Chris Cooper's Blog, page 32

The Two-Brain Resource Hub: 16 Critical Assets

Today, I have a huge present for you.

The fitness industry grows one gym at a time—and it shrinks one gym at a time.

I want to make sure your gym keeps growing. That’s why, after we collect and analyze all the data from our State of the Industry Survey every year, I give it to you for free.

Fill out the State of the Industry Survey here.

When our data has been collected and analyzed, I’ll send you our annual “State of the Industry” report before anyone else gets it.

And this year, you don’t have to wait to start taking action.

As soon as you’ve finished the survey—3-8 minutes from right now!­—I’m going to give you access to our new Resource Hub. You’ll get a link to the hub on the submission confirmation page.

The resources you’ll find are some of our best guides to help you:

Get more members.Earn more from each member.Keep members longer.Pay yourself more.Control your costs.Hire and train your staff.

Whether you’ve been following Two-Brain for a week or for the last 12 years, you know we publish amazing stuff for free all the time. The new Resource Hub is like a greatest-hits compilation: You don’t have to dig through everything to find our most popular stuff. 

And we’re only giving the link to people who participate in the State of the Industry Survey.

Fill out the survey.Click the link to access the Resource Hub when you’re done.Pick one thing and act on it. Then move to the next.

Short of mentorship, this is as simple as we can make it for you to grow your gym. 

When you’re ready to speed up your progress, you can book a call with my team to talk about mentorship. Do that here.

The post The Two-Brain Resource Hub: 16 Critical Assets appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

What Sets the Best Gyms in the World Apart?

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Humans need gyms. I’m Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” We have been evolving as a species for thousands of years. Every generation has worked hard to increase their health span, their lifespan, and their wealth, and we’ve come a long way, but now things are going backward. For the first time in history, human lifespan is shortening. We have access to food and technology and science like we’ve never had before, but we face new challenges of abundance and consumption and inactivity. For the first time, we have to make time to be physically active. For the first time in history, we have to make choices about the food that we eat, or we will die younger, sicker and sadder than our parents did. The sole bastion against this reversal of evolution is gym owners and trainers, and there should be enough of us to turn the tide.

Chris Cooper (01:01):
Every single year, 10,000 new trainers and gym owners join our army that’s marching against the evil of wasted potential and shortening lifespan. But the problem is that every year, 9,000 of us quit. So, our ranks are growing but not quickly enough to turn the tide. Two-Brain stands at the forefront of this battle. Why did you and I become trainers and coaches? The simple answer is that we want to help others, but the more complicated answer is that many of us have had our own health and fitness transformation. Many of us have seen depression, obesity, and sickness reversed by the pursuit of fitness and health, and we want nothing more from life than to share that knowledge, joy, and wellbeing with others. We give up meaningful careers to do that. We turn our backs on potentially lucrative jobs in the name of service. We just want to help other people.

Chris Cooper (01:57):
So why do so many of us quit? We never quit because we lose our passion for service. We never quit because we’re tired or exhausted. We never quit because the work is too hard. We never quit because we’re hungry or tired. We quit because we run out of money. Those other things do happen. We can get burned out. We can get depressed. We can get exhausted. We can risk our marriages, our income, our homes. We can bear all of that, but all of those things happen because we run out of money. Sometimes we just run out of time. We start fixing our gym, and things are looking a little bit better, and then unfortunately, boom, our gym is still fragile enough to suffer from one major setback. Our landlord raises the rent or 10 clients leave, or one of our key staff members opens up their own gym, and we’re done.

Chris Cooper (02:46):
That’s it; we’re that fragile. Our businesses are fragile enough to be wiped out by one fell swoop. The government makes a new law that nobody expected. We’re done. We’re out of business. Ten or 20 years of serving people, expanding their health, keeping them out of the hospital, keeping them working, keeping them paying taxes, and then the power bill goes up, and we’re done. The gym business, the fitness business, is fragile. Now, fitness, this isn’t a brand-new idea. People have been helping other people get healthy and fit and eat better and exercise for over 100 years. There’s no reason for our businesses to be this fragile or for our industry to be so immature. By immature, I don’t mean dumb; I mean that we’ve not learned the lessons required to make meaningful careers, yet. We don’t know exactly how to run profitable gyms. At least we didn’t.

Chris Cooper (03:40):
And the reason that we didn’t have these lessons, this knowledge, is that nobody was gathering it and sharing it. Nobody was creating a body of knowledge, applying the filters of proof to all the claims in our industry. Nobody was collecting data to say, “Here’s what works, here’s what doesn’t, here’s the straight up bullshit, and here’s how you spot a liar in our midst.” Nobody was out there doing that until now. The thing that makes our gyms anti-fragile, that helps us grow as professionals in the toughest industry in the world, is data. The foundation of all our decisions as gym owners and trainers must be rooted in data, or we will always have fragile gyms and short careers. Now it’s tough to gather data if you’re a single gym owner working your tail off 14 hours a day all by yourself, living on this fitness island, largely disconnected from other gym owners, largely disconnected from the overwhelming body of knowledge.

Chris Cooper (04:40):
You can be as scientific as you want in your own gym. I tried to be, but here’s the problem: Every time you change one little thing in your business, you’re taking a risk. If people don’t like the change, they will use it as an excuse to give up on their pursuit of fitness. If your prices go up because your family is starving, people will quit and give up on their journey of fitness. If you buy a new car, people will think that they are being charged unfairly, and they will give up on their pursuit of fitness. If you run a Facebook ad that gets new members in, you might celebrate for a day and then regret it for a year because all of your current members quit. And when you do something that pisses off your current members, they will go out smoking. They will make it feel like the worst breakup of your life, but still, you have to do these little experiments, and what prevents you from having to do them all yourself?

Chris Cooper (05:30):
I mean, if you don’t do the experiments, you’ll never grow. You’ll never know what works. You’ll never advance your gym. You’ll never make a better living for yourself and your family. You’ll be caught; you’ll be paralyzed in staying the same forever. You have to do them. But how do you avoid the pain of doing science, of turning your gym into a Petri dish and losing people as you change things and then changing your mind and losing more as you change it back? Doing experiment after experiment? Well, the way that you avoid the pain is that you connect with other gym owners who are also doing science, who are running their own experiments, who are collecting data and saying, “Here’s what actually works. Here’s what doesn’t work, and here’s the proof.” There has never been a unifying force in our field. Other fields, other industries, have governing bodies.

Chris Cooper (06:14):
They have licensing agencies. They have regulatory commissions. They have associations. They have science. They have data. They share the science of their practitioner’s growth. Why do you think scientists are in high demand? Because there’s so much BS out there, so much misinformation. Why do you think doctors make more than fitness coaches? It’s because they’ve been doing the science for 2,000 years. They’ve been running experiments, and they know what works to change the health of their patients. Why do you think surgeons charge more than doctors? Not because their work is more valuable, because it’s more urgent, and it works. They save lives, and they save lives because of science. They’re no longer bloodletting. They’re no longer attaching leeches to your body. They’re not talking about the four humors of the body like the ancient Greeks did. They’re doing science, and the science of gym ownership is measuring what works along six different metrics.

Chris Cooper (07:09):
If you’re a solo gym owner out there on your own, you have to do science all by yourself. You have to run Facebook ads. You have to run enough Facebook ads to figure out how they work. You have to spend $10,000 on Facebook ads before you even know if they do work. You have to ask for referrals. You have to do 100 reps of asking referrals before you get good at it, and only then can you ask yourself, “Is this even working?” You have to post to social media every day for three years. You have to take the pictures. You have to write the posts. You have to make up the little hashtags. How do you know if they’re any good? Trial and error. And it can take you 10 years to get good at social media. You have to create your own media, your blog posts, your YouTube, your podcasts like this.

Chris Cooper (07:51):
You can’t rely anymore on CrossFit or dance studios or the TV stations to do that for you. You have to be your own media company, but it takes 10 years to get good at blogging. I’ve been doing it for 25 and I’m a B+ blogger at best. How do you get good at this stuff fast? How do you know what works on Facebook? How do you know which Instagram posts are likely to land? How do you know what kind of blog you should publish? What kind of video you should shoot? What kind of podcast you should be recording? You ask people who have done it successfully and are doing it successfully and are doing the science to get better. How do you know who those people are? You look at their metrics. You ask them to prove it, and then you take what they’ve done, and you copy it.

Chris Cooper (08:34):
Here’s where gym owners go wrong. They seek opinion instead of data. So, all of us do this. We go into a Facebook group, and we say, “Hey, who’s running Facebook ads?” And you get 10 responses, and three responses will say, “Facebook ads don’t work,” and three responses will say, “Facebook ads are bullshit. You don’t need them.” And two responses will say, “I’m crushing it. I get 57 leads per month,” but one of those is lying, and then the last two people will try to sell you their ad service. That’s not data; that’s opinion. We want to know as gym owners: Do Facebook ads still work? How much do they cost? How much time should I put into this? And if I want to jump over three years and $10,000 of learning, who can I copy? The way that we find this out, how it works, how it works best, who to copy is that we find the best people, the people who are worth copying, and then we build models based on what they’re doing, and we grow our gyms based on those models, and therefore we elevate the industry through the collection of data.

Chris Cooper (09:34):
Only Two-Brain is doing this, and only we can do this at such a large scale. Why are we doing this? Why are we collecting this data, asking you to fill out this survey, publishing this guide? Because I want to sell you mentorship. Yes, I do. I want you to benefit from this data. I want you to make money from this guide. I want you to make decisions based on our models. I want you to capitalize on my science and eventually hire a coach, a mentor. We’re all coaches. We all understand the value of coaching, whether we’re doing amazingly well or really poorly. We all know that we can go farther faster with a coach, but I also want you to help me elevate the industry. I want us to do science together. I don’t want to do any more guessing. I don’t want to lose another 9,000 gyms every single year in the mission to change people’s health.

Chris Cooper (10:23):
We know what to do, but we can’t do it if the clock is ticking, and our gym runs out of money too soon. We cannot reverse the de-evolution of our species if our gyms and trainers are going bankrupt in three years. I want your gym to last 30 years. I want your coaching to benefit your clients for their entire lifetime. The only thing stopping that is not your passion. It’s not your knowledge. It’s not your skill. It’s not your sense of service. It’s not your willingness to grind or your willingness to starve. The thing that’s stopping your impact is that you run out of money too soon. My job is to help you stop that, and the best tool that I have to stop that is science, and our State of the Industry survey is the root of that science. I want you to take our State of the Industry survey.

Chris Cooper (11:12):
It will take you—I just measured some of the speeds—it’ll take you between three and eight minutes. If you’re cautious or if you don’t know your metrics well, you want to put the extra time into it, eight minutes is what I ask. If you’re super-duper fast, you know the metrics off the top of your head, and you’re a quick typist, three minutes is all it takes. What we’ll give you in exchange is, first, access to the data. We publish a very thorough report. Here it is on all the data and what it means every single year. We’ll share it with you. You don’t have to be a data analyst. We’ll tell you what it means. I’ll also give you a bonus package of a whole bunch of really valuable Two-Brain materials. Those are your prizes, but those of you who are truly invested in this industry and invested in changing lives, in making a good living for yourself and your family, I know that you’re not going to be tempted by prizes.

Chris Cooper (12:02):
What you’ll be drawn to though, like me, is impact. I know that you’ve always been drawn to making an impact, and that’s what we’re doing here. We’re participating in the evolution of the human species by first creating an evolution within the industry that will extend the life of the human species by keeping you in business longer. You can help more people. You can help people for 30 years instead of three. You can magnify your impact by keeping people at your gym longer. You can create a legacy by building a gym that somebody will someday take over and continue. You will not fail. I hope you participate in the State of the Industry data. I’m going to post the link to the survey below. I know that I ask you every single year, but this is how science is done—through repetition, consistency, measurement, analysis, and finally, growth. Thanks for doing science with me. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and this is the start of our data collection period for the State of the Industry data. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your science.

The post What Sets the Best Gyms in the World Apart? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Humans Need Gyms: State of the Industry 2024

We have been evolving as a species for thousands of years. Every generation has worked hard to increase their healthspan and wealth. We’ve come a long way, but now things are going backward.

For the first time in history, human lifespan is shortening. We have access to food, technology and science like never before, but we face new challenges of abundance, consumption and inactivity.

For the first time, we have to make time to be physically active. For the first time, we have to make choices about the food we eat or we will die younger, sicker and sadder than our parents did.

The sole bastion against this reversal of evolution: gym owners and trainers.

And there should be enough of us. Every single year, 10,000 people join our army that’s marching against the evil of wasted potential and shortened lifespan.

But we have a problem: Every year, 9,000 of us quit. Our ranks are not growing quickly enough to turn the tide.

Two-Brain stands at the forefront of this battle. 

The Noble Mission and Our Challenges

Why do we become trainers and coaches? The simple answer is that we want to help others.

