Chris Cooper's Blog, page 31

Life-Saving Lessons: Gym’s Instant Response Keeps Member Alive

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Injuries to members. No gym owner ever wants something bad to happen, but the reality is that stuff is unavoidable. Every so often, someone is going to get injured even though fitness training is incredibly safe. The best plan: Be prepared. In fact, be overprepared so that you can manage any situation. It’s Worst-Case Scenario Week on “Run a Profitable Gym,” and I’m Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe” wherever you’re watching or listening. Today, my guest is going to explain how he managed an incredibly stressful event at his gym like a pro, with the help of his staff and members. It’s going to be a great story for you guys to listen to. Erik Zeyher. He runs Warlock Athletics in New York, and in mid-August, a member had a heart attack. This is just a tough one for everyone to think about right now, but here’s the good part. I’ll give you the skip to the ending. The member’s wife, a nurse, later said if it had happened anywhere else, he would’ve died. So, there’s good news at the end of this story. Erik’s here to tell the tale and help you be at your best if the worst ever happens at your gym. Erik, welcome. How are you doing today?

Erik Zeyher (00:57):
Mike, I’m great, man. Thanks for having me on, and it’s good to see you again since the Summit.

Mike Warkentin (01:01):
Yeah, I’m super pumped about this because the CrossFit and fitness community is hurting a little bit right now, so we’re going to give them some good news. First, tell it—I mean, stressful situation—but the good news is that you saved somebody’s life at your gym. Tell me the whole story. What happened? How’d you guys do this?

Erik Zeyher (01:15):
Yeah, let’s kind of start from the beginning. So I was actually at home. It was like 4 p.m., a little after. And, you know, class normally does their warm-up, does normal things. And I got a phone call from my head coach, and I missed the first phone call, and within 30 seconds, the phone rang again. And knowing that she was calling me twice in a row, I’m like, “Something is wrong.” I picked up, she goes, “Hey, so-and-so was on the floor, AED is attached to him.” And I said, “Put the phone down. I’ll be there in five minutes.” And I lived probably about 10 minutes from the gym.

Mike Warkentin (01:45):
How fast were you going? Do you remember?

Erik Zeyher (01:47):
I was probably going about 70 in a 35, like 30—double the speed limit at that point.

Mike Warkentin (01:53):
Life is at risk. Yeah.

Erik Zeyher (01:54):
Yeah. And just to be there, like, that’s the instinctive reaction, right? And without getting in a car accident myself, we had a member going into cardiac arrest, whole house on a Monday. You got 10 people in classes. You’ve got a semi-private going on. You’ve got a PT going on. You’ve got parents, kids in the building. I mean, like, you have a full house with three—and I lucked out where like, these are—two out of three coaches that were on right there are my full-time staff members. So, they luckily knew exactly what to do. One called 911, one of our members is actually—as lucky as this may sound—is a PA. He’s a cardiac PA and knows the member’s dad very, very well. Guy hit the floor within 15 to 20 seconds. Our members—one is also a nurse, hands on chest with CPR.

Erik Zeyher (02:42):
One of our coaches grabbed the AED, sprinted right over, within 60 seconds this guy was hooked up to the AED, cleared for shock, shocked, and then brought back to life and continued with CPR. And this is all within two minutes for which them seemed like an eternity. And we’re also very fortunate the firehouse EMT is 400 yards up the road, and it still felt like an eternity before they got there. Our member came back from a 40-meter warm-up run. It wasn’t like we were working out in the middle of a crazy workout. We were actually doing a memorial walk for Lazar Dukic. So, you know, you’re trying to do everything right, and then this catastrophic event happens, and a guy hits the floor, foaming at the mouth—not the phone call that I want to get as an owner.

Erik Zeyher (03:25):
Paramedics came, brought him to the hospital, the whole nine. Luckily, where it—when we got to the hospital, I met his wife there. I followed along, you know, she literally said point-blank, “If this happened anywhere else, on the golf course where he was driving, while we were shopping today, he’d be dead.” It happened that he was 60 feet from an AED in our facility, which I’m, again, very fortunate my business partner is a career paramedic and EMT and firefighter. So, he’s always harped on it over and over again. And obviously, you try not to roll your eyes because you hear it so many times that we need to practice this thing, but we’ll never roll our eyes ever again. And this thing saved time—one of our members’ life.

Mike Warkentin (04:03):
Yeah. And that’s—what a story. And I can’t imagine how stressful that would be, obviously for you as the owner, but also for the people that were there right at ground zero when this happened. And this is what I was getting at in the intro, like, 40-meter warm-up run for a member of your gym. That’s not preventable. Like, that’s just a thing that happens. There’s nothing you could do on that one. All you have to do is manage the situation. Now I’ve got to ask you this. The response time and the reaction was so fast—like you said—you know, within seconds, people are on him. You’ve got—yeah. And you’ve got like an AED hooked up, and everything is just moving at warp speed. That doesn’t just happen, right? You can’t do that if you haven’t planned. How did you guys make this happen? What did you rehearse in the past, or what are your procedures and plans?

Erik Zeyher (04:45):
Yeah, so we actually have a full plan and go through regular training and semi-annual training for the AED. So, all the coaches on board know how to handle it, know what it sounds like, know where it’s located. It lives in the same spot. The—it’s funny—we had the protocol for exactly what goes on. What we didn’t prepare for was how to respond to it afterwards. Ah, right. Like, as in communicating with the members. What does class continue? Does it not continue? Like, do you move everybody outside? Do you keep them inside? Like, there’s just a lot of things, and it happens really fast.

Mike Warkentin (05:16):
I’m going to ask you about that part. But yeah, finish off the first part about how you prepare, and then let’s get into how you manage the aftereffects.

Erik Zeyher (05:23):
Yeah. So, we—I mean, we go through regular training with the AED. We go through the CPR course. We make sure that our coaches are prepped so they know exactly what goes on and how to use that. The great part is the AED, once it’s hooked up, is super simple to use. But again, even in a dire situation, it seems—seconds seem like minutes. And we’ve even had some of our coaches who are trained to be like, “Man, I couldn’t act fast enough.” And they know what goes on with this thing. They’ve seen it before; they’ve pulled it out. But it’s much different in a game-time situation, where they need reps. Because there’s no real-life pressure. You practice like I see it. Yeah, you can’t. And even just try to create some sort of fresher point for the members to be—or the coaches to be able to actually practice with a little bit of a penalty. Probably a better idea in retrospect.

Mike Warkentin (06:09):
But you still can’t, you can’t recreate that. You just can’t, you know, no matter what you do, that stress of this person that you care about on the ground, like you can’t plan for that. So …

Erik Zeyher (06:17):
Yeah. And even the PA said, he’s like, “Listen, like I do this for a living, and it was stressful for me because I know that member.” He’s like, “That gave me major anxiety.” And even, and like, this is the guy who’s a trained professional who does it for a living.

Mike Warkentin (06:30):
Well, I mean, listeners—just a quick lesson here. Obviously, if you haven’t practiced this stuff at all, you should start practicing this stuff because it’s going to be way more stressful. Like the AED seems just like, “Oh, it’s talking to us, this box and that whole thing.” When it’s real, that practice is going to come in handy. Because you’re going to remember stuff. So, how often did you drill your plan?

Erik Zeyher (06:50):
Yeah, I mean, every time someone came on board, they went through that piece and usually one of our coaches actually taught it to the member. We have a fully written SOP, a full document for it. And again, like even, it gets checked and inspected monthly. So, this way like the—we still know that the battery is still operating, the pads are up to date. It’s funny, but like, when we actually opened our gym, we didn’t have enough funds to even buy an AED, right? So, like we’re kind of—and it’s not required by New York state to have an AED within a gym. You actually need to have 500 members in your gym in order to be required to have an AED.

Mike Warkentin (07:20):
That’s interesting.

Erik Zeyher (07:21):
It’s crazy. It’s absurd, actually, when you think about it. And I was really fortunate, one of our members said, “Hey listen. I’m going to cut you a check for 500 bucks. Put that towards the AED.” And that helped us significantly. So, within 18 months of opening, we were able to purchase an AED. Not only that, but again, having a paramedic and firefighter that owns the business, like, “Hey, like, this is a top priority for us.” So, it’s literally sat in a box on a wall for 8 ½ years. Other than, like, being tested and being checked monthly, it’s literally sat there seeming like, “Man, I hope we never have to use this thing.”

Mike Warkentin (07:55):
And then when you did, the pads were current, the battery was working, your staff was trained, and you mentioned a word that I always highlight on the show: You said SOPs. No successful gym owner that I’ve ever spoken to does not have SOPs and standard operating procedures, rules and tasks, everything laid out. If you want to be a successful gym owner, this is essential. And in this case, it was lifesaving. So, you know, kudos to you for doing that and having this prepared. And then for having, you know, your staff and people manage the situation when it happened. Because like you said, game day is not the same as practice, and there is just no way to simulate this kind of thing happening. So, talk to me now, like, your staff responded. Two minutes, the whole thing goes down. Then what? Obviously, you’ve got a fire hauler, you said 400 meters away, right? Or 40 yards away. People show up, and well, what about the rest of the people at this point? You had a gym with about 20 people in it.

Erik Zeyher (08:43):
And again, like systems, right? So, like, we actually—because we check everybody in—we use Mindbody. We check everybody in. We know exactly who’s in the building, right? And like, so those attendance records to make sure, like, follow up. Is everyone OK? Like, did anyone need to leave? We have all that stuff. But in terms of what happened afterwards, it feels like a whirlwind. And I couldn’t imagine if I had to coach afterwards and I couldn’t actually be able to help the member and help its family, and like, I could literally clear—I had everything cleared off my plate because I don’t coach any classes. I don’t do any PTs where I could literally be like, “Cool guys, this is how we handle this thing.” I could take care of my staff. You know, if this was before I started with you guys, when I was working 80 hours a week, it would’ve not only—even though it was a great turnout—it might not have turned out that way.

Erik Zeyher (09:34):
It could have seriously affected the relationship with members and people afterwards because they don’t feel like they’re taken care of. But because I literally could put all of my effort into, “Cool, let’s debrief tonight with the staff. Let’s debrief with the members that were in the building in our own Zoom meeting. Let’s make sure that I follow up with the member and actually be there in the hospital for him to visit.” Right? Like these things, if you’re coaching all the time, you can’t do. And because we’re set up for success from the likes of you guys, of what we did for the past three years, man, was I able to really help everyone across the board. But in terms of what went down afterwards, again, it felt like a whirlwind. If it seems like it’s a little bit harder to describe right now, that’s because it’s exactly what it felt like. And I’ve shared that with a bunch of people now. I know that afterwards, basically we went to the hospital, my coaching staff continued coaching. Talking about it afterwards, if we had to—when somebody goes into cardiac arrest, I would’ve just had our staff clear the entire gym and just have them go outside this way. Like whatever’s going on, they don’t have to witness that piece. And we’ve had both sides of it in terms of, like, we’ve had professionals in terms of Dutchess County, like stress relief that—but like they said, “Hey, it would’ve been better if you did this.” Firefighters saying, “Hey, it’s good that you kept everybody in there,” so they could actually see what goes on in case it does happen again. They know how to save somebody’s life.

Mike Warkentin (10:54):
That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have thought that.

Erik Zeyher (10:56):
So, like, we’ve had both ends of the spectrum, and then even for the staff being like, “Man, like I need to go back to coaching right now.” Like, are they OK to coach right now? Like they just witnessed a member go down. Cardiac arrest, foaming from the mouth, be shocked back to life. And my staff wasn’t OK. Like, it took us probably at least 10 days to kind of get back to it, and like, it was like random crying sessions throughout the week. Feelings hit in the middle of a workout, you know. And these are top level coaches, like an L2 and L3 and another L2 who have been doing this for five, 10 years who are seasoned veterans at this. One of them was in the Air Force, right? Like really struggle with this part. So, like, us debriefing as a team that night before we even put anything out to the rest of the community? Massively important.

Erik Zeyher (11:44):
Obviously, the member is still in the hospital. I left for a little bit—actually dropped his car back off at his house because he obviously couldn’t drive it. Debriefed with my team that night for about 45 minutes to an hour as long as they needed to kind of get stuff out. And then my business partner and I created basically just some information as to what was going on to our members. We left the name out of the member. We stated just the facts, but we wanted to make sure that our members knew what went on so they didn’t hear it through the grapevine, and provided some really clear information so there was no rumor mill. Right? It also allowed us to address and let our members know, “Hey, listen, tomorrow night we’re going to actually have a debrief for anyone that was in the facility when it happened, so that this way we can kind of break down, we can share some stories about it, make sure that you guys are OK.”

