Chris Cooper's Blog, page 34

Do Not Sell Punch Cards at Your Coaching Gym

Punch cards are horrible if you’re selling fitness coaching.

I’ll be blunt about that.

A recent paywalled Morning Chalk Up article surveyed gym owners and business experts—including Chris Cooper—on the punch-card topic, and all but one person concluded that they are a bad idea.

The outlier: A single gym owner in a military town said the cards work for clients who deploy regularly, and 10 percent of revenue comes from punch cards. That’s a special situation.

Everyone else said punch cards don’t help a coaching business in any way and generally cause a lot of problems, too.

In case you didn’t read the article—“Are Punch Cards Hurting Your Business?”—I’ll answer the question in the title by restating Chris Cooper’s position:

“Punch cards are bad for the gym and they’re also bad for the client.”

My Punch-Card Experiences

A long time ago, I bought a punch card at a gym. The owner got $200 in revenue before services were rendered, and I got my card.

The card had an expiry date—something that was allowed in my area but not others—so the owner had some idea when he might see more of my money. But he had no guarantee that I’d buy another card.

I showed up for classes sporadically, never gained any momentum and saw limited results. When I attended, I needed more coaching than the regulars.

Eventually, my card expired with classes remaining. I was irritated and didn’t buy another card. In my mind, I had “lost money,” which is generally the worst feeling a business can give a consumer.

But I hadn’t learned my lesson. When I opened a gym some years later, I created some complicated, completely untrackable “system” that allowed certain people to show up when they felt like it.

As a business owner, I quickly realized punch-card members were a huge pain in my ass:

They always needed more coaching than anyone else.They didn’t know any of the gym’s procedures or rules.They showed up in full classes and made life miserable for coaches.They showed up in empty classes and got personal training for $20 an hour.They showed up to classes that had been cancelled months ago and got mad.They eventually had the right to “pay the old rate” to access services that had dramatically increased in value.They said, “The other gym I drop in at programs more workouts I like.”They showed up months later and asked for refunds on unused classes.They shared punch cards with friends and family members.They regularly forgot to pay me.They sometimes handed me cash, which I forgot about and put through the washing machine.They created labor: I had to print and laminate cards, and coaches had to spend time trying to find the hole punch after class.Their existence suggested “you can pop in here randomly. Regular training isn’t needed.”Their “special snowflake” status encouraged other members to attempt to choose their own adventures in my business.

I’ll give you one more entry that’s more important than any of the others:

They didn’t come often enough to develop a fitness habit and get results.

That’s the only thing that really matters.

Everything else on the list could be classified as “very annoying.”

But when a client is offered a membership option that won’t produce results, your business is utterly failing the client.

“Show up whenever you feel like it and accomplish nothing!”

“Sporadic training is the key to keeping the 20 lb. you want to lose.”

“Sleep in today and come ‘later in the week’ to ensure you don’t finish the 5-km run you signed up for.”

You are literally selling cars that don’t run and buckets with holes in them.

That’s bad for clients who need to get fit and bad for your reputation as a business that helps people get great results fast.

Clients who don’t get results don’t become healthier, and they leave and tell other people your program doesn’t work.

What could be worse?

In my opinion, nothing.

So if you’re considering offering punch cards at your coaching gym, don’t.

And if you’re currently offering punch cards, stop.

The post Do Not Sell Punch Cards at Your Coaching Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Going for Groups: How Rob Sowden-Taylor Filled His Gyms

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
A gym with more than 400 members in classes that have 18, 25, or even 80 participants. That’s Ion Strength and Conditioning in Wales, and its owner is here to talk with me today about huge client counts in gyms. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe,” whatever you’re watching or listening. Two-Brain’s Top 10 leaderboard for clients in May ran from 341 to 941 clients, and these are single locations. Running a big gym is very different than running a gym with 100 or 150 clients, and I’m really excited to talk to Robin Sowden-Taylor today because one of his gyms in the Top 10, but he has a second gym that’s a little bit smaller, so he’s the link between big and small gyms. Rob, welcome from Wales. How are you today?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (00:42):
Mike, brilliant, thanks. Thanks for the invite and opportunity to chat to you. Like I said, I’ve been an avid listener for years of the podcast, and it’s had a fantastic influence on me over the years. So, yeah, having the opportunity to chat here today is awesome. So, thanks for that.

Mike Warkentin (00:59):
You are very welcome, and you get the chance now to have an influence on some of the listeners out there and share some of your secrets. So, I’m going to dig right in, and I really want to ask you this because you’ve got a really interesting situation. You’ve got two gyms, but one on the leaderboard has triple the client counts of the other one. So, I need to know what are the main differences in running a very big gym and a smaller gym?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (01:17):
I think the main difference at the moment is just pure duration. The one facility, our flagship facility, we’ve had for the best part of 10 years where our second facility is very much in that growth phase. And we’ve been operating 18 months now, so we have aspirations of following the same blueprint that we’ve created over the past 10 years in our first facility. And things are moving in the right direction. And the big thing that we focus on is just being process driven in what we do. And yeah, I’m really happy how our second facility is growing. We’ve got a big focus, like majority of listeners on the podcast, around our community. And even though we run a larger model in terms of membership base, it is at the heart of what we’re trying to do, building around those human connections, which is such an impactful part of this industry.

Mike Warkentin (02:10):
When you look at your two gyms, do you see any problems in say the big one that just aren’t in the little one because it’s still growing? Or is everything kind of the same? What do you see?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (02:18):
Do I see a big difference? Not really. I think the biggest influence over the years with what we’ve done in our first facility is just grow things organically, allow things to develop. From day one, did I have the goal of running a facility with over 400 members? Probably not, but I think a lot has changed over the last 10 years. The big saying without, again, too cheesy too, too soon: The man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves destination. And when you’re enjoying the journey, the goals just happen. And I use that because I think it’s such a perfect way of talking about how we’ve built things. The people are involved with me at Ion, we’re very passionate about what we do, and like I said at the start, it’s about being process driven and just getting things right day to day. And the growth has happened organically. So, we’ve got the desire and hunger to achieve what we’re building in our second facility as our first.