But the more complicated answer is that many of us have had our own health and fitness transformations. Many of us have seen depression, obesity and sickness reversed by the pursuit of fitness and health, and we want nothing more than to share that knowledge, joy and well-being with others.

We give up meaningful careers. We turn our backs on potentially lucrative jobs in the name of service. We just want to help others.

So why do so many of us quit?

We never quit because we lose our passion for service. We never quit because we’re tired and exhausted. We never quit because the work is too hard.

We quit because we run out of money.

Those other things can happen, too. We can get burned out, we can get depressed, we can get exhausted, and we can risk our marriages, our income, our homes. We can bear all of that. But all those things happen because we run out of money.

Sometimes we just run out of time. We start fixing our gym and things are looking a little better. Then, unfortunately, our gym is still fragile enough to suffer from one major setback: The landlord raises the rent, 10 clients leave, one of our key staff members opens their own gym, and we’re done. That’s it.

Our businesses are fragile enough to be wiped out in one fell swoop. The government makes a new law that nobody expected. We’re done. We’re out of business.

Ten or 20 years of serving people, expanding their health, keeping them out of the hospital, keeping them working, keeping them paying taxes, and then the power bill goes up, and we’re done.

The gym business and the fitness business are fragile. But coaching isn’t a new idea. People have been helping others get healthy, get fit, eat better and exercise for 100 years. There is no reason for this industry to still be so immature.

By immature, I don’t mean dumb. I mean that we have not learned the lessons required to make meaningful careers yet. For decades, we didn’t know exactly how to run profitable gyms.

The reason we didn’t have these lessons, this knowledge, is that nobody was gathering it. Nobody was creating a body of knowledge and applying the filters of proof to all the claims in our industry. Nobody was collecting data to say, “Here’s what works, and here’s what doesn’t, and here’s straight-up bullshit, and here’s how you spot a liar in our midst.”

Nobody was out there doing that until now.

The Solution: Data

The thing that makes our gyms antifragile, that helps us grow in the toughest industry in the world, is data. The foundation of all our decisions must be rooted in data or we will always have fragile gyms.

Now, it’s tough to gather data if you’re a single gym owner, working your tail off 14 hours a day, all by yourself, living on this fitness island, largely disconnected from other gym owners, largely disconnected from the overwhelming body of knowledge. You can be as scientific as you want. I tried this and struggled.

But here’s the problem: Every time you change one little thing in your business, you are taking a risk. If people don’t like the change, they’ll use it as an excuse to give up on their pursuit of fitness.

If your prices go up because your family is starving, people will quit and give up on their journey of fitness. If you buy a new car, people will think they are being charged unfairly and give up on their pursuit of fitness. If you run a Facebook campaign that adds new members, you might celebrate for a day and then regret it for a year because all your current members quit.

And when you do something that pisses off your current members, they will go out smoking. They will make it feel like the worst breakup of your life.

And yet, if you don’t do these experiments, you’ll never grow, you’ll never know what works, you’ll never advance the gym, and you’ll never make a better living for yourself and your family.

You’re caught.

How do you avoid the pain of doing science, of turning your gym into a petri dish and doing experiment after experiment?

You leverage the community of gym owners. You connect with other gym owners who are doing science, who are running their own experiments, who are collecting data and saying, “Here’s what actually works, and here’s what doesn’t work, and here’s the proof.”

We Are Stronger Together

There has never been a unifying force in our field. Other fields have governing bodies. They have agencies, licensing, regulatory commissions, associations, science, data. They share the science of their practitioners’ growth.

Why do you think scientists are in high demand? Why do you think doctors make more than fitness coaches? It’s because they’ve been doing the science for the last 2,000 years. They’ve been running experiments, and they know what works to change health care.

Why do you think surgeons charge more than doctors? Not because their work is more valuable but because it’s more urgent, and it works. They save lives. And they save lives because of science. They’re no longer bloodletting, attaching leeches, or talking about the four humors of the body like the ancient Greeks did—they do science.

And the science of gym ownership is measuring what works along six different metrics.

If you’re a solo gym owner out there on your own, you have to do science all by yourself. You have to run Facebook ads. You have to run enough Facebook ads to figure out how they work. You have to spend $10,000 before you even know if they do work. You have to ask for referrals. You have to do 100 reps of asking for referrals before you get good at it. And only then can you ask yourself, “Is this even working?”

You have to post to social media every day. You have to take the pictures, you have to write the posts. How do you know if they’re any good? Trial and error. It can take you 10 years to get good at social media.

You have to create your own media. You can’t rely anymore on CrossFit, dance studios or F45 to do that for you—you have to be your own media company. But it takes 10 years to get good at blogging. I’m a B+ blogger, and I’ve been doing it for 20.

How do you get good at this stuff fast? How do you know what works on Facebook? How do you know what Instagram posts will land? How do you know what kind of blog you should publish, what kind of video you should shoot, or what kind of QuickCast you should record? You ask people who’ve done it successfully.

How do you know who the successful people are? You look at their metrics. You ask them to prove it. And then you take what they’ve done and you copy it.

Data and Proof, Not Opinion

Here’s where gym owners go wrong: They seek opinion instead of data. So you go into a Facebook group and say, “Hey, who’s running Facebook ads?” You get 10 responses. Three responders will say, “Facebook ads don’t work.” Three responders will say, “They’re bullshit; you don’t need them.” Two will say, “I’m crushing it; I get 57 leads per month,” but one of those is lying, and two other people will try to sell you their ad service.

That’s not data; that’s opinion.

We want to know: Do Facebook ads work? How much do they cost? How much time should I put into this? And if I want to jump over three years of learning, who can I copy?

The way we find this out—find the best people to copy, and then build models based on what they’re doing, and grow our gyms based on those models, and therefore elevate the industry—is through the collection of data.

Only Two-Brain is doing this. Only we are doing this at such a large scale.

Why? Because I want to sell you mentorship. Yes, I do. I want you to benefit from this data, make money on these decisions, capitalize on my science and eventually hire a coach. We’re all coaches. We all understand the value of coaching. Whether we’re doing well or poorly, we all know that we can go further faster with a coach.

But I also want you to help me elevate the industry. I want us to do science together. I don’t want to do any more guessing. I don’t want to lose 9,000 gyms every single year in the mission to change people’s health. We know what to do, but we can’t do it if the clock is ticking and we’re going to run out of money too soon.

We cannot reverse the de-evolution of our species if our gyms are going bankrupt in three years. I want your gym to last 30 years. I want your coaching to benefit your clients as long as they live. The thing that’s stopping that is not your passion, it’s not your knowledge, it’s not your skill, it’s not your sense of service, and it’s not your willingness to grind or starve. The thing that’s stopping that is running out of money too soon.

My job is to stop that. The best tool I have is science, and our State of the Industry Survey is the root of that science.

Our 2024 Survey: Let’s Research Together

I want you to take our State of the Industry Survey. Completing it will take you between three and eight minutes—I just measured some of the speeds. If you’re cautious, you don’t know your metrics, and you want to put extra time into it, eight minutes is what we ask. If you’re super-duper fast, you know your metrics well, and you’re a quick typist, three minutes is all it takes.

What we will give you in exchange is first access to the data. We publish a very thorough report on all the data and what it means every single year. I’ll also give you a bonus package with a bunch of Two-Brain materials—the link is at the end of the survey on the submission confirmation screen.

Those are your prizes. But those of you who are truly invested in this industry and changing lives, in making a good living for yourself and your family, I know that you’re not going to be tempted by prizes.

What you will be drawn to is impact. You’ve always been drawn to making an impact, and that’s what we’re doing here: We are participating in the evolution of the human species by first creating an evolution within the industry that will extend the life of the human species.

We will keep you in business longer so you can help more people.

You can help people for 30 years instead of three. You can magnify your impact by keeping people at your gym longer. You can create a legacy by building a gym that somebody will someday take over and continue. You will not fail.

I hope you complete our State of the Industry Survey. I know I ask you to participate every single year—this is how science is done: through repetition, consistency, measurement and analysis.

Thanks for doing science with me.

The post Humans Need Gyms: State of the Industry 2024 appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Is Your “Elegant” Programming Really Just Crap?

I think a lot of people misinterpret the word “elegant” when it comes to gym programming.

The word popped up a lot in the fitness community after CrossFit founder Greg Glassman used it frequently in these sentences starting in about 2017 or so:

“We sit collectively in unique possession of an elegant solution to the world’s most vexing problem. And it may be so elegant that it’s optimal.”

Glassman’s “elegance” means “simple and effective.”

To me, that’s how you’d describe the programming seen on CrossFit.com back in 2008 or 2009.

Fran one day, 5 x 5 deadlift the next day, run 5 km the next day, then a rest day. And so on.

That, to me, was simple and very effective.

But what I saw on many gym websites—including mine—around 2017 was not elegant at all.

After the high-volume 2009 CrossFit Games, programmers very clearly started down the “more is better” path, and they gained momentum quickly.

You could see the shift in focus without looking hard: weight vests where they weren’t needed, scaled-up loads or greatly increased rep schemes, “monster mashes” that combined two or three very hard workouts, much more difficult gymnastics skills, etc.

For top or even upper-mediocre athletes, you’d also get two-workout “double days” and training sessions that stretched well beyond 60 minutes.

Further, programmers showed an increasing tendency to create complicated strength pieces that were “complemented” by long, brutal, ass-kicking conditioning workouts—with some gymnastics skill training as a “little finisher,” of course.

The worst offenses were almost always workouts that tried too hard to use Da Vinci Code rep schemes. You know the stuff: “I’m turning 30, so I’ll do 30 reps of 30 movements” or “It’s 2019, so we’ll do 20 rounds of 19 reps.”

Far from elegant, all this could have been described as “excessive adornment and silly creativity”—and yet it almost never was for reasons I can’t comprehend.

As a community of box owners, we were quick to criticize others, but we rarely turned a critical lens on our own programming, even when it was increasingly obvious that we had traded simple for silly.

I was guilty of this. At the time, it felt important to show off your knowledge and experience by creating WODs no one had thought of. Basic—but very effective—workouts just didn’t seem cool enough.

And—let’s be honest—how many of us created workouts that were designed to manage crowds rather than produce results? (Guilty, again.)

We also forgot some important activities—such as auditing client results and working on our soft skills to ensure members actually wanted to show up and do the workouts we had created.

It was just way more fun to lock yourself in the office and crank out percentage-based lifting schemes that showed an advanced level of knowledge.

Overall, it was as if an entire generation of gym owners forgot these words Glassman wrote in 2005, well before he started talking about elegant solutions:

“There is a compelling tendency among novices … to quickly move past the fundamentals and on to more elaborate, more sophisticated movements, skills or techniques. This compulsion is the novice’s curse—the rush to originality and risk. The novice’s curse is manifested as excessive adornment, silly creativity, weak fundamentals and, ultimately, a marked lack of virtuosity and delayed mastery.”

Ask Yourself These Questions

The novice’s curse doesn’t have an expiry date, and everyone likes to feel clever, so you’re still at risk of writing bad programming.

To help you avoid that, I’ll offer a clarifying question you can always ask yourself:

Who am I writing this workout for and why?

It might seem like a stupid question, but if I’m honest with myself, this would have been my answer many times:

“I’m writing this workout for other local gym owners because I want to look smart if they visit my website.”

I definitely would have said this many times: “I’m writing this workout for myself because I want to show off how much I know.”

And a final confession: “I’m writing this super-hard workout for my clients—but I wrote it because I’m scared they’ll think simple is boring and go to the gym down the street if I don’t post monster mashes, too.”

Here’s the answer you really want:

“I’m writing this workout for my clients because it’s exactly what they need to make progress toward their goals. I know this because I constantly measure their progress and adjust my programming to ensure they are always moving forward at the optimal rate.”

That answer is less common than you might think.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a final question:

When’s the last time you objectively evaluated your programming against your clients’ progress?

Many gym owners never do this. We write our workouts, pat ourselves on the back and assume they’ll produce results because we’re brilliant.

But are clients getting measurably fitter?

You can’t answer that if you’ve avoided turning a critical eye on your scripts and client results.

If you’ve never evaluated your programming or haven’t done so recently, it’s high time to put it under the microscope to ensure you’re doing everything you can to help clients reach their goals.

The post Is Your “Elegant” Programming Really Just Crap? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Press the Easy Button: Our Favorite Programming Providers

You can buy back a lot of time for a very reasonable price if you outsource your programming.

Think about it: If you spend eight hours programming workouts every month but buy that time back for about $200, you have eight hours to invest in building your business.

Could you generate more than $200 in eight hours? Yes.

You could win just by selling three PT sessions at $75 each—to say nothing of bigger wins you could score by setting up marketing funnels, improving retention and increasing average revenue per member.

I won’t belabor the point. But I will give you three great options if you’re thinking of outsourcing programming.

CompTrain

Website

Price: US$79.99 per month or $576 billed annually

Ben Bergeron—a speaker at the 2024 Two-Brain Summit—has coached athletes to the top of the CrossFit Games podium and built CrossFit New England into a flagship affiliate.