Erik Zeyher (12:28):
We also chatted with—there’s like a Dutchess County. I’ve got to remember the exact acronym, but basically like an incident stress debrief team. And we reached out to them, they gave us some really great resources that we could share with our community, and I shared within the Tinker group. And then from there, we basically sat down with our members and another debrief two days later with our team. Again, checking in daily with these guys to make sure they’re good to go. Remember, meantime, he’s still in the hospital for the next four or five days, gets an AED put in, make sure he gets the deluxe version of that. But again, still checking into him to make sure that he’s doing OK in there. It was a lot. I mean, I’m used to kind of being thrown into the fire, and as a gym owner, and even as a person, this was hard. It was really, really hard. And like, I’m fairly removed from my gym, where I don’t have to do a ton of work in the gym. So, I couldn’t imagine having this happen and being a gym owner who is in the mix of coaching everything. I wouldn’t be able to handle it.

Mike Warkentin (13:24):
Yeah. So, you mentioned our Tinker program—and listeners, what that is, it’s our program for our top-level gym owners. And Erik is in that. And what that essentially means is he’s making more than $100,000 a year from his business. He doesn’t have to work on the business—or sorry, in the business—pardon me. He can work on the business. So, he’s a little bit freed up from stuff. He has freedom of time; he has freedom of money. He can choose which roles he wants to take in the gym, and it can be—he can coach if he wants to, but he doesn’t need to or want to. So, he’s doing something else. And what that does is give you the freedom of time, which then, an instant like this happens, and he can behave like a CEO would. Step in and absolutely manage the situation with his partner to take care of his member, to take care of his staff, to take care of the other members who are outside who maybe weren’t involved in the incident, but are still affected by it.

Mike Warkentin (14:08):
That’s why we want you to be a great gym owner because if you are wearing every single hat in your business, and something like this happens, you are going to coach the class, you’re going to do the AED, you’re going to have to manage all the flow all by yourself. It’s chaotic. And we want you to have that freedom so that if something happens, or if something doesn’t happen, you just want to work on your business, you can do it. So, that’s what the Tinker program is. And mentorship can help you get that freedom of time. Now did you say that you didn’t cancel classes or you kept things going after the member was taken out?

Erik Zeyher (14:37):
We kept things going. I think if it was a different result where he wasn’t shocked back to life, it would’ve been a very different situation at that point. We would’ve shut down classes for the remainder of the day. But seeing like he was, you know, back to life, didn’t really know exactly how he got there, but given a thumbs-up on the way out to everyone, you know, it—the crazy part is that one of our members who actually provided CPR, as soon as she was done, got up and just jumped right in ready to start the workout, started kettlebell swings, didn’t even bat an eye. Right? But, again, a true professional and what she does, and what he does, to be able to handle those things.

Mike Warkentin (15:11):
Would you—going back, if something this would happen again—would you continue the classes after that? Even if it was a successful revival?

Erik Zeyher (15:18):
Yes, I would have in that situation. The only thing that we probably would’ve done differently is if he went down, like I said before, moved the rest of the class outside just to kind of like give that a little bit of space.

Mike Warkentin (15:29):
That makes sense. But it’s interesting that the firefighters even said that having people view something like that—as traumatic as it can be—can actually save lives down the road. Like that’s an interesting kind of takeaway that I wouldn’t have thought of. It’s obviously stressful for them, but if they’re like, “I’ve seen this before, and I know that I need to do this and grab this and do that,” that’s actually a really good skill to kind of have. So, that’s an interesting one that I hadn’t considered. Had you ever thought of that?

Erik Zeyher (15:51):
No, I never thought of that before. And it’s one of those things where like these guys are around it all the time. Right? Like, they live and breathe it. So, again, like I’m like, “Alright, that kind of makes sense. I get that piece.” And at the same time, you’re like, “Man, I still want to protect my people and my community from seeing what goes on with that.” Because it can be very traumatic. I think the other part is that I think people—at least I didn’t realize—was that our response to that was what it was, again, we lucked out where it was really fortunate. We could have done everything right, and it could have ended the other way, right? But at the same point, the fact of how we responded with checking in our members, debriefing, giving them resources, it showed that we were a professional business.

Erik Zeyher (16:30):
And the members that might imagine themselves in that situation were able to see, like, “Man, like I’m in really good hands.” So, it allowed us to—at least in my mind—allowed us to double down the buy-in from our members. Because we’re like, “Listen, you guys did everything you’re supposed to do. You communicated with us. You made sure that we were debriefed, you gave us resources. You made sure that the staff was OK. You’re doing everything you’re supposed to do, and we feel really good about that.” If I was coaching again, I would’ve missed a lot of these steps. I probably wouldn’t have been as good of a communicator as I would have if I didn’t have the time for it. But I was able to sit there, and craft a post, make sure that we made sure that everything was communicated the right way. I was able to have free time the next day just to be at the gym from 5:30 a.m. until 9, when I’m not normally there, just to hang out with members and maybe answer a few questions, and let them just like vent to me a little bit, just to be there versus if you’re in classes and coaching all the time, like, you don’t have that opportunity. So, I think that me having that bandwidth for my members in that respect was an absolute game-changer.

Mike Warkentin (17:32):
Yeah. And I love the stuff that you did where you cared for your staff, you had some meetings with those guys and said, “Hey, this was stressful. What can we do to acknowledge what’s going on?” You did the same thing for members. And so, you’re having these—you’re out, you’re reaching out and caring for people who are affected by this even though they weren’t the person in, directly in the incident. They’re still suffering through it. And you said, you know, you’ve experienced people with tears and stuff. I love that you did that. Chris Cooper’s talked a lot about the CALM model of leadership. I’m going to put a link in the show notes, just a resource that’s going to be very helpful for you listeners at your gym. But what I want to highlight here is that you communicated, and that’s super important because one of the things I can’t stand as a media guy is watching rumors spin up.

Mike Warkentin (18:08):
And you know, you mentioned it, the rumor mill goes. All of a sudden, this happened, that happened, it was four people, and this and that. And it’s like, you need to get out front of things in a professional manner and say, “Here’s what happened, here’s what we’re doing,” and be a leader. If you let things go wild by themselves, you get rumors and stuff gets really bad. It’s especially important with injuries and things like that because people are worried, you know, you’ve got to reach out. Obviously, you reached out. Was his wife at the gym by chance, or was she somewhere else?

Erik Zeyher (18:35):
No. So, it’s actually really funny. So, she actually somehow tracked down the ambulance on the drive there, and like, literally merged right behind it. And he’s sitting up, and he can see everything going on behind. He was like, “I thought you were going to rear end us about three times at least.” And yeah. It was so—yeah, she found her way there. I’m so grateful too that Chris shared the CALM resource earlier that week. Because I actually used that for when we posted about Lazar Dukic. So, it was super helpful. So, I actually already had a reference. Right? So, I made the post in my community about that piece, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I already know how to do this thing,” because Chris already gave me the system for it. We need to use it again. So, all of a sudden, one rep, probably not as good. Two reps, I’ve done 100% more work. So, now it allowed me to be a little bit better at it. So, again, kudos to you guys.

Mike Warkentin (19:26):
Well, that’s—I didn’t realize the timelines there. That’s very interesting. Because yeah, Chris did share that resource. We did a special podcast with Bonnie Skinner as well, talking about managing, you know, traumatic situations in relation to the CrossFit Games and any, it could be applied anywhere, obviously. I forgot that we had done that right around the time of this. So, it’s crazy that you saw that in advance and had that top of mind.

Erik Zeyher (19:45):
The other crazy part about this, we—I forgot to mention—was that this was during a memorial walk for Lazar Dukic, like, this was the Monday after the CrossFit Games, and like, it just happened. I’m like, so we just got hit with that as a CrossFit community. We now have our member that just, with the cardiac arrest, I was like, “Man, talk about being thrown to the wolves.” It literally felt like I was thrown like a dryer and just being tumbled around. It was a tough week.

Mike Warkentin (20:09):
But you still manage it like a pro, and the response was so amazing and that—you got the best possible result in something like this, were able to show your community what a, you know, group of fitness professionals you are. Are you making any changes to your emergency plans based on this incident? And the reason I’m asking this is because other people who haven’t gone through it might be able to see some places where they can update their plans.

Erik Zeyher (20:30):
Yeah. So, in terms of the response of what we have with our current plans, not going to change anything other than like if an incident does happen, we’re going to end up moving people outside.

Mike Warkentin (20:40):
But that was battle tested. You tested that, like, it worked.

Erik Zeyher (20:43):
Yeah. What we are going to change is some of our responses afterwards because a lot of that stuff we created on the spot, and we’re still kind of evaluating that between like the communication with the members, the debriefing of the staff, and again, it’s incident-to-incident. We’re trying to create a general framework for how to respond to that. If it is like say members are outside and someone gets struck by lightning, right? Like you try to create like a general framework, but some of these things you just can’t possibly imagine until it actually happens. But in terms of the process afterwards, we’re probably not going to change too much. Just how we respond and communicate to the members afterwards. That was our—kind of like the first runaway, unfortunately.

Mike Warkentin (21:20):
No, that makes sense because everyone looks at an emergency action plan, and you have your steps of like, “You will call the hospital at this number, you will go stand on the side of the road and wave down the ambulance, and you will do this, and you’ll do CPR.” But then it kind of stops there. Most emergency action plans that I’ve seen just stop and that’s it. And there’s no, like what happens afterwards when, you know, the gurney goes out and the sirens go to the hospital, and the rest of us are kind of just standing around, and you realize—and found out how to live through it—that there needs to be something else there. So, I guess, if listeners, if you’re out there, if you have an emergency action plan, at least put some, like, a little bit of railway tracks in place to say, “What happens next?”

Mike Warkentin (21:59):
“How are we dealing with it? How are we communicating with everyone who doesn’t know but is part of the community? How are we managing the people who had to deal with the incident? How are we managing the people who maybe didn’t have to deal with it but saw it and are affected by it? How are we managing the people who weren’t even there but are still very affected by it?” Maybe this guy’s best buddies are in a different class or something like that. You probably can’t lay all that out because as you said, Erik, everything is so different. These incidents are so specific, but just a general plan. We are going to communicate, and we are going to do this for the staff, and we’re going to do this for the members. Just like a three-part thing might be a good idea. Would you think that would be wise, Erik? Or would you add anything to that?

Erik Zeyher (22:33):
Yeah, so I mean, the other thing too—and this is again brought up by our staff—he’s like, “I didn’t know whether to start class right away, or like, kind of get back to it.” And again, they’re about to start the workout in like five minutes, and everyone’s just been frozen out of everything for 15 minutes, right? And giving everybody like, “Hey listen, warm up for five minutes. Grab a drink, use the bathroom.” Yeah, bring it back together and even just have a conversation of like, “Hey, if you’re not OK to work out right now, like it’s OK. Pack it up. If you need to sit on the sofa and hang out for a little bit before you even decide those things, totally cool. If you’re ready to rock and roll, you want to work out, that’s here.” Because we had some members literally like pack up and leave because it was that traumatic for them. And like, we’re trying to keep tabs—I’m really fortunate, like I’m in the hospital with the member who went down. I have my staff members, my coaches following up with the members who had to leave because it was so traumatic. Like, “Hey, I called so-and-so just so you know, we had a really tough time with this. You should probably reach out.” I’m like, “Perfect.” But again, if you don’t have a good staff in place and you don’t have some of these people that are at least aware of who’s going in and out, and there’s no documentation of who’s in the building at the time, it’s really hard to back trace some of that stuff. And like everyone, when they work out in class, they are trapped. There’s no open gym for us. There’s no free roaming around. If you’re in the building, we pretty much know that you’re in there.

Mike Warkentin (23:50):
Yeah. And like, we’re not going to make this a business decision. But at the same time, you can imagine that if someone saw this, left the gym very rattled and no one reached out, that member may not come back. It might be just a really negative experience. And like, again, we’re not about dollars and cents here. We’re about caring for people. How much better is it if you reach out to them and say, “Hey, I know you were in that class, and you know, what can we do? How can we help you work through this?” That shows a huge professional level of care. And you can’t do that without systems. Like you said, you can check your attendance report. These people are here. They’ll be contacted. We’re going to contact them a second time. We’re going to have a little Zoom call for them or whatever. Anything that makes things better. And that all falls back on systems. Erik, as we—remember you said you were going to bring something up later on? Did you think of what it was?