Mike Warkentin (03:22):
Yeah. So, if you have haven’t seen—because when my gym started grow into the 230-member range, I had problems. So, if I were you and I had one gym at 400, one with 100, something smaller than that, I’d be like, “I’m having problems at the big one. And the little one’s probably a little bit going better,” but you have obviously solved some problems that I wasn’t able to solve. So, I want to dig in and figure out how you’ve done this because you’ve got two gyms, which is more than twice the work. This is an exponential thing at this point, and you have a really big one and one that’s coming up. So, I’m going to guess that you’ve got some systems and staff and procedures. So, let’s dig in and figure it out. Give me the first summary, if you don’t mind. What’s the quick summary of your larger gym? Like, we’re talking like what square footage have you got? How much size have you got? Or sorry, how many staff people have you got? What kind of programs are you running? Give me the 411 on this thing.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (04:07):
Yeah, so we’re a 5,500-square-foot facility. We specialize in group training; that’s what we do. We do have personal training, but our sole objective is the group training side of things. And our program really reflects our target market; for me, our target market are those individuals that value their health and wellness, but potentially time precious, busy work lives, busy family lives. And I think that’s what I’ve molded our business around over the years. Certainly, how we look from day one to how it looks now is completely different. In the early days, probably a lot more of a hardcore CrossFit facility where I feel we’ve evolved and brought our own brand and style. And I have to say, one of the biggest points I always like to make in terms of business is the importance of learning from others.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (05:01):
As I said at the start, the influence Two-Brain has had on me, but also probably Jason Khalipa with his model at NCFIT is what we’ve started to mold ourselves around a few years back. And our core program now very much revolves around the duration. So, we have our Ion 60 class, which is our structured strength and conditioning class that we tend to run six-to-eight-week blocks in. That’s probably our most popular program. Our Ion 45 class, which is highly attended in terms of numbers within the class. And that’s very much like our bootcamp-circuit-training-style class. We don’t include barbells. I see us less intimidating, a lot more all-inclusive, so it really helps break down those barriers to entry. And then we have our Ion 30, which is our 30-minute total body conditioning class.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (05:51):
So, that structure works really well for us in terms of fulfilling our ambitions, in terms of servicing the needs of our members. And then, a big part of what we’ve also had a lot of growth in is the specialty programs that we offer. For me, my whole objective with what we are doing and where my passion really lies within this industry is simply having a positive impact on our local community from a health and wellness perspective. And that ultimately is at the heart of what we do on a day in, day out basis. My team is very much bought into that side of things as well and understands that. And specialty programs that we’ve have, we’ve had a huge amount of growth in, which is fantastic to see.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (06:38):
So we run a popular youth athletic development program, which is going from strength to strength. This week, we started off summer holiday, the kids’ summer holidays. And over the past three years, we’ve been able to partner with local-based businesses, and we’ve got a full program, 54 hours of classes over the summer now, which we’re able to offer to children free of charge, which for me is just amazing for us to be able to do, be in a position that we’re able to facilitate this because I know the benefit, certainly, the potential for kids to be quite inactive at times during the summer is potentially there. So, that youth program is a real passion of mine, and being able to see the growth there has been excellent.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (07:23):
The other area, the complete opposite, is our Legends program. So, our over 60s program that initially started out with just my mum and dad post-COVID, my mum and dad, my parents-in-law, and it’s just gradually grown and grown. We’ve got a lady, Sarah, who runs, heads up, she specializes in older generation and strength and conditioning training. And we’ve now got the class to a point where we’re running it five days a week. We’ll have on average anywhere between 15 to 20 over 60s participating in each of those classes. And there’s a real community built there as well. We’ve got a fantastic little coffee bar within the gym, and being able to see that community grow there, again, is extremely rewarding to us, knowing the impact it’s having on these individuals and how important it is for their health.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (08:19):
My wife, she’s my partner in the business as well. She runs—we’ve also got one-year-old little boy. We love him to bits, but it’s also, her passion for strength and conditioning has naturally gravitated towards that area, and she’s started our postnatal strength and conditioning class for mums, which again, been blown away by the popularity in terms of—and it just shows the importance for new mums having a safe space. We’re able to close the gym during quiet times of the day, but seeing—she runs that class three times a week, and we’ll have on average 20 mums coming with their babies. They all hang around for coffee. And it’s, again, it comes back to the whole ethos of what underpins Ion, and it’s about those human connections. So, the specialty programs are what I believe post-COVID has really helped take things at Ion on to another level. And yeah, it’s been fantastic to see the growth in those areas.

Mike Warkentin (09:25):
So you’ve got a great focus on groups, and that’s a general strength and conditioning. Then you’ve got your mom fit, you’ve got your Legends, you’ve got your youth, and you’ve got—I really like this—30-, 45- and 60-minute classes, which I never thought of doing shorter classes than an hour, but as I’ve aged here and become busier, I would gravitate towards your 30-minute classes because I want to get in and get out, and there are other people who are just like me, and you found a bunch of them. I’ve got to ask this: How many staff people does it take to manage all these groups and all these clients? What have you got, and do you share them between locations?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (09:57):
Yeah, so I mean, it keeps coming back to our members’ needs, and that’s how we’ve evolved things. So, with us being YYC, we specialize in group training. So, we open at 5 a.m. in the morning, which is early in the UK. In the U.S., in Australia, it’s a little bit different, but in the UK it’s early. Our first class is at 5:25 in the morning, and our last class is at 7:30 at night. And we have literally classes throughout the day, back-to-back classes, all well attended. This is brilliant, fantastic to see. So, obviously staffing it, manpower, is a big part of it. My background is in professional sports, so I had a 10-year career as a professional rugby player, and alongside building my business I’ve had 12 years working as a professional strength and conditioning coach in rugby.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (10:48):
The reason I say that is I’m coming from a team sport background. From day one, I really realized and understood the importance of building a team and building a strong team. And for me, in the fitness space, in what we talk about in terms of business, the point that a lot of people talk about is client retention and how important that is in the business. And I couldn’t agree more, but I think my focus has certainly become a lot more around staff retention and having a focus on my team. Because what I ultimately want to try and achieve with what we are doing as business is focus on them in terms of providing an environment that they enjoy being in on a daily basis, making sure that their wellbeing is in space, and people aren’t being burnt out in terms of certainly the busy classes that we run, that they’re also earning a wage, a salary, that allows them to see longevity within the business at Ion, and that’s been a big focus for me.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (11:48):
And what I believe from a team perspective, environment is everything. And I know we’ll go on to talk about potentially what things we do from a retention perspective, but ultimately, I’m trying to create the best environment I can. If our environment is strong enough that when people leave at the end of their workout and they’re buzzing and they’re motivated going into the day and then looking forward to getting back into the gym the next day or whenever it may be, that’s the ultimate goal because it’s consistency. You can have whatever program you want, the strength and conditioning, bootcamp, results—I’m not going to say any monkey can write a program. There is more art to it, but ultimately what drives results for general pop is consistency.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (12:31):
Young people to turn up on a regular basis over a long period of time. And that’s what I feel we do well. In terms of the team that I have in place, again, probably a big influence over the years has been the book, “The E-Myth,” in terms of the practitioner, the manager, the entrepreneur, and that’s probably how I’ve really started to mold things. I see myself as my role within the business is now working on the business and having a focus on business development. We’re doing quite a lot now in the corporate wellness space as well, and that’s an area that really excites me. We’re running outreach projects within the community again, so they’re key areas that I’m working on. And my wife, she takes the managerial role where a lot of the admin, the onboarding new members and that side of things, takes place.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (13:20):
And then Johnny is our head coach. So, Johnny’s been with me literally from day one. Started off as a member, got into coaching, and over the years, seen the progression he’s had professionally, personally. He’s certainly one of the best coaches that I’ve had the experience of working with, and seeing his growth has been amazing. And for me, it’s been about trying to upskill Johnny, taking on more responsibility. And now we’ve really—Johnny’s really got to a place where he leads the coach development side of the program, the time tabling, the daily operating procedures, the need to be in place and does a fantastic job with that. So, they’re the three key roles that I see—well, when I say key roles, they’re all, everyone on the team is a key role—and then we have the rest of the team.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (14:04):
So, we’ve got probably a third—not probably—a third of 10 coaches, eight would be close to full-time hours, two more part-time, but there’s real diversity within the team as well, which I love. Trying to get a balance of female and male coaches, different age ranges. One of our coaches, a good friend of mine, is BJ, an American pastor, ex-football player. So, he brings a real energy to the environment. We’ve got younger coaches who have finished university, who are building their careers, like I said, I mentioned earlier, Sarah, who’s our Legends coach. So, it’s a real good environment for coaches to be in. I think the program that we offer ticks a lot of boxes for our coaches in terms of exposing them to a range of different populations, whether that’s the general pop, the over 60s, youth development. We do a lot with sport teams as well, sporting teams. My background being in rugby, we get a lot of teams coming into us and using the facilities and both amateur, semi-professional and professional teams, which is, again, it creates a great environment for them to work in. And ultimately, again, I just keep coming back to that point. That’s what the focus for us is trying to really nurture and nourish the team environment that we’ve created.