The CompTrain program offers detailed lesson plans and timelines to keep coaches on track, along with weekly Q&A sessions. You’ll also get coach development, access to a private Facebook group, and a monthly CompTrain Gym call with Ben and other team members.

Mayhem Affiliate Programming

Website

Price: US$129 per month or $1,299 per year

This stream allows you access to CrossFit Mayhem’s programming three weeks after it’s used in Cookeville, Tennessee, at Rich Froning’s affiliate.

The Mayhem team of Darren Hunsucker, Christi Novak and Jake Lockert deliver six workouts a week, as well an optional cardio piece.

Check out the site linked above for free trials and discounts offered through platforms such as Wodify, btwb and more.

NCFIT

Website

Price: $169 per month

Jason Khalipa and Matt DellaValle (MDV) have been at the Two-Brain Summit for the last two years, and they’re the driving force behind NCFIT.

I like to geek out on programming, so I love the fact that NCFIT is planned across an entire year. If you want to find out exactly how the program operates, check out the 2024 Programming Outlook here. (The 2025 Outlook will drop in November or December.)

Your subscription gets you access to four programs, all packed with fun workouts designed to help people get fit. NCFIT Workout comes with Performance and Fitness versions for each session and is perfect for group classes. Compete is set up for people who have competition goals, Flex is all about strength and bodybuilding for aesthetics, and Go is low-drag, high-reward programming with minimal gear.

The package comes with in-depth lesson plans, a daily dose of professional development for coaches, and demo videos.

Two-Brain Clients: Visit the Marketplace through your Two-Brain Dashboard to access a very special offer from Jason, MDV and the NCFIT crew.

Focus on the Right Things

You can do your own programming if you love writing workouts and have a great business underneath you. I follow that path right now.

But if you aren’t passionate about programming, buying workout plans is a no-brainer. Farm it out so you can focus on things that fire you up.

If you enjoy programming but other aspects of your business are lagging, it’s wise to consider offloading programming for less than $200 a month.

In fact, I’d suggest that if you’re making less than $100,000 a year from your business, you could invest in programming to buy back the hours you need to build your business.

What would you do in those reclaimed hours? Work on the business, not in it, by addressing retention, marketing, sales, value, staffing, systems and so on.

That’s where a mentor comes in. Two-Brain doesn’t sell programming, but we’ll give you an exact plan to earn $100,000 a year or more if you’ve got the time to work on growing your business.

To hear more about that, book a call here.

The post Press the Easy Button: Our Favorite Programming Providers appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Do a Month of Group Programming in 1 Hour

If you’re making less than $100,000 a year from your business, I’d advise you to buy back some hours to build your business.

Programming is an easy win: Trade $150 for hours you can spend on marketing, staff development, retention and other critical tasks.

So what if you’re making $100,000 a year and love programming?

You can certainly handle the role yourself if you want to. I do.

I’ve detailed my gym’s comeback story on “Run a Profitable Gym.” When I found myself without a GM, I divided the GM role into six parts, and I decided to handle the programmer role personally.

I took on the programming role because I have the freedom to choose how I spend my time, and I love programming.

After decades in business, I also know how to get results for clients, and I know exactly what they want to accomplish. So I create programming—but I don’t spend a lot of time doing it.

Here’s my system.

Catalyst Programming Template

CrossFit’s Level 1 Manual contains a template for creating programming. You can see it on Page 74 here.

I swap monstructural (M) for aerobic (A, Zone 2 work).I swap gymnastics (G) for high-intensity interval training (B, Zone 3-5 work).I swap weightlifting (W) for strength work (C).

Here’s what it looks like in a three-week block with five days on and two days off:

Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 4Day 5Day 6Day 7ABAAC   CBB     C    Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 4Day 5Day 6Day 7BCBBA   ACC     A    Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 4Day 5Day 6Day 7CACCB   BAA     B    

And here’s how I fill out the week of programming:

1. Program an annual challenge for the month. This is a measuring stick for your clients. You can use a workout like Fight Gone Bad, Fran, a local 5-km run, etc. It provides a point of focus for the month and gives people something to train for.

2. Insert your weekend workouts. For me, we always do a partner HIIT workout on Saturday, and we are closed on Sunday.

3. Head to days 1 to 5 and program strength work (C), HIIT work (B) and aerobic work (A) in that order.

Strength work is first because you have a higher need for specificity.HIIT work is second because you have a medium need for specificity. Workouts can easily be selected from old CrossFit.com programming: I love the stuff in 2008-2009.Aerobic work comes last because you have the lowest need for specificity. I want to provide Zone 2 training for my clients who want to lose weight, so I use cycling, rowing, rucking, swimming and so on. The body can’t tell the difference in modality.

This process takes me about an hour every month.

For a deeper dive, check out this video:

And if you want to see the exact workouts I create, visit my gym’s website: Daily Catalyst.

How to Evaluate Your Programming

Is this process complicated? No.

But it gets results and helps clients accomplish their goals.

How do I know? We find out what our clients’ goals are and track their progress toward them. If they are moving forward, we know the programming is working. If they are stalled, we know the programming isn’t effective. Good programming gets results, period.

This evaluation was standard operating procedure at the very first CrossFit gym, where founder Greg Glassman adjusted his programming based on his clients’ results. But it was forgotten by a generation of gym owners who never asked their clients about their goals and never adjusted programming based on results.

The first step to improving your programming is asking your clients about their goals.Step 2 is tracking their progress.Step 3 is adjusting your programming based on the results you see. 

I learned my lesson after years of mistakes, and now I know that my programming is only “good” if it helps clients accomplish their goals. It doesn’t have to be clever or creative, and it doesn’t need to be hard for the sake of being hard.

It just has to produce results for clients.

The post How to Do a Month of Group Programming in 1 Hour appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Beyond “Spicy”: How to Ensure Your Programming Gets Results for Clients

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Coop, I’ve got a great workout for you today. Are you ready?

Chris Cooper (00:05):
Yeah, let’s hear it.

Mike Warkentin (00:05):
OK, here we go. First, Fran, but it’s scaled up. 42, 30, 18 reps. And then you’re going to do it at 135 pounds. That’s part one. It is spicy. After that, we’re going to do a little Smolov squat cycle work, and then pirouette handstand practice. Your finisher, Chris, weight vest Cindy, except you get a 400-pound deadlift at the end of each round. Are you pumped to train today?

Chris Cooper (00:26):
No. No thanks. I’ll pass.

Mike Warkentin (00:29):
OK, it turns out it’s not 2015. You do not need to serve hard for the sake of hard beat downs at your gym anymore. So, what’s good programming? You’re going to find out today on this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe” wherever you are watching or listening. With me today is gym owner, Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper. He’s not doing the workout that I set up for him, but he is going to talk about why he’s not doing that workout and what he thinks of programming. Coop, welcome. How are you?

Chris Cooper (00:52):
Hey, great, man. You know, your workout reminded me of years ago we used to go and do these powerlifting meets inside a federal prison. I won’t name the prison, but one of my first visits, I was wearing a CrossFit hoodie from my L1, and this inmate is like, “CrossFit. We do CrossFit. Let me show you what my CrossFit workout is.” And he took a piece of line paper, and he just listed every exercise that he knew, and he was like, “That’s what my CrossFit workout is, and we do that every day.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s not really what I think CrossFit is.” But it was bad programming, and it was hard just for the sake of hard, and so today we’re going to talk about alternatives to that.

Mike Warkentin (01:27):
Yeah. And honestly, that inmate in that prison, he took the same path as some gym owners, and we’re all guilty of putting together workouts that were just way too hard. Like it’s my 30th birthday; I’m going to do 30 reps of 30 exercises. There’s a lot of people out there, you can bow your head in shame, just like I did, for putting together stuff like that for no point. So, we’re going to talk about good programming in 2024, how to get better results, retain your clients and make your business better. So, Chris, like I said, a lot of us have lost our way in programming at times because we just wanted to try different things and experiment and look cool, honestly. You’ve got a great programming story about Greg Glassman, CrossFit founder, from the original days back when he was programming his own gym, his own workouts. No one remembers the story. What is it?

Chris Cooper (02:08):
Well, so first, I don’t think I remember anybody using the term “programming” before Greg Glassman. It was always you were doing your routine or something else, right? And a lot of people would even say routine. So, in my world, and I’ve been a coach now for 30 years, Greg started using the word “programming.” And so, when he moved from doing one-on-one to doing small group, he realized that the challenge was going to be programming for all of these people so that they were doing the same workout at the same time because they all had different backgrounds and needs. And so, what he developed was basically an audit cycle. And this is a story that he shared with me, and it’s also been kind of corroborated by Greg Amundson, who was one of the clients at that original CrossFit gym. And so, what he would do is write the program for the month, and then at the end of the month he would go back and look at his client’s goals or results on certain benchmarks.

Chris Cooper (03:04):
So for example, he would write the program, and then at the end of the month, he’d go back and say, like, “OK, well what were our areas of common strength? Well, everybody deadlifted pretty well. Everybody did pretty well in the 200-meter intervals that we had. Their times were fairly consistent over the reps. However, when we got to the pull-ups, everybody seemed to struggle. That’s an area of common weakness, and that will be addressed in next month’s programming. And so, the next month’s programming would be a reflection of areas of common opportunities for improvement in the current month. Later though, when I visited HQ finally for the first time in maybe 2014, I just happened to be there while there was some programming going. And I think Tony Budding was the guy holding the pen, but there were a lot of people in the room, and it was this collaborative effort, and they were following the prescription from the L1 guide, but there was no audit process.

Chris Cooper (03:56):
And granted, they were writing for crossfit.com where they couldn’t really track results anymore because nobody was posting their workout results online in the comment section anymore as they were in 2001. But the way that workouts were selected and programmed seemed to kind of miss the point to me. And it was now like, “Oh, let’s do this. Oh, that’s spicy. Oh man, that sounds brutal.” And of course as an avid CrossFitter in 2014, that got me really excited. Oh, that—man, that looks hard. I want to do all these; they look so crazy hard. But the reality is that none of those were geared toward a specific purpose. And that’s what good programming should be. It should always be geared toward an outcome. And somewhere collectively we’ve all kind of lost that; we’re programming to get people results, and we have to measure their results to know if our programming is any good, and if we’re not measuring those results, we can’t know if our programming is any good. And this is true whether you’re doing one-on-one training or small group semi-private like Greg was doing, or big group programming like we have in a lot of gyms now.

Mike Warkentin (05:03):
I rarely evaluated my programming after the fact. And the way I started to realize there were holes was honestly in the Open, which I don’t really like competition in gyms, but that’s my own personal ax to grind. But I realized, “Oh, as a gym, we are bad at handstand pushups,” or whatever it was. And that’s where I started to get feedback on the programming. But I never sat down for like almost a decade to sit down and say, is this matching up with my client’s goals? Because I didn’t know their goals. I didn’t ask them, I didn’t do goal review sessions, which, listeners, you should be doing. I didn’t do that. And then I didn’t sit back afterwards because I wrote these programming bibles like, “Oh, this is the perfect stuff,” and I walked away. I never sat down and said, “Did this get the result?” and that was a huge mistake. So, this is an interesting thing. We’re going to talk about this toward the end of the show, listeners, because we’re going to give you something tactical that you can do to make your programming better. But let’s talk about this. Should you do your own programming in 2024? Like what are the costs of doing it yourself, and when is it a good idea to use one of the many external providers that are out there?

Chris Cooper (05:58):
Yeah, so if you’re a one-on-one trainer and you’re working one-on-one with clients, you have to do the programming for that client. You have to start with their goal in mind and work backward to say, “Here are the inputs that will eventually get us these outputs,” and you have to measure their progress as you go. Brian Bott says to all of his clients, “The best program that I write for you will always be the next program,” because it is like he’s sighting in his rifle and getting more and more specific based on what the client responds best to. Right? Makes a lot of sense. One-on-one, it’s time consuming, but it’s simple to do. Semi-private, it’s a little bit different. In our semi-private model at Catalyst and a lot of gyms like Brian Bott, everybody has their own individual program.

Chris Cooper (06:43):
So you’re writing the program individually, they’re training together, sharing a coach. In a small group, all five or six people are doing the same program, but still, it’s a small group, and so you have this kind of intimate familiarity with the people. You can say, like, “You know what? Our aerobic capacity is kind of falling behind our other metrics. I’m going to program more of that next month.” And what some people will do, like Dan, one of our mentors, is he’ll say to the client, “Do you have a specific priority next month?” And if they’re like, “We want more biceps,” he’ll add that in there, right? And I get that like you are soliciting some feedback. You’re not letting them guide the programming. You know what they need, but they know what they want, and you’re putting some of that in there.