Erik Zeyher (24:34):
Yeah, so there’s a bunch of stuff. So, one of the things that most people don’t realize is that for the first 72 hours, at least for traumatic events like that, it’s very much—there’s still a lot of ups and downs. So, we know with our staff that like, “Hey, listen, you guys are experiencing ups and downs.” Even though we debriefed, it still might be really difficult. Basically, it takes like 10 days for you to kind of get back to norm with that stuff. And so, after 10 days, we held another debrief to basically go, “Hey listen, if you’re still struggling with this, let’s talk about it and show up.” It also gave us a really good indication as to if we needed to help people get additional help and resources outside of just doing a debrief and talking with our team and sharing what they saw and how they felt. Because it raised a little bit more of—not like a red flag, but like a pink flag.

Erik Zeyher (25:19):
Like, “Hey, I’m really struggling and need some additional help.” Because like you said, all of our members are people who are part of this community. We want to make sure that they feel safe, they feel like they’re OK, not something that they need to carry with them and that’s a burden that they need to hold onto, right? So, we wanted to provide a safe space for our members to do those things. The other really great part that goes with this is that our, AED is from a company called HeartSine. They’re like a fairly big company. They actually donate an AED of the recipient’s life who it saved. So, our member actually gets to pick an organization that they get to donate an AED to. Because I didn’t even realize too how much information is in the AED. The police department—or no, the fire department came back over, they had to export the data that was there so they could give it to the heart doctor. There’s like—they ran like a full report off of this so you can see exactly what’s going on before, you can see what’s going on after, as they get shocked. I didn’t realize that.

Mike Warkentin (26:17):
Sure. Because it’s analyzing heart rhythm to determine whether it can even shock. I didn’t realize that it tracked that it could be downloaded. That’s incredible.

Erik Zeyher (26:23):
Yeah. So then they give that to the hospital, so they can then understand exactly what went on.

Mike Warkentin (26:27):
How long was this going on? What was going on? Yeah, that’s critical stuff.

Erik Zeyher (26:32):
We were also set up—some of our members expressed like, “Hey listen, like, not that I had to give CPR, but like I felt helpless.” So, we actually, working with the American Heart Association and some other local companies, are going to host a CPR course for our members. Like one of those things you always kind of kick the can down the road a little bit, and you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll do it. We’ll do it.” And my business partner used to host and run the course, and he’s now in Florida, like he doesn’t live in New York anymore. So now we’re bringing somebody in to do that again.

Mike Warkentin (27:02):
Going to dust off Rescue Randy.

Erik Zeyher (27:04):
Yeah, we did, we did. We’re going to do—we did separate training for our staff again just to make sure everyone feels comfortable with it because some of our staff, they’ve been through the training, but they might not have focused on it 100%. They check the box, but then they go, “Oh wow, it’s actually like a real situation and need to be prepared for this thing.” The other really awesome stuff is that between Dutchess County, the Arlington Fire and the Grange Fire Department, the American Heart Association, they’re actually recognizing our members with awards who saved our member’s’ life. So like, it goes from this really hard, difficult piece—and it’s still hard to kind of talk about—to being a really nice recognition for people who went above and beyond to save someone’s life with CPR and hooking up the AED in the blink of a second. So like, super excited about that for our members and our staff.

Mike Warkentin (27:52):
I’m imagining it must be just hugely emotional to see your dude in the hospital recovering and his wife and just, like, he’s still there.

Erik Zeyher (28:00):
Yeah. I mean, I’m not a very huggy person, and she’s like, “I got my quota for like the next five years of hugs from you after today.” It’s one of those things where, again, you’re grateful that it happened within 60 feet of the AED because it could have happened 200 meters out on a run, right? It could happen on the golf course; it could happen anywhere for this guy. But it just happened that we had a cardiac PA, a nurse, whole staff in there and an AED 60 feet away. Like, you should go play the lotto.

Mike Warkentin (28:26):
Let’s close this out. I’ll give you a couple things, listeners. Check with your insurer and your local jurisdictions to find out what you are required to do. Because some places require you to have an AED and if it’s not over 500 members, it’s just—you must have one as a fitness facility or whatever. Check those local regulations. Be sure you do that. I would also recommend—make sure that you have your coaches CPR certified. Make sure that’s current. Erik, let’s go a little bit further based on your experiences here. What are some other key takeaways, simple stuff people can do right now today to make themselves more prepared for something that could be very, well, would be very stressful?

Erik Zeyher (29:00):
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I actually wrote about this and shared a post. I’m going to just pull it up real quick.

Mike Warkentin (29:04):
Yeah, tell us exactly.

Erik Zeyher (29:06):
I think it’s more important to be specific with it than me kind of reading off the cuff. One of the other things—and I’m going to share this because I don’t think people sometimes realize the benefit that goes with mentorship all the time—is that financially, we wouldn’t be able to be in the position that we’re in if we weren’t mentored by you guys and Anastasia and Ashley and Chris and everything goes into this thing. The other really cool part is because we’re in such a good position, we also want to pay it forward and buy another AED for a gym that’s either starting off or can’t afford it. So like, to be able to do that for another community, whether they use it or not—like hopefully at some point they never have to use it—but if they are, they’re prepared. You know, I’d rather have that be there. So, we’re really fortunate because of what you guys do with us. To be able to help another gym out with that. So, it’s really cool to be able to do that.

Mike Warkentin (29:57):
Oh, you know, and they’ll just say that’s one of the reasons—that’s kind of the foundation of Two-Brain—is Chris has always said he wants gym owners to be wealthy because they’re some of the most generous caring people in the world, and they’re going to use their success to help others. And Erik, I think that’s living proof of it. So, what an incredible story. And whatever gym gets that AED, I hope they never have to use it, but I’m glad they’re going to have it. Give me what’s on your list.

Erik Zeyher (30:17):
So, number 1, obviously, is have an AED. Number 2, overtrain your staff until they borderline hate you. Again, you can’t be overprepared for what goes on with this piece. Staff who are professionally trained on this and or full-time staff that know exactly what’s going on, they’re in the building more hours, makes a really big difference. Two of those coaches are there 40 hours a week. The other one spends about, like, probably 20 hours a week in there. So, he is borderline full-time. Working—being able to have some sort of capacity and have a team being able to divide and conquer and knowing those roles? Massively important. Right? Like, the coaches knew that they needed to follow up with certain members. I was in charge of assigning people jobs. We were able to divide and conquer, and if I’m in the fire and doing everything, it doesn’t work out very well.

Erik Zeyher (31:06):
Emergency systems. You’ve got to have SOPs, fire drills and practice at game speed. You know, we’re going to implement more practices at game speed. Whether there is, like you said before, Mike, it’s really hard to simulate a real-life situation. But unfortunately, I can put a burpee penalty to it that’ll make it really uncomfortable. Or in a … Like you can create some sort of pressure externally. And we used to do this in soccer for PKs, but you can create something to make people a little bit more focused. And maybe that’s just reflecting back on what goes on.

Mike Warkentin (31:36):
Well, you could even just have them sprint out. Say the member went down on your 200-meter turnaround on your warmup run. Hits down there, sprint out with the AED, you know, even something like that, you better believe they’d be running hard.

Erik Zeyher (31:47):
Yeah, a staff debriefing especially if something traumatic happens. I didn’t realize the importance of that until talking with other professionals, and that wasn’t something that we planned for. So, if something does happen that’s traumatic, that staff debriefing is super important. Attendance tracking: Make sure that everyone is down in the building, that you know who’s in there. And then also, the member debrief within 36 hours of the event. I think that’s super important. And even the communication with your members. Again, we made sure that it was vague enough where they knew somebody went down. Because not everyone knows we have 200 members. Not everyone knows that. So-and-so went down, and we don’t want to sit there and share his medical information. However, we do want to let you know—because you’re going to probably hear it through a grapevine—that some sort of thing went down. So just—we tried to air all this out of caution with that while still communicating really effectively.

Mike Warkentin (32:35):
Yeah, privacy concerns. But obviously, you want the rumor mill to not spin up and people to think it was, you know, it was my husband at home if they hear something weird. Right?

Erik Zeyher (32:45):
Yeah. And then—last but not least—but one of the hardest parts that I struggle with is like, how do I thank a guy and gal who just saved somebody’s life in our gym? Right? Like, I feel like I can’t do enough. So, trying to—whether that’s like, yeah, obviously we send a fruit basket home to our member and some stuff like that while he is recovering. But like, I can’t even begin to fathom how to say other than like, “Thank you,” and give them the shirt off my back for those members. But like, “Dude, you stepped up in a time where we most need you. I know it’s your profession,” and even if it’s not. But like, I don’t know how to thank somebody for that when it’s that much of a game changer.

Mike Warkentin (33:19):
I think it’s just right in the eyes. Thank you. And a firm handshake, and “I love you.” You know, I don’t know what you can—

Erik Zeyher (33:25):
No, “I appreciate it.” Maybe a few hugs too.

Mike Warkentin (33:28):
That too. I know you’re not a huggy guy, but you know as many as you can handle. And I’m going to guess you probably have to file an insurance—a report with your insurer. Is that correct?

Erik Zeyher (33:36):
Yeah, we filed it with the insurance. We reach out to the American Heart Association as well so they know what’s going on. Even, like, HeartSine, the company that does our AED actually gives us new pads since we used them and saved a life. I don’t know if they do that the other way around. I hope they would. And the other really cool part—and it depends on your insurance company—we use CrossFit RRG. They actually cover up to $25,000 in expenses for that member that’s in the hospital. So, again, he doesn’t have to pay for anything out of pocket in terms of that. So, it was nice to be able to call and be like, “Hey, listen, just so you know, anything up to that point we get to cover for you through the insurance company.” Again, another level of professionalism that goes with that that we were, again, super pleased about. But if I don’t have the time to—and Chris doesn’t have the time—to make those phone calls to follow up, some gym owners might miss that piece. And that could be really big for someone who struggles with finances to have something like that happen.

Mike Warkentin (34:33):
I didn’t know that was available, and I guarantee a lot of other people don’t know that was available. So, that’s an interesting insurance clause to look into. Erik, thank you so much. You know, congratulations, high fives to your staff and community for taking care of something. Thank you so much for sharing this, and—not just sharing the incident—but giving us a concise action plan to take out of it. Listeners, if you’re out there, follow those steps. Erik just laid out all the stuff that you would need to do to respond just like his community did. Erik, I really appreciate your time and your story.

Erik Zeyher (34:59):
Yeah, Mike, I can’t thank you enough. And if people want to reach out at all, they can. Again, some of that seems a little bit overwhelming with some of this AED stuff, even just to get it in place. Happy to help if you want to reach out, at least like point you in the direction or assist with that. Because in New York, we need medical oversight. We need a doctor to sign off on this stuff. But thank you again, and you know, if anyone needs help out there with this stuff, happy to pioneer that and help them along.

Mike Warkentin (35:24):
Where can they find you If they want to reach out?

Erik Zeyher (35:26)
Warlock Athletics on Instagram. Great way to find us. You can also reach out to me personally. It’s @growwitherik on Instagram as well. Or just shoot me an email. It’s on the website warlockathletics.com.

Mike Warkentin (35:36):
If you’re out there, take advantage of it. Upper-level professional gym owner. His gym saved a life. If you need some help, talk to him. Reach out that way. Erik, again, thank you so much. We’ll have you back on the show at some point. I think, probably related to some of your Tinker level escapades. I’m Mike Warkentin, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Thank you so much for watching and listening. Please subscribe on your way out wherever you are. And now here’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper (36:00):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you, have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today.

The post Life-Saving Lessons: Gym’s Instant Response Keeps Member Alive appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Warlock Athletics Saves Life of Member

The team at Warlock Athletics in New York saved a life on Aug. 12.

At the end of a warm-up run for a workout in honor of Lazar Đukić, who died while competing in the 2024 CrossFit Games, a Warlock client went into cardiac arrest.

A coach called 911, while another sprinted for the AED. A member who is a cardiac physician’s assistant and another who is a nurse started CPR within 20 seconds. The AED was on the fallen member within 60 seconds, and a shock revived him within two minutes.

Emergency responders showed up quickly and rushed the member to the hospital for more treatment.

Warlock co-owner Erik Zeyher had received back-to-back emergency calls while at home and rushed to the gym to find that his team had responded swiftly and heroically, so he went to the hospital to meet with the member’s family. (Erik explains why he had the time to do this here.)

At the hospital, the client’s wife said this:

“If this had happened anywhere else, he would be dead.”

The client had literally gone down within 60 feet of an AED, surrounded by people who were prepared to use it.

It’s a great story that comes when the CrossFit community is hurting, and I’m proud to share it.

And it gets better.

Pay It Forward

I’ve often said I want gym owners to be wealthy because they’re the most generous people on Earth. Instead of sitting on their riches, they’ll use their wealth to improve their communities.

Here’s the proof: Erik and Warlock Athletics didn’t initially have the funds to buy an AED when they opened. But a member donated $500 and they picked one up within 18 months of opening, even though they weren’t required by law to have an AED.

Now, Erik and his partner have solidified their business and have the funds to buy an AED for a gym that doesn’t have one.

“Because we’re in such a good position, we also want to pay it forward and buy another AED for a gym that’s either starting out or can’t afford it,” Erik said.

He added: “Financially, we wouldn’t be able to be in the position that we’re in if we weren’t mentored by (Two-Brain).”

And that’s why I want gym owners to run successful, profitable businesses.

Lessons and Tips

Erik joined Mike Warkentin on “Run a Profitable Gym” to talk about the incident and offer tips for other gym owners.

“We had the protocol for exactly what goes on,” Erik said, referring to a cardiac incident. “What we didn’t prepare for was how to respond to it afterwards.”

To help you prepare to be at your best in a worst-case scenario, I’ve collected Erik’s complete plan for you. He also said you can contact him through Instagram if you have questions.

1. Check local laws to determine if your gym must have an AED. (U.S. gym owners: this site has info on which states have AED requirements.) Check in with your insurer, as well. The best plan: Get an AED even if you aren’t required to have one. If you have one, ensure you adhere to the maintenance checklist so the batteries and pads are ready for use.

2. Ensure staff members have current CPR/AED credentials. If you practice your emergency plan at intervals, ensure new staff members who join before the next “fire drill” understand exactly what to do.

3. Overtrain your staff “until they borderline hate you,” Erik said. Create an emergency action plan and full SOP, and incorporate drills at intervals so staff members know exactly what to do if something happens. A key element that’s not always in emergency plans: Assign a staff member to check the attendance log so you know exactly who was in the building. That will come in handy when the initial shock passes (see below).

4. Include some oft-omitted details in your plan: Will the class and other training groups/PT sessions continue after an incident? Will the people in the building remain inside as staff and first responders work or will you move them outside or to another room? Who will go to the hospital? Who will coach if classes continue?

5. Make sure you have a detailed post-event plan. Many gym owners will assume that the situation is resolved when the ambulance leaves, but Erik learned that true fitness professionals must go further.

6. Plan to communicate with your community: Ensure confidentiality but get way out front of the situation to shut down the rumor mill. (If you need help with this, use the CALM Model.)

7. Include a staff debriefing in your post-event plan. Some team members will need assistance working through stress, and you might consider bringing in an expert to help. This debriefing is not about reviewing performance (you can do that later, too) but about ensuring your team members are OK. (Erik reported that even some of his trained pros were rattled by the heart attack.)

8. Include a post-event plan for your members—those who witnessed the event and those who did not but were still affected. Erik recommends having a debriefing for members within 36 hours. If you had a staff member get the attendance log when the incident occured, you can personally reach out to the people who were in the building first to care for them.

9. Personally thank everyone who responded in a time of great need. How? Few things take the place of a hug or handshake and a heartfelt “thank you for being a hero.”

10. When you’re clear of the incident and its aftermath, review your team’s response and make improvements to your plan if needed. Then keep drilling.

I’ll add one more:

11. Make sure you’re OK, too. Leaders often have to remain stoic in the face of chaos, so take time to deal with your own emotions and stress when the urgent duties are complete. Don’t hesitate to talk to a professional.

Review Your Plan!

I’m incredibly proud of Erik and the Warlock Athletics community.

I hope this story inspires you to review, upgrade and practice your emergency plan today.

You never know when you’ll need it.

The post Warlock Athletics Saves Life of Member appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Summer 2025 Revenue Won’t Suck (If You Do This)

I struggled badly in the summer months as a gym owner.

In fact, I dug a hole so deep in June, July and August that we rarely climbed into the black until January of the following year.

When I had the chance to talk to a gym owner who posted his best month of revenue in June, I had a lot of questions.

Stan Skolfield runs Skolfield Sports Performance in Maine, and he put his gym on a Top 10 revenue leaderboard that runs from US$63,000 to $90,000.

So how did he do that when my revenue cratered every summer?

Stan told me his big June came because June in gyms for kids is like January in gyms for adults.

When kids are out of school for summer break, they need stuff to do—and Stan provides it, big time.

Skolfield Sports Performance serves kids and youths aged 8 and older, with the primary demographic being 13-18. He has 10,000 square feet of space and seven coaches, with a mix of full- and part-time trainers. The gym has been associated with Parisi Speed School for more than 15 years.

Here’s Stan’s approximate revenue breakdown:

20 percent—On-ramps55 percent—Semi-private training10 percent—Group classes10 percent—Speed camps5 percent—Retail and remote training

In June 2024, Stan created $37,000 in revenue by registering 227 kids in speed camps held outside his gym—so his training space isn’t overwhelmed. He coaches the kids to be faster for eight weeks, and all along the way he works to promote the value of his core programming inside the gym.

Yes, his kids camps provide massive front-end revenue, but they also funnel kids into his gym when the speed camps end.

I asked Stan how a gym owner could generate just $2,000 of new revenue in summer next year, and here’s the plan he laid out:

Add special youth programming—speed camps or general kids programming.Run two one-hour sessions a week for eight weeks.Charge about $15 per session. (Stan doesn’t know your exact business model, so set your prices based on expenses, value and profit margin with the help of your mentor.)Create a 16-session plan that appeals to the kids you target (e.g., make it fun for very young ones, emphasize performance for older teens, etc.).Tell the parents in your gym about it, and ask them to tell their friends with kids.Get eight kids in the program to gross about $2,000.Tell parents that their kids can attend up to 16 sessions, but they’ll still get amazing results with 10-12. That way parents know they aren’t “failing” if they miss a few sessions over summer—and they won’t ask for refunds for missed sessions. If the program is a hit and demand warrants it, run another. If that’s a hit, too, consider adding ongoing kids programming.

Stan provided a final shortcut: Get a complete plug-and-play template for programs from Parisi Speed School. The cost of the template “is pennies compared to the ROI,” Stan said.

Revenue PR in Summer 2025?

This is a very simple plan that can generate new revenue next year.

But it will only work if you take action now.

Put summer kids programs on your calendar now, then work back from the start date and add set-up milestones, such as “get kids program announcement in April newsletter to clients.”

If I were you, I’d put this one on the calendar with an alert: “Jan. 10, 2025: Start planning and marketing kids programs to start in June.”

If you do that, your summer revenue totals will look much different than they did this year.

Take two minutes right now to make an addition to your calendar, then be sure to take action in the winter of 2025.

The post Summer 2025 Revenue Won’t Suck (If You Do This) appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Exact Cure for Summer Slumps in Gym Revenue in 2025

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Confession: Summer months at my gym were usually Death Valley. We usually lost money, and we had to climb out of a hole for the rest of the year. It was brutal. My guest today posted huge revenue in June, his best month of the year. He’s going to tell you how he did it, so you can avoid the summer slump in 2025. Welcome to “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe” wherever you are watching or listening with my thanks. Stan Skolfield runs Skolfield’s Sports Performance in Maine. He landed on our leaderboard for June Revenue. That leaderboard runs from $63,000 to $90,000. These are huge numbers in summer months. We’re going to dig into one of those numbers today with Stan. Welcome, Stan. How are you?

Stan Skolfield (00:43):
Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Mike Warkentin (00:45):
I wish I had spoken to you in 2009. You probably would’ve saved me, I don’t know, $200,000 or something like that. What we’re going to do is even better; I’m going to speak to you today, and you’re going to help all the listeners save that money and have a better year in 2025. You ready to roll?

Stan Skolfield (01:00):
Sounds good. Let’s go.

Mike Warkentin (01:01):
Alright, so, June: I want to dig into that number first. Huge revenue number when many other gyms are struggling to break even. How did you do this?

Stan Skolfield (01:09):
So, I think before we kind of go into that, it’s important to know that in the world of sports performance and training the youth market, our revenue cycle is different than your normal gym revenue cycle whereas like January, February, March, you guys are going gangbusters, for us, that’s our June. So, June, July, August are our biggest months of the year. And the reason for that is all the kids are out of school. College kids are home, kids are out of school, and they’ve got a lot more free time, right? But then you hit September, October, and all the kids are back in school, and everybody plays a fall sport, right? Everybody plays field hockey, soccer, football, cross country, golf. Then, so you go through that for September, October, then November, those sports start to let up, athletes begin to kind of creep in.

Stan Skolfield (01:57):
And now, not as many kids play a winter sport, or if they do play winter sports, you look at like hockey, like much more conducive to strength and conditioning, and also the schedule allows them to kind of come in and train a little bit more. So, November things pick up; December, things get busy. January is very busy for us. March, February, March are all great months. And then things take another nosedive. April and May, everybody plays a spring sport. Baseball, softball, outdoor track, lacrosse, you know? So, our revenue cycle is much different, so for us, June is our big month, right? That’s where we’re going to capture a lot of our business and we’re able to offer some different profit centers that we wouldn’t normally be able to do throughout the normal school year.

Mike Warkentin (02:43):
Hey, listeners—Stan, I’m going to interrupt you—listeners, what Stan has here, he knows his avatar cold, and he knows the cycle of his business. So, because that’s based on his avatar, he knows what people are doing when, when they’re likely to buy his stuff, when they’re going to be off at college. If you don’t know your avatar in your business cycle, that is your cue to learn it. Stan, go ahead. Tell me June’s specific stuff because I know you got cool things going on in there.

Stan Skolfield (03:04):
So, for June, obviously we get a ton of kids who begin to return to our program, but it’s also for us is we run speed camps, and that’s been kind of our bread and butter, and we slowly began to grow that from year to year. But for us, like for the month of June, we did 37k in the month of June, just in speed camps.

Mike Warkentin (03:27):
Just in speed camps.

Stan Skolfield (03:29):
Just in speed camps. Like that’s over 227 kids that we got into our program. And the beauty of that, too, is they’re all outside the facility, right? So, these are all taking place outside your facility. You’re not interfering with your regular programming. In terms of expenses, there’s not much for expenses because you go out and do those on fields, right? And there’s so many benefits to doing that, but it’s a very easy way to not only boost your revenue, but also gain a ton of exposure for your facility, right? So, now I’m able to kind of go outside that normal 10- to 15-minute market from where we are to go and expand that out to 20 to 30 minutes outside that expose kids to our program, what we do, expose parents to our program, expose coaches to our program. So, now they’re get—that’s like our low barrier offer, so they get with us for like eight weeks, and then you leave a breadcrumb trail at the end about, “Hey, here’s how to kind of get involved in our program down the line.”

Mike Warkentin (04:35):
OK, so, you’ve got basically a low barrier offer that kicks in about well over $30,000 in revenue for you in June, and it feeds your main programs for the rest of the year. That’s incredible. I’m going to guess that you are somehow connected to an Italian javelin thrower named—do you want to say his name?

Stan Skolfield (04:54):
Yeah. So, yes Bill Parisi. We’ve been—I’ve been associated with the Parisi Speed School for over 15 years. And part of that and being part of that process, like that’s our bread and butter. And the important thing about running a speed camp, but just like anything else in your programs, it can’t just be something you kind of throw together and just show up one day, throw some cones out, and away you go; it’s got to be a systemized approach to what you’re doing, right? So, and it’s something different each time, or everything’s kind of a progression that builds off it, and that’s all stuff we do within the program. But you’ve got to be able to have your staff—it’s just like any other SOP, like, “Here’s what we’re doing on day one of camp all the way through day 18 of the camp from start to finish.” Not only from the training side, but also education and getting them indoctrinated into our social media culture as well as, “Hey, here’s how to find us at the end.”

Mike Warkentin (05:50):
Wow. OK. So, listeners, I’ve had Bill Parisi on this show. I’ll put a link in the show notes for you to that one so you can see what he’s all about. Bill was also a speaker at the Two-Brain Summit this year, and I chatted with him there. He’s a great guy, fired up and he’s very good at getting kids, youth and even professional athletes to move really, really fast. If that’s something you’re interested in, check that out. Parisi Speed School. Stan, give me the 60-second summary of your business. You’ve covered some of the stuff, but let me know what you’re doing in that place. Like how much space have you got? Who do you serve? Adults, like what have you got going on there?

Stan Skolfield (06:17):
So, Skolfield Sports Performance, we’re a comprehensive sports performance facility. So, what I mean by that is we do a little bit of everything from strength, speed, power, agility, mobility, flexibility, injury prevention and nutrition. Right? We serve athletes eight years old on up. I would say our primary demographic is 13 to 18. We have a very, very small adult following, and that’s primarily—we’ve launched some stuff that hasn’t quite gone, taken off the way I want, but I also don’t put a ton of effort into it. And so our facility is 10,000 square feet. I’ve got a four lane, 50-yard track.

Mike Warkentin (06:54):
I see it. It looks great.

Stan Skolfield (06:56):
Yeah. It’s an ideal space. 25-yard turf field and then a weight room to kind of go along with it.

Mike Warkentin (07:02):
OK. It looks beautiful. I love the—I looked up online some of the pictures, and listeners, you can do the same thing, but it looks great, and I love how you’ve got some stools right around the side where you can actually have, people can watch what’s going on there, and that’s kind of a cool thing for it. I even saw a foosball table in there if I wasn’t mistaken. Is that there? Is that right?

Stan Skolfield (07:19):
Yeah, we did have a foosball table in there. We did take it out. We’ve had ping pong, but we end up—you know, as you evolve, I end up kind of turning that room into something a little bit different. That’s more of like our sales room versus kind of like an athlete lounge.

Mike Warkentin (07:34):
Yeah, and that’s an interesting one too because Chris has talked about on the show that certain areas of your business, and I made this mistake—I had a great big lounge, and it was 1,000 square feet; it was never full. And then, towards the late stages of my ownership in that building, we turned it into a personal training studio and ran yoga out of it. So, that’s an interesting thing. Listeners, what are you using your space for? Are you getting a return on it? There’s another one you can look at. So, how many coaches have you got?

Stan Skolfield (07:59):
I’ve got seven right now. Not all are full-time. A lot of them are kind of part-time coaches. In the fall, I’ll pare down to four, right? And then as the volume picks up, I’ll pick up coaches as well.

Mike Warkentin (08:13):
OK. And then if we’re talking revenue streams, is it fair to say kids revenue is like 90% or something like that? Or what have you got for a general breakdown?

Stan Skolfield (08:20):
So, our kind of breakdown, I mean, yeah, kids makes up probably 95% of our revenue, but if you really look at it—so our on-ramp program, which is kind of really our one-on-one program, that that kind of breaks down to about 20% of our revenue, semi-private is closer to like 55, 60% of our revenue, and then we do have classes, and our classes are really for the eight- to 12-year-old demographic; it ends up being about 10%. We do a little bit of remote training, a little bit of retail, and then team training and speed camps ends up making up overall about 10% of our annual revenue.

Mike Warkentin (08:55):
OK. So, that, listeners, is a really interesting breakdown. You guys should take note of that. When you have your—you said on-ramps or one-on-one. Semi-private, is that like two to three to four, or what are the numbers in there?

Stan Skolfield (09:07):
So, it’s up to five. Anywhere from two to five athletes, and we’re a little bit different. So, just how we do things, so we’re more higher ticket. That’s been my process. I don’t care about—I’ve run programs in the past where it was about volume and class base, and I just learned I would way rather have way less clients, but get great results, but also charge a premium for that, and I’ve found that that’s exactly what parents are looking for. And in this industry, I try to educate them all the time, like, you’re willing to go out and pay $120 for a hitting lesson or $150 for a skating lesson, right? But I’m over here charging $10 to teach your kids the stuff that’s really going to impact yourself on the field, on the ice, and on the court.

Stan Skolfield (09:55):
So, we’ve gone to the mode of like, “Hey, we’re going to charge a premium for our service, but we’re going to deliver great results.” And so,kind of how we do it a little bit is, we have an on-ramp program, but our on-ramp program is 18 sessions in length. It’s 18 one-on-one sessions. Everything’s scripted out from the very first session to the 18th session of all the different things that we’re going to teach them along the way. So, by the time they finish that, we say you’ve earned the right to move into semi-private, and then 95% of our kids kind of move into that semi-private model. So, it’s a kind of—that’s why we’re so heavy, kind of one-on-one and semi-private in our services.

Mike Warkentin (10:36):
OK, listeners, I’m going to ring the bell again. This is the system. Someone, a gym owner, a top gym owner has come on the show and said he has a system for something. I ring the giant bell because every successful gym owner who comes on the show without fail has a documented system. No one is doing it by the seat of their pants. So, that is a really, really cool one. I love what you’ve got there. I love the fact that you have one-on-one intro stuff that feeds into a different program. And the thing that you said that’s even more important for listeners is this one, gym owners: By and large, we charge way too little for kids programming. I did it; I charged like 35% less for a kids membership, even though I had to buy special equipment, develop special expertise and put in way more effort to watch, manage, a smaller group of less attentive people.

Mike Warkentin (11:19):
I charged less for that. It’s ridiculous. Look at your kids programming rates. They should be at least equal to your adult rates, if not more expensive, and people who specialize in kids—Bill Parisi told me this as well, and martial arts and cheer gyms, things like that—they will tell you kids programming should be charged more expensive than adult stuff. So, keep that in mind. Now I’m going to ask you this: You mentioned breadcrumbs that lead from your June programs, your outdoor speed camps, into your program. What are some of those breadcrumbs? Because this sounds like a $100,000 question.

Stan Skolfield (11:52):
So, number one, very early on within those speed camps and whatnot, our social media game is pretty tight. I’ve got somebody who does our social media, and like everything else, there’s a system that’s based into it, right? In terms of, “Here’s what we’re going to post on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, all the way through,” and we’re very consistent about that. But most importantly, you’re celebrating your clients within that. Because kids want to see themselves, right? Like kids are the biggest consumers of social media, right? So, getting them involved in our social media platforms is number one. So, now they always know where to find us, right? And then having funnels, obviously following John Franklin’s recipe of sell by chat. I have my social media person on top of that as well. And then the other big thing we do that we’re doing this year is the event I’m hosting tomorrow, so it’s called Summer Slam.

Mike Warkentin (12:42):
Well, I like that too.

Stan Skolfield (12:42):
Summer Slam is going to be our end of summer event. So, we have big testing days that we do where we’ll go and reevaluate all of our clients. So, it’s their opportunity to retest in like the 40-yard dash, the five-ten-five, vertical jump, chin up. So, we’re inviting all the kids from our camps, all our current clients, their friends, any coaches who want to come by. So, they’ll come in here, we bring them through a whole warmup, bring them through all the events, and then at the end we’re going to kind of have a cookout. We’re going to have a spike ball tournament. We’re going to have corn hole, golf, tug of war against the coaches, and a dunk tank.

Mike Warkentin (13:20):
Are you going in the tank?

Stan Skolfield (13:21):
Well, it’s going to cost you. So, it’s not just like, “Hey, you get the throw and put Stan in the ice-cold water.” Like you may have to bid some pushups or burpees or something like that for it, but it’s just a way to get all those people into your gym. Let them see like, hey, this facility and the culture and everything involved, and so then now you’ve also kind of captured all that intel in terms of names, email addresses, you put them in Gym Lead Machine and let them begin to kind of do the work.

Mike Warkentin (13:52):
OK, so, listeners, Stan has just laid out another system. This is his funnel of how he gets people into his business, and it involves strong social media game, which is essential, especially with his market because these kids are on social media. He’s got sell by chat working, he’s got events that get people into the gym and trading their information for whatever it is, whether it’s the chance to dunk him in a tank or not, gets their information, funnels that in Gym Lead Machine and lead nurture, and this is where people are coming from, and that’s where he is getting high-value, long-term clients. Again, it is a system. Two-Brain teaches clients how to build four different systems. This is one of them. And you can build four of them that run at the same time to fill your gym with high-value leads. And it’s not flash-in-the-pan, weird bait-and-switch stuff. It is just established short, easy, slick marketing stuff that works if you do it every single day. So, I’ll ask you this, this is an interesting one: Would you ever invest more time into an adult program? Or is it just better for you to just focus on the kids? Because it seems like you’re crushing.

Stan Skolfield (14:50):
Absolutely. That’s my next step, right? It’s the biggest missing hole because, again, in the sports performance realm, your gym usually sits empty until noon, right? And that’s a whole big time period where you’re just missing out on revenue. So, this year I’m kind of filling it with some hockey team training in the morning, but that is my next place I’m going to attack and how I’m going to do it. I’ve tried a couple different versions without success, but at the same time, it hasn’t been my core competency. So, I know where the bills are paid, where the effort needs to be, but this is my next part I’m going to conquer. So, I’ll throw it out to any of the listeners out there, man: If you’ve got a great adult program in a standalone facility, I’ll trade you ideas about how to crush a summer camp to teach me how to run a great adult program.

Mike Warkentin (15:37):
There you go. There’s an open offer from Stan. I was curious to see what you would answer that because I’ve talked to some gym owners and I said, “Hey, would you expand into this obvious market?” And they’re like, “No, I just want to focus on this.” But for you, you’ve identified in your facility a space that could be filled, and the cool part is you’ve got all these kids running around; their parents are there too, so I’m sure you’ve got a target market laid out where you just need to figure out how to get these parents in. Correct?

Stan Skolfield (15:59):
Right. And it’s more about the programming, and my goal is just like, hey, I want to get them into that, that morning area and just filling that time period, getting some revenue generated during those off periods where it’s so quiet.

Mike Warkentin (16:12):
I’m just throwing this out off the top of my head. Could you ever do a 55+ program for retirees in there? Like a legends program? That’s what I filled my 10 a.m. slot with.

Stan Skolfield (16:20):
That’s—absolutely, and I did, when I went to the Two-Brain Summit, I paid close attention to, I forget the presenter’s name—alright, how’s he doing it? And I took copious notes and said, “Hey, this is an avenue that I could definitely attack.”

Mike Warkentin (16:34):
Yeah. Because we just did general CrossFit and group training, and we struggled to fill that same time slot. I couldn’t get adults in there because they were all working. I got like three or four realtors from time to time, but that was it, those flexible schedule people. When I got legends people, so retirees, that’s where I filled that spot. So, I’m curious, I want to talk to you in a year and see what you’ve done with your space there, but we’ll circle back on that. Tell me about this, gross revenue. How has it improved over time for you? Has it been like a steady climb to the level that you’re at? Or have you had peaks and valleys, or how has it gone over the last five years or so?

Stan Skolfield (17:05):
It’s been a steady climb. I will say there are two big jumps that kind of occurred. One was actually when I joined Two-Brain, right?  And learned so much, like the processes that we put in place. Joleen Bingham is our mentor. She’s fantastic and really got to straighten out a lot in terms of like billing structure and program offerings. But, so that was the first big jump for us in terms of revenue. The second one was actually this year, basically from April on. And a couple things have happened during that time period. And when I talk about jumps, like this April, we had a 70% jump in revenue over last year, and May was like 30%, June, July, actually, this past month was another 50%.

Stan Skolfield (17:59):
But I think it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but I think part of it is like the cumulative effect of all the work that you do in the background to try to grow by putting all the processes in place that Two-Brain recommends. But also, I hired a training director to take my place in terms of just servicing all things related to training. And he actually began to do all the evaluations for us, and the evaluation for us is our sale. So, getting me out of doing that was the last big hurdle where I could continue, begin to kind of really focus on that opportunities pipeline or the sales journey and being able to focus, put a lot more focus there, and I think that’s been a big jump for us, as well as the other big thing we focus on is retention.

Stan Skolfield (18:47):
You know, as I said, you lose big numbers, and come, like I said, you get to September, and you have this booming summer, and then you’re like, “Man, I hope that all these kids kind of come back in November.” But what I’ve begun to do is twofold. One, educate the staff about like, “OK, so we’re a month away from fall sports starting up. Here’s what you need to do. You need to go approach your clientele. Here’s what you need to say. ‘Hey, you’ve got pre-season coming up. I’ve got some really exciting ideas about what your program’s going to look like. Here’s what we’re going to do in September; here’s what we’re going to do October,’ so, now it begins to get in their head that the programming is not the same; it’s different,” right?

Stan Skolfield (19:33):
But it’s a foregone conclusion that you are going to continue to train versus just that idea of, “Well now I’ve got sports, which is going to compete with my training time, so therefore I’ve got to drop the training.” And it’s like, no; you look at high-end athletes if your goal is to get into college program or above, you’re going to have to train year-round. So, you might as well begin to kind of instill those habits now. So, providing that education to the staff and making that more purposeful has had a big change. I mean, just this year alone, like April, we were—between new sales and retaining clients—we were able to grow by 30 people over the month of April, and now if you add that in with like a good ARM, that’s going to have a pretty good effect on your bottom line.

Mike Warkentin (20:22):
Wow. Listeners, retention, repeat sales and referrals do not just happen. You must make them happen. Stan took himself out of a role that was taking up lot of his time and has more time to focus on these kinds of things and make them happen. That is staff education to get clients to rebuy and re-up when their terms are up or when they have to go off to school and come back or whatever it is. All of this doesn’t happen without planning. Again, that’s a system, and that’s something you can put in place if you have the time to build those systems. If you’re cleaning your own toilet and coaching your own classes, you may not have that time. So, you got to start thinking about, “Where can I offload?” It’s called the value ladder. “Where can I offload lower value jobs to buy back the time to grow my business?” Stan offloaded a really important job, which is that evaluation sales process so that he could do something even more important, and you can do the same thing wherever you’re at. Start at the bottom with cleaning; work your way up to those levels. I’m going to ask you this: Are there any metrics that you’re working on improving in the next quarter? What’s on your mind right now?

Stan Skolfield (21:18):
So, what’s on my mind right now is obviously retention for the fall. Right? That’s a big one. That’s number one. That’s the biggie too is obviously grow an adult program, like being able to put some thought into like, “Hey, what is it that we’re going to do?” You know, those are my two as it relates to what I’m looking at for the fall. I mean, obviously LEG, is the biggie, you know? And if I can continue to just have that, not as big of a pitfall in September and October, that will play huge dividends to our end-of-year numbers.

Mike Warkentin (21:49):
I like it. And again, that’s that cyclical nature of your business. There’s nothing you can do when a kid finishes off summer break and heads back to their fall sports thing that’s going to take up all their time. They only have so many hours in the day; they’re not going to be trading with you. How do you fill that? What do you do? So, listeners, the lesson for you is look at your business, and we talked about this in the beginning: What is your business cycle, and can you make changes, or can you put in additional revenue streams to shore things up? And that’s what I should have done. So, what I should have done back in the day when we started—June, July, August was Death Valley, as I said in the intro—I should have put in some kids sports performance programs, maybe an outdoor camp, something like that, towards the end of my time in a physical space.

Mike Warkentin (22:28):
We did that. It helped a ton. Chris Cooper had the same thing. I believe he said August 2008 was the worst revenue month in the history of his gym. He couldn’t pay the rent; he couldn’t pay himself. It was brutal. He made a vow that he would fix it in 2009, and he did it predominantly with kids sports performance camps. Now that’s not saying that’s the only thing you can do. You could do nutrition program, you could do more PT, you could do all sorts of other stuff, but you can add additional revenue streams, and Chris has always been clear: Don’t add every single revenue stream under the sun. Add the ones that you can focus on and capitalize on, and do not kneecap your main revenue stream. So, when Stan is talking about adding an adult program, it’s not at the expense of a kids’ program. It’s in addition to that kids’ program. Gym owners out there listening right now, and I think I have an obvious answer, but I’m going to ask for details based on what you say: How would you help them add $2,000 to next June’s revenue? What would you recommend? What’s your exact plan?

Stan Skolfield (23:22):
So, I mean it, it shouldn’t come as any big surprise that, yeah, adding some sort of youth programming, right? Whether it’s in the form of speed camps, right? Or whether it’s in the form of like some sort of youth membership program, and you begin running classes for them. And again, not to pitch anything but the Parisi speed school, like we have that model laid out, right? It’s really a turnkey model, right? Yeah. Plug and play. “Here’s what you do.” And literally from session number one to session number 12 for a summer camp. I mean, it’s easy revenue, and the back end of it will help your business on the backend, so that would be mine.

Mike Warkentin (24:00):
Do you get clear ROI on the Parisi Speed School?

Stan Skolfield (24:02):
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s pennies compared to the ROI.

Mike Warkentin (24:07):
Would you say the same thing about Two-Brain mentorship, does that do the same thing for you with ROI?

Stan Skolfield (24:11):
Hands down, like those two right there, what we pay for that, I mean, month after month, year after year, what that has done for us has been exponential. Two-Brain in itself, like I’m the best salesperson in the background, in terms of the people that I’ve—and I’ve said this before, like, especially those in the sports performance industry because it is tough. It’s a niche business, and there are some people who are doing well with it, but there’s no one really out there that’s kind of like saying like, “Hey, here’s the exact formula.” You have to take kind of—even in Two-Brain, you have to take, “Hey, here are the principles. Here are the principles you need to follow in order to run a successful gym. Obviously having SOPs and a standardized process and a great sales process. And here’s your intro offer. Here’s—adapt, our NSI is our evaluation,” but take those principles and adopt them to sports performance, and it works. And as I talk to other sports performance owners, I’m like, “Man, this is the best money that we’ve spent, and I can show it year to year, like exponentially what our revenue, revenue, growth and success has been.”

Mike Warkentin (25:23):
Oh, I love hearing stuff like that from gym owners. I’m going to put you on the spot. Let’s do this. Let’s help gym owners up there listening. Let’s do this right now. What is a low drag, the lowest drag summer, June, like a June sports camp, that they could put together? Like what would you put in there? How many sessions would it be, and what would you price it at? Let’s give them an exact template that they could potentially use next June to make some money. What would it be?

Stan Skolfield (25:45):
So, what I would say is, is this: It’s number one, like two days a week, right? So, you’re going to offer two days a week. It’s going to be one hour in length.

Mike Warkentin (25:53):
So, eight sessions, eight hours.

Stan Skolfield (25:54):
You got it. And you’re going to—and we typically run like eight-week camps, so you’re going to cover it, and we’re going to charge anywhere from $12 to $15 per person for that camp, right? And again, your expenses are low, and then just script it out from start to finish. What are you going to do? Here’s going to be your warmup. Here’s—for us it’s like, “Hey, here’s what we’re covering today. Today we’re covering acceleration, the ability to reach maximum speed in the shortest time distance possible.” We bring them through our warmup, which is a workout. Then we say, “Hey, here’s some drills that we’re going to reinforce. Thigh high, toe up, body at 45 degrees.” From there, we’re going to bring it to a sports-specific application, right? For the next 15 minutes, maybe we’ll do some 10- to 20-yard dashes reinforcing that technique, and then we’ll finish it off with some conditioning, right? OK. Ding, bang, boom, done. Run it, and away you go.

Mike Warkentin (26:45):
So, if you ran that—let’s say you ran it for, I think you said eight weeks—let’s say we do it for four weeks, and we’ll just give people basics. So, four weeks, eight sessions, and you’re going to charge, you said about $15 per person, something like that.

Stan Skolfield (26:56):
Going to charge about $15 per person and just give it age demographic. I’ll give you a little secret. One lesson I learned today. So, I ran nine camps this year, right? One of which was brand new, and it was our highest producing camp. It’s about servicing a demographic that doesn’t get serviced. So, football, historically, like all the football, everybody goes after the football program, speed and conditioning with football. But the problem is, all the football coaches, high school football coaches, they’ve already got their hands in those kids, and they run good programs with them. But man, if you’re in the fifth, if you look at the fifth-grade to the eighth-grade demographic, you are already bought in. If your kid is in football, like you’re already in the youth programs; your parents have already become fanatical about it: “Johnny’s going to be the next best running back.”

Stan Skolfield (27:42):
And their schedule’s just as tough, but no one’s servicing that group. We had 40 kids in fifth through eighth grade for football. Those kids, when they show up at the beginning of August, still need to be in shape. They still need to have speed, they still need to prevent injuries, right? Like go after that. So, the secret is like, don’t just always focus on the high school kids; man, those younger kids, gyms don’t let them in, but they’re still fanatical about sports when you look at the youth travel sports industry.

Mike Warkentin (28:13):
So, that latches on exactly what Chris has said in other spaces. He said like in certain areas—his town has big hockey camps and things like that—but no one was servicing, I think he said it was downhill skiers and figure skaters and other things like that. So, look, listeners, in your local market. What’s out there? What are kids doing? Who’s not serving them? And can you fill that hole? What can you do to offer value for people in that space? I’m not going to pump you for any more information, Stan, because that is exactly the tip that people need as they head out the door. I’ll just tell you, listeners, right now, put this stuff on your calendar and start working on it in January next year to launch in June. If you do that, you will avoid the summer slump. Stan, thank you so much for being so open, sharing your secrets and helping gym owners avoid the problems that I went through.

Stan Skolfield (28:56):
My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Mike Warkentin (28:58):
It was my pleasure. And listeners, if you want to check out more, please follow Stan. Tell them where they can follow you on social media. What should they look for?

Stan Skolfield (29:05):
So, Instagram is Skolfield_Sports. Facebook obviously is Skofiled Sports Performance. We also are on YouTube Skolfield Performance. TikTok, same thing.

Mike Warkentin (29:16):
And TikTok because kids are on TikTok. Check those things out. You’ll save yourself a summer slump in 2025. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe” on your way out the door. And now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper (29:29):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you, have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today.

The post The Exact Cure for Summer Slumps in Gym Revenue in 2025 appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

When Big Revenue Meets Low Expenses

Huge revenue is one thing.

Combine it with tiny expenses and you have an amazing gym.

I’ll show you what the Top 10 gyms posted for revenue in June 2024, but first a question:

How good are these numbers if the owners are minimizing expenses and getting huge ROI on the money they do spend?

Revenue stats alone can be misleading.

I know gyms that grossed a million dollars a year and had almost no profit. That’s bad.

How about $60,000 in revenue with a 33 percent profit margin? That’s almost $20,000!

Whatever your gross revenue is, I want to help you improve your profit margin.

If you look at your expenses, you might find some places where you can work on your margin—and you don’t always have to make cuts. In fact, you might discover that some reasonable investments generate huge rewards for you and your staff members.

Example 1

This one is simple. Maybe you have two music subscriptions but only use one service. Cut the other and your profit margin goes up.

Example 2

What if you messaged your accountant and said, “How can I make better use of your service?”

Maybe the accountant responds with this: “If you get your monthly documents to me on the 15th every month instead of making me chase you until the 30th, you’ll only pay me for accounting, not hounding you.”

Here, you’re not cutting anything; you’re just improving a process so you spend less.

Use this approach with the other professionals you work with.

Example 3

What if you audited your facility and asked “where am I wasting space?”

Maybe that room full of broken bumper plates and unused fitness machines can be cleared to make space for a small PT studio. In this example, you’re getting better ROI on your space, and you’re creating a place where your coaches can earn more money personally and bring more cash into the business.

Example 4

What if—instead of turning off your ads completely—you evaluated them to discover which ones were connecting with viewers and which ones weren’t? By making adjustments, you could drive down cost per lead and give yourself more at bats in the sales office.

And then you might double down: What if you worked on sales techniques with a mentor? A small investment in time might drive up your close rate for the rest of your career and add hundreds of thousands of dollars to your revenue.

High-Revenue, Low-Expense Gyms

When I review our revenue leaders, I always ask questions like this:

Who’s doing the most with the least?Who can stretch a small space or low headcount the furthest?Who’s crushing it in a tiny space or getting amazing ROI on expenses in a larger gym?

These are important questions, and our leaders always have good answers. It’s no coincidence that four of the Top 10 gyms for revenue also appeared in the Top 10 for net owner benefit back in March.

What’s the No. 1 thing you can you learn from the people with high revenue and low overhead?

That the combination is possible.

If you want to push your gym in that direction, here are my tips:

Start small and upgrade space later—or if you’ve rented a larger space, sublease a portion to cut expenses until you can afford to use all the space.Select a good location but don’t pay retail-area rent.Ensure revenue diversity, with 10-20 percent of revenue coming from personal training, nutrition coaching or some kind of specialty program.Spend time coaching or mentoring staff.Give staff members opportunities to grow the pie for everyone (intrapreneurship).Work with a Two-Brain mentor so you can avoid wasting time on mistakes and just follow the right path to success.

I want to see you on our revenue leaderboard someday—but I also want to see you take home a lot of money from your gym.

The key: Drive up revenue but always monitor expenses so you can protect and even improve your profit margin.

The post When Big Revenue Meets Low Expenses appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

$63,000-$90,000 in Revenue: How These Gyms Did It In Summer

Our June revenue leaderboard is a beautiful thing.

The numbers you’re about to see are from one month only, but they’re all very close to rolling three-month averages for these gyms.

That’s amazing because June, July and August can often be horrible months in gyms as clients flee into lake country to relax.

We interviewed the gym owners on this leaderboard, and I’ll give you their quotes in just a minute:

Here’s how these top gym owners avoided a summer slump:

Client focus: “We create a welcoming community with workouts that meet beginners where they are. And I listen to my members.”

Client focus: We are “focused on good service and touch points with clients.”

Client/avatar focus: “We only have an unlimited membership. We focus on providing a ton of value for the unlimited membership, and with everything that we provide, it doesn’t make sense for us to have lower-priced options. Part of this is choosing to focus more on a client avatar that is comfortable with this rather than those looking for the cheapest deal in town.”

Retention (I love this one!): “We focused on retention and will keep focusing on that.”

Annual rate increases: “Our membership rate increase just took effect, and this is our first year that we have announced to our members that this increase will be annual from here forward.”

Referrals funnel: “My most important marketing channel is Google reviews.”

Paid ads funnel: “This number is consistent for us, and we are projecting even greater revenue with some advertising initiatives that we are putting in place starting this month.”

Paid ads funnel: “We have started specific advertising initiatives for personal training by shooting high-quality videos specifically for Google ads, Facebook and Instagram.”

Staffing: “We have a full-time sales director who is literally knocking it out of the park!”

Staffing: “I’m making a big change today: I’m hiring a right-hand person for my CSM to help her with tasks that she is weak in so she can focus on selling, which she does very well. Since delegating more and more of my work to others, I’ve seen a reduction in my hours for the same pay, so I’m really happy.”

Mentorship/Prescriptive Model as a market advantage: “We really do things the Two-Brain way. I think that it works really well in a group training setup as long as you are able to follow up with people’s goals, update prescriptions and individualize. We have five gyms within 500 meters offering either access to functional training equipment or functional training classes … . But still, it feels like we have no competition at all.”

Mentorship: “We stick to what Two-Brain shows us and what our mentor helps us with.”

These are all great quotes, but I’ll highlight the last one: You don’t have to figure it out on your own.

If you’d like to boost gross revenue so you can earn more and pay staff members more, a Two-Brain mentor can analyze your business and tell you exactly what to do.

To find out how to start working your way toward the numbers you see on our leaderboard, book a call here.

The post $63,000-$90,000 in Revenue: How These Gyms Did It In Summer appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Explosive Summer Revenue: Tips From Top Gyms Around the World

Chris Cooper (00:02):
How much revenue did your gym do last month? Historically, the summer months are usually some of the lowest in the fitness industry, but today I’m going to share with you how Two-Brain gyms did between $63,000 and $90,000 U.S. last month alone in the summer months. I’m Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and every month I share one of our leaderboards that we publish internally. Two-Brain is built on data. We don’t guess; we don’t just copy what I did at my gym way back in the day. What we do is we track our best around the world, and we’ve got 1,000 gyms in the Two-Brain mentorship family now. We look at who’s doing the best for each different metric, and then we interview them, and we share their top lessons with you. This is how science works, and this is how Two-Brain keeps getting better and better and better, helping more and more and more gym owners create good careers for themselves and their families and their coaches and stick around and help people long-term.

Chris Cooper (01:00):
First, I want to talk about the revenue leaderboard because this is a summer month, and I can remember August 2008, it was the worst revenue month I’d ever had in my gym. It was the downside of the summer months. My clients were putting things on hold, going out to their cottages for the month, and I was at a low point in revenue. I couldn’t pay myself; I couldn’t even pay my rent. The idea of some of these numbers being possible in coaching gyms—mind you, these are not big global access gyms—the idea of some of these numbers being possible would’ve blown my mind. In fact, I would’ve been skeptical. But here’s the reality: We track these numbers, we’ve been sharing them with you now for years, and I’m going to do more than just tell you, “Here’s what the numbers are,” to try and impress you.

Chris Cooper (01:46):
I’m going to tell you exactly how they did it so that you can go out and do it too. So, let’s start at the bottom of our pyramid here first, and these are all in USD. We convert everything so that we’re comparing apples to apples. In 10th spot this month, from New Zealand, a gym did $63,114 U.S. in revenue. Pretty amazing. And what’s cool here is that usually we take a rolling three-month average because I don’t want you to just see these dips and spikes. This time, I chose to just report their one-month average. But the reality is that most of these gyms on a three-month average are actually a little bit higher. Very cool to note. In ninth place, a U.S.-based gym that did $63,232, so about 118 bucks more than the 10th place. But hey, every dollar counts In eighth place, $64,657 revenue.

Chris Cooper (02:40):
Now revenue means top line. That’s money coming into your business. That’s not the bottom line. It doesn’t tell you how many clients you have or the average value of those clients or how long those clients stick around. Those are all important things to note, but the reality is that it all starts with revenue. From there, you can decide a strategy for your expenses, you can decide a strategy for your clients, but our goal here is to start with a top line of high revenue, so there’s a bottom line available to pay you and your coaches later. In seventh place, a gym from Denmark, $65,580 U.S. In sixth place, another gym from the U.S., $66,333. Now that’s the top—that’s the place 6th to 10th. We’re going to go into the Top 5 here for revenue. What’s interesting is that the fifth-place gym is from Switzerland, and this gym did $67,993, U.S. in one month.

Chris Cooper (03:41):
And that’s really good, but their average is actually a little bit higher. And so, you’ll hear from them what they did this year and what they’ll make sure that they do again to keep their revenue growing. Hey, I’ve got a secret for you. You’re listening to this, you’re not on this leaderboard, but the people who are on the leaderboard are listening too because they’re always trying to get better. The top four gyms this month are all from the U.S. So, U-S-A, U-S-A. Fourth place, $72,235 in revenue. Congratulations. Third place, $81,800 in revenue. So good. Second place, $88,549 in revenue in one month. Incredible, and first place, $90,495 U.S. This is a summer month. This is for a gym owner who deserves it. This is their top-line revenue that they’re using to buy a beautiful facility, hire coaches, change more lives. These numbers were not reached by people who got into the industry for money.

Chris Cooper (04:43):
I’ve never met a person who’s done that in 12 years of mentoring gyms and 16 years of helping them. We’re all in it to help people. But to do that, we have to grow a good business, and revenue is one of the key indicators that show us whether we’re growing a good business or not. So, congratulations. This was a major personal best for the gym that took the top spot in the leaderboard. For other gyms, it wasn’t even a personal best because it’s the summer, but what they’re going to tell you will help you grow your gym to being a personal best month too. Let’s get into their lessons. Our top theme here is consistency. Nobody has these big spiky months and then drops back down again. Now that used to happen in the old ad agency days, you would see these ads for gyms who just had their first $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 month.

Chris Cooper (05:37):
And the ad made it seem like, “Oh, this is going to continue forever. We’ve found the secret solution, and we’re just going to keep doing this,” but the reality, and we all know this by now, is that most of those gyms had one or two good months. The clients who came in and bought a big high-ticket offer left, and two months later the gym was back to where they started, and then they wanted to run the ad again. And so, they did the same ad, six-week program, whatever, and new clients came in, but it didn’t work quite as well. And so, they tried it again and again and again, and they increased ad spend, and clients came in, and clients went out, and they had this big churn problem. And eventually after a year or so, maybe even two of trying this, the gym owner would look around and be like, “Whoa, where did all my regulars go?”

Chris Cooper (06:20):
“Where’s my culture? Where are my coaches?” And what they realized was that these big spiky months didn’t help them long term at all. The key to what I’m about to share with you is consistency. Every gym in Two-Brain is growing a little bit every month, a little bit more, a little bit more. They’re growing faster and faster as we learn more things. Gyms who are in our program today grow way faster than a gym that was in our program even two years ago because of what we’re learning and testing and proving. And so, these gyms are going to share their secrets with you, but what I want you to keep in mind is that they’re not just doing it once and then forgetting about it. They’re being consistent and doing it again and again and again. Alright, here’s their top lessons: First, the number one gym that I just reported had June revenue that was way above their average, but their rolling average of $62,000 a month is still a very strong number.

Chris Cooper (07:11):
That gym focuses on kids, so it’s not a surprise that there’s a revenue spike as summer starts, and the owner recognizes this, and many gym owners have revenue dips in the summer, so it’s very wise to plan for that. And kids programs can be a perfect option for you. I mentioned that in August 2008, I had the worst month ever, and I resolved that I was never going to do that again. And so, the following summer, we had kids camps for hockey every single day. Here’s what this gym owner had to say though. He said, “This number is extraordinary, and it’s an outlier. June is typically our best month of the year, but that being said, since February, we’ve had a pretty solid trajectory upward in our monthly revenue from the previous year.”

Chris Cooper (07:53):
“I expect this increase in revenue from our regular programs to continue based on a new program we put in outside of our normal camp revenue in the summer.” Now, his camp revenue he described as this, he said, “We focused on growing the number of speed camps that we run in the summer. In 2023, we had 135 kids, and we grossed about $27,000 in revenue. In 2024 though, we added three more camps servicing 227 kids and grossing 37k. Each of those camps runs for one hour twice a week for eight weeks, so they take place outside of our facility, and they do not even impact our space needs.” He continued, “Unlike most of the gyms in Two-Brain, we’re focused on the youth market versus adults, and we’re partnered with Parisi Speed School.” You’ve heard them on the podcast before. He said, “We don’t have an adult program yet, so we’re 99% athletes between the ages of eight and 21.”

Chris Cooper (08:48):
“And even within that demographic, we are one of the few that focus on running camps outdoors. Outside camps are easy to implement. They don’t interfere with your gym space needs. They’re a low barrier offer, and they create marketing awareness for parents, athletes, coaches, and siblings for the main sports performance program that we run at our gym.” Amazing. We can all learn from this. If you’re having a bad month right now, plan for next year, get with a mentor, build out an annual plan, and make sure that you have kids camps or even outdoor camps on your schedule next year. Here’s some quotes from the other gyms on our leaderboard. First, client focus. They said, “We create a welcoming community with workouts that meet beginners where they are, and I listen to my members.” Another said, “we are focused on good service and touch points with our clients.”

Chris Cooper (09:35):
A third said, “We focus strictly on our avatar. We only have an unlimited membership. We focus on providing a ton of value for the unlimited membership, and with everything that we provide, it doesn’t make sense for us to have low priced options. Part of this is choosing to focus more on a client avatar that’s comfortable with our rates rather than those looking for the cheapest deal in town.” Very important lesson for everybody. Another gym said, “Retention. We focus on retention, and we just keep focusing on that. It’s not how many we bring in; it’s how many we keep.” Another said annual rate increases were the key to revenue. They said, “Our membership rate increase just took effect, and this is our first year that we’ve announced to our members that this increase will be annual from here forward.” Interesting. Another one said they have a referrals funnel.

Chris Cooper (10:24):
“My most important marketing channel is Google reviews.” Pretty impressive. Another said their paid ads funnel is responsible for their revenue. “This number is consistent for us, and we’re projecting even greater revenue with some advertising initiatives that we’re putting in place starting this month.” Hey, when your ads are working, why not just put more money into them? Another one also mentioned their paid ads funnel. They said, “We started specific advertising initiatives for personal training by shooting high quality videos specifically for Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram.” Another Gym mentioned staffing. They said, “We have a full-time sales director who is literally knocking it out the park,” and staffing was mentioned by another gym. They said, “I’m making a big change today. I’m hiring a right-hand person for my CSM”—this is the person in charge of retention—“to help her with tasks that she’s weak on so she can focus on selling, which she’s very good at.”

Chris Cooper (11:18):
“Since delegating more and more of my work to others, I’ve seen a reduction in my hours for the same pace, so I’m really happy.” And finally, the common theme among all these gyms was using the prescriptive model to sell their service and keep people engaged and using mentorship to keep them on track and focused. One said, “We really do things the Two-Brain way. I think that this works really well in a group training setup as long as you’re able to follow up with people’s goals, update their prescriptions, and individualize. We have five gyms within 500 meters from us offering either just access to functional training equipment or just classes. But still, it feels like we have no competition at all,” because they’re running the prescriptive model. They’re getting the right clients, they’re charging what they’re worth, and they’re keeping those people. They don’t have the high churn problems and low-price pressure of people who just sell group training. By running the prescriptive model, having a mentor, they stand out even among five gyms within 500 meters.

Chris Cooper (12:20):
And finally, one more quote, another on the leaderboard said, “We stick to what Two-Brain shows us and what our mentor helps us with.” Good gyms have mentors. Great gyms have mentors from Two-Brain, and the best gyms stick to what they’re told from their mentors, and they don’t get distracted by all the noise and overwhelm they hear from other gym owners and other people outside the industry. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Two-Brain Business is my mentorship practice. It’s built on science, and we do this science by tracking what actually gets results, and then interviewing the people doing those things and sharing those lessons with you and mentoring others to do them. If this is helpful for you, we have these kinds of discussions for free all the time at gymownersunited.com. That’s our free Facebook group. There are 9,500 gyms in that Facebook group from around the world. There’s no sarcasm, no name calling, no guilt. It’s just positive conversation and discussion to help you grow your gym. Thank you for growing your gym. Thank you for helping people. You deserve to be successful. Go out there and get it.

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Kids Camps: Got Any Planned for Summer in 2025?

August 2008 was the worst revenue month ever at my gym.

I was crawling out of summer bloodied and beaten, and clients were still messaging me to put memberships on hold.

I couldn’t even afford to pay myself, and I couldn’t pay my rent.

The numbers I’m about to show you would have blown my mind back then. In fact, if you had told me they were possible in coaching gyms, I would have laughed at you.

In 2024, US$60,000 months are common in coaching gyms around the world, even in summer—and that’s a wonderful thing.

Before I show you the leaderboard, here’s a note:

We usually calculate three-month rolling averages when we present revenue so the leaderboard is full of sustainable numbers, not lucky strikes.

For example, a gym that runs a major promotion could generate huge revenue in one month but then sink into the red in the next months. We saw this in the era of “six-week challenges,” when many gyms around the world posted monster months before crashing back down to Earth.

This month, I chose to report just on June 2024 to give you a one-month snapshot for a summer month. But get this:

Four gyms on the leaderboard have three-month averages that are higher than their June numbers.Five other gyms have three-month averages that are within $7,000 of their June numbers.Only one gym only has a significant disparity between June and “standard” months—but there’s a very specific reason for that, and it might help you next summer. (Details below!)

Here’s the leaderboard:

Summer Secrets?

The No. 1 gym had June revenue well above average, but that gym’s rolling average of $61,197 is still very, very strong.

Here’s what happened in June: The No. 1 gym focuses on kids, so it’s not surprising to see a revenue spike as summer starts.

Too many gyms have severe revenue dips in summer, but kids programs can be a perfect way to add revenue when school is out and the weather is warm.

Think about it:

Many of your clients have kids, so you’re already working with hot leads. Your adult clients already know, like and trust you.Kids badly need activities in summer, and parents often struggle to find them.Parents want to find ways to keep kids moving and off their screens.Many kids have sports goals for the next school year.

All that sounds like a golden opportunity.

Here’s what the No. 1 gym owner said about June revenue:

“We focused on growing the number of speed camps we run in the summer. In 2023, we had 135 kids and grossed $27,000 in revenue. In 2024, we added three more camps, servicing 227 kids and grossing $37,000. Each of those camps runs for one hour twice a week for eight weeks, and they take place outside of our facility, so they do not impact our space needs.”

It gets better: “Unlike most of the gyms in Two-Brain, we are focused on the youth market vs. adults (we are partnered with Parisi Speed School). We don’t have an adult program (yet), so we are 99 percent athletes between the ages of 8 and 21 years of age. Even within that demographic, we are one of the few that focus on running outside camps.

“Outside camps are easy to implement, don’t interfere with your gym’s space needs, are a low-barrier offer, and create marketing awareness for parents, athletes, coaches and siblings for the main sports performance program we run at our gym.”

Did you catch that last part?

These camps generate significant revenue, but they’re also an easy access point and feeder program for the main offering at the gym.

This is a huge win. The gym takes in front-end revenue with a program that doesn’t eat up space, and it has eight weeks to win the kids and parents over so they join the sports performance program that runs inside the gym.

Wow, right?

Remember how I said August 2008 was a brutal month for me?

In 2009, I put summer camps in place for young hockey players.

In the next post in this series, I’ll give you more quotes from our leaders.

Here, I’ll leave you with two questions:

If you’re not happy with summer revenue in 2024, what are you planning for 2025?

Might camps for kids be the perfect addition to your programming for June, July and August?

The post Kids Camps: Got Any Planned for Summer in 2025? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Lead Response Time: Less Is Always Better

“How long has the light on the answering machine been flashing?”

I said that many times when I was rifling through a junk drawer between classes to find a fresh dry-erase marker at my gym.

Eventually—maybe even a few days later—I’d check the messages.

“Just calling to get some info about joining.”

“I was wondering what kind of classes you offer.”

“Can I talk with someone about the gym?”

As you might imagine, my gym didn’t grow very fast back in 2011.

Our 2024 State of the Industry Survey for gym owners is now live.

You can fill it out here, and if you do so, we’ll send you our definitive report in late fall. (You’ll also get immediate access to a pile of great Two-Brain resources.)

We work the final numbers rigorously and send an independent analyst into the pile before we release our findings to the world, but I’ll give you a sneak peak into some very early, unaudited data from a small group of survey respondents:

Of the first 25 gym owners to complete our survey, 60 percent call leads in 3 hours or less.

That number will change as more responses pour in, and we’ll give you the exact breakdown when we release our report before the end of the year.

But it’s worth noting that I wouldn’t have seen a stat like this at any point in 2020. Elite gym owners might have called leads fast back then, but the majority of us still took our time responding to people who wanted to find out more about our gyms.

That was a mistake in 2020, and it’s a mistake now.

When we analyze funnels created by Two-Brain clients, we look at leads, set rate (how many people book free consultations), show rate (how many bookers actually show up) and close rate (how many people make a purchase).

The gyms who get more appointments than anyone else always respond to leads faster than any other gym owners—immediately or within one hour.

Those gym owners also always have great systems that encourage people who book appointments to show up. And they invest in sales training so they close more often when clients are sitting in their offices.

Data for the Win

All this is a far cry from the flashing light on my answering machine in 2011.

My tip for you today: Respond to the next lead that enters your funnel immediately and see what happens. Keep doing that, and track your set, show and close rates to see if your funnel works better when you respond to leads fast.

I’m confident the data will help you run a better fitness business.

And the Two-Brain team wants you to have even more data so you can grow your business fast in 2024.

To get our 2024 State of the Industry report, take five minutes and fill out our survey here.

And when you get the report in late fall, use it to earn more, serve clients better and create the life you deserve.

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What Keeps Gym Owners Broke?

I had to make every mistake myself to learn how to grow a gym. You don’t have to. 

You just have to leverage the community of gym owners to find out what doesn’t work and what does—and you must ask for proof or you’ll get led astray.

This process was borderline impossible 15 years ago. But it’s simple in 2024.

And it’s critical: 10,000 new fitness pros open gyms or launch careers every year, and 9,000 of them close or quit every year.

We can’t change the world this way.

Why do these people pull the rip cord?

Not because they’ve run out of passion for helping people.

Not because they’ve reached the end of their training knowledge.

Not because they got bored with the industry, not because they can’t grind, and not because they didn’t expect to work hard. 

Gyms close because they run out of money.

Trainers quit because they can’t make a living.

Hey, I’ve been there: I came very close to giving up as a trainer when, in my best year, I didn’t earn enough to feed myself.

My solution was to open a gym—and when I realized that my training skills weren’t enough to run a good business, I almost went bankrupt, taking my family and my staff with me.

Now, in 2024, I produce an annual report that gives gym owners all the tools I wish I had back then.

You don’t have to make mistakes and fumble for solutions. You can skip right to the good part of entrepreneurship.

Data-Backed Resources

Our State of the Industry Survey is where you start to build your foundation.

By completing the survey, you help us create tools for the entire industry and provide help where it’s needed most.

Today, I’m going to go over some of the biggest reasons gyms go broke, as proven by data.

When you fill out the survey, I’ll give you solutions to each of these problems right away—no waiting. When you submit your data, you’ll get a link to Two-Brain’s Resource Hub for gym owners. It’s packed with assets you can use to build a better business today.

Here are the Top 6 reasons gyms fail:

1. Not Enough Clients

Gyms are getting better at marketing, but many don’t have enough clients because they fail to keep the ones they get (see No. 3, below).

The second reason gyms don’t have enough clients is they’re inconsistent with their marketing. We teach every gym owner to build four funnels: a social media funnel, a referral funnel, a paid ads funnel and a content marketing funnel.

To grow your gym, you don’t need fancy marketing—but you need to market consistently, and you need to be good at sales.

Fill out our survey to get access!2. Gyms Don’t Charge Enough

Coaching services should be expensive. Many gyms charge far too little because they price themselves based on local averages (which are always trending down) or because they think lower prices will attract more people (they do, but they attract high-churn, price-conscious people who don’t stay).

Gym owners also fail to offer proper onboarding because they mistakenly believe it will be a barrier to entry (it’s not). Or they fail to offer 1:1 coaching to people because they think everyone wants the cheaper group option (also wrong).

In our Resource Hub, I have some great tools to help you charge what you’re worth. You can only get them by filling out our survey.

Fill out our survey to get access!3. They Lose Members too Fast

Let’s face it: Gyms keep clients for around eight months on average, but we need to keep them much longer if you want them to become healthier.

Two-Brain gyms keep every client for 21 months, on average. We do that by focusing on retention—I’ll give you some of our top tips after you fill out the survey.

Fill out our survey to get access!4. They Don’t Pay Themselves Appropriately

You don’t go out of business just because you need more clients. You go out of business because you need more groceries. 

I know making money wasn’t your primary reason for opening a gym, but lack of income is still the primary killer of gym owners.

Think about it: Are you willing to ask your family to tighten their belts forever? Maybe you can grind on an empty stomach—but should they? That’s the thought that finally drove me to raise my rates, control my costs and pay myself more.

Gym owners leave too much money in their gyms and they pay too much to the landlord and the government and the staff and the bank. They keep too little for themselves.

You must have a plan to pay yourself an increasing amount over time. If you don’t, then why open a business? Get a job working for someone else.

Fill out our survey to get access!5. They Don’t Control Their Costs

Way too many gyms try to start with a big space in a prime location, loads of equipment and pro staff. You can have all these things, but if you commit to too many expenses without generating enough revenue, you’ll run out of money.

The biggest error is overspending on space, but overspending on staff is a close second. When gym owners don’t know how to pay their staff members properly and teach them how to “grow the pie for everyone,” gyms fail and everyone loses a job.

If you don’t control your costs, you’ll always feel like your business is out of control—because it is.

You must understand the difference between an investment and an expense, you must understand where your money is going, and you must learn where it should be going instead. 

Fill out our survey to get access!6. They Don’t Hire the Right Staff and Mentor Them

Gym owners often hire friends or whoever’s available, and they have constant staff churn as a result. Or they “trade” memberships with people and then try to manage staff members who behave like volunteers.

You need detailed plans that cover hiring, staff development, career building and retention. If you don’t have these plans, mediocre staff will stay too long and good staff will leave fast to compete with you (it’s happened to all of us).

Fill out our survey to get access!Solving Your Problems

You can get solutions to all these problems if you read our blog every day, listen to our podcast twice per week and watch our YouTube videos on weekends. Or you can fill out our survey in the next 3 to 8 minutes and get some of our top guides for free. 

Want to really step up and fix these things fast? Book a call to talk about mentorship here.

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