Mike Warkentin (15:26):
OK. So, you’ve got a decent sized team of about 10, and you’ve got some management level positions and a head coach. Now I’ve got to ask this one because you have some of the biggest classes I’ve ever heard, at least 25 to 80 people at times. Like how do you manage a giant group like that?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (15:40):
Yeah, it’s challenging.

Mike Warkentin (15:43):
I couldn’t do it.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (15:44):
It certainly is, but you know, for me it’s, like I said, the environment that I’m used to working in is team sports. From early on, it’s where I feel I thrive personally, and it’s also what I’ve wanted Ion to build too. When we talk of those numbers, that’s very much in our Ion 45, our bootcamp style class on Saturday and Sunday morning; we regularly get 60 people to attend these classes. When it comes to more seasonal style, like holiday period, we’ll easily get 80, 90 people in a class. In terms of the day, the running of the classes, the big part for me, two key points: group management skills, and that’s a big requirement from what I need from our team.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (16:33):
It’s not something that you’re going to necessarily learn on a course or from an education perspective; that is experience. That’s what comes with experience. And in order to have group management skills, it all comes down to, again, the systems and standards that we have. So, in order to run these busy classes, it’s a requirement. We have—not just our busy classes, our standard Ion, and our coaching team is, every class has the same experience. So, whenever people are coming into our classes, everything is set up for that class prior to starting. With us, all the racks would be set out with the bars, all the kettlebells put out, all the cardio machines, whatever we are using in that class. We shape the gym floor, manage the gym floor. So, it shows our members a standard.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (17:18):
It shows that we care about what we are doing, and ultimately, we want a member who’s coming into our 5:25 class or the 7:30 in the evening class all to have the same experience. So, managing those classes is challenging. And again, I keep referring back to things that I’ve learned from others. And I listened to the Ben Bergeron podcast at the start of the year, and what really jumped out to me—because I think at times, we also feel a little bit ashamed if we have busy classes because we may feel that we’re not giving the individuals the level of coaching that they need. But again, what’s my aim with Ion? It’s about having a positive impact on our local community from a health and wellness perspective. The more people I can get into our facility training—yes, it’s good for business, obviously—but ultimately I know it’s having a positive impact on all these people’s lives, and that’s what it’s about.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (18:11):
And Ben Bergeron, quite outspoken, was like, “I don’t try to cap my classes.” He’s running classes, 30 people in a class, and that’s something that he’s proud of. I know he talks about the systems, the standard that’s needed to operate. And that’s what it comes down to: organization. If you’ve got all good organization, good structures in place, then that’s what’s going to allow you to operate at a good level. And I have to say, these classes that have the high numbers, the energy that’s there, the environment that’s created, is fantastic to see. In our Ion 60 classes, we don’t push for those sorts of numbers, but still, they can still be highly attended. We get up to 30 people at times in those classes, where we’ve shaped our program. It’s simple, so it’s that whole point. What we try within our strength program, we very much focus on the fundamentals, the key movements, squat, hinge, single leg, push pull. It’s about the virtuosity, the performing the common uncommonly well.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (19:13):
And that’s where we have a lot of consistency. For some people over the years, they haven’t really taken to the style of program that we run. We’ve lost members to other more traditional CrossFit facilities. But I’m very comfortable with that now because I understand the why in terms of what we do. We’re building around functional fundamental movements, and we want people to move as best as they possibly can. And that’s at the heart of all of our programs.

Mike Warkentin (19:45):
So how many coaches would you have in a class of say, 80? Would you have one coach, or can you, do you have more?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (19:49):
We tend to join the 80 class. We’ll always try and have an extra pair of hands on deck, but commonly those 60 classes, one coach is running it. The way our facility is, we’ve got a nice shaped facility. We also have an outdoor training area that, for the larger classes, we’ll also use the extra space. But when we’re running these classes, we run them quite circuit-based style, where it’s moving from station to station, it’s formalized, it has five lanes. Each lane is set up with the right level of equipment. You know, if you are using kettlebells, it’ll have your 24, your 16, so it’s all mapped out. And again, that’s what allows for a good class is the organization, and the coach. The exercise, the movements, that we’re using, they’re lower-skill exercises, so it makes it a little bit easier to move around the gym floor and make small little tweaks if needed. But ultimately, it is about crowd management; it is group management, those larger classes.

Mike Warkentin (20:50):
Listeners, I’m going to point something out to you here. Rob has mentioned systems a number of times. If you want a gym with a lot of people, a large number of clients, you have to have good systems. And no gym owner who makes our leaderboard and comes on this show has said to me, “I don’t have systems.” You have to have really well documented business systems. As you get bigger, those systems become even more important because mine, when I hit 230 members, they imploded, everything fell apart, and I was screwed. If you’re going to go big, your systems must be airtight. The best way to do that is to get them airtight with the help of a mentor at 150 clients, and then grow organically with a purpose slowly and focus on retention so that your systems don’t get overloaded. So, Rob, I’m going to ask you this, and this is the question that I’ve been most interested in since we started chatting that I wanted to ask you on this show: Big gyms generally have worse retention. We know this from the “State of the Industry” report. We see, as gyms get larger and classes get larger, traditionally retention gets lower and length of engagement; people bleed out. So, my question for you, I know that you have relatively low churn: Do you have any retention stats, and what do you do to retain members? How do you do what other people aren’t able to do?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (21:57):
Yeah, it’s just going back to what you mentioned there about the systems side of things. Again, I keep saying and referring back to my work in professional sport. I think, as I said, from an early point, I’ve been forced to implement systems because I’m not always going to be present. I’ve relied on my—and I can’t stress enough, just to back up exactly what you’re saying, we haven’t had things perfect. We’ve made plenty of mistakes over the years, but it’s learning from those setbacks, those failures, that moves you on to the success that you can have. But ultimately, it’s the systems that we have implemented allow things to move in the right direction.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (22:37):
Knowing I was coming on the podcast, we use Wodify as our backend system. So, I had a good look through the number side of things. So, our monthly churn is approximately 3%. I also have to point out, our membership base is 400, roughly around 430 members, currently that’s their memberships. Looking on Wodify yesterday, so we’ve got 799 live accounts. So, a lot of our specialty program isn’t membership based. We do a lot around drop-ins with that. So, in terms of the numbers that we have, it’s high. It’s high in terms of people using the facility. So, we’re 430 members, but we have 799 live accounts currently. Three percent churn should be the 90% daily retention, so what five points out? So, we’re 74%, so 74% in terms of that 90% 90-day retention of new members coming on board, according to Wodify, that’s in a good place. However, I look at that, and that’s a number that I think there’s areas we can improve on that, and we can try and improve that. The LEG, in terms of the average length of engagement, that’s always been something I’ve been really proud of because even though we’ve grown, we’re still at over 40 months in terms of the length of engagement.