Chris Cooper (07:25):
Makes perfect sense. But when you’re talking about big group programming, it really doesn’t make sense to do the programming yourself anymore. And early on when I was mentoring gyms, and we’re talking 2013, 2014, a lot of gym owners would think, like, “The programming is my product. That’s my secret sauce. That’s my differentiator. That’s what people are buying,” right? We all thought that because we all thought we were brilliant at it. But the reality is they would spend 12 to 15 hours a month on the programming, and they would be reading brand-new books like “The Anatomy of Speed” and thinking, “How do I apply this?” And they’d be reading textbooks and arguing online about it. And eventually it became this like, “Who can make the craziest, hardest workouts? Who can make the spiciest workouts?” If you’re going to be spending more than an hour, two hours a week on your programming, you can probably buy back your time and use that time to grow your gym.

Chris Cooper (08:21):
Instead, if you are making less than $100,000 a year, you need to buy yourself some time. Programming is just a really efficient way to do that. There’s some great options out there like Mayhem, like CompTrain, like NCFIT, and they’re going to give you constantly very functional movement performed at high intensity. They’re going to do a really, really great job at it, and they’re going to give you like coaches’ notes, right? And for now, even if you love programming, for now, use one of these services. It’s going to plug right into your booking and billing software probably. It’s just so simple. It’s such a leverageable service, and then you use the time that you would’ve spent programming to work on your marketing or your sales or whatever project your mentor has given you.

Mike Warkentin (09:05):
If I had done this, if I had spent less time arguing online, trying to create the cleverest workout and spent even half of that time learning how to sell and market, my gym would’ve been much, much more successful, much, much sooner. I eventually offloaded programming because I started to just despise it. All of a sudden, I had time to work on the business, not in the business. And I still love programming, but I just didn’t want to do it anymore. And what you said is really interesting because I chatted with Jason Khalipa and MDV from NCFIT yesterday, and they said this: I asked them, “How many people are on your team for like creating stuff?” It’s like 12 to 20 people that they have creating the NCFIT program, and they’re doing all this stuff. They’ve got this annual prospectus that comes out that tells you what’s coming and what’s good.

Mike Warkentin (09:45):
We know what you’re going to work on. They’ve got coaches’ notes, which also take a huge—like coaching development is included in that, right? You don’t have to dial up your coaches because they’re reading the purpose of the workout, how it should run, all this other stuff; that gives you a lot of backup there. They’ve got all the different streams going on. They’ve got videos. They’ve got everything. They’ve got warmup. They’ve got all this stuff in there. And I think about this, like, “How much time are they putting into it?” It’s a lot. This is a whole business. I can’t match that time. And if I could, I would be neglecting other aspects of my business. So, I mean, that’s a good way to ask you, Chris, like who’s a favorite provider for you that you really, really like?

Chris Cooper (10:21):
Well, I like NCFIT, and I like it—I mean, I like it a lot. So, they give you that annual prospectus, and while they can’t look into my gym and track everybody’s results and change the programming based on that, everything they give me has a reason. And programming is like a haircut; anything looks good as long as it looks like it’s done on purpose. So, in gyms where they say, “Ah, clients left because they want different programming,” the programming is not the problem. The problem is that the clients do not see their future with this programming. They don’t understand why they’re doing this program anymore. And so, they think, “I’m doing this because it’s hard or because it’s spicy and because it’s novel. And when those things run out, I’m going to go find the spicier, the harder, the more novel things somewhere else.” But if you explain to your clients every day, “Here is exactly why we’re doing this right now,” or “Here is the intent of this program,” or “Here’s how this program gets you to your specific goals,” nobody will be leaving your gym over the programming.

Mike Warkentin (11:24):
Yeah. And that mirrors what they said; that’s what they said to me yesterday. I said, “Well, what about these spicy workouts?” And they said, “We put those in from time to time, but we specifically tell the clients, ‘This is hard for this reason. We’re going to challenge your capacity and show you where you’re lacking,’” and so on and so forth. There’s a reason for that. It’s not the reason that I had in 2015 where I’m like, “I want to show people like—I want to beat them up a little bit and give them that burn that they come back for.” That didn’t last long term. So, it’s interesting. And guys, I’ll tell you listeners, if you’re a Two-Brain client, head to your dashboard, and in the marketplace, you’re going to find, I’ll dare say it, a spicy offer from NCFIT that you can check out. Please do that if you are a Two-Brain client, and we’re not going to use that word for the rest of the show. Chris, why did you go back—after talking about all this stuff—why did you go back to programming your own gym? You’ve got a big company, you got lots of stuff going on, but you’re doing the programming at Catalyst in Sault. Ste. Marie. What are you trying to accomplish there?

Chris Cooper (12:11):
Well, I shared the Catalyst comeback story on this podcast about a year ago. And so, I found myself without a GM and jumped back in and gradually broke the GM role up into six different roles, and one of those was programming. And I hired people to take all five, but decided I wanted to keep the programming too, because success in the gym means that you have time freedom. It doesn’t mean that you have gym avoidance. Like you’re not—I love my gym, I want to be involved in my gym, but I don’t want to be chasing people for membership dues, et cetera. I don’t want to be managing the coaches’ schedule. I do like the programming, and one thing that’s evolved in my 30 years of coaching is a better understanding of what actually gets people results. A large percentage of my clients want to burn fat.

Chris Cooper (12:57):
A large percentage of my clientele now is also over 40, and they’re thinking about their health span; they’re thinking about their lifespan. They’re listening to Peter Attia; they’re listening to the Huberman Lab podcast, and that’s great. I’m glad they’re that aware of their health, but they also recognize and understand the need for us to be separating things out a little bit differently. They can’t go hard every day anymore. They’re not trying to make the CrossFit Games Masters competition. And some people are, and God bless them. Good for you. In my gym, nobody really wants to make the CrossFit Games. They watch it. They like it; it’s interesting, but they want me to tell them how to get healthier and fitter, and part of that prescription is going to be more aerobic steady state zone 2 work. Now, I’ve tried this a few different ways over the years to bring this into group classes.

Chris Cooper (13:49):
When you have a one-on-one client and you say, “I want you to spend 40 minutes in an aerobic state, zone 2. Here’s your heart rate monitor, go,” no problem. That’s assigned as homework. In semi-private, again, no problem. Assigned as homework. But the reality is, if you’re in a big group class, it’s actually harder because the workout might feel boring. It’s harder to coach an easy workout, isn’t it? If you’ve got a very spicy workout, like the workout is the entertainment; the coach just has to crank the music and high five and say, “Go, go, go,” and that’s it. It’s easy to coach it. It’s almost like assembly-line coaching. If somebody’s doing something wrong, you pull them out of the assembly line, and you fix the problem, then you put them back in the workout. Whereas this type of coaching doesn’t lend itself to that because you can’t really do zone 2 wrong.

Chris Cooper (14:38):
“Uh oh, you’re not breathing through your nose, Mike. Breathe through your nose,” right? Like it’s not a fix-the-flaw type of thing. And so, it is actually harder to coach. You have to be an engaging coach. You have to be exciting. And so, we had to level up our coaches. We also had to spend more time explaining, “Here’s why you’re doing this today.” So, for example, today we have a 20-minute zone 2 block at the beginning of our workout where people are doing fairly easy movement. They’re breaking a sweat, they’re raising their core temperature, but it’s not a warmup. They’re actually metabolizing fat better, and then they’re going to get into some strength work. And then they’ve got a very simple HIIT workout from crossfit.com 2001 that they’re doing at the end. And the reason that we break that up is because we want to optimize each of the metabolic pathways instead of lumping them all together and kind of hoping for the best.

Chris Cooper (15:29):
And I can dig into that, and I can talk about this stuff all day, but a lot of gyms right now, CrossFit or no, they understand that we need more zone 2 in our programming. They just don’t know how to do it. And unfortunately, CrossFit’s not going to adapt. They’re owned by a private equity company. They’re not going to change the formula now; they’re not going to pursue change it. It’s really up to us, and luckily the affiliate agreement with CrossFit allows us to do our own programming. But also, if you’re running an F45, bootcamp and you realize like, “Wow, these clients need more than HIIT every day if they’re going to actually burn fat and achieve their goals, the outcome that they’re paying me for,” then you need to become aware of how to bring this into your own programming. So, I shot a short video of how I do programming for Catalyst right now, but the programming is less important than how I present it. Back to the haircut analogy, if I tell you, “Here’s why we’re doing this,” and I make it as fun as I can, that’s where you get client buy-in, and that’s why I want to do the programming myself.

Mike Warkentin (16:32):
Yeah, and we’re going to, in the blog this week, we will talk about exactly this. So, I will show you that video that Chris is talking about where he walks through the programming at his gym, and we’ll talk about how that thing works. So do check the Two-Brain blog where you’re going to see how Catalyst is programmed, and Chris walks you through it very quickly with a simple template that you can use at your gym if you see fit, so don’t miss that. So, Chris, you touched on this a little bit—these hard workouts like Helen, Fran, some of these really tough workouts, it’s kind of fun. You crank the tunes, you just say, “Go,” and you kind of step back and you yell, “Pick up the bar and keep running,” and all this other stuff. That doesn’t necessarily push trainers to be better coaches, right? So, that’s more cheerleading. How does different programming that shifts into, you touched on this, but how does that shift push coaches to be better trainers as opposed to cheerleaders?

Chris Cooper (17:17):
Well, workouts that are hard to perform are not usually that hard to coach because you have to stay focused on the hard workout. When I’m doing Fran, I don’t need somebody beside me telling me to work hard because it is hard. And all of my attention and focus is on that workout, right? And there’s definitely a time and a place and a lot of value to that. When I’m doing a 40-minute zone 2 block, I am easily bored, easily distracted, and if the coach is not keeping me on task and keeping me focused and explaining what we’re doing and telling me a joke or encouraging me to keep up my pace, that I’m doing perfect, that I’m staying in the right zone—if the coach isn’t very engaged, I’m not going to be engaged, and I’m not going to want to do it anymore. I’m going to get bored.

Chris Cooper (18:07):
And a big reason that people are not getting results is not like that they don’t know what to do. It’s that they get bored, and they quit. Every coach knows this. The reality is that every program works if a client stays on it, and the hard part of coaching is keeping the clients on it, and if you add in what the client needs, sometimes it’s even harder to keep the client on it. But the result or the outcome is the point. And if we want to get the best outcomes for people, it’s our job as coaches to become better coaches, to get people what they need to do instead of just what they want to do all the time, and sometimes that means coaching harder things, and sometimes that means coaching exercises that are easier but require more coaching. So, I get it.

Chris Cooper (18:56):
I went to this site called WOD Generator because I was actually looking for a specific CrossFit-style bodyweight HIIT workout that I couldn’t find. And somehow, I clicked on this WOD Generator thing, and it’s obviously AI. So now we’re in this era when you can have infinite hard workouts that are hard for the sake of hard, but you should be able to look at every single workout that you’ve given your client in the past year and answer the question, “What is this for? What result am I trying to produce here? What is the outcome that this workout is built for?” And if you can’t do that, then you should outsource your programming, number one. But number two, you should work on becoming better at programming. If the point of this workout is, “It’s spicy,” or “Well, it’s really hard,” or you say something like, “Well, the point of this workout is that it builds resilience,” you really need to ask yourself like, “Am I programming to get the client to the outcome that they’re paying me to get?” because nobody’s walking in the door saying, “Beat me up.” Nobody’s coming in the door saying, “I’m here to build resilience.” That doesn’t happen. And so, this is kind of a call to really examine, like, “Is your programming producing the outcome that people are buying from you?”

Mike Warkentin (20:11):
And I’ll reiterate, if you don’t know a client’s goals, you can’t even answer that question. You need to figure out: What are your people doing? Because I assumed everyone wanted to do Fran with me because it’s awesome. A lot of people were at my gym to lose weight, but I didn’t know that because I didn’t ask them, so if you’re listening right now and you want to start evaluating your programming, you’re going to need to make sure that you ask all incoming clients, “What are your goals?” and make sure that you write them down and have a plan for them. Give them a plan and provide the accountability they need to hit them and then backfill with your current clients and say, “Hey, we’re going to start doing goal review sessions,” and gym owners, when I speak to our top entrepreneurs in Two-Brain and they’re doing goal reviews, their retention is better, their average revenue per member is better, their revenue is better—everything goes up as a result of goal review sessions.

Mike Warkentin (20:53):
So start doing that. That’s a huge step to use to evaluate your programming. Chris, some of the best coaching I ever did, I think was in warmups and little skills and drills kinds of things where, you know, snatching or cleaning jerk or even muscle ups or whatever it was, we did these drills. It was low intensity. Everyone was resting; they were fresh. I feel like I got results. I felt like when we started workouts like, Fran, Helen and Cindy, people kind of went back to their old patterns, and you couldn’t really make a lot of changes because they’re half blacked out. But in those initial intro periods, you could make things way better and then they marginally improved during the hard workouts. And if you kept that pattern up, then things got better at intensity, but it’s very difficult to do that level of coaching when people are just blacking out.

Mike Warkentin (21:34):
That’s just a thing. And here’s an interesting one that I’ll throw at you and see what you think. One of the things, Hero workouts on crossfit.com, those were always a struggle. And let’s be clear, these are people who fell in the line of duty and served their countries and so forth, and they should be honored. Let’s be super clear about that. However, sometimes you get something where this guy’s favorite workout was or movements were like GHD sit-ups, and you there was like a year attached or a month and a date. And so, you’d kind of get into these situations where you’d have to end up doing like 18 rounds of 12 of these plus this and these favorite workouts of, “Wow, these are hard.” And honestly, they were supposed to be hard for the sake of paying tribute to fallen soldiers and service people.

Mike Warkentin (22:18):
But I think sometimes as CrossFit programmers, we looked at those workouts and then stepped back to our own affiliate level and started putting together some weird stuff because it’s the 12th day of the 12th month, and we’re going to do 12 workouts, and things got really ugly, and I’m super guilty of this. I’ll give you one more confession. I wrote workouts not for my clients and not for—I wrote them for other gym owners because I wanted other gym owners to see that I was clever and creative and thought of different things that they hadn’t thought of yet. Shameful, and I wish I could go back and erase some of that stuff, but I did it, and the other reason that I did some workouts was I wanted my clients to do hard stuff and feel the intensity, and I didn’t want them to look at other gym workouts and say, “I should go try that hard one.” And so, I felt pressure to over-program. Have you ever dealt with that too?

Chris Cooper (23:01):
Yeah, yeah. And there is something to be said for achievement. Like once a month, we will program a challenge, and Murph is a great example of a challenge that you would program once a month, and people would think about it, and they would stress about it, and having that challenge on the horizon would keep them coming into the gym more often. I get it, but just like you don’t have a test in eighth grade English every day, you don’t have a test in your programming every day. And so, the story that I got from Greg Amundson, who was the Original Firebreather really, was at the end of the month you look at the programming and you say, “Huh. Nobody did a really great job on those rope climbs. Next month we’re going to be doing a lot of rope climbs on purpose. We’re going to address that weakness.”

Chris Cooper (23:48):
And I think, like I’m the worst for this. The initial intake program for Catalyst was like, “Come in and try this hard workout, and if you throw up your first day, you get a free hat,” right? I thought that’s what I was selling, that I was selling intensity. I’m not; I’m selling outcomes, results, and chasing people off the first day does not get results. If I was going to do one thing to fix everybody’s programming right now, it would be: Start getting consistent with goal reviews. Your clients will tell you in those goal reviews what their priorities are, and you, as an expert coach, will know what your priorities are for programming based on your client’s results. So, if you only do 10 goal reviews this month and you look at, you put them all in the InBody or you take your tape measure and you also say like, “What’s something you’d like to improve right now?” you will get to amazing priorities that can guide your programming next month. Number one, “Oh crap, everybody is concerned about weight loss, and nobody’s making progress there. I need to add more zone 2,” or, “Maybe I need to carve out 10 minutes three days a week where I talk about nutrition,” and then everybody says they want to improve their deadlift. “Hallelujah. Let’s put the deadlift in a few times a week.” And gradually, you just get better and better at programming because you get better at getting clients’ results.

Mike Warkentin (25:09):
Well, listeners, to reiterate, those are your steps; when you leave the show, you are going to do as many goal reviews as is feasible for you. More is better, honestly, but do as many as you can. Find out what your clients want to do, write those things down, then you’re going to program to accomplish those goals. Then you’re going to evaluate the results of those workouts and say, “Did my programming accomplish those goals?” And you’ve got to be objective here. You can’t just say, “Ah, my program is great. They didn’t do the work.” You have to say, “Did it actually get the result that it was supposed to?” And if it didn’t, you didn’t do good programming. And I’ll give you this too, if your clients didn’t show up to work out and do the workouts and skip things, you are not serving your clients properly.

Mike Warkentin (25:47):
So you need to work on retention. And you know, Coop has said this many times: The best workout is the one the client will do, right? So, you have to find a way to get clients in the gym. and that requires soft skills and all these other things. So, I won’t get into that whole ball of wax, but again, goal reviews, program to accomplish goals, evaluate. I’m going to tack on one bonus thing: If for example, in goal reviews, you got 15 clients who all said, “Man, I want to get better at a 5K run time,” or, “I want to get better at long-distance running.” Oh, that sounds like a specialty program that you should then sell. “You know what? We’re going to do an eight-week ‘Couch to 5K’ specialty program, and we’re signing up for the Fun Run in September, and everyone’s going to do it together. It’s going to be a blast. Do you have any friends who might want to do this with you?’” OK, all of a sudden I’ve got 30 people, and I have a specialty program running. You might end up doing that every single year because it works really well. That’s just something you can do with regard to your programming. Chris, you’ve done that, correct? Like that literal plan? Was it the Maple Fun Run or something like that?

Chris Cooper (26:46):
A thousand times. Yeah, Mountain Maple, literally. Yeah, and we’ve done that with other events too. I mean, there’s so many opportunities, and when you plug a challenge into your programming every month, another side benefit is that you get people who really, really, really want to do well at that challenge. So, like our monthly challenge in November is called the Super Meet, and it’s six lifts. You have a two-hour window. It’s a powerlifting meet plus weightlifting, plus a weighted pull-up, and people really take it seriously. And so, we’ll have a specialty program for eight weeks leading up for people who want to specialize because our group programming is broad, general and inclusive. So, it does open up all these opportunities. Some of these things, so for example, like our challenge last month we called the Smoke Jumpers, and it’s basically a benefit for wildland forest firefighters.

Chris Cooper (27:35):
And the workout was the wildland firefighter test from the U.S. I won’t go into the whole thing, but people were told, “If you want to bring a friend to this, you can.” It’s a weighted walk basically. And so, there’s opportunities for that too. On the other hand, when we’re doing Murph, we do not allow drop-ins. We close the door. I mean, it’s usually done on a holiday, so there are visiting people who want to come into town and do Murph with us, but I don’t know what kind of shape they’re in. Some of them want to bring their cousin who lives locally and wants to try Catalyst. That’s not a good day for them to come in, right? Like we don’t have any more free hats for people who barf. Yeah, I mean the challenges are big, and they have their place, but that’s not it every day. You can’t test every day; you have to train every day.

Mike Warkentin (28:26):
And these challenges and goals, like we’re talking: How many people quit when they’re signed up for a challenge or a goal? You know, it’s not very many, right? You get built in retention for stuff like that.

Chris Cooper (28:34):
Yeah. None. It’s a magnet. Look, if you don’t know where to start with programming and this is all overwhelming, go to crossfit.com, 2008. To me, in my mind, and we all have our favorite, but that’s peak CrossFit programming.

Mike Warkentin (28:49):
That’s when I started. It was cool stuff, simple.

Chris Cooper (28:51):
That’s—Greg was doing it. And you’d have a benchmark just about every week, and you wouldn’t see the workout until a day in advance, but you’d be checking that at 12:01 a.m., and “Oh my, here’s the Filthy Fifty. I’m not going to go back to sleep now.” And you’d get excited, and that’s what got the core of CrossFit affiliates addicted was just a beautiful balance of novelty with occasional testing. And I think you’ll remember this too. Sometimes in that programming, a 5K row would show up, a 5K run. And the reason that it got sussed out and affiliates stopped doing it was it’s like, “Well when I program a 5K run, nobody comes to the gym that day.” Well then you have to become a better coach and tell them why they need to be there and make the run fun, like that’s the key.

Mike Warkentin (29:43):
I talked about this exact stuff with Jason yesterday, so please, listeners, subscribe, you will hear the rest of that show. But I’ll tell you the quick story, Chris, I remember those tests showing up, like the Filthy Fifty, and wow, we stayed up all night, and it was hard, but it was just that; it was one workout, and you could get back to business and were fine. Eventually things got so extreme that Jason told me he used to do Filthy Fifty once, then he would do it a second time back to back, and then he would do the actual workout that he was training for because that’s the level of volume and extreme—he was training at the top level of the CrossFit Games. But that CrossFit Games programming trickled down to the affiliate level, and we all thought it had to be super hard, and no longer was Fran or a five-by-five back squat enough. It was, “This plus this, plus this, plus this, plus this, plus my client is injured and leaves,” right? And that’s what happened to a lot of us because we didn’t stick to the original plan, and we got into the whole spicy meatball thing that you were talking about where it’s like, “This is so hard.”

Chris Cooper (30:33):
No, that’s the paradox with CrossFit Games. And we’ve talked about CrossFit, but this applies to any coaching business, this whole episode. The paradox with the CrossFit Games, though, is unique to CrossFit, and that is that we started confusing the competitive with the outcome. So, if your goal is to make it to the CrossFit Games, then yeah, you want to train like an athlete. But if you look at any sport, the top athletes are not the healthiest, sometimes they’re not even the fittest athletes—they’re not going to have the best longevity. In cycling, we have a saying that, “You are a bike rider and not a bike racer.” Bike racers have a different set of skills. If you look at the guys who were just in the Tour de France, by the end of that race, they are sickly looking. They look like they’ve been on a starvation diet or they’ve got an eating disorder or something. They’re at the top of the sport. But other cyclists who train as bike riders can be enormously fit and healthy. And it’s the same in CrossFit; it’s the same in fitness. The pursuit of competition can actually pull you out of health and fitness. Most of our clients are here for health and fitness, and you have to be programming toward that outcome, and if you’re not measuring their progress toward that outcome, you can’t say that your programming can deliver that outcome.

Mike Warkentin (31:46):
I can’t close it out any better than that. Chris, thanks for talking about this. Where can people go after the show to discuss stuff like this more and chat with other gym owners?

Chris Cooper (31:55):
I’d love to have them in gymownersunited.com because while this is kind of a coaching topic, let’s face it, we’re all owner-operators. We opened our gyms because we love coaching, and we also often love programming. And so, we talk about this stuff too.

Mike Warkentin (32:09):
Gymownersunited.com: You can hang out with a bunch of really excellent gym owners in there. Chris and the Two-Brain mentor team are also in there all the time answering questions and giving advice. It’s a great place. Please go there, and my second request is hit “subscribe” on the way out the door. Thanks for being here, Chris.

Chris Cooper (32:21):
Thanks buddy. Take care.

Mike Warkentin (32:23):
Alright, see you next time, listeners.

The post Beyond “Spicy”: How to Ensure Your Programming Gets Results for Clients appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Should You Do Your Own Workout Programming or Outsource?

Thousands of affiliate owners made the same mistake over the last 15 years:

We thought our programming was our product, and we spent hours creating workouts while our businesses sputtered.

I was guilty of this, but I’m not alone. I know many, many people who couldn’t read a profit-and-loss statement but could crank out incredibly detailed workouts for large groups.

In 2024, it’s very clear that your workouts are not your product. Your product is coaching, and the workouts are just tools you use to get results for clients. You sell results, not squats and push-ups in various combinations.

Further, companies now specialize in programming and employ large teams to create detailed plans that include warm-ups, coaching notes, cooldowns, video instructions and so on. Access to these plans isn’t costly at all.

So what should you do: Keep programming in house or farm it out?

Here’s the answer.

1:1 Programming

You have to do the programming for PT clients. You work backward from their specific goals to create the workouts that will generate the swiftest progress toward those goals.

You must measure clients’ results constantly and improve their prescriptions. This is time consuming but simple and financially rewarding if you’re an experienced coach who charges a premium rate for personal services.

PT clients should understand that the best program they’ll receive is always the next one because it’s based on an ever-increasing pile of data. The longer you work with a client, and the more closely you track results, the easier it is to create the perfect plan to accomplish goals fast.

Small Group Programming

The trainer or a head trainer can do the programming.

In this scenario, the coach has an intimate familiarity with a group of four to six members and can emphasize certain things to move the group forward.

Some coaches will even solicit feedback so clients feel heard. They know what they want and the coach knows what they need, so if they want some biceps curls before beach season, the trainer can easily work that into the plan.

Large Group Programming

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to do programming for large groups yourself anymore.

Your programming isn’t your product, yet you’re probably spending a lot of time on it. If you spend more than one or two hours a week on programming, I’d advise you to consider buying back your time so you can work on growing your gym.

I’ll say that another way: If you’re making less than $100,000 a year from your business, your need to buy back some hours you can use to improve your business. The more time you spend on programming, the more outsourcing makes sense.

For about $100 or $200 a month, you can get access to well-considered, carefully planned programming that comes with detailed instructions that double as professional development for team members. These programming services often link up seamlessly with gym management software, saving even more time.

Even if you love-love-love programming, purchase workouts and use the free time to build the business. Learn how to market and sell, hire and train a client success manager to improve retention, create high-value services to increase average revenue per member, and so on.

If you reach $100,000 net owner benefit and have an urge to take the programming back, do it!

(I did, and I’ll tell you how I do it quickly in the next post in this series.)

When It Makes Sense to DIY

Doing it yourself is fine in the early stages of business.

Many of us bootstrapped our way into business by making plyo boxes and medicine balls, renovating warehouses, handling the accounting and answering the phone.

But when we did that, we spent our most precious resource: Time.

As you evolve as an entrepreneur, you must offload jobs so you can do increasingly valuable work.

When you’re a passionate coach who loves fitness, it can be very difficult to imagine letting someone else do the programming.

But when you open a gym, you’re not a coach anymore. You’re a CEO. And CEOs make time to work on their businesses by offloading tasks.

No matter how attached you are to programming, I’d recommend you do a time audit: How long does it take you to do the programming every month?

Now put on your CEO hat and ask this question:

If you bought back those hours for just $150, could you use them to push your business to the next level?

(Yes.)

The post Should You Do Your Own Workout Programming or Outsource? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Paid Marketing Secrets: Colm O’Reilly’s Tips for Gym Owners

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Paid advertising: What’s the difference between, “Just do it,” and, “Buy these shoes today and get 10% off”? Today you’re going to get the answer, and you’re going to find out how to improve marketing at your gym. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe” wherever you’re watching or listening. With me today is gym owner, Two-Brain mentor and marketing expert, Colm O’Reilly. He’s also the founder of We Do Your Paid Marketing, a brand-new company that helps you do exactly what the name says. Colm, welcome from Ireland. How are you today?

Colm O’Reilly (00:30):
I’m great, Mike. I’m great. Thanks for having me. It’s great seeing that intro live because I’ve heard it so many times every week on the podcast, so it’s great seeing it actually.

Mike Warkentin (00:38):
That’s good. Well, you’re at least a second- or third-time guest already, but we haven’t had you out in a little bit, and I’m very happy to get you back here to talk about marketing, which is something that’s near and dear to you. I’m going to ask you this right off the top: differences between paid branding campaigns and paid direct response campaigns. What are they and what are you trying to accomplish?

Colm O’Reilly (00:56):
Yeah, absolutely. So, in general, when we take someone on for marketing mentoring, we start with the direct response or what’s known on Facebook—and by the way, whenever I say Facebook, it’s shorthand for Facebook and Instagram, and we can dig into that a little bit later if we want. But generally, when we start with someone’s gym, we want to get them leads straight away. We want to get them people who have at least an interest. Maybe it’s cold, maybe it’s super warm, but at least an interest in improving their fitness and health. And that’s a lead campaign on Facebook, and that’s your direct response. They’re scrolling along, we come along every third or fourth post and we’re like, “Hey, do you want to get fit?” Something like a message to that extent, and that’s a direct response because they click into that and we’re like, “Sweet, give us your name, phone and email.”

Colm O’Reilly (01:41):
Next step, privacy statement. No one ever reads the privacy policy ever, but we all have them. And then the next step is either like, “Thanks, one of our expert team will be in touch,” or “Hey, do you want to take the next step and book a consultation, book a free intro, book a No Sweat Intro?” So, an intro, that’s direct response. Why we start with that is because if we’ve got a limited amount of advertising dollars and we’ve got a limited amount of time, we want to invest it in the thing that’s going to bring us closer to sales because, let’s face it, most gym owners need more people in, or at least they need to up their sales, or frankly they need to develop their lead nurture and sales skills. So, that’s direct response. Brand awareness on Facebook is generally done to two other platforms.

Colm O’Reilly (02:21):
It’s known as the engagement campaign or the traffic campaign. And I’ll speak to engagement campaigns because that’s the one we’d recommend. An engagement campaign is basically boosting your already great organic content out to a targeted audience. So, if you’ve got a great post about how Samantha lost 20 pounds or how Jill got her first pull-up, or how Bethany managed to find time in between mining her kids and her busy job, you’re speaking to your avatar. That’s more brand awareness, and that’s building the whole idea of the, “Look, people like you achieve the things they want by trusting our company.” Now the great thing about engagement campaigns now on Facebook and Instagram is they used to just be like, you’d boost your post and people would see them, like, “Oh, that place is cool,” but for them to take action, they’d have to go into your profile, find your link, go ahead and book, and now Facebook and Instagram give you the ability to put a link on a boosted post, so when they see it, after a couple of seconds Facebook registers you’re reading it, and it will change color. So, it’s like prompting you to click in and visit the site, and it builds more—it gets them to take more action.

Mike Warkentin (03:32):
You already answered this to a degree, but I’m going to ask you this again just to restate it. If an owner is going to run ads, like we’re talking a gym owner is going to run paid ads for the very first time, what kind would you recommend that they start with, and why?

Colm O’Reilly (03:44):
Well, honestly, I’d recommend if they’re in Two-Brain, they just wait until the marketing mentor can help set them up for it. And I know that’s a plug for Two-Brain, but every other week, I’ll get a call from someone who said they spent an hour, two hours, three hours trying to figure out the backend of Facebook versus jumping on a 30-minute call with myself or one of the marketing team—we can take care of that in a few minutes, which saves you those precious hours you have. Because let’s face it, most gym owners, they’re up, they’re running a 5 a.m. class or a 6 a.m. class, they’re getting home, they’re cleaning the gym and they’re finishing at 8 most days of the week. So, we know your time is at a premium. Let us help you. But if you want to do it yourself, you’re going to set up what’s known as a lead campaign and a lead campaign will be something that says, “Hey, please fill in this form,” essentially.

Colm O’Reilly (04:34):
And that form generally is name, phone, and email. The reason why we want to do a very simple form to kind of extend out the answer is you want to make it super easy for people to take that next step in their fitness journey. So, when someone’s scrolling Instagram or on Facebook, they’re not in buying mode. They haven’t gone and looked for, “Personal trainers in my area,” “CrossFit gym in my area,” “Fitness class in my area.” They’re on there to be entertained, see some cat videos, see what their friends are up to or just dissociate for a few minutes. We come along and we’re like, “Hey, we’ve got the solution to your fitness problem,” so we want to make it super easy for them to take action because they’re not in action taking mode. So, we make it super simple, very, very simple form, name, phone and email.

Colm O’Reilly (05:18):
Generally what most people on the social media platforms, that’s already prefilled. So, it makes it easier again for them to click in and say, “Yes.” And then boom, we’re like, “Hey, the next step is to book a 30-minute consultation or come on down to the gym or book a phone call or book a Zoom consultation.” But you want to make that first step super easy for people to take action because social media is not where they’re taking action. It’s where they’re browsing, chilling out, being entertained. That’s probably a longer answer than you bargained for, wasn’t it Mike?

Mike Warkentin (05:46):
No, but that’s—what you’re doing is you’re asking people to take action on something and you’re not just putting out your brand in the sense that, like, “We do this thing; we have this feeling.” The example that I use is a Budweiser commercial if you’ve ever seen one of those. The giant horses roll across carrying a carriage or whatever, and it looks glorious, and there’s cool music, and at the end there’s a beer can, and that’s the brand, right? And they’ve done this for decades, and it’s very powerful and so forth. As gyms, and Colm, I want to ask you about this specifically. Most of us don’t have great brands, so running brand campaigns right off the bat maybe won’t do exactly what we want. That’s not to say they’re a bad idea, but we talked a little bit about this before the show. What you really need, if you’re going to start spending money, is return on that investment, and a branding campaign is going to take a while to get some traction. Direct response can make some gains quickly. So, talk maybe a little bit about that. Why is maybe branding not the thing to focus on right off the bat as a gym owner?

Colm O’Reilly (06:40):
Yeah, and I think you raised it very well with the likes of, say, Budweiser or Coca-Cola. That’s building the idea of like, “Well Coca-Cola sells this image. It’s fun, it’s bubbly, it’s poppy.” They don’t talk about, “Hey, it’s probably contributing to your diabetes,” and that, amazingly, they dropped that part.

Mike Warkentin (06:57):
Just left it out. Yeah, that’s cool

Colm O’Reilly (06:58):
Ditto with the beer commercials. It’s like, “Yeah, crack open a cold one with the boys,” and so, that branding makes sense because you want to be aware of that. Now again, you’ll see that like with insurance companies when they pay for stadiums and that sort of thing, it’s like they’re planting the idea, so when it comes time for you to take action, you’re front of mind. And that’s actually very true for us as well. But again, start with something that you can see in instant return. It’s very easy with a lead ad to say, “I spent $100, I got 10 leads, $10 a piece. Found one of them, they paid me 200 bucks. Boom, I spent a hundred bucks, I got 200 bucks.” For those in Europe, that’s euro; for those in the UK, that’s quid. So, there we go, international.

Colm O’Reilly (07:40):
For branding, what you’re doing is you’re building your know, like, and trust factor, and you’re getting your posts out to people to warm up your audience. But it is a slower burn, and it’s harder to see the direct benefit of it. There is a phrase in marketing that’s like, “50% of all advertising works; we just don’t know which 50.” So, from the … area, absolutely, you put up your Heinz commercial, you put up your Mercedes-Benz commercial, and you’re hoping that this works. And it’s not as easy to say, “We did this, and we got that.” It’s not a strict A B; there’s a more complex path. For gym owners with our branding—and again, you live in a very, very small market. We’re very, very geographically tied for our gyms. And even if you take some of the biggest gyms in the world, they’re still very, very geographically tied.

Colm O’Reilly (08:30):
As much as I might like Invictus, for example, well, I don’t live in San Diego so I’m not going to see them. As much as I might think Gary down in Waterford has great branding with his gyms, it’s still a two-hour drive from me. I’m not the market for them. He has a very specific market. So, with branding, what you’re doing is you’re taking your best organic posts and you’re giving them to people in your area, in your age demographic who you want to see more of. Now what you should put out is, if you think—because I want to give you more of a direct instruction—if you think of your best client, your seed client, right? And I’m always picturing her because our target demographic is busy working parents, busy working moms predominantly. So, I know … So, all my posts, or 99% of our posts, are directed at, “What would she need to see a week before joining a gym?”

Mike Warkentin (09:26):
Great question.

Colm O’Reilly (09:28):
So, that’s where I’m going. So, for example, you’ll see a lot of Murph posts, and we do Murph in Ireland, and despite the fact that, not like it’s an American holiday, but it’s a big CrossFit event, and we want to be part of the whole CrossFit ecosystem, and it’s a big thing in my gym. Everybody goes and does it; we train for it, et cetera, et cetera. So, we’ll definitely put up a, “Hey, great bank holiday,” Murph post, or we had a barbecue in our gym last week as well, great internal event. We were like, “Thanks, Gus, for putting up the barbecue. Thanks, Aiofe, for taking the photos. Thanks to the loaders, et cetera, et cetera.” They’re great posts for our members, but most of our posts are like, “Hey, look at Arthur saying, ‘Great people, great coaches, the system works.’”

Colm O’Reilly (10:09):
As a busy parent, that post goes and gets a boost. So, people say, “Hey, I’m like Arthur. I’m a busy parent. I’m 40 plus. I’ve done … in my time. I can do this.” Or we can say, “Well done to Linda for kicking ass on our nutrition challenge.” And they’re like, “Hey, I struggle with my nutrition. These guys helped Linda overcome a struggle too, like she didn’t know what to eat or how to count her calories or her macros.” They’re the types of post you put into brand awareness, not the great barbecue or great Murph ones.

Mike Warkentin (10:38):
So, as you said, and I’ve seen this in the Two-Brain resources, it’s very easy to track the ROI on direct response stuff. There are formulas that are very great, and you said, “I put out this many ads, I got this many leads, I got this much front-end revenue, I got this much recurring revenue out of it, this minus this equals, ‘I made this much,’ and I spent this—it was a win.” I even can go down and boil down, “I can spend this much per lead because I know I’m making my money back.” Like it’s a science, and I love it. It works really well. Branding, a little bit different. Is there any way to measure the ROI on branding campaigns?

Colm O’Reilly (11:09):
Not for gym owners, I would say. It is harder to measure because there are so many variables that change month to month. So, some people have a slower July; some people have a slower August. Some people have a great January and September; some people don’t. And even if you compare year to year, things change outside of our gym as well. So, it is harder to directly measure it. Now if you’re going to measure it, what you would do is you would monitor your number of “organic leads,” so website leads or people who didn’t come like, “OK, this person paid $5 to see my ad,” or whatever on Facebook or, “I paid $5 to get them.” You would track your organic content between running engagement ads and not. Now, that might seem like you shouldn’t run brand awareness or engagement ads at all as a gym owner.

Colm O’Reilly (11:58):
And I will caveat this by, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” I do paid marketing for most of my day, so of course I’m going to recommend paid marketing. What I can tell is we went to all our seed clients or most of our seed clients earlier this year, and we said, “Why did you pick us?” To get to my gym, you have to drive off the main road past another CrossFit gym. As you turn the corner, you pass by a bootcamp. As you turn that corner again, you pass by a personal training studio. If you take a wrong turn, you’re going to end up in another gym, and if you take another wrong turn, you’ll end up in a High Rocks gym. So, to get to ours, it’s very, very easy for people to have choice, and so many of them, the response that they could remember was they saw us first, and they liked our vibe.

Colm O’Reilly (12:43):
So, brand response is being there in front of your client when they’re ready to take action, and we don’t know when they’re ready to take action, which is why we need to be there all the time. I ask people this quite a lot; it’s like, “Can you remember the last three or four ads you saw on Instagram or Facebook?” And they’ll say, “No.” And that’s because you’re blind to it until your reticular activating system, if I got that right—that’s where your brain is primed to look for something—when that’s ready, it will spot the ads. So, that’s why your brand awareness is so far. So, when people go into the “Discover” feed or click on the things that pop up in your story, you can then see, “Oh hey, this is a great gym.” Like, “Hey, if you’re looking for your sign to get fit, August is the perfect month before the kids go back to school and the madness begins,” for example. So, no, you can’t directly test to see if, “OK, well I put $5 a day into it, and I got two clients at the end of the month. It’s not as simple. I do think it is important once you’ve developed your lead nurture and your sales process, and you’ve honed your skills with the direct response marketing.

Mike Warkentin (13:49):
And that’s a great response. Chris Cooper is the proof. I’ll give you a quick anecdote. Chris started blogging about how he was fixing his gym back when he was a young and unsuccessful gym owner. That thing that he started—it was on a website called “Don’t Buy Ads”—spiraled, with some work of course, into Two-Brain business, which is now the largest gym mentorship company worldwide. It works, and he’s built it on content, which is essentially branding. He’s also run ads and so forth. But the idea, Colm, that you put out, I think, is great for gym owners. You have to pay to get people’s eyes, and you can very easily track that ROI, which is fantastic because I hate it when people—like I used to work in radio, and you say, “Oh buy these radio ads; they’ll work for sure.”

Mike Warkentin (14:29):
And people would just say, “Well, how do I know for sure? Like, “Ah, people …” you know? And you can’t really track the ROI. In the digital age, you can track ROI very clearly so that you know, all of a sudden, I spent $1,000 but I made 2,000. This was a win, and you know that. So, you can track that money, and it’s an investment, not a cost at that point. With branding though, I love what you said, where you can do things organically where it doesn’t cost you anything but your time. And if you do that all the time over and over and over and over like Chris did, you build this whole entire structure behind that pointy, the sharp tip of the spear—that’s the paid ads. When people look further down, they start seeing your website, your social media, your smiling clients, your testimonials, your blogs, your YouTube, whatever else you have.

Mike Warkentin (15:11):
All that stuff costs you nothing but time to put up. It builds your brand, and then eventually, maybe, once you’re a very successful business, you can maybe run some paid ads, a little bit of branding content and so forth with boosted posts. But I really like that idea. On our blog this week, Chris Cooper’s got two things for you. One of them is a direct response tactic. It’s called “sell by chat,” where you’re going to use anything on social media, whether it’s paid ads or not, to start talking to leads and people who know who follow, comment and like on your stuff and sell them stuff. You’re going to ask them to come in for a No Sweat Intro, free consultation, and then you’ll sell them something. He’s got the exact steps laid out. That’s a direct response campaign that makes inroads very quickly. Another thing that he’s talking about in terms of branding is a concept called the Quickcast.

Mike Warkentin (15:52):
And I won’t lay it out in detail, but what it is, a very short podcast that you put up regularly on YouTube and a podcast platform that helps you get your brand message out and talk to your current clients and prospective clients. Doesn’t cost you anything but time, and that combination gives you the pointy thing, which is the direct response and the background stuff, which is when people look at your shit and say, “What’s this all about?” and they find lots of great stuff. Colm, what do you think of that plan for a gym owner right now? Just those two tactics. Simple and trusted.

Colm O’Reilly (16:26):
Absolutely. So, with sell by chat, I would say that getting customers is hard regardless of any business. And we’ll make the path easier for you by giving you a sell by chat guide, by giving you the type of images and type of content that, on aggregate, we know work for paid marketing. And we’ll give you the blog post ideas and, “Look, here’s how you set up a podcast.” There’s all courses for them in it. I don’t want everyone to think that getting customers is super easy. There is a skill, and there’s an attrition rate because what generally happens with people when they start, like they send 10 DMs the first day on Instagram to their new followers like, “Hey, it’s Colin from CFI, thanks for following us. How did you happen to hear about us?” and 10 of those might get all left on read or not even opened.

Colm O’Reilly (17:11):
And then they go, “Well, that didn’t work.” And like, I did it, and because John first suggested, “Start DMing new followers.” I did it, and it was two weeks of absolutely nothing. Then finally Isabelle replied and said, “Actually I was looking for a new CrossFit gym.” Then it was easier for me to go, “Hey, I can see you’re into rugby. Are you still playing? Have you retired?” et cetera, et cetera and got her in. So, what I will say is that if you’re using sell by chat or any marketing method, any conversation starter, understand that attrition is part of the game. So, you are not failing; you’re not doing anything wrong. If the first 10, the first 50 attempts don’t work, it just becomes part of what you do. You could put out the best Instagram post in the world, but some world-breaking headline takes place, and nobody’s going to talk about it.

Colm O’Reilly (17:58):
There’s nothing you can do about that. Matt Temby actually said—he was talking about strategies once on a call—and he said, “Just because a football play doesn’t execute perfectly, it doesn’t mean it was a bad play. You might just have to run it again or run it again with a different variation.” So, when you start with sell by chat and it doesn’t work the first time, that’s OK. You’re getting good reps in, and also you’re getting more comfortable starting conversations, which you can then bring into the coffee shop. You can then bring into your neighbors, you can then bring into your gym members and just be like, “Hey guys, we really thrive on referrals. You mentioned your brother, you mentioned your boss, you mentioned your sister—how do we get them in here for a free trial or a free chat?”

Colm O’Reilly (18:39):
So, that’s sell by chat, absolutely do it. We do a podcast, and I think we’re the third most popular health and fitness podcast in Ireland, which says a lot for the health and fitness podcast here in Ireland because we’re only talking to our members, right? Like most of the time we’re talking to our members and we’re like, “Why do we do strength? Why doesn’t it matter if you miss a PR one day? Simple changes for your sleep, how to manage your stress.” All we’re doing is just putting out content. Now realistically, what you’re doing with content like that is you’re giving people a vibe, like, “This is the type of person you’re going to deal with. These are the humans.” And then if that resonates with someone, it’s going to work. But again, with that, if you put out content one week, miss a week, put it in two or three weeks later, it’s not going to gain traction.

Colm O’Reilly (19:24):
And as Coop has said, this stuff compounds. So, now Coop has, I don’t know, 10 plus years of emails and blogs, but he still writes every day. So, first of all, it refines, it sharpens his message, and you do it more with your gym because, I might be talking too long, but like if someone says, “Work for everybody as a gym,” you’re not. Like, I’m only for the people in the Sandyford area of Dublin and about a 15- to 20-minute commute. I’m not for the people of Bangladesh or Brisbane or in Baltimore. So, you’re not for everybody for a start. You are for people in a specific area, which is why we talk about keep mentioning your area in your posts, in your podcast, in your sell by chat. And I’m not for people who don’t want to get coached, who don’t want to be social. I’m not for people trying to make the CrossFit Games, and that’s just to instantly get it filtered out.

Colm O’Reilly (20:16):
So, but the more you refine your message, the easier it is to say who you are and who you aren’t for. And I totally get the fear of saying, “Well we’re not for that type of person,” but in reality, if you can be like, “No, we’re not that type of person.” And I’ll give you an example. I had someone, she went ahead and booked a phone call with me. Talking to her briefly on the phone, and she said, “I’m very nervous about CrossFit because all I see are 20-year-olds running around with their shirts off.” And I said, “Well, luckily we’re all 40-year-olds who run around with their shirt off.” We didn’t have our shirts off, but I said, “We’re more people who are busy. They want to come in a couple of times a week, have a great workout, de-stress and get back to their day.” And most of our members are in the same age range as you. But that took time for me to be able to refine that message, to be able to say that we’re not that type of CrossFit. And if you want that type of CrossFit, if you want to be competitive, I can absolutely refer you out to another gym.

Mike Warkentin (21:08):
And that makes perfect sense. If you try to appeal to everyone, you won’t appeal to anyone because people look for very specific things, right? And so, you have to understand your avatar. Who do you serve? Who is your exact best client? And when I talk to gym owners on this show from our leaderboard, these are the top gym owners who crack the Top 10 in metrics for Two-Brain every month. They always tell me they can rattle off in quick succession their exact avatar brief. It is a 30- to 55-year-old woman who wants to get stronger and lose body fat in this area or whatever it is. And it’s some variation of that. That informs everything they do. Their paid marketing is directed at that person. Their branding is directed at that person, and you’ve already talked about exactly who you are for. People of this age who do this kind of thing in this area of this city, away you go.

Mike Warkentin (21:55):
I’m going to ask you this: You said a really interesting thing earlier in the show about, “What does this client need to see a week before joining?” Now what does that look like on the branding side? So, if someone says, let’s say for example, a person sees one of your calls to action, something direct response saying, “Hey, come do this thing, join our gym,” whatever. Let’s say they don’t act on that, but they start creeping on you in the background and going to one of your social media platforms or your gym or whatever. What does that person need to see to join CrossFit Ireland?

Colm O’Reilly (22:21):
Well, I’ll answer the question more broadly than CrossFit Ireland, but it will apply to everybody. It’s that, for most people—it’s very difficult for gym owners to grasp this because we love fitness. It’s integral to part of our life. We understand the physical and mental and social benefits that fitness gives us. For most people, fitness has never been rewarding in and of itself to do—sorry, rewarding in terms of actually losing weight, getting in good shape, or it never been intrinsically enjoyable. They’ve hated running, they’ve hated lifting weights, and they haven’t found that thing that makes them go, “Oh, I actually can enjoy this, and I can see benefits.” So, that would be the start is telling your clients that you understand them. So, you could put—we put out a post once, and I remember it was my social media girl, Garrett, fair credit.

Colm O’Reilly (23:06):
She put out that, “Everybody has 24 hours in a day,” post. And I thought it was going to be one of those nonsense, “You can find a day,” and it’s very, very, of course, blaming the person. And she goes, “But we get, you have demands on your time. We get you. That’s why we have a flexible schedule. That’s why we also allow you to bring your kids in if you can’t find a babysitter.” So, we’re saying, “We get you, and we can help you overcome your problem.” So, that’s one thing to say; post, like, “We get you. We get your objection.” And how you find them out is you just listen during your No Sweat Intros, and you listen during your phone calls or your sell by chats to what objections people are saying, and then you just turn it into a post, and then you boost that post. “We get you. People like you achieve what you want to want to achieve. And here’s how you get started. Here’s the first step.”

Mike Warkentin (23:51):
I’ve got to bring that up for listeners. In your No Sweat Intros, free consultations, you are going to hear problems that you can solve. You will offer your solutions. What Colm just said, which is a great piece of advice that you should take from the show, get that solution for these clients, prospective clients who are joining your gym, get that in front of the people who are out there and tell them how you’re solving the problems, right? If you can do that and they come and they look and they say, “Ah, this problem that I have; here’s how it’s solved,” and they see that right away there, it’s a greasy slope right into your gym. That’s a great, great idea, Colm. What’s a problem? Give me an example that a gym might copy. What’s a problem? You said busy schedule, right? That’s one that you’ve seen in No Sweat Intros. And so, your posts and your branding will start to talk about flexible. Is that how you do it?

Colm O’Reilly (24:32):
Yeah. So, well, you’re flexible to your times as well. And I know other gyms lean into the, “No, you train every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6 a.m., and that’s your spot, and that’s your crew, and that can work for them. And that’s not our brand, but that works really well for them. So, it’s finding the brand you want. Another problem I can definitely hear in my demographic is, “I know I need to do strength work, but I don’t know what to do.” So, we say, “Everybody knows you need to keep strength up as you age to avoid health problems. For a lot of people, they don’t know what to do. We teach you what to do; we hold your hand accountable every day of the week. So, you don’t have to worry about that.” Another problem people have is gyms, they have the perception that everyone’s super fit, and they’re going to be judged. So, we say, “We’re a nonjudgmental supportive environment.” That does not mean slagging free and friendly-abuse free. It just means nonjudgmental because there’s plenty of that.

Mike Warkentin (25:25):
Oh, I know your personality and a little friendly abuse is part of the deal. So, that’s your avatar, right?

Colm O’Reilly (25:30):
Absolutely, yeah, it’s not bullying, it’s just your turn.

Mike Warkentin (25:32):
But think about this, listeners: You put up a post—it’s just your turn. That’s funny. Think about it, listeners: So, you put up a post or a paid ad, and someone sees it but doesn’t act on it, but maybe takes a peek at your stuff and then sees people like them doing certain things that they might want to do and then a bunch of stuff around it that says, “Here’s how we make it easy. Here’s how we solve your problems.” And a great one again is if someone’s market avatar is like, “Busy urban professionals within 10 minutes of walking distance from the gym,” on a lunch break, that might mean 30-minute classes. And it’s like, “We give you 30-minute classes because we know you’ve only got an hour because we checked with all the businesses surrounding, and many of our clients work in your buildings. You have an hour. We’re going to get you in and out within 30 minutes and fitter faster.” That’s an easy solution. If someone sees that, then that paid marketing campaign starts to take effect because they understand how it solves their problem, and away things go, which is a really, really interesting way that branding can help direct marketing work much, much better. Colm, talk to me about your new company and what you do as a Two-Brain mentor and as part of that company.

Colm O’Reilly (26:35):
Oh, as a Two-Brain mentor, most people will come to me when they’re midway through Stage 1 or Stage 2, and they’re ready to start paid marketing. So, they’ve got their consultation area, their free No Sweat Intro set up. They have an on-ramp package, so they’re ready to onboard new clients in a much more pleasant way.

Mike Warkentin (26:51):
And we teach people how to do exactly this stuff to get it into that space. Keep going.

Colm O’Reilly (26:55):
And the consultation is that if you’re nervous, we’ll sit down and have a chat with you or the free No Sweat Intro because people don’t want to go in and show a fitness instructor, “Look how terribly unfit I am.” And particularly in front—this is in their head. So, that’s the idea of, “What’s in my prospective client’s head?” “I don’t want to be embarrassing.” “I don’t want to hold up the class.” “Well, that’s why we start you with one-on-ones in an on-ramp to make you comfortable in the gym to teach the movements and to find the right level for you.” So, the paid marketing is extending out to say, “Hey, are you ready to make a change in your fitness?” So, we deal with the backend of Facebook and Instagram, so you don’t have to figure out the ever changing how they’ll change the algorithm, how they’ll change the user interface on it as well. We’ll set up your ads for you, and we try and set up what are known as evergreen ads that don’t change.

Colm O’Reilly (27:43):
And they can run without too much of you going in and having to spend your very precious time in figuring out what to do and what to look for. Then, We Do your Maid marketing is, again, we save you that time long-term by: We take your brand images, your best images from inside your gym, we create ads around them and then we monitor your performance for you, so you don’t have to worry about the lead generation. That’s taken care of. You know what’s working best from thousands of gyms across the world, so you’ve got a much greater data set to pull from so we can get you, “OK, well this is what’s working the best for your market.” And then you can focus on conversations with people, which is why you started the gym, anyway, was to coach people.

Mike Warkentin (28:23):
And that’s really great because you are going to see the performance evaluation; you’re going to see the reward. So, “I invested this, and I got this.” It becomes a clear investment rather than a cost, which is a huge deal. You also get advice like this because when I started doing this kind of stuff, it was, “Use these lines. This exact script has been tested in, it was like 100 gyms around the world. It’s working really, really well. Use it in your market perhaps with a tiny variation like this for your exact demographic or perhaps just as is.” I also got advice on exact photos to use, and eventually we tailored things to a different degree, but that was all helped out as well. What does your company do?

Colm O’Reilly (29:01):
Well, We Do Your Paid Marketing is the extension of the setup, that we will take care of that for you long-term, or if your ads go stale, we’ll be able to regenerate them a lot quicker. So, rather than you having to go in, figure out what type of images work, figure out what type of copy works, what type of headline works, figure out if anything changes in the Facebook marketing—we’ll take care of that. So, that saves you that time, so you can just invest in the conversations and the No Sweat Intros. So, really what that is, it’s saving you that time and that exploration because if you’re a gym owner, you maybe don’t have a month, two months, three months or $1,000 to figure out what type of ad works. So, take what we know.

Colm O’Reilly (29:42):
This is like, “Well this one works,” and we’ll fit it to what you want to say. So, some gym owners hate the word “tone,” even though that might be what your client says. So, if you don’t want to focus on people who want to tone up, we can talk about strength and muscle gain for you, but I know which words are going to pass the Facebook filter, and I know which words are going to resonate with your market and which ones aren’t historically and in aggregate. So, we can take care of that for you long-term with your branding as well. We can also run your brand awareness and your engagement ads, which then is providing you feedback on, “These are the types of posts that are getting the engagement. These are the types of posts that are getting people to click,” and I’ll sidestep from talking about We Do Your Paid marketing for a moment to say Facebook and Instagram will tell you to push video because it keeps people on the platform. So, over the last 30 days—I pulled up the stats before I jumped on this call, so I’m talking off memory—but in my brand awareness, I have my ad set broken up into reels and images, and reels got 18,000 engagements over the last 30 days. Images got 425. So, you’re thinking, “Oh wow, cool. I should definitely do reels.” But images got 225 actions taken on them, as in people clicking through to visit my website.

Mike Warkentin (30:56):
How many actions?

Colm O’Reilly (30:57):
It was about, for every two people who viewed an image, one person clicked through. So, it was about 200, 225 out of 450. Reels were about 50 out of 18,000.

Mike Warkentin (31:07):
So, that’s interesting, and you wouldn’t know this if you didn’t track your data.

Colm O’Reilly (31:11):
No. And this is the type of thing that we can track for you and do for you long term, again, because then you don’t have to worry about popping up and looking at ads manager. And ads manager is like a nuclear reactor we’re using to toast marshmallows. So, it can be very easy to get distracted and get bogged down and get lost in numbers that don’t matter versus the numbers that do, and that’s what we can do for you.

Mike Warkentin (31:33):
Here’s my theory on this, Colm, and again, this is just my theory, but when I start scrolling through reels, I’m watching reels. That’s what I’m doing. I’m not clicking out of things; I’m not filling out forms. I’m there just to stare at a screen much like you did 20 years ago watching a TV program, whatever those are now, just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. I’m not into stuff. However, if I’m looking at an image and reading something, I am much more inclined to, say, read and take action on something because I’m not in that scroll, scroll glazed over kind of thing. That’s just my theory, but that’s how I operate. Listeners, think about your market, and again, if you aren’t tracking data, you won’t have this info, but that’s a really insightful thing that Colm has laid out based on the data that he sees. Where can people find out more about We Do Your Paid Marketing?

Colm O’Reilly (32:18):
Yeah, you can go to wedoyourpaidmarketing.com, or you can just find me on Facebook and Instagram, Colm O’Reilly, and just send me a DM or email me.

Mike Warkentin (32:28):
That sounds like a direct response campaign right there.

Colm O’Reilly (32:30):
Right? Right is, yeah. … smoke signals, whatever. Whatever works for you. I’ll answer.

Mike Warkentin (32:36):
On the way out the door, I always like to give listeners something that they can do today. So, tell me about a direct response action that they could take today to try and get a few more leads or clients. What would you recommend? Something simple.

Colm O’Reilly (32:48):
Quite simply, put up a post or send an email to everybody and say, “Hey, are you ready to get started in your fitness this month?” I’m not even going to name the month because I don’t know when you’re listening to this podcast, but change this month to August, September, October, whatever it is.

Mike Warkentin (33:03):
Should be August. Yep.

Colm O’Reilly (33:05):
Yep. But you might be listening to this in two year’s time in the middle of … So, if you are, it will still work. It’s just, “Hey, are you interested? If so, reply or shoot me a DM.” Make it very, very easy for people to take action because then you make it easier for them to take the next action, and that will help.

Mike Warkentin (33:26):
What happens in your experience when someone sends an email like that? What—do they get clients of it?

Colm O’Reilly (33:31):
Most of the time, yes. Yeah, absolutely. And again, I will caveat that sometimes you might just hit people at the wrong time. So, we launched a summer campaign last year. Boom, 10 people in; it was sweet. This year, two. Same campaign. Sometimes that happens; sometimes the things bomb, and you just roll onto the next thing. Nobody remembers that. Nobody remembers that email. Even if they got the email, even if they follow you, you just send it again like, “Hey, oh, the next month has rolled around.” And you want to give people an excuse to start. So, if you say, “Hey, are you ready? Our August intake is open.” “Oh, OK, their August intake is open.” No, chances are people can roll into your gym at any stage, but now you just said “the August intake,” boom, you’ve given them an excuse to get started.

Mike Warkentin (34:18):
Consistent daily actions to build your business. Chris Cooper talks about it all the time. This is one small thing. How long would it take you to send that email? I don’t know, like 30 seconds. Send it, and then at an interval, like Colm said, send it again. You will get some clients sometimes, maybe you won’t get any another time, and then you’ll get some at a different time. But if you don’t send that email, you’ll get no clients guaranteed. So, try that tactic, easy, away you go. Colm, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate it.

Colm O’Reilly (34:44):
My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you.

Mike Warkentin (34:46):
That was Colm O’Reilly. He’s a Two-Brain mentor, he’s a gym owner, he’s an amateur comedian and he is also the founder of We Do Your Paid Marketing. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin, and please hit “Subscribe” on your way out the door. And now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper (35:00):
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 Paid Marketing Secrets: Colm O’Reilly’s Tips for Gym Owners appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Bad Branding: What Is Your Gym Really Selling?

If a visitor sees the word “community” within the first five seconds of viewing your website, I think you have a branding problem.

If you have this problem, don’t worry: I highlighted “community” on my website back in the day. It’s a common mistake.

What’s the problem?

You know what community is, and you see its value.

But here’s what your average website viewer will think if they find your gym when looking for fitness services:

“What does ‘community’ mean? I have lots of friends. When do we talk about my goals?”

And then they click out and visit a better website that’s selling what they want to buy.

“Community” isn’t a bad thing. It has an effect on retention—but you can’t measure the effect.

And “community” doesn’t get people in the door. It means less than nothing to a website visitor. It’s not a selling feature.

If you rank the things gym website visitors want, you’ll get a list like this:

1. Weight loss.
2. Fat loss.
3. Increased muscle/strength.
4. More energy.
5. Less pain.
6. Improved sports performance.

You could summarize this as “look better and feel better.”

Way down the list, maybe in 50th place, you might find that people wouldn’t mind “training with other cool people and making new friends.”

So why would you try to market “community” instead of “look better, feel better”?

Bad Gym Branding From Around the World

“Community” is a branding problem. But it’s not the only branding problem in the fitness, uh, community.

Here’s what I did: I clicked into gym websites in major markets with the goal of finding five examples of good branding. I wanted taglines and words that told me within five seconds which of my problems the gym could solve.

I found lots of bad stuff.

I logged it below, with some pointed comments for entertainment purposes. You’ll find the great lines I found after the bad stuff I had to wade through.

These examples all come from real websites, and everything was visible immediately after landing on a page or within a very short scroll. These were prominent words and phrases clearly placed on the page as part of a marketing strategy.

If you have this stuff on your site, don’t feel bad. I made almost all the mistakes on this list, too. But don’t let your website visitors see this stuff as soon as they land on your page.

1. Results based—which results?

2. Looking for a new challenge?—Actually, I am trying to deal with an existing challenge. Want to hear about it?

3. Unlock potential—whose, how and potential for what?

4. Protocols/training principles—Are you speaking to your college ex.-phys. prof or a dude who has sore knees?

5. Best equipped—your gear is irrelevant.

6. Welcome!—Thank you. Now what?

7. Premiere functional fitness facility—So what exactly do you do?

8. Lasting success—As a crypto buyer, mechanic, parent or something else?

9. Oversight—Is your gym a prison?

10. Where trainers can build their brand—To whom are you selling what?

11. Discover what sets us apart—I’m new here. Could you just tell me?

12. System of fitness—Will your system help me get stronger?

13. Empower your spirit—Can we talk about weight loss, too?

14. Strength in community—What about strength in my legs so I can run faster?

15. Family—Are you niching down to specifically help families accomplish fitness goals?

16. People focused—I hope so!

17. You’ll never walk alone—What if I want PT? Can I run alone?

18. Complete CrossFit box—I need nutrition help. Do you have that?

19. Passion for improvement—That’s pretty general. Want to hear about my goals?

20. Unforgettable workouts—I’d prefer lasting results, like keeping off the 20 lb. I want to lose.

21. Check out our merch store—I already have lots of T-shirts.

22. Competance, confidence—I am not making this up. “Competence” is spelled wrong.

23. Drop-in policy—Is it cool if I try to create a lifelong habit, too?

24. Try it for free—Try what for free?

25. Elevate your fitness journey—Kinda vague, no?

5 Good Lines

And now, after all that, just five lines I liked:

1. Get in the best shape of your life.

2. Lose weight, feel great!

3. We improve your health and performance. (I love this.)

4. Take control of your health and achieve your fitness goals.

5. Getting stronger and losing weight starts here. (This is my favorite by far, even if the grammar is a little off.)

Fix Your Landing Page Today!

The lesson: Most gyms have vague or ineffective branding on their websites.

You can set your business and your website apart by doing this today:

Step 1: In as few simple words as possible, clearly tell your ideal client how you will solve their problems.

Step 2: Take that phrase and put it in giant font on your landing page.

That’s it.

Don’t pay a brand manager to tell you what to do, don’t try to be clever, don’t be wordy or obtuse.

Just clearly tell website visitors how you solve their problems and your brand will be stronger.

The post Bad Branding: What Is Your Gym Really Selling? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.