part of what we do in Two-Brain right now is, you know, we’re asking clients, we’re having those, uh, goal-setting sessions and just general conversations about, Hey, how can we help you better? And this and that. And GLM makes that easy too and sending out automated emails and getting that feedback. And it’s maybe hard on the ego to ask for help or to ask, you know, what can I do for you? What am I not doing now? You know, how am I not serving you now? Maybe that’s hard on the ego, but it’s better for your business if you do ask those questions.

Mike (24:22):

Isn’t it a novel concept to actually ask customers what they want? You know, it’s so funny. Cause again, so simple, but I didn’t get it until Chris told me, you know, and like, Hey, wait a second. Maybe not everyone wants to do muscle-up clinics. Huh. Interesting. You know, and that kinda changes things where all of a sudden, you really realize and some gym owners have had this crazy, you know, revelation where they’ve just discovered that maybe their clients don’t even want group fitness. And again, there’s nothing wrong with group fitness, but there’s some gym owners I’ve spoken to that have actually talked about getting rid of the group program just to go to personal training. And there’s the hybrid model. There’s all this other stuff, but it comes down to what their clients want. So asking your clients, you know what, I’m going to throw this out to you. I think some of your lifetime value is probably related to your willingness now to ask clients what they want and then providing those goal review sessions. Would you agree?

Jonathan (25:08):

Yeah, absolutely. People need a reason to stick around and if you’re constantly not giving them what they really want, then they’re going to go to a gym that gives them what they want. And we have certainly lost our share of clients to other gyms that have the type of programming that they want or, you know, a lifting class that we don’t provide or this or that. And so it’s like, OK, well, we have that choice at that moment. Do we provide this service? And do we think it’s a value to more than just the handful of people who, you know, who are asking for it or is it, something that we want to roll out to the rest of our clientele or do we want to avoid it and just say, OK, no, we want to focus on these, you know, this type of member, this avatar or whatever.

Mike (25:58):

And that’s, you know, that’s another thing I’m glad you brought up that I’m really hearing when I talk to gym owners around the world about this kind of stuff, knowing your client is just so important. And again, something I didn’t do back in the day, but now you have the competence to say, OK, you know what? We’re not going to be the Olympic weightlifting competition gym, or we are, whatever. And if you have to make a decision, it makes it way easier to make that decision. I mean, have you been in a spot, cause I was, where, you know, a bunch of clients say we’d really like a 9:00 AM class slot. And I’m like, OK. And I put it in and guess what happens? Right. Three people show up and you’re bleeding money out of this gunshot wound of a class and you can’t get rid of it, but you know, did you have something like that happen too?

Jonathan (26:37):

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We even recently it’s like, OK, well we added in an extra class and all these people who said they wanted it aren’t showing up. So we’ll see how much longer it lasts, but you try. Yeah.

Mike (26:54):

And I love what you said there, you listen to the members most of the time, but not all the time. And you know, you give them what you want, unless it’s something that you just, it’s not something you’re going to provide to that client avatar. Jonathan, thank you so much. I love talking to old school affiliate owners who have been around for a really long time. Thanks so much for being here and sharing your thoughts on lifetime value. And eventually I want to chat with you down the line maybe a year or so, and see what your thoughts are as you’ve looked at that number even further.

Jonathan (27:17):

Yeah, absolutely.

Mike (27:17):

I’m Mike Warkentin. Jonathan Beckner was the guest today on Two-Brain Radio. Be sure to subscribe for more episodes. And the FOMO is real. Join Gym Owners United Facebook. That is a free group, but it’s private. You can literally ask your gym business questions and get answers from other gym owners, certified Two-Brain mentors and Two-Brain founder, Chris Cooper himself. The gym owner down the street is in that group. And you should be too. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook. I’ll see you in there.

 

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2021: The Best Time to Open a Microgym

By Joleen Bingham, Certified Two-Brain Fitness Business Mentor

You have a dream to open your own microgym but have been holding off for a number of reasons.

Now is actually the perfect time to open your gym.

No, you didn’t read that wrong.

In 2020, the COVID Crisis completely interrupted the fitness industry.

With the world tightly focused on public health for more than a year, staying healthy is a priority for more people now. In 2021, businesses that focus on personalization, provide accountability and allow people to continue their fitness routines will stand out to consumers who are looking to stay healthy in safe ways.

2020 taught us that being in good health lowers our risk of disease. To rid themselves of “comorbidities” that can predispose someone to disease or more severe symptoms of a disease, many people now want to lose weight and address chronic health conditions. Those who are healthy want to stay that way. Others want to reduce anxiety through activity. Most are looking for ways to do all this in a smaller, more controlled environment where they are less likely to be at risk for transmission of COVID-19.

A microgym provides just that.

People need accountability and individualized options, not just access to equipment and a do-it-yourself fitness plan that’s unlikely to bring results. With all the stress in their lives, they need someone to tell them the best workouts for their goals, hold them accountable from day to day, and check in every 90 days with Goal Review Sessions to make sure they are getting results. Microgyms can provide all that because the focus is on creating solid, long-term relationships, not on selling a huge volume of monthly memberships and handing towels to the few nameless clients who actually show up.

Even better, staff at a microgym can create customized plans for people and combine in-person and at-home options. The flexibility of these plans allows people to easily and immediately transition to 100 percent at-home training if public health concerns cause future disruptions.

2021 is the year that people will seek out personal treatment. Now more than ever, they want to be more than just a number.

Will you be ready?

The Two-Brain RampUp Program gives you all the tools you
need to take your business from startup to successful, thriving microgym.

The post 2021: The Best Time to Open a Microgym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Pandemic Pushes Pull-Ups Online at 5 of 10 CrossFit Games Semifinals

This week:

CrossFit Games Semifinals: The virus and the virtual competitions.How did Jillian Michaels get to represent the fitness industry?
Pandemic Event Planning: Harder Than Fran

I really feel for the CrossFit Games athletes who are trying to compete during a pandemic.

But I have even more sympathy for CrossFit Games staff and Semifinal organizers.

A recent article announced the seeding procedures at the NOBULL CrossFit Games Semifinals, and the pandemic is treating the Games much like it’s treated the “2020” Olympics. The Tokyo games were pushed back to 2021 and will take place in August with no international spectators allowed.

To try and prevent the spread of COVID-19, the International Olympic Committee is now on Version 2 of its “Playbook” for athletes and team officials. The 60-page document contains fun stuff like this: “Make sure you have access to enough masks to last throughout your stay in Japan. Everyone is responsible for their own supply.”

And this: “Keep physical interactions with others to a minimum. Avoid unnecessary forms of contact such as hugs, high-fives and handshakes.”

I bet a lot of athletes really miss the days when you really only had to worry about pre-event diarrhea and post-event drug testing.

The Fittest Online

CrossFit is doing an admirable job attempting to deal with a similarly impossible situation: Selecting the fittest person on Earth during a pandemic. It’s a logistics nightmare.

For example, travel restrictions mean half of the 10 Semifinal events must be online—like the Atlas Games, a North American qualifier that was set to include four-time defending champion Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr.

Toomey-Orr likely wouldn’t have been able to compete in the Torian Pro Semifinal in her homeland of Australia—she’s posting to Instagram from Nashville, Tennessee, at present. So she was moved to the online Atlas Games and would have been likely to qualify for the CrossFit Finals without seeing the faces of the athletes she was crushing.

Then Toomey-Orr was moved again—this time to the in-person Mid Atlantic CrossFit Challenge set for May 28-30. It’s the right call to get your best athlete to a live event that includes 2020 Games finalists Haley Adams and Brooke Wells, as well as Amanda Barnhart. But it’s definitely not easy for athletes and organizers to manage the chaos of an unprerdictable year.

The Games themselves will likely create more issues as athletes try to get to Madison to compete in person at the Finals in late July. Hopefully they’re all able to get there—it would be heartbreaking to earn a spot and lose the chance to compete due to red tape at borders.

Jillian Michaels: Not Our Fitness Business Expert

Back in December 2020, The Wall Street Journal posted an article with a headline that’s hard to resist if you run a gym: “The Fate of Home-Exercise Equipment When COVID-19 Ends.”

Since the run on fitness gear started in spring 2020 as gyms were shut down around the world, I’ve speculated that you’ll be able to find a lot of equipment for sale about a year after the pandemic ends—whenever that will be.

People, in general, just aren’t motivated to do things on their own without coaching and accountability. I’d guess the pandemic definitely converted some longtime gym-goers to garage warriors, but I suspect many other people will head back to the gym—or maybe the couch—if “normal” ever returns.

There’s a reason you can always find treadmills, elliptical machines and steppers for re-sale. Don’t believe me? I randomly checked the sporting category on Craigslist in Baltimore, and you’ll find a ton of fitness equipment among the 1,200 listings at press time. Same deal in Seattle, where there were 3,000 listings at press time.

Use My App!

All that aside, I was displeased to find that the article wasn’t anything more than a short Q&A with superstar trainer Jillian Michaels.

Among her comments on the post-COVID landscape: “I do think that really expensive group classes and really expensive big-box gyms are going to take a hit because people are realizing they can get community and great workouts at home.”

Anyone who runs a microgym with any skill knows that no one is actually looking for “community”—though it took people like me many years to realize it. Sure, community is a nice bonus in a gym, but it’s not a selling point. As Two-Brain Founder Chris Cooper has said, microgym owners neither sell workouts nor community. We sell coaching.

Then I recalled that Michaels is behind “The Fitness App,” which delivers “customized workouts and meal plans.” And it includes access to a community forum. So Michaels’s comment reads less like industry insight and more like a sales pitch. Which is fine. But I expected more data and less opinion from the Wall Street Journal.

If you’re interested in reading a little more about Michaels’s app, you can check out this review or this review with 2021 updates. The reviews are generally positive, which is good for Michaels and her clients.

But “The Fitness App”—and Michaels comments—don’t really have anything to do with microgyms and businesses that sell coaching. Many Two-Brain clients around the world are proving that. And we have the data. For one example, check out “How PT Went From 0 to 50 Percent of Monthly Recurring Revenue.”

To learn how to start or grow a fitness business,
download Two-Brain’s huge collection of free tools.

The post Pandemic Pushes Pull-Ups Online at 5 of 10 CrossFit Games Semifinals appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Care Changes Lives: Leaving a Legacy

My gym’s mission is to change the health of 7,000 people in my city.

Yours is probably something very similar.

This mission will take 30 years. That means my gym has to be around that long—even if the business evolves, the mission stays the same.

That means the business must survive without me. And I need to make sure the mission will continue when I’m gone.

I also want to leave a meaningful legacy for my kids, and for my city. Below, you’ll find my plan.

1. Build a Gym That Truly Runs Without Me

Even after fixing my mistakes, it took another five years for me to become completely replaceable in my gym. I had several false starts: I abdicated too early, leaving the wrong people in charge. Or my systems weren’t deliverable by others. Or the other coaches didn’t have enough local affinity to attract clients. Fixing all these things took time, and I made many mistakes. But if I didn’t have the goal of “fully autonomous gym” in mind, it never would have happened.

2. Create Multigenerational Cash Flow

Savings are fine and insurance plans can create short-term payouts for your kids. You can pay off their college tuition in advance and you can set up a trust fund. But in my mind the best way to create cash flow for them forever is to buy real estate. I’m not going to flip buildings; I’m going to rent them. The rent I collect pays more than a job would, and my buildings should continue to generate cash flow for my kids and grandkids before they fall down.

3. Empower Entrepreneurs

Canada’s educational system guides kids toward teaching jobs. We teach kids that the economy hasn’t changed since the 1970s: You write a resume, do an interview and then sit in one job for 30 years until you’re worn out. That creates young adults who are unprepared for the modern workforce (or even victims of a changing economy).

I want kids to have entrepreneurial skills even if they never start businesses. I want them to create wealth instead of fighting for a larger piece of someone else’s pie. I want them to employ others, add value to our economy and improve the world they inhabit.

We’ve made some small inroads into local entrepreneurship—kids summer camps, local Shark Tank events and the Two-Brain Business Workshop—but I’ll focus more on these things in the next five years.

As my mentor, Todd Herman, told me: “If you know how to build an audience, you’ll never go hungry.” That’s what “teaching a person to fish” means in today’s world.

4. Provide Short-Term Help in a Crisis

Unfortunately, some people in my local community are in a state of constant crisis. I look for the points of highest leverage and then apply pressure through money or connection.

Last year, during a shutdown, I bought 50 bikes for local kids. They were good bikes that could stand up to some abuse. I could have just given the kids the money or handed it to a local charity. But bikes are highly leverageable. Every bike has a great story. Bikes give kids mobility, some adventure and the opportunity to escape the “real world” for a few minutes. Bikes create connections. And even if nobody rides a paper route anymore, bikes can show a kid that there are some great things in the world if they leave their own doorways. I’ve never seen a sad person on a bike.

5. Bring Entrepreneurs Here

My city is on the decline. Entrepreneurs founded the city, created the jobs and fed tens of thousands of people for generations. Now the steel mills and paper plants are gone. But the area is still largely untouched, living is inexpensive and we all live on America’s front porch (I could literally paddle my kayak from Canada to the U.S. in 15 minutes).

In a mobile economy, my city is a dream come true. But not for people who want to work on a production line or find a job in middle management. This is a city for makers and dreamers. These are the people who will revitalize our area. I want to show them around.

Save a Starfish

If someone had asked me 10 years ago, “How will you have a meaningful impact on the world?” I’d have had no answer. I would have thought too broadly. That’s where most entrepreneurs slip up. This is the parable that changed my thinking:

A man is walking along the beach when he notices dozens of starfish in the sand. They’ve washed ashore during a storm. And as he looks up along the beach, he sees there are thousands of them dying outside the water.

He also notices an old woman walking toward him. Every few feet, she bends over slowly, picks up one starfish and heaves it into the ocean. Then she takes a few more steps, bends over, picks up another and tosses it.

When their paths intersect, the man says, “Excuse me. There are thousands of starfish dying here. You can’t save even a tiny fraction of them. What you’re doing is noble, but in the end it won’t make a measurable difference. Why do you keep doing it?”

She looks down at the starfish in her hand. She throws it in the water. She looks at the man and says this:

“It sure made a difference to that one.”

If you want to make a change, start with one. If you want to make a difference, change the next one. If you want to leave a legacy, teach one more.

Other Media in This Series

“Care Changes Lives: Change One at a Time”
“Care Changes Lives: Change Their Supporters”
“Care Changes Lives: Change Your Town”

The post Care Changes Lives: Leaving a Legacy appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Care Changes Lives: Change Your Town

“If you really care about a client, you have to care about the people around them. And if you care about the people around them, you have to care about their environment.”

A local chiropractor was presenting at our coaches meeting at Catalyst, my gym. He was a big outdoors guy, but he wasn’t talking about ecology or recycling. He was talking about changing our town.

His plan was to build bike trails everywhere—and he did. My plan is to change the fitness of 10 percent of our population—7,000 people—before I retire. I can’t coach everyone, but 7,000 people will impact 21,000 more—and that’s enough to change my town of 65,000.

Below, I’ll tell you how I’m doing it (and how you can do it, too). Steal any of these ideas!

The Catalyst Mission

My gym’s mission: change the health of 7,000 people in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

We worked hard in 2019 to get really clear on our mission, our vision and our values. We do our best work with 150 high-value clients. When we do our best work, those clients influence at least three others they care about. Over 30 years, we will change the health and life value of 7,000 local people—10 percent of the population.

Free Seminars

We use our platform to deliver high-quality expertise. This includes our own expert coaches and other local experts. When we identify another local expert who can help our clients live healthier, happier lives, we’re eager to invite the person into our community to share. These experts come from health, fitness and nutrition—but also the fields of therapy and finance.

Free Facebook Group

Catalyst runs a free community health and fitness Facebook group. Our goal in the group is to guide the right people to our service and help everyone else for free. Not everyone can afford the high-value service that we provide yet. But we can deliver all the knowledge necessary to others until they can afford it.

Give Leverageable Gifts

The lockdowns in our city revealed opportunities to help. I called the offices of mental-health agencies and foster-care organizations and asked, “What do kids need?”

They said, “Bikes.” So I used my bike connection to get 50 of them into the hands of local kids.

Another agency said, “Frontline workers are exhausted.” And when a friend’s cafe ran into trouble, I saw an opportunity.

The key? It wasn’t money in either case. Money greased the wheels. But the connections made the gifts possible. You have lots of connections. That’s your value to the community.

Serve Where You Can

The COVID lockdowns of 2020 made politicians of us all. Knowing that posting on Facebook and Twitter wouldn’t change anything, I started looking for places to volunteer without running for office.

I found a posting for a board position on the local Economic Development Committee. I applied, and now every month I talk with city leaders about creating economic opportunities in our city.

Call the Media

People need help. The media is looking for stories right now—especially advice that will help people. And you have the advice they need.

Email with an offer to provide “at-home fitness tips” or advice on “how to manage stress.” Stay away from the “how to lose 10 lb. before beach season” stuff and they’ll probably call you for an interview.

You’re not extending this care simply because you want the attention. But because true care is so rare, attention often follows your gifts. The larger your gifts, the more attention you usually get. You don’t have to chase attention; it will find you if you’re generous to your town.

The Greatest Gift You Can Give

The best gift you can give your town isn’t rock-bottom prices. It’s to be a 30-year beacon of fitness, health and hope. A 20 percent discount is a shortsighted play. Staying around—and becoming profitable enough to give back—is the real play if you want to change the world.

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Care Changes Lives: Change Their Supporters

If you really care about a client, you have to care about the people around that person.

If you truly care about this client, you need to know what’s going on at home. You need to know what’s going on at work. You need to know about his or her children and their environments. And then you need to help the client make positive changes in every aspect of life.

Think about it: You can put clients in a positive, caring, health-altering environment for three or four hours per week. But the rest of their time is often spent in a stressful, harsh or health-harming environment.

If you really care about clients, you have to take steps to change the rest of their world. And that means changing the people they live, work and surround themselves with.

How to Help Them Change Everything

Sit down with all clients at least twice per year. Four times is best.

Ask them: “Are you totally happy with your progress?”

If they say “not totally happy,” then dig in. Use motivational interviewing to determine what’s going on in their lives and how you can help them manage better. Make a new prescription. Sometimes this prescription will include more of your service; sometimes it will include less. Sometimes it will include a referral to another service.

If they say “totally happy!” then extend your care to their environments. Start with the people around them.

Ask, “Are your coworkers stressed right now?”

Or, “How’s your partner doing with nutrition?”

Or, “How’s your kid’s hockey team managing through this weird season?”

Then think: “How can I help the person/people my client just mentioned?”

And then offer your assistance:

“I think I can help. What if I came to your office, brought some sandwiches and gave everyone some ways to destress at work?”

Or, “I think I can help. What if we brought your partner into our nutrition kickoff program for a month?”

Or, “I think I can help. What if we gave the kids a super-fun off-ice experience here on Saturdays?”

This is sometimes called “marketing.” That’s because the process has reciprocal benefit: The clients become healthier when their environments become healthier. Your business becomes healthier when you add more members. It’s literally a “win-win-win.”

But it starts by helping clients. And when you help the people around them become happier and healthier, the client will be the biggest winner of all.

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Broke Gym Owner Stops Sleeping in Office Hammock, Finally Takes Wages

Mike (00:02):

Jeff Jucha paid bills for his gym personally and didn’t see a paycheck for three years. Then he got sick and had to make huge changes. Here’s what he did and how you can make your gym an asset, not an expense.

Chris (00:13):

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

Mike (01:28):

This is Two-Brain Radio. I’m Mike Warkentin here with Jeff Jucha of West Little Rock CrossFit. Arkansas is the natural state, but cutting himself a check did not come naturally to Jeff. After he hit the wall, he made some changes and now he’s a certified Two-Brain fitness business mentor. So Jeff, thank you for being here. Here’s the big question right off the bat. Why couldn’t you afford to pay yourself for so many years? Like where was the money you should have received as an owner? Where was that going?

Jeff (01:52):

OK, so let’s start with why it didn’t have any. I should preface this, I was born and then after that, now I was 22 when I started my business. And so I was one, I did not have a lot of experience in money, but even before that, I had probably zero formal education on finances. So, we take that into account here, but because of that, you know, I didn’t have any long-term goals. So, you know, for money or for profit or keeping my business running, I was really just, I loved working out. I loved hanging out with people and having human interactions. So I was like, I can get paid to do this. I’ll start a gym.

Mike (02:33):

That’s a such a common story. Mine isn’t that different.

Jeff (02:36):

Yeah. So I was just all about like totally in the present, which is like got its perks, but it’s got its negatives.

Mike (02:42):

Yolo!

Jeff (02:42):

So I had no long-term goals. So I didn’t have anything to reach for. So number one, that was an issue. And because I didn’t have anything to really reach for, I didn’t have anything to track, so I didn’t have a reason to track. And even if I did those long-term goals, I wasn’t tracking metrics anyway. So there was no way for me to really tell where money was going. And especially to tell that it wasn’t going to me.

Mike (03:09):

And what year was this?

Jeff (03:11):

This started in 2012. And that continued into, that was about almost halfway through 2012. And that continued closer towards the end of 2014 into 2015. It was just how I ran it. We’ll say that’s how I was able to get away with running it. You know, I was lucky. But yeah, I was paying things—I was paying for personal things out of the business account, but I was also maxing out my personal credit cards to pay for big purchases in the gym. There was no plan or structure or tracking. So we’ll say there was no structure to my finances and there was no tracking and there were no goals. And so that’s pretty much how you get to, you know, it’s kind of like, you know how to lose a guy in 10 days. It’s like how to lose a business in 10 months.

Mike (04:02):

You would actually, so you would let the business pay for some of your personal stuff. So you were getting some benefit out of that in some ways, but you kind of were doing it haphazardly and then you’d have to like, you know, use your personal credit card to pay off gym stuff. And, you know, it was just kind of a back and forth shell game, I guess.

Jeff (04:18):

Yeah. And it wasn’t even a shell game. It was just, I just really did not know what I was doing. So I was, you know, I would get a net owner benefit from, or not even a net benefit. Right. So net is you keep something. I was getting owner benefit, but then it would all go right back on like my credit cards and I have to pay interest on those. And like, I was just spiraling down the whole time.

Mike (04:37):

It’s like the cash advance from Visa to pay off MasterCard, and so forth. And all of a sudden, there’s zero plus zero is zero.

Jeff (04:44):

Yeah. I don’t think a payday advance place would have touched me.

Mike (04:47):

You know, what’s interesting. It’s so common. Like, my story was like, I had a full-time job, so I had a gym and I didn’t feel pressure to make that gym profitable. I just wanted to break even. So we didn’t profit. Right. And I’ve heard other people say the same thing. Like they opened a gym living in their parents’ house or something like that. Didn’t feel a ton of pressure to make that business a business. It was just there. But then eventually they realized it was kind of a disaster that was swallowing their souls and they had to make some changes. So your story is, you know, is not super uncommon. Let me ask you this, how bad did things get? Like, can you tell us like the lowest of the low thing and like, what hardships did you endure to keep this thing going?

Jeff (05:20):

Oh man. I’ll keep it pointed to just like a few things I think would encompass it. So, take whatever I’m about to say and like triple it, but this is like, that’s just the amounts. So it was not enough room. Well, you know, the first thing is like, you know, I was maxing out on my personal credit cards cause I had no savings to use cause I was so young. And so there was no real safety net. There’s no real buffer and, you know, live with that stress long enough and it’s going to affect you. And I also will, keep in mind that like I kind of thrive in the high chaos environments and enjoy it to an extent, but after a long enough time it will wear down on you.

Jeff (06:06):

So keeping that in mind that there’s no real safety blanket here. You know, early on, while I had started the gym, I went through a divorce pretty young and did not have the money to go buy a place of my own or rent a place on my own. So I slept in the gym in a hammock for a solid month before I could even get a place on my own. And well, number one, hammock sleep is not really bad. It’s pretty good. But number two, you know, I had too much pride to go with my family and like stay with family, but they obviously, you know, I was so prideful, I’d sleep in a hammock at my gym and like try and get up and get ready for the morning, go to my office and work and do stuff before all the classes would start rolling in.

Mike (06:50):

I have to jump in and ask you two important questions here that I have to know the answer to. What did you attach the hammock to, first?

Jeff (06:57):

Yeah. So I put two eyebolts from home Depot into the walls of the offices that were in my gym. And you should not do that. I didn’t use the squat racks actually. It was pretty cold or pretty hot out there depending on the weather. So I had air conditioning in the offices. So that was it. There’s still holes in the wall from where I did that, by the way.

Mike (07:18):

So this is my second question is did you hide the hammock when it was time for business or did you leave it up and just like, ah, you know, take afternoon power naps or did you like obscure this from people?

Jeff (07:29):

At first I was like hiding it and then after a while, since I was taking power naps through the day and it was really, really good, I got great sleep, you know, quality wise, great sleep. I would just shut the door. So like nobody could really go in there or anything.

Mike (07:48):

You got the hammock in the gym, you got credit cards maxed out, which, you know, you’re paying interest on. You’re getting stressed. Take me further.

Jeff (07:54):

So, you know, through the divorce, you know, it’s super hard, you know, what are the things that can kill a business, well, divorce is right up there. Definitely came close. My mindset got super negative at that time and you know, the members and the staff and the whole culture just started really reflecting me. So that was tough. We lost members because of that. We had struggles because of that. And, you know, I placed that on me back then. I had this just piece of crap truck, which also was crap brown by the way. So it’s really, I love that truck still got it, but broke down like all the time, like twice in the Walmart parking lot. And I had to walk back to the gym, but, I couldn’t afford cheap house that I actually ended up being able to rent.

Jeff (08:38):

So I had to call them and say, look, I can’t pay rent. I need to get out of this lease. So I moved in with my brother for a few months till I got back on my feet. And in the time that right around that time, I got kind of sick and had this sore throat and a cough and I couldn’t afford insurance, so couldn’t afford to pay for my own insurance. And so I didn’t go to the doctor. Well, you keep a sore throat and a cough for two months. And I was coaching and stressed and had all these other stresses and going through divorce and was like, man, I was just a beat down organism. And so I got even sicker. And finally, someone back then who really, really cared about me, made sure that they looked up insurance that I could qualify for.

Jeff (09:23):

And they’re like, what do you make? And I was like, here’s the last tax return. Right? It was something like that to find out like how much I made. And it was like, Jeff, you are so broke. You get the best insurance in the country for free. And I got the best insurance for free and I immediately went to the emergency room and they’re like, yes. So there’s a problem with your lungs. And we’re really glad you’re here now because if you waited longer, maybe you wouldn’t be. I got loaded up, man. I had all kinds of drugs. I was high for a week, I think, on the medicine I had to be on. They were like, this isn’t life-threatening today, but if you had waited much longer, this would be very life-threatening. So that was a turning point. Not even by choice, it was like, well, if I’m going to survive, I’ve got to figure out how to adult through things and start putting some money aside and be able to actually take care of myself financially.

Mike (10:20):

I’m going to ask you about that. But I want to know, like when you were in the hospital here at this low point who was running the gym, was someone taking care of it for you? Or had you gotten to that point where someone could do that for you?

Jeff (10:28):

I had one staff member left who coached the classes that I think I missed like two classes because I went to the ER place on a weekend. So I had a couple of days to just kind of start recovering again. And he coached the Monday mornings. And I think the noon and I only had to show up Monday in the evenings, but really, I just had one staff member helping at that time. So I still had to go coach.

Mike (10:53):

Wow. So you just soldiered up on that one and like put on the chin strap and went back to work, even though you were just hurting.

Jeff (10:59):

Yeah, there was no relief, no cure.

Mike (11:05):

Yeah. So this is a tough situation. So you decided there, you got to make a change. Now tell me how did you do it? And then specifically, how did you find the money to actually start paying yourself? Because there’s this whole thing with profit first where people say, where does the money come from? So tell me about your changes and where the money came from.

Jeff (11:21):

Yeah. So I started on a personal basis. I sold everything that I had personally that I was not using. And you know, maybe you start there, maybe you don’t, but you can definitely look in your gym and if you have more than a couple of GhDs, like you have stuff that you probably don’t use you can sell. So looking in the gym, there was plenty of things that I had bought because you know, we were going to send like five teams to the games or whatever.

Mike (11:46):

At least five.

Jeff (11:46):

So we had to have equipment that really didn’t need.

Mike (11:51):

What was the weirdest piece equipment that you unloaded? Do you remember? Like it was it one of the Rogue Pigs or something like that?

Jeff (11:58):

It wasn’t one of the Rogue Pigs, I’d have to think about that. We had this powerlifting group for a while and I think not the weirdest thing, but probably like the most out of place thing, my gym is very much run like a, if it occupies square footage of the gym, it has to pay for itself and more, or else it does not stay here. So like every square foot is accounted for, for making money. So what doesn’t fit there is a deadlift jack.

Mike (12:27):

Whoa, there you going, I bet another one, if people are listening out there, take a look at your reverse hyper and tell me if there is a computer, a clipboard or a collection of protein cups on top of it, and if there is, it’s not making any money for you.

Jeff (12:39):

Yeah. Jerk blocks, jerk blocks were another one. We actually held onto those way too long. But yeah, we should have gotten rid of those sooner.

Mike (12:45):

I couldn’t part with mine, but I finally did too. Cause we went into a garage and we got rid of our big space, went into a garage and like jerk blocks, take up a huge amount of space. GHD too. All right, take me further. So you sold all your stuff and you sold stuff from the gym that wasn’t making money. What else?

Jeff (13:00):

Yeah. You know, I tightened the chin strap and I worked almost every class that I could to save money. You know, not totally by choice, but like had the staff had come down to I had one person helping me and he was solid and reliable. So I coached as many classes as I could and I stopped giving out as many and this person at the time, wasn’t super reliant on that income. So it worked out all right. The other thing too is to, you can look at it like the money that you have now, and you can start making headway, but you still have to make sure that you’re moving somewhere that’s growing solutions for you and not just growing your problems too. So I affinity marketed with my PT clients. And I went from too, the other part of this too, is to stop recommending group to everybody that walked in the door.

Jeff (13:50):

If I felt like that I could help them with PT at the time, this is different now, but at the time it was like, I need money. And if I can help you with PT and you can afford it, I’m going to offer it. And now it’s more, of course, of a, like, what’s the thing that will help this person the most. And I can not project my budget and it’s relieved lot of stress of sales that way. But at the time it was like, if I can help you and you got the money, let’s do this. And so I went to 12 PT clients for myself, two to three times per week, I think it was 50 bucks a session back then for an hour. And so that was very helpful for me. And I was able to make myself enough money to not be so concerned with bringing on staff to help with classes.

Jeff (14:35):

And I made sure that I at least took a percentage of our gross income and I paid myself something because if the business took a loss, Hey, that’s better than me taking a loss because the business, even if it died, you can make it reborn. But like, I can’t come back from the dead. I can’t pull a walking dead episode here. So like I have to take something and I made sure that I paid myself just enough to cover my expenses and break even and have zero savings was where I started. And the business did like the business bank account started draining a bit for a while and the business bank account was a loan too, of course, but it was money. But it turned out all right. And I had taken a loan out to buy a partner out because we have a great relationship.

Jeff (15:24):

It was just decided on price. And I didn’t have that money. So I was somewhere in there a stroke of brilliance, borrowed more than I needed to pay him. So I had something. And I think that buffer helped a ton, but yeah, sold stuff I owned, sold stuff at the gym. I saved money where I could, reduced the expenses and then make sure that I grow my revenue as much as I can in the shortest time, PT’s the way to go for a lot of us. Not just sticking to group.

Mike (15:55):

So to recap. So we’re clear, the mentorship plan. You wouldn’t just say to someone, you know, sell all your stuff, right. You’re saying, I found in my gym, I evaluated what was useful and what was making me money and what was not. And you got rid of the extra stuff that was like, you probably shouldn’t have bought in the first place. Right. And Chris Cooper’s talked to this many times and said, how many barbells do you really need? You don’t need the Eleiko, you know, spinning barbell bearing bar for $2,000. You just need, you know, this, these small amounts of stuff. So you did that. You checked out on some of the expensive gear and whatever gear you just didn’t need. The second one, you would probably never tell someone. I know like our mentors are constantly telling people, you know, to not coach every class, unless they want to replace themselves. But in an emergency situation like this, you need to buy yourself some time and some income just to get your feet underneath you. Correct?

Jeff (16:40):

Because the cost of the proprietor or the entrepreneurial, like it falls on no one else’s shoulders and you got work to do. You got work to do so buckle up and get it done, but work to a place where you don’t have to do it forever.

Mike (16:52):

Right. Because it’s not sustainable. Like, that’s the point I guess I’m making is that like you couldn’t coach every class at your gym forever and not burn out and you certainly couldn’t grow the thing. So the thing that was really important here, I think was that you managed to do all that stuff, but also find time to grow your PT business. Like just start getting high value clients through affinity marketing, which means guys, he was doing it with no ad spend affinity marketing is just using your current clients to acquire more clients like them through their relationships and so forth rather than spending money on ads. Which you probably didn’t have to spend at that time. So you found a way to at least try to grow and get higher value clients at a time when you were working, do you remember how many hours you were working?

Jeff (17:30):

I don’t even want to think about that. If we don’t count the time that I was just sitting there stressing about things, we’ll say definitely full time.

Mike (17:42):

And so the other thing you said, your business set up was like an LLC or a corporation or something like that.

Jeff (17:48):

Don’t I don’t remember where I said that, but it is, yes.

Mike (17:50):

Yeah. So the reason I was asking was you said that it’s better for the business to take the loss than for you to take the personal loss. And so that’s what I was kind of getting out the other thing too, where I did this a lot of times where I propped up our business because I wanted it to look profitable, but that wasn’t the right thing. Like you should run the expenses through the business. The business can go first, your house and your mortgage and your car and all that stuff, feeding your kids that can’t go first. The business would go first.

Mike (18:17):

So, you know, there is a kind of an order of operations here and you definitely discovered that. Tell me, do you remember like what you started to pay yourself and did it fluctuate down or up or did it always just go up from that point?

Jeff (18:27):

It started with, I would make sure I wrote myself a check in which I was just, I was so mentally fogged up that I didn’t just make a transfer, but I’d write myself a physical check I was paying for, I would make sure I wrote a check to myself for rent. I wrote a check to myself for my month’s worth of groceries that I had budgeted, gas, a couple other things like my life had become super, super minimal. Especially while I was, you know, kind of staying with another person and just had a bedroom and a car. I didn’t own a lot of stuff anymore. So I think in total, I was probably paying myself like 12, maybe 1500 bucks a month tops.

Mike (19:11):

And did that, uh, did that ever waver down, like, did you ever get to a point where like I got to cut myself $800 or did you hold firm on that line and then keep improving?

Jeff (19:20):

This is, so it wasn’t really so much that I wrote myself 1200 bucks every month. It was, I couldn’t afford to do it all at once. And so when I needed to pay rent, I’d write myself a check. And gas was pretty much like I just cut myself that money. And I think every week I did groceries. And so I went through a lot of checks, but I had a lot of checks because, you know, you buy a thousand checks when you start your business. But I was doing them when the expenses would come up. And I think, honestly, that was, if I had done it the other way, it might’ve just put us in too bad of a position. You know, keep the lights on, but I did it that way. I never went down. I don’t think I ever went back down to that low again.

Mike (20:05):

The reason I ask is because during COVID times, people are forced to make some hard decisions. And I’ve talked to some owners who have thought about this and said like, Oh, the temptation is there to pay myself less this month because you know, we’re locked down. And, you know, it’s been some hard decisions, but most of the ones I’ve spoken to have just decided to pay themselves anyway, and then find a way to get the money that the business needs, which I think is the right plan. Because again, you need the money as a person, your business can, you know, you’ll figure that one out and it’s more important that you and your family have food than the business.

Chris (20:35):

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Mike (21:12):

So do you remember when you started, you’re going down this path, do you remember when you started to pay yourself like more than just living expenses when you got to that point where you started to cut yourself, maybe a check that had some quote unquote profit or surplus in it?

Jeff (21:24):

Yeah, I think I stayed around, let’s see here. This would have been around the end of 2016, maybe. I had finally gotten to where I was comfortable to write myself a salary check, and I think that was like two grand per month. And the business was still retaining profit as well. So like there was cash in the account. And that’s really another thing too, I think for listeners is even if you do take a pay cut and pay yourself less, remember that if you are staying profitable with the business and if it’s in the aims of doing that, like, yeah, not just like, how can I get by with less, but like, how can I afford the things we need is a better mindset, but you remember the profit still sits there.

Jeff (22:12):

And so if I needed anything, I would write myself a check from profit, is what I told myself. We didn’t really have as much profit in there as I would like, but yeah. So I think towards the end of that year, I was able to get myself to where I was making, you know, 24 grand a year, you know, for, I don’t even know what all, what all I was really doing to earn that. But well, more than that much, I did way more work than most of us probably should do for 24 grand a year.

Mike (22:44):

Your hourly rate is probably not good if you actually broke it down there, I’m sure you were doing, probably working for like two bucks an hour or something like that.

Jeff (22:51):

That’s that’s really gratuitous of you. I don’t think I made that much.

Mike (22:56):

So where does Two-Brain come into this and how did you learn about like actually establishing the profit first and pay yourself first systems where you know, you establish this and you do it based on like actual calculations and percentages and the math, where did that kind of all come in?

Jeff (23:10):

So I had been following Chris since the don’t buy ads.com days.

Mike (23:16):

You’re one of those guys. Nice.

Jeff (23:18):

Not definitely not like a hardcore follower. And like, you got to do all the things. And obviously, I don’t think I would’ve been in the position I was if I had just done half of them.

Jeff (23:31):

But I had known Chris’s stuff. I had been a fan of it. I had seen some of the things work. I would just get super distracted, but after I saw that he, that Two-Brain was forming and there was a program and I had done some other programs before, you pay some money and then like go through the course and then like you’re done with the course and like, that’s it. And I was like, well, it was cool. So I was looking at that again. I was actually talking to another group that said mentorship. I did a call with them. I didn’t really, like, I didn’t think it was a good fit, but, when I saw Two-Brain was opening, I actually booked a help call with Chris. Yeah. I think Chris was my first guy to talk to, but you know, I’ve slept since then, so I’m not sure, a lot of sleep since then, but I think Chris was the first guy I talked to and I just knew it was the right way to go.

Jeff (24:29):

And I had kind of said like where I was, and from there, like once I had gotten started in the incubator, what’s ramp up now with us, but once I’d gotten started in the incubator program, the most important thing was someone telling me this week, you’re doing this. Do not talk to me until you have this done. And not so much like literally that, but like that was the vibe. And it was always at the end of the call, you know, we’d have a great call. It was like, OK, here’s the deal. And it was like, it was kind of like making, it was making a deal. And I didn’t want to let someone else down and I think a lot of us can identify with this. We treat our dogs better than we treat ourselves and we will show up for someone else long before we will show up for ourselves.

Jeff (25:14):

And so I got a lot of work done, I think actually finished incubator in like three weeks instead of six or seven, because I could go through all the modules. And so I did all of it early. It was just like super, I wanted to be like the A plus student for once in my life and not a D student. So yeah, so Two-Brain was where I started there and had made a lot of progress through the incubator. And at some point after that, and I’m not sure on the date here, got turned on to profit first. I think it was Mike Michalowicz was originally like, yeah, does it and licenses it. And I been kind of doing some of that stuff with like, well, pay myself. And then I gotta like really hustle to make these expenses and make the staff pay, like, make sure that there’s something left, like, but like I have to take care of me.

Jeff (26:02):

And I think that was the first things I identified with. And then there was like the profit accounts there too, and was like, well, I have a separate, it’s just my personal savings account, but that’s the profit account. And then it was like, save money for taxes. I was like, I’m so dumb. Why did I not think of this? I like, I get, cause you get your tax bill every year. And you’re like, well there, went all the money I made and or all the money I don’t have. So, made such good sense to just do it ahead of time. And don’t wait for your, the idea was like, don’t wait for your business to tell you whether or not it’s going to be successful, write down what you want and make it successful on paper first and now fill in the holes and make it there. And make it what you need to see. It was just from there. I never went back.

Mike (26:50):

If you want to know exactly how the profit first systems and the bank accounts that Jeff was talking about work, John Briggs, he wrote the book profit first for micro gyms. We’ll put the link in the show notes here, and he’ll tell you exactly what those accounts are and why you should have them. There’s I believe six or seven. And it tells you why and when you should transfer the money in there, and exactly one of them is the tax accounts got to have money at the end of the year so you can pay that bill and don’t lose everything you have, your money’s already set aside. So that’s a huge one, but there are other accounts that John will tell you about. Check that link in the show notes. So Jeff, you started going down this path, you recovered from the worst part, you know, the sickness, the debt and all that. Now you’re at a stage where you’re on the Two-Brain mentorship staff. So in your work helping other gym owners, how important is it for them to start paying themselves first? Like where does that rank them on all the hundreds of priorities that gym owners have?

Jeff (27:40):

When I get a new mentee or I take someone through the on-ramp program, it’s one of the first things that I find a way to slide into the conversation. You know, how much do you pay yourself? And if it’s nothing I’m like, OK, well, let’s talk about doing this. And I’m sure half my clients who are listening right now are like, yep, Jeff’s annoying about that. And now you all understand why. So, it is not supremely important, but it is among the things that are supremely important. Like, cause there’s a group of things that are super important, right? Like you deliver great service, you know, make sure that you are like doing affinity marketing before going to paid, there’s these things that are just like hallmarks of what makes a solid foundation. And one of the things that helps build that solid foundation is that you do pay yourself because it sets an intention.

Mike (28:33):

Makes it a business too, right? Like the business has to pay the owner something, otherwise it’s not a business at that point. Like it really, if you’re just, if you’re not paying yourself, like what are you, it’s a hobby, right. It’s just, it’s not a business. It’s not by the definition, it is not doing anything other than eating your time for nothing.

Jeff (28:49):

And the way that I look at it is similar, you know, tomato, tomato, is that like, it is a business. Whether you treat it that way or not. If you don’t set an intention and you don’t set set expectations early on in a relationship or teach this new puppy that like, it will not bite you and you know, positive reinforcement when you don’t tug on the leash, like it’s either it’s the business will serve you because you set that intention early and you’ve decided I am going to make sure that this is sustainable because it will pay for me to take care of myself so that I can show up because the worst gym is the one that closes and leaves everyone homeless. And so set your intention strong like that. Because if you don’t, it will be the opposite.

Jeff (29:36):

And instead of the business serving you and the people you care about, you and all the people you care about will be serving it instead. And it doesn’t give anything back. Unless you set that up early and decide that you’re going to pay yourself something. And it’s more of just an exercise of practicing to stop martyring yourself. Because like you’re only martyring yourself for yourself for most of us. But yeah, it sets the intention that like and sets the track for like, here’s where we’re going to go. Because if you don’t like, you’re just going to be wherever the winds take you.

Mike (30:12):

Guys, if you’re out there listening how to make a hundred thousand dollars per year with 150 clients, it is a new guide by Chris Cooper and Two-Brain Business, you can download it. We’ll get that link in the show notes. And in that guide, you can go through a short diagnostic. Chris is going to show you three different scenarios that tell you exactly how you can put this a hundred thousand dollar net owner benefit together. But you can also use this diagnostic. And it’s just a short little tool. Take two to three minutes. It’s six different questions. You have to fill out the answers and it’s just circling answers. It’s not like a deep thought thing. You just have to circle different things. Like how much do you pay yourself? And that is number one. The first thing Chris is asking you in this diagnostic is how much money do you earn from your business per month?

Mike (30:51):

That is net owner benefit. And it means like, what is your salary? What other benefits does the business pay? Does it pay for your car or your coffee or whatever. We’ve got recurring memberships, average revenue per month and so forth. In six lines, two to three minutes, you’ll be able to go through here and find where the major holes are in your business. And what’s preventing you from making a hundred grand. So I’ll encourage you take this thing, use it, and then take some action. It’s exactly what Jeff is talking about. Taking action and moving on these things. So I’ll ask you this, Jeff, for listeners who are not paying themselves first at all, or they’re not paying them first, or they’re not even paying themselves at all, how would you coach them to make a couple of changes right off the bat? Like how can they find this money? Imagine again, we’re talking to like, you’re talking to a brand new client, a mentee, and this person is not paying himself or herself. What do you tell that person? How do they start? Especially when they feel like there’s no money.

Jeff (31:39):

Everyone’s gym is different, but my process stays pretty much the same. Cause you can work within it based on your comfort level. So, you know, imagine you’re in a boat like, we’ll say like a pretty big rowboat in the ocean it’s wood, right? If your boat has holes in it, then you’ve got to plug those holes first, before you start thinking about bringing on more business, right? So start with auditing. What are the things in your gym that you could remove that could bring you some of this income to give you or not so much income, but some money back so that you can have some initiation energy in this and to kind of kickstart the fires, right? So getting some quick money is super helpful. This is Dave Ramsey teaches this, like save up a thousand dollars as fast as you can.

Jeff (32:25):

Which was part of the stuff that I was practicing in getting myself out of those, that position back when I was sick, but save up a quick $1,000. And like you could turn this into a gym version of it with offload something worth a dollars or things worth a thousand dollars and put that away real quick. Right now, like take a percentage of that and pay yourself. And then after you’ve removed that, look at where your money is going each month, if it’s not going to you, or if it’s not going to where you can really connect it to providing service to the clients who are bringing you income, you’re not maximizing that thing. You should probably remove it. Or maybe you could reduce the plan if it’s a subscription plan. So, you know, get rid of what’s weighing you down and like throw the stuff overboard and then your expenses where your money is going.

Jeff (33:13):

Even if it’s not expenses, but like things maybe you just haven’t been paying attention to. If you’ve got money going out every month, those are the holes you’ve got to like put some cork in and plug the boat really quick. And then now you’ve got to where, OK, I can scoop some of the water out of this boat. Now I feel comfortable bringing more people into the boat. And that’s where you can start bringing the income back in again and asking more people to show up. You know, I did it with PT clients, different micro gyms, all over the place have different models, or not so much models, but different services they offer. It might be nutrition for you because maybe you can’t work anymore. It could be other things, but you know, start with, can I scoop some water? Can I throw the things overboard I don’t need, make some money, plug the holes with the money that’s leaving your business right now. And now the boat’s actually safe to bring people on and you’re not just going to sink even faster. Now you can start bringing people on board. So, yeah. Look around you. What can you get rid of, audit where your money’s going, plug those holes, start bringing more people on board because now they’re not going to be sinking your boat with every person that you put on there.

Mike (34:19):

Yeah. And you’ve, I mean, you hit on exactly what John brings said. You’ve got two ways here you can find the money. It’s like you cut your expenses or you increase your profit or your revenue. And the expenses, if you audit your expenses at a gym, it’s likely that you’re going to find some stuff that you’re not getting return on. And it might be like the old music subscription that you stopped using three years ago, or, you know, just all sorts of stuff that you will find that you maybe just don’t need. Right? Can you get a better deal, for example, if you’re buying programming, can you get a better deal and get better stuff? Check out Two-Brain coaching for some options there. And if you’re a Two-Brain client, you’re going to find some really cool stuff there.

Mike (34:56):

But just audit your expenses. At some point, you are going to get to a point where you can’t cut any more stuff like you can’t cut your hydro, unless you wire, the rowers into the lights, which I don’t know if anyone’s done yet, but it is a brilliant idea, but you will not be able to cut anymore. After that, you’ve got to grow. And that’s exactly what you talked about. You do some affinity marketing with PT. There are other ways, you could add in a nutrition program. You could add in some retail supplements. The idea here is like a mentor will tell you how to grow and pick the low hanging fruit so you’re not doing everything. You’re just doing the things that will move the needle. And at that point, then you focus on these things. And Chris has these scenarios laid out there’s many of them, but he’s got three that involve different aspects of business that will help you find some revenue.

Mike (35:37):

So if you’re struggling with that, book a call with our mentors, cause they can tell you, first of all, what to look at, how to figure out if you’re getting ROI on your expenses, then how to grow the other way. So Jeff, now, when you talk to like a gym owner and help someone do this, what happens to that person when he or she starts paying themselves first? What is the general like, is it like a life-changing aha moment that changes the trajectory of everything? Or how does things go when people start paying themselves, giving themselves that first check from their business?

Jeff (36:03):

They get happier.

Mike (36:04):

Right, it makes it easier.

Jeff (36:08):

Yeah. It’s tough to enjoy things when you’re drowning. Like you can be really fulfilling your purpose and finding meaning in what you do. And but if you’re, you know, just in a room and water keeps coming up to the shoulder height, like you’re stressing and you’re worried, but if you can stabilize that and stop that, people can take a breath and actually appreciate what they’ve built so far and what they’re doing. And like, you can accept a compliment and like actually enjoy it and believe it. And you can actually like, OK, you can start believing that you’re actually worth paying yourself. You’re worth being successful because your clients all want you to be successful. They do not want you to not go on vacation. They don’t want you to struggle. They want you to be happy. They want you to be successful.

Jeff (36:56):

Just like you want that for them. So when you, you know, whether it’s add business or you just restructure an on-ramp program, I do a lot of restructuring as well, too. As part of that equation, generating revenue, doesn’t always mean generating new business, affinity marketing’s huge, but you know, you may alter, you may change your rates and we’ve got a way to do that. Yeah. We’ve got all this stuff down. It’s tested, we’ve got the numbers, we know exactly how to go about it. But once someone sees like, wow, I didn’t have to go make this a multi-million dollar operation for me to actually just be able to pay for my kids to go to the school that I want them to. And like, you see it’s possible. And it’s a lot closer than you thought it was. And so owners like on the call where we make some changes and they start paying themselves and they start making the income to pay themselves, or they get rid of the things that were holding them down. They’re happier on that, you see it on someone, you know? But you also, you get to hear about it in your reviews. So people are happier.

Mike (37:57):

Well, it’s refreshing to look at the numbers that Chris lays out and see that you don’t need 300 or 500 clients to make a hundred thousand dollars. Right. You could certainly do it, but that’s a lot of clients to find, to be able to do it in 150, or there are models where you could do it even in 50 clients, if you have the right service, that’s refreshing because 150 is not that hard, a number, right? Like if I told you Jeff, you know, 2016, Jeff or 2014, Jeff, I need you to find 400 clients. You’d be like, whew, I can barely, I’m sleeping in a hammock dude. But like, if I told you 150, you could kind of think of like, I can find 150 people I can help. Right.

Jeff (38:32):

I have more than that and I’m still losing money.

Mike (38:35):

See, there you go. And that’s the perfect thing. So guys do check out this guide, take a look at it. It’ll give you some real ideas on how you can make positive changes. The action step that I will give you. Whether you are a well, I’ll give you this action step right now. This is the one you do. Pay yourself something today. Write yourself a check. Even if it’s for a dollar. If you’re not paying yourself at your gym, write yourself a check. Even for a dollar. Take out Jeff’s checkbook that he’s was still probably using to this day because he bought a thousand of them and pay your self. Yeah, you still do. I love it. A dollar. And you know what? Write even a sequence of post-dated checks and keep them because the second you start taking something from your business, you will be happier. Just like Jeff said. After that, talk to one of our mentors who can tell you the entire path to more bigger checks and eventually that a hundred thousand dollars or more. If you desired. Jeff, I’m glad you survived that horrible sickness. I’m glad you dug your business out and you’re helping people. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us and thanks for helping mentees on your calls.

Jeff (39:27):

Thanks for having me.

Mike (39:28):

My pleasure. Talk to you again soon. That was Jeff Jucha on Two-Brain Radio. I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. FOMO alert. You are missing out on Gym Owners United. That is Facebook group for gym owners only. Join it right now. Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper and our mentors help gym owners solve problems every day in that group. If you have a question about the gym biz, ask it and get answers in that group. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook. See you in there.

 

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Care Changes Lives: Change One at a Time

“You think I can’t afford your gym? F*** you, man.”

He’d joined my gym as a friend, but he was leaving angry.

Here’s the story: A good friend had joined my gym in its earliest days. He showed up regularly for a few months but then began to drop off. I literally didn’t see or hear from him for three months.

As I prepared to run his card for another month of membership that he wouldn’t use, I thought:

“This guy is my friend. I’m going to cancel his membership. I know what he makes, and he definitely can’t afford to keep paying for something he’s not using!”

So I cancelled his membership. He got the cancellation auto-email. And he finally showed up at the gym—to tell me off.

Consistency and Care

You care about your clients. Some feel like friends to you. And because most of us are first-time entrepreneurs when we open our gyms, we sometimes confuse “membership” with “friendship.” But they’re not the same. In this series, I’m going to tell you how to care a lot without hurting your business.

Consistency is more important than anything else. You have to treat everyone the same way you’d treat anyone. That means no more special favors, no more ignoring bad clients and no more making guesses about what people want.

1. Be Consistent

Provide a consistent experience for your clients—and your staff.

If you provide an A+ experience for most clients but a C- experience for one, then you’re running a C- operation.

Deliver the same experience, for the same price, to every client.

Teach your policies and rules to everyone. Make them simple. And enforce them the same way for everyone every time—especially when you don’t want to. Don’t create a rule you won’t enforce the same way every day. Remove choice from the equation. Write your rules and policies down. Grey areas create stress.

Then lead by example. If you break your own rules, everyone will.

When hiring, hire the best people for the roles instead of trying to fill your jobs with the people you already have. And post jobs publicly. Don’t default to hiring your friends.

Treat your worst client as well as your best. If you can’t, fire the client.

2. Charge Appropriately

Charge what you have to charge to provide excellent service.

You want to do your best work. You can’t do your best work on an empty stomach.

Charge for your value—your first average-revenue-per-member (ARM) target should be $205 per month.

Don’t give special deals or trade in kind. Your friends will want to pay you full price. If they don’t, they’re not your friends. Treat everyone the same. If you want to treat someone like your best friend, great—but you have to treat everyone that way. Remember: Most cliques in a gym start with the owner.

To determine your rates, start with the excellent service that you want to provide, and then charge what you have to charge to provide that service (it’s probably a lot more than $150 per month for unlimited access to your time, staff and resources).

3. Retain

Keep the client around long enough to benefit.

Always focus on your current clients first. Never sacrifice their experience to get a new client.

Plan the client journey in advance.

Care enough to have honest conversations about progress.

Care enough to say “here’s a better way”—even if you’re not comfortable with the price.

4. Ask

Care enough to ask.

The top reason most gym owners have stress? They ruminate. They imagine conversations before they have them. They jump to worst-case scenarios in their heads.

Ask your staff about their goals.Ask your clients about their progress.Ask your team about their plans. 5. Be Honest

Care enough to tell the truth.

Get over your fear by asking yourself, “Do I care enough to get to the truth here?”

Be friendly. Have friends. Have relationships. Get clients. But keep the lines clear. Writing your policies and prices down will help you say “here are the rules” instead of “let’s make a deal.”

If they were really your friends, they’d ask to pay double.

Don’t Buy Friends

If you take nothing else from this post, please take this to heart:

Giving a free membership, or a $20 discount, means you’re trying to pay someone to be your friend.

We were supposed to get over that in the third grade, but most of us never did. We think we’re giving our friends winning lottery tickets when we give them something for free. But when we turn our relationships into transactions, we always create an unbalanced ledger. Nearly every gym owner has had a heart broken by a member who “owed” him or her for special favors done at the gym.

The best way to treat your clients: Deliver unwavering consistency to everyone.

The post Care Changes Lives: Change One at a Time appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Send Healthy People to Doctors Before Trainers?

This week:

Do healthy prospective clients really need a doctor’s note to train with you?U.K. gym chain experiences post-lockdown influx.How competitive athletes should choose the best programming stream.

Doctor’s Note Required to Squat?

The Fitness Industry Council of Canada (FIC) sent out a recent edition of FitBizWeekly and expressed dismay that fitness wasn’t included in the 2021 Canadian budget. Despite the omission, the council will forge ahead with its Prescription to Get Active program.

For the record, anything that gets people moving is good. Anything. However, gym owners won’t be surprised to read that I’d love to make some edits to a “client journey” from the couch to our gyms by way of the doctor’s office first.

Yes, some people absolutely need to see a doctor before exercising. But, in general, apparently healthy people don’t need a trip through the health-care system before becoming more active. The Mayo Clinic reports that moderate physical activity is safe for most people but recommends prospective exercisers consult a doctor if conditions such as heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis and so on are present.

Here’s what happened when I tried to test out the Prescription to Get Active website: I clicked “get started” and was asked if I had a prescription from a health-care provider. I did not, so I was shuttled to a map to find a health-care provider who might help me. I couldn’t find any within 480 kilometers. Were I disinclined to get active in the first place, I would have closed the browser then so I could continue my extensive research on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I passed on “Loki” trailers—for now—and scrolled down the page to find much less prominent info on becoming active “today.” Any marketer will tell you that info is completely buried, and the site very clearly suggests seeing a health-care provider is Step 1 in becoming active.

It’s not. Seeing a microgym owner who uses the prescriptive model is the best first step. A qualified trainer can provide a precise activity prescription—and it will be better than the general advice a doc will provide. Even better, gym staff can get many people started immediately while referring those who need medical clearance to the appropriate providers.

Finally, the FIC plan’s major value proposition is that a prescription will give a person a month of free access at registered facilities—lots of GoodLife locations, along with other brands.

While “free” is a big deal in marketing language, it’s generally a bad play in fitness unless you’re selling access to a facility and don’t care if people actually show up. Microgym owners are acutely aware that people who get things for free have little incentive to use them. Worse, a free month at a chain gym will certainly not involve a personal relationship with a trainer, an in-depth intro program and the accountability that’s needed for long-term adherence.

I’m not here to poke holes in any attempt to get people into gyms or get the government to help a fitness industry that keeps people healthy. And it’s possible the doctor-first approach is a strategy to hook into federal funding. I’m also not here to criticize doctors.

But, in the interests of getting people moving with low drag, I just wouldn’t focus on sending generally healthy people to the doctor first. That’s a huge barrier to entry—especially during a pandemic when the medical system is already strained. Any qualified trainer can identify which people can start right away and which should see a doctor. That’s the right path.

If They Come Back for the Pec Deck…

Good news: A BBC.com article suggests gyms will acquire or reacquire clients after a lockdown.

Referring only to PureGym, a chain of more than 280 facilities in Europe, the article reported “tens of thousands of new members have joined since restrictions eased in England.”

This isn’t the pinnacle of journalism in that we don’t know if these are returning members who cancelled or “new” clients who have never held memberships. We also don’t know how many “tens of thousands” of people appeared or if the influx was enough to replace departed members. We also don’t have a clue if the crowd’s credit cards will stop PureGym’s bleeding, which was apparently around US$700,000 a day over about eight months of closure.

Still, it’s good to see some positive news for the gym business. PureGym’s facilities in England, Scotland and Ireland now have sneakers pounding on treadmills, and clubs in Wales are expected reopen on May 3.

For microgym owners who are still dealing with lockdowns, the bright light is that if people are returning to or joining low-touch facilities with rates of about $20 a month, they’re even more likely to return to facilities that have always focused on creating deeply personal connections to members.

Indeed, Chris Cooper wrote about “the surge” after an earlier lockdown, so if you’re feeling down right now, check out “Why Some Gyms Are Thriving After COVID.”

Is It the Special Programming?

Programming streams are legion these days, with Mat Fraser and Underdogs Athletics recently releasing their training plans into a crowded market that includes Misfit Athletics, CompTrain, Invictus, PRVN Fitness and many more.

Which one is the best? The one you stick to.

Competitive athletes can be very fickle, and the lure of a new stream with “secret tips and strategies” can be powerful. It’s not uncommon to see people jumping around regularly and announcing their new allegiance on social media, as if poor programming were the only reason for previous failures.

The reality: Just about every single program will get results if you stick to it. That’s not to say some aren’t better than others or athletes should never change their programming. But I will say that 5 rounds of 10 thrusters and 10 burpees is pretty close to 10 rounds of 5 burpees and 5 thrusters.

Over a decade covering the CrossFit Games, I came up with an unofficial award: Programmer of the Year. I mentally gave it to the coach who acquired the most post-Games prestige based purely on the success of an athlete at the finals. I could have won this award several times had Rich Froning walked into my gym in 2010.

The coaches behind podium athletes were indeed great—but they were great before their athletes rose to the top, and they’re still great now that those athletes have retired. And I’m sure a few coaches to Games athletes aren’t that great—but their athletes sure are.

If anyone is looking for advice on how to pick a programming stream, here it is:

Pick the stream that offers the closest relationship with an actual coach you can message. Stick with that stream for at least a year and base any changes on testing, not on the blowing of the winds from Aromas or Madison.

While some workouts might be better than others, no general programming stream can ever replace contact with a coach who can give you what you need every day and address sleeping, eating, stress and recovery.

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