Mike Warkentin (23:59):
Sorry, one four or four zero?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (24:00):
Four zero, yeah. So, it’s interesting how you look at it, like the Two-Brain platform that we use with my mentor, Lisa. Lisa, who’s been amazing working last for the last year or so. And that’s been certainly so beneficial for me having that accountability to working with the team, when I’m away from the gym, what things I can be working on to try and improve. So, you know, I can’t speak highly enough of Lisa in terms of working with her from a mentorship point of view. But in terms of the platform, there is a difference between Wodify and in terms of the Two-Brain. We’ve had this right from the get-go, so I’ve always been aware we’ve had a very good LEG.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (24:47):
And we have to—one of the big things, even though we have a high membership base, the big part of our team is to know a majority of our members by name. I want them to know we know people personally. Yes, it becomes more and more challenging, but it’s something I still think that we’re very good at. And it’s being able to have the personal touches with the larger facilities, which are the really, really important things. I like to reference—a big part of where I love the professional development, and I’m currently reading, just coming to the end of reading “Unreasonable Hospitality” by Will Guidara. In terms of what he talks about in terms of just that, the unreasonable hospitality, and trying to create the best environment for people to be in on a day-to-day basis.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (25:31):
And that ultimately is what drives our retention rates. You know, it’s what do we do to try and drive retention? What systems do we have in place? It’s not being complacent with it, but ultimately our big focus is on environment. When people are coming in on a day-to-day basis, that’s what keeps them coming back is what we expose them to. And I said it’s the smaller touches in and around the facility. We’ve got a great coffee area, our Yellow Chair coffee bar, which just creates a real good post-work workout or pre post. If people are in a rush, grabbing a coffee shoot, being able to have a conversation with others for a couple of moments. But then there are other areas we offer. It’s not something we do compulsory for everyone, but we offer regular member check-ins where we all do a goal setting session using the InBody machine.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (26:22):
But that’s more optional as opposed to compulsory. We run HYROX events, so we’re HYROX affiliated. We did that at the start of the year. The trend in that space is certainly really high at the moment. So, it’s something that we want to piggyback on, and it’s been a great filter funnel into the gym. But we run quarterly events. We have over 120 members taking part each time. We attach it to a charity that we’re working with, and we always make it team-based to make it all-inclusive and a great environment to be. So, there are some of the key ways that we’re trying to drive the retention aspect for Ion, but it’s yeah. It’s the retention side of things is the challenge, but I feel we’re in a pretty solid place. We can always do things better.

Mike Warkentin (27:14):
Do you have a client success manager?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (27:17):
My wife, I’d call. I refer to that as Rach in terms of the managerial role. And I see everyone in our team is responsible for that client retention manager. However, that is a role that we’re in the process of looking at bringing into the team, because I think would be the next step for us in terms of just, again, those smaller touch points. We try to stay on top of that as best as we can, whether that’s birthdays, newborns, weddings, whatever, and recognizing them within what we do. But I think having that client success manager would be something that I think could be really valuable to us.

Mike Warkentin (27:54):
Now, listers, if you’re out there, client success manager is a high-leverage role. You do not need an ultra-skilled person. You need a personable person who can follow a checklist and do what you ask them to do on time, every time, no matter what. And the person’s role is literally to improve retention, drive up length of engagement, and there’s lots of ways you can do that. It can be with simple things like calling absent members: “Hey, I noticed you haven’t been in the gym in three days. When are you coming back?” Stuff like that. There’s also birthday cards, gifts, surprise-and-delight-type things. There’s a ton of different things that a client success manager can do, but every gym wonder that I’ve spoken to on the show who has one says the role pays for itself. The ROI on this position is incredible because if the person saves one or two memberships a month, it usually pays for the wages. So, think about that as you guys are thinking about retention and length of engagement. I’m going to ask you this one, Rob. You said you have stable numbers and low churn. How do you acquire new clients? Do you have any stats you can share on that? Where do they come from?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (28:52):
If I’m honest, and again, it’s not being complacent. A lot of our growth has been organic. Like I said, we’ve been doing this for 10 years, so it’s taken us 10 years to build up the membership to the place it is currently is at. We don’t tend to do a huge amount with paid social media ads. So, a lot of the leads that we tend to have are very organic, come through the website. We’re proactive on social media. We put a lot of content out. So, they come through that, but I would say the big funnel for us also has been through our specialty programs in terms we get a lot of parents who are bringing their kids to our youth program that like what they see, understand when they see in the flesh in terms of what we do on a day-to-day basis. That’s a great way of bringing people in. The mum fit program that my wife runs. That’s been a fantastic funnel also, going from that postnatal training to once they progress, coming on board as members. So, those programs in particular have been a fantastic funnel for our membership base.

Mike Warkentin (30:00):
It’s kind of brilliant. It’s kind of brilliant what you’re doing, where you’ve got, if you get one person, you should be able to get that person’s parent and that person’s kid. And one person should be times three each time, right? Do you have a process set up for that? Like, do you ask them for referrals and say, “Hey, does your mom want to join this? Or does your kid want to join this?” or how do you get those people?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (30:18):
No, to be honest. No, we don’t. I mean, it’s, like I said, a lot of what we have done has been organic in terms of, rather than it being forced or planned. I think the big area is probably also” How can we lower the barrier to entry? I think there’s always a perception around the style of facilities we run—that warehouse style, whereas, when people are used to the health club, certainly in the UK probably, we’re always a few years behind the States, Australia, in terms of where the industry is. And I think there’s still that point. But the functional fitness space is certainly growing, and now it’s about trying to break those down, those barriers down, making people feel comfortable in terms of walking through the doors and understanding what we’re trying to achieve here is about trying to address sedentary lifestyles, nutrient deficient diets, chronic stress, those primary causes of chronic disease these days. That’s ultimately what I’m trying to build Ion around is a health facility, and the more people who can come through the doors, that’s the important part to it.

Mike Warkentin (31:25):
So tell me about that. What is your intake process, and how does it affect retention? How do you get people in the gym easily and get them training, get them to stay for such a long time?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (31:32):
Yeah, so new inquiries we have, they’ll always tend to come through websites or social media or word of mouth. My wife, Rach, she’ll always organize a discovery call. So, the first part is the discovery call. Rach talks about the goals, what they’re looking for. We like to explain our services, our program, what we do at Ion. And then from there there’ll tend to be two options. So, it’ll either there be option one, to come and have a No Sweat Intro where if people are still a little bit unsure, have a little look around, meet someone in person, see the facility, see the class, meet some of the team, which is always a real good way of breaking down that barrier. Or we offer a free taster class for our Ion 45, our bootcamp class.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (32:18):
We always try and encourage them to go to a quieter one. When we say quieter, still one with probably 15, 20 people in it. But it makes it a class, and we’ll always try and find ways of buddying them up, a new member buddying up with an experienced mate, but it’s just so people feel comfortable. Because I understand there’s nothing worse than coming through the door when you don’t know anyone. You’re jumping into an environment. It’s trying to make it as friendly and warm feeling as possible from the get go. So, they’re the two starting points. From there, then—

Mike Warkentin (32:47):
They’ve had a call first, right? Even the trial people have had a call first already.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (32:51):
Yeah, so everyone will have a call first, and then it’s those two options. We have two style memberships. So, we have our basic membership and our full membership. So, our basic membership is for our Ion 45 class, our bootcamp class, and our Ion 30 class. Then we have our full membership that also includes all the other classes and mainly our Ion 60, our structured strength and conditioning class. So, if someone wants to sign up for full membership, we will have two one-to-one sessions where they’ll be introduced to the fundamental movements, the barbell exercises that we use in classes, and it’s about trying to just introduce them to the movement. It’s not about trying to make them experts in them. That’s what classes, consistency, is what’s going to help them get there. But it’s just a real good way of spending two hours with a coach, familiarizing themselves with our program, our environment, the coaches themselves, the cueings that we use, and then they’ll progress into the class environment. With our Ion 45 class, it is about, like I said, lowering the barrier to entry. It is about, it’s a lower scale workout that’s required, so we feel comfortable that people can move straight into that class environment. So, they’re two options. Then from that process, it’s either two one-to-ones or dependent on the membership they have, they go straight to our class environment.

Mike Warkentin (34:08):
OK. So, you’ve got a pretty greasy intake process where you’re trying to get people in there fairly quickly, and you’re running a group model, so that totally makes sense. And then your retention is pretty good. So, you’re doing some good stuff there, and you’re using the No Sweat Intro in a discovery call where you’re asking about goals. So, those are critical things. Listeners, if you’re out there, free trials, just throwing people into class, not recommended. Better retention, better length of engagement, better average revenue per member if you sit down or talk to someone on the phone, ask them, “What are your goals?” and tell them, “Here’s how I get you to your goals with our services. Do you want to sign up?” “Yes.” And away you go. And then you have a 90-day goal review session. That is the best practice to get people to those goals. Do you do goal review sessions? You’ve got a huge crew. Is it possible to do that with your group?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (34:47):
Yeah, we do goal review sessions. As I said, it’s optional though. It’s not something we’ll go through the whole membership base and say, “It’s time to book in.” We make people very aware month to month that we have these times available. If people want to book in for the goal reviews, use the InBody machine, talk about the direction they’re moving with their training, their nutrition, then that’s it. I would say again, on the retention side of things with group training—but we’ve also just brought on a nutritionist, Jen; she’s absolutely fantastic. And for me, that’s a direction that we’re really keen on going down. Because I really see that’s going to help with the retention. It’s going to help members achieve the goals that they want quicker as well. She’s someone who’s very aligned with our methods, our beliefs, in terms of what we’re trying to do as a facility. So again, that comes into that retention model as well.

Mike Warkentin (35:43):
Is there a limit to how big you can get, and why or why not?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (35:46):
Hmm. I think when it—so in terms of the goals, where do I want to take Ion? I think growth 100%. What underpins this business, Ion, is my passion. My passion is what—it’s something I think we all as gym owners have. It’s like having a little child, isn’t it? That you build, you grow and no retirement. For me, it’s a big part of my why. And for me, what does growth look like? I’ve used the term a couple of times, but the phrase in terms of what we’re trying to do is have a positive impact on our local community from a health and wellness perspective. For me, growth is now very much on “How do we expand that to our wider community?” rather than just being our local, the wider community.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (36:31):
So for me, growth isn’t necessarily in the brick and mortar in terms of trying to open more facilities or trying to get more and more members in. I’m never—I don’t want to be in a point that we turn people away, and I think we’ll continue to grow organically in both facilities. But ultimately, for me, it’s areas like the corporate wellness side of things, the outreach programs that we’re doing within the community. They’re areas that I really want to try and grow, because that comes back to what my whole why in terms of what we’re doing as business is about. So, again, that’s where I see growth being, not necessarily within just members and numbers from that side of things.

Mike Warkentin (37:11):
OK. So, you’ve got some interesting programs that you’re going to target. Listeners, I’m going to summarize for you two things that keep coming up in this conversation with a gym owner who has a lot of clients: systems and retention. We’ve mentioned those a ton of times. We mentioned marketing and acquiring clients a little bit, and that’s obviously part of the pyramid. You have to have systems, find your clients, bring them in and intake them and keep them for a long time. But retention is going to be—I would put that in place before you look at client acquisition and marketing, because if you just get a bunch of clients and your retention sucks, they’re just bleeding out the back door while you’re filling them in the front door, and it’s not a good plan. So, retention first and then systems. Start with your systems. Get good systems in place, test them, test them again, then scale up slowly.

Mike Warkentin (37:54):
And when things start to rattle a little bit, you’ve got to tighten them up. And a mentor can help you do this with a specific plan, because I did not do this. I started to scale up, but all of a sudden, everything fell apart. I had no one to help me tighten them, and everything slid back down, and we lost money. That’s when I got a mentor who helped me bring up my systems to the level they need to be at, find the right number of clients in that system, and then make the money that we wanted to. So, Rob, I’m going to ask you this final question: Your mentor, Lisa, what is the most important thing that she brings to you, and how has she helped you most with your business?

Robin Sowden-Taylor (38:24):
I think the word that jumps out at me straight away is accountability. For me, that was—so we started working together last year. I took on a new role in rugby that was going to be demanding, again with the international team. So, I’ve been away with the World Cup for three months away from the business. I just got back from Australia, a month away from the business. So, I was very conscious.

Mike Warkentin (38:45):
It’s still running without you.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (38:47):
Exactly. And probably the worrying thing is it runs, I think it runs better when I’m not actually there.

Mike Warkentin (38:53):
Go back to Australia.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (38:54):
Yeah. But it’s the accountability on me and Johnny and Rach in particular, that is really, it’s been so beneficial for us to have that. And I’ve been … about the Two-Brain for quite a number of years, and quite frankly, it’s really, it’s a no brainer. It really is because it’s—if we want to grow as gym owners, having people who have been there, who have done it, having those conversations, having that accountability in terms of getting stuff done, because there is so much to do when you’re running your own business. There’s so many things to get on with, and the one thing I just come back to in terms of—for me being on this journey, I’ve been in the industry for 12 years, 10 years running a gym.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (39:38):
And I think it can get a little bit daunting at times in terms of your systems, but it is just been trying to focus on doing the best we can do day in, day out, and if we get that right, the growth of business will come, the system side of things. It’s just trying to pinpoint what systems you want to work on at the time. Whether that’s what’s the flow of the class, what do you usually do? How do you want to lock up at the end of the day? What’s your standard? Because ultimately, as gym owners, what we are prepared to tolerate in our presence becomes our standard. And we need to set a standard for the others, the rest of the team, to follow. And that’s what I feel we’ve done.

Mike Warkentin (40:13):
Rob, thanks so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.

Robin Sowden-Taylor (40:16):
Mike, brilliant chat. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Mike Warkentin (40:19):
It was my pleasure. Gym owners, as you exit, I’m going to give you your first targets. If you’re looking to go big, your first targets are going to be 150 clients, $205 ARM, with a 13-month length of engagement. If you hit those numbers, we have data that shows you can make  $100,000 a year from your business. At that point, with the help of a mentor, you can scale up however you want, or you can do something different. But those are your first targets. If you hit those, you can make a great living, and then the world is your oyster, and you can decide exactly what you want to do next. This has been “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. Thanks for watching and listening. Please hit “subscribe” on your way out. And now here’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper (40:56):
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 Going for Groups: How Rob Sowden-Taylor Filled His Gyms appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Tailored Coaching for the Four Client Avatars

Four personality types can be found in a gym:

Fact-based introvertsFact-based extrovertsRelationship-based introvertsRelationship-based extroverts

At the 2024 Two-Brain Summit, gym owner and mentor Brian Bott explained how you can improve your business dramatically if you understand these personality types.

Here, I’ll explain how you can improve your product—coaching—by tailoring your approach to clients in each group.

Coaching Fact-Based Introverts

Profile: These clients analyze everything. They’ll go through an InBody scan and check every number, they’ll log their workouts, and they’ll review all their data from wearables. They want to know the exact plan, and they will have questions about it. Don’t take offense. Fact-based introverts aren’t looking for a power struggle. They just want to know all the details, and if you provide them, these clients will love you.

Ideal Approach: You must explain exactly what’s going on. If you do, fact-based introverts will feel smart and confident—big wins for these people. You know how your other clients glaze over when you talk about linear periodization and heart-rate training zones? These client demand that sort of thing. Over-explain their programming. In fact, over-explain everything. The more you come back to “why and how,” the better.

Say Things Like This: “We’re going to increase your load by 5 percent. Your last deadlift day, we used 200 lb. for 10 reps. That means you should be able to do 210 for 8 today. That’s our goal.”

Coaching Fact-Based Extroverts

Profile: Loud and in charge, these people want to be the boss. You must allow them to feel like they have input in their training plans. They need to feel important, and they love being asked for opinions and feedback. They can cause problems when they assume they know something but don’t really have a clue.

Ideal Approach: Give them choices—they love choice—even if doing so creates a little extra work. For best results, ask for input in ways that allow you to win regardless of the answer (“Do you want to do presses with a barbell or dumbbells?”). If a headstrong client goes astray, steer them in the right direction. Don’t fight them or rub their noses in an error. If you get argumentative, they’re gone. If you keep them around, you can slowly nudge them in the right direction over time.

Say Things Like This: “What do you want to work on next?” and “Hey, if you’re already this good, I have one little tweak that will make it even better.”

Coaching Relationship-Based Introverts

Profile: These people are calm, laid back and not easy to excite. They fear upsetting others, and they don’t care who wins as long as no one gets hurt. They prefer to “be just like everyone else” and don’t often like independent activities. That said, private training can be perfect to start because they hate being singled out from a crowd and sometimes attempt to hide, which can lead to bad choices (”I’ll just use 135 lb., too.”).

Ideal Approach: Private training is perfect for these people to start, but they can eventually work out in a group if you coach them directly and not in front of others. Always provide one-to-one feedback—even in a group—and encourage your other leaders to give them one-to-one feedback, too. To help them settle in, reduce opportunities for them to make mistakes, especially when they’re new. Example: Grab the dumbbells for them so they don’t have a chance to pick the wrong ones. For programming, keep it simple. They won’t get bored, and they’re uncomfortable with change. But don’t take risks: They’d be mortified if they fell on a box jump. Early wins are more important for members of this group than for anyone else. They need to feel like “I can do this.”

Say Things Like This: “All of our members started this way and got some extra help. You’re going to meet people and fit right in. We will start with on-ramp and take great care of you before we introduce you to something else.”

Coaching Relationship-Based Extroverts

Profile: These are your high-energy, people-pleasing Tasmanian devils. They’re the life of the party, and they probably won’t listen when you explain the workout. These people couldn’t care less about your programming. They want to be energized and feel the burn. Relationship-based extroverts often need to be propped up until the party gets started, but once it’s in full swing, they can motivate others and take a lot of pressure off a coach.

Ideal Approach: Relationship-based extroverts don’t want a lot of explanation, and they don’t really care about the numbers, so you need to keep track of things for them. They might pick the wrong load, lose track of their reps in a workout or talk while the coach is speaking. They care about their results, but they care more about the experience, so you must feed them energy and excitement to keep them engaged. They might need more conditioning workouts and intensity than the average person. Instead of giving them details, ask how they’re feeling and tell them they going to “love eating this spicy meatball of a met-con. Let’s go!”

Say Things Like This: “We’re going to do 15 to 20!” and “Was this fun for you?”

Tailor Your Coaching

In a gym, coaching is your product, and you should strive to reach an A+ level.

Many gym owners think that means they must acquire more and more credentials—because certifying bodies tell them that’s the secret to success.

But it’s not.

Yes, great coaches should have a baseline level of technical knowledge. But the most important skill a coach can develop is the ability to motivate clients and keep them coming back, day after day and month after month.

If you identify the four personalities in your gym and tailor your coaching, your clients are going to get better results even if you can’t diagram the Krebs cycle for them.

If you teach your staff members how to work with these personalities, too, you’ll have a team of people who know how to keep clients for years.

The worst approach: behaving like the grizzled football coach who grabs facemasks, barks at everyone, and gives “my way or the highway” speeches because he knows everything there is to know and his charges can bloody well adapt to his style.

That approach will drive clients away.

Instead, go deeper to connect with clients on their level. If you do, your members and your gym will thrive.

Additional reading: Sales Secrets: The Four Personalities in Your Gym

The post Tailored Coaching for the Four Client Avatars appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Evaluate Your Coaching and Programming

If you want to improve your product, you must evaluate it first so you have a starting point.

Are your coaches performing at a 3-out-of-10 level or are they 8s?

What about your programming?

I know, I know: “My coaching and programming are amazing.”

I always think the exact same thing.

But when I’m honest with myself and take a deep dive into client results, I always see areas where I can get closer to a 10 out of 10.

Here’s exactly how to evaluate and improve your product.

Coaching

You can’t just think about your coaches and say “they’re pretty good.”

You must evaluate them two or three times a year and use a clear system.

Call these evaluations Career Roadmap Meetings because you’re using them to develop professional, happy coaches who can create careers as they help clients get results.

Schedule these evaluations well in advance. It’s a huge mistake to avoid them until you’re furious. If you do that, your anger will create a hostile situation in which it’s very hard to make improvements. If coaches know evaluations are coming every four to six months, they won’t walk into your office on the defensive.

For your evaluation, write down the top 10 skills a coach needs and ignore peripheral stuff like “cleans up equipment after class.” That’s operations. Operating standards are important, but we’re focusing on your product, and clients can still get great results if the coach forgets to put a dumbbell away.

Here’s an example that shows a few essentials for a great coach:

Next, rank each coach out of 10 in each area. I recommend you actually watch the coach work rather than sit in your office and do the evaluation from memory.

At your scheduled meetings, talk about the coach’s goals, then walk through the evaluation: “Here’s where we’re starting from.”

No matter what, give each coach one point of focus for improvement before the next meeting. Every single coach can improve something. Let them know you will always do this.

If you just say “you rock” and move on, that coach will be caught off guard when a problem arises. But if you highlight an area for improvement in every meeting, coaches won’t feel attacked, even if they’re sorely lacking in a certain area.

Before subsequent meetings, re-do the evaluation. Have things improved? By how much? What’s the next area of focus for the coach?

If you follow this process regularly—measure, mentor, measure—your coaches will continually improve the quality of your product.

If you rarely evaluate your coaches and assume they’re always doing a great job, your product will suffer.

Programming

Way back in the very first episode of the “Run a Profitable Gym” podcast, CrossFit’s “original firebreather,” Greg Amundson, told a story that’s always stuck with me.

At the first CrossFit box in Santa Cruz, California, Greg Glassman used a scientific approach to evaluate programming. It’s simple, but no one uses it because we all think our programming is great.

Here’s the system: test, analyze and adjust.

In practice, it looks like this: Glassman would program the workouts for the month. At the end of the month, he’d look at the workout scores for all clients, and he’d identify weak spots.

Example: “As a gym, we’re struggling with rope climbs.” So Glassman would program more rope climbs the next month, then measure output to see if the group was improving.

Same deal if everyone set Fran PRs in a month. That would indicate the gym’s clients were getting better at short, high-power workouts, so Glassman would shift the programming emphasis to longer workouts.

When was the last time you did something like this?

There’s no shame in saying, “I’ve never done it.” I’d bet more than 99 percent of gym owners don’t do this.

We’re all guilty of creating the month’s workouts and then regarding the document as the pinnacle of fitness programming.

But is your programming moving clients toward their goals? Do you have any weak spots? Could you make adjustments to help clients get results faster?

If you don’t test, analyze and adjust, your product won’t be as good as it could be.

If you really want to provide A+ programming, you’ll evaluate it scientifically and take clear steps to improve it.

Product Improvement Doesn’t Just Happen

As CEO, you have a lot on your plate. It’s easy to focus on other aspects of your business and assume your product is “fine.”

But fine isn’t excellent.

Excellence requires regular evaluation and a clear commitment to improvement. If you’re always testing, analyzing and adjusting, your product will improve and your clients will get better results.

When that happens, you’re well on your way to being regarded as “the best steakhouse in town”—and that’s a title you definitely want.

The post How to Evaluate Your Coaching and Programming appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Million-Dollar Gyms Don’t Have 10-Cent Coaching

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Most fitness businesses suck, but most coaches are pretty good. I know this because I lived it. My business systems were a two out of 10. My coaching was about a seven. After I improved my business systems to an eight, I needed to improve my coaching, but I didn’t know how. This is a common problem in gyms all over the world. How do you systematically improve your product? And the answer isn’t just “get more credentials.” Today I’ve got Oskar Johed here, and he’s going to give us the real answer. My name is Mike Warkentin. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Please hit “subscribe” so you don’t miss a single episode. Now, Oskar owns CrossFit Medis and CrossFit Sickla in Sweden. He’s also on CrossFit’s Level 1 Seminar Staff. Coaching is one of his passions. His gym has more CrossFit Level 3 trainers than any other in Sweden and maybe even in the world at this point. His gym does over a million dollars in revenue just by focusing on basics and delivering amazing service. So, Oskar’s going to help us systematically improve coaching. Welcome Oskar from Sweden. How are you?

Oskar Johed (00:57):
I’m good. Thank you, Mike, for that introduction.

Mike Warkentin (00:59):
Yeah, you’re very welcome. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, especially about something that you are very passionate about. So, I’m going to dig in here, and let’s help some people fix their coaches. So, talk to me about a gym’s product. What is the main thing that we are selling?

Oskar Johed (01:11):
Coaching, like results. We can talk about self-actualization and stress and pain relief and dream fulfillment and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, we sell results. That’s what we deliver, and that mostly is linked to aesthetics and maybe some performance and weight loss. But we sell coaching to improve people’s fitness, and then we know there are cascading effects of that that can be psychological and emotional and spiritual for that matter. But at the end of the day, I think we sell coaching, and some people might talk about the care and empathy and compassion. Sure, but honestly, I think if someone’s yelling at me and called me weird names, but still got me really close to my results, I’d probably take that. So, I think coaching is about giving people results.

Mike Warkentin (02:06):
You sell, as a gym owner, results that are generated through coaching. You don’t sell community. You don’t sell clean bathrooms. You don’t sell reverse hypers and cool air bikes and all that stuff. That stuff can be in your gym, but you don’t sell it. You are selling results through coaching, so think about that. Some people—I made this mistake—I thought I was selling community. I’m not; I’m selling results. So, Oskar, when is a time to focus on a gym’s product? Like I focused on it at the wrong time when I was losing $5,000 a month, and I’m like, “I’ll improve my coaching, and everything will get better.” That didn’t happen. So when should a gym focus on coaching?

Oskar Johed (02:39):
Well, I think it kind of depends. See, two things come to my mind. One is obviously if you are the owner who runs the gym by yourself, and now you’re going to start offloading some of the tasks to your team, then probably you should start focusing on coaching before you fully step away from the dance floor. Because there’s got to be a pretty big discrepancy between the care and the quality of coaching from the owner, and when you start filling in part-time trainers or even full-time trainers. So, in order to make sure that transition is as smooth as possible, you probably have to start doing that before the owner coaches the Friday evening class, and then Monday comes a complete newbie, and it’s going to be a huge discrepancy of the product.

Oskar Johed (03:25):
That’s going to be unfortunate. It’s going to be a necessary hole to dig yourself. But from a more general perspective, I think that it is the product that we sell, but you should probably focus more on that right before it is no longer your strongest spinning plate. You obviously want to make your coaching better, your product better, be also better at sales. You need to be better at marketing, better at average staff development. You need to be better at managing your time. You need to be better at building relationships, taking care of yourself, all that stuff, right? So, there’s so many things that we could potentially focus on, but since it is the number one product, it’s the one thing we sell. So, when you think that your sales is better objectively, then probably you need to focus on that.

Oskar Johed (04:17):
Because at the end of the day, at least according to me and what I’ve seen over the years, is it is the product. Like you coach people to get results, and it doesn’t really matter how nice the bathrooms are. People will not sign up if the bathrooms are dirty. We know that for sure and all the other things, but at the end of the day, people want results. So, when something gets better, when something gets noticeably better, then I think that it’s time to maybe start focusing on that. And to your point, if we go back 10 years or so, coaching was pretty decent because at least in the semi-CrossFit space, people were, the owners were pretty excited about coaching. They got really good, maybe seven, maybe eight, maybe even nine out of 10.

Oskar Johed (05:00):
But they didn’t really focus on the business. And when the heyday of CrossFit was kind of over in a sense, you had to focus on the business stuff. And now a lot of people fix the business stuff with the resources and what we can provide in Two-Brain. So, the operations of the business, the behind the scenes so to say, might be six, seven, and eight, but now the product is not there anymore. And then it doesn’t really matter how good your sales are if you’re losing people, because, once again, results are going to give retention. That’s going to bring a thriving community. Because people are fit, people are happy, people get results, but the product is really important. So, I’d say make sure—right before something gets better is probably when you should focus on the product.

Mike Warkentin (05:40):
Yeah. And I can name maybe off the top of my head a dozen amazing coaches. These were top level coaches who don’t coach anymore because their businesses were bad just like mine was bad. They’re gone. So, the coaching space has lost these leading lights, and these were great, great trainers because they weren’t able to run a business. So, what Chris Cooper’s talked about is that passionate coaches, we want to coach people, and we kind of end up opening gyms on the side often. So, the coaching’s pretty good, but the business aspect is horrific. Once you get the business plate that’s wobbling to spin really nicely, then you start looking over at your coaching, you’re like, “I haven’t addressed that in a while.” Now it’s time to get it. So, I’d say in agreement with you, Oskar, when your business is stable and things are going pretty well on the other side, meaning your operations are good, your staffing’s good, your systems, business, sales, marketing, retention, all that stuff is going pretty well, start looking at your product again.

Mike Warkentin (06:32):
Then you can really focus on that. Because if your product is great and your business systems suck, you can go out of business. That will happen. So, let’s talk about this now. What is—like you’re looking to improve your product. What are the first steps to doing so? How do you ensure that this process is simple, focused and effective? Because a lot of people are just like, “We need to make our coaching better. Try harder and maybe get another credential.” Like that’s not the answer. What is?

Oskar Johed (06:54):
Get an awesome business partner who takes care of a lot of the hiring. Because I think you can avoid a lot of problems by hiring the right people, right? And in my case, Karl, we’ve been doing this together now for 10 years, and he’s, at least for the last three years, he’s been really hard on hiring coaches. That’s been his side of the business, and he’s been doing a really good job there and making sure we hire the right people. It’s got to be very hard to eventually get people to really want to outperform themselves every single time to step on a dance floor, be compassionate, ask another question, make sure they pick up the trash, maybe spend two more minutes at looking up a progression for the class for someone who has an injured leg or something. And that’s so much easier if you have the right people you can mold from the start, so to say. So hiring is obviously something we should be better at.

Mike Warkentin (07:44):
I’m going to ask you this. Coop has said this: Hire for personality, and train for skill. Do you do that?

Oskar Johed (07:49):
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Like, all our trainers, we got—currently we have nine individuals who have passed a Level 3. We can talk about that separately about credentials and all that stuff if needed. But three of us have made it to CrossFit Seminar Staff. And I think one of us maybe has some kind of degree in—like no one has a university degree in strength and conditioning. We are all just—

Mike Warkentin (08:12):
Oh, you’re a banker.

Oskar Johed (08:13):
Right, bankers and average people who got pretty good at one thing here because we cared about it. So that is something I wholeheartedly agree with. Now it’s very hard—like, you know that in the beginning, if anyone can alleviate the pressure of you having to coach every morning, every lunch and every evening, you can take anyone who can not mess it up worse than no one, right?

Mike Warkentin (08:34):
Yeah, you’re awake and breathing.

Oskar Johed (08:36):
Right? And if they can smile, that’s even better, right? So, in the beginning you obviously take whatever so you can spend some time with your family or take care of yourself. So, you kind of have some people in your organization you have to deal with. But going forward, I think the number one thing is to make sure you hire the right people for what you’re looking for. We can talk about credentials again, but whatever you’re looking for in your organization, that’s what you should hire for, right? Now when you have people there, you should obviously focus on the lowest hanging fruits because we’ve talked about previously, like there’s going to be spinning plates everywhere. There are going to be fires burning, and you have to let some fires burn. And then they have the whole like, “Hey, what’s important, what’s urgent?”

Oskar Johed (09:16):
But if you look at how can you get some quick wins, and I think if I just look at if you have—I talked about this at the Summit—if you have a newer coach and intermediate and a more seasoned coach, like three avatars or so, we actually have more steps. But if you have like a junior, mid and then experienced—if you were a newbie, just make it fun. Because if someone just gave you the keys like, “Hey, here’s the shirt. Go and coach your class now,” you’re going to be a deer in headlights. You’re going to be super intimidated, and you’re going to be quiet, right? And so, you need confidence, and confidence is going to come with experience, but if you genuinely believe in what you’re doing as an organization, you are going to be more confident.

Oskar Johed (09:58):
So if you’re a new coach, if you just make it fun, I think that’s going to improve the product short-term pretty quickly. If you are a more seasoned coach or senior coach, experienced coach, like they’ve been doing it for a while, if you just decide to focus on one thing—after you listen to this podcast and you’re like, “You know what? Today we’re going to be doing the power cleans. I’m going to teach one thing in the power clean. I’m going to look for one thing. And again, I’ll try to correct it or acknowledge improvements here.” We can look at 20 different things in every single movement, which is quite a lot, and then different individuals respond differently. But if you decide, “Hey, today I’m just going to focus on this one thing. I’m going to address this. I’m going to be looking for that one.”

Oskar Johed (10:42):
And that’s the one thing I’m going to have cues for so I can correct them. That’s going to make me—because I know what to look for and I know what to say if I don’t see it, and if I see it, I’m going to say, “Good job.” Because at the end of the day, as a trainer, my job is to honestly be able to say, “Hey Mike, that’s better.” That’s better in terms of reducing the risk of injury or improving your performance or in effort. “Hey, I know even if I looked at the recording, that one did not look any better than the previous one, but I can damn sure tell that you’re trying. So, hey, good job on trying.” Right? Because then you go, “Dude, I’m going to the Olympics or the CrossFit Games pretty soon,” right? Because that’s what we’re looking for.

Oskar Johed (11:20):
You then objectively made the product better. Because you feel, or we can see a noticeable change in your performance. So just focus on one thing and consistently do that. And then you can start adding two things maybe per movement and three and four and five, and all of a sudden, everything’s better. And then as a group, what you could do that we do: This month, focus on one thing. “Hey team, just make sure that the whiteboard brief is no longer than four minutes. No one came for this lecture. So hey, let’s just—” and Karl did this in maybe, let’s say, March or April. Hey, he recorded a 10 out of 10 whiteboard brief. Like “This is the workout. This is the what, this is the how and this is the why.”

Oskar Johed (12:04):
“And then check for injuries and demo the movements. Done in two minutes and 20 seconds.” And if you’re a complete newbie, you can just say, “We’re doing five by five back squat. This is a back squat. It looks like this, and we’re doing it to get stronger.” And more seasoned trainers can talk about energy systems or how you’re going to have maybe some improving weight and then you’re going to like—are we going to do straight sets or undulate or whatever? But just like, this is what we focus on with everyone this month. Next month, you might be focused on, “Hey team, just make sure that no one stands around listening for more than one minute after the workout has started or the session has started.” Or “Let’s just focus on making it fun. So hey, prepare a few ridiculous jokes or have a question you ask everyone during whiteboard. Hey, who’s your favorite superhero?” Or something that we can all agree on, so we do something consistently to bring up the consistency in the product. Does that make sense?

Mike Warkentin (13:02):
Yeah. And I’m going to point this out for listeners in case you missed it. Oskar is focused. He’s recommending you improve one thing, make sure it’s better, then hit the next thing. You can’t just say, “I’m going to improve every single aspect of coaching all at once. I’m going to make you see, correct, whiteboard brief, everything, remember people’s names.” It’s frazzled; it doesn’t work. You need to focus on small aspects of improvement and incrementally improve things over time with focus. So, Oskar gave a great example: “This month, we’re working on better whiteboard briefs,” and there are different levels within his system for beginner and expert coaches. But the point is “We’re doing a short brief, we’re explaining why we’re doing the workout, we’re demoing the movement, and then we’re getting moving,”—something like that, right? An area of focus. The other thing you said that I’ll reiterate, hire the right people.

Mike Warkentin (13:51):
It’s tough to do this sometimes because you’re frazzled and frantic and you can’t figure out “How am I going to see my kids today?” You hire anyone; you put them in place. Not maybe the best plan. You might have to do it at the beginning, but the better plan is to find the right person, and it’s personality first. Does this person want to learn? Is this person passionate? Is this person likable? That’s a huge one. But because if you hire a really skilled jerk, your product is not going to improve. Hire a likable, passionate, teachable person who you can mentor to success, integrate them in your business, let them know your vision and so on and so forth, and then you’re going to have focus on improving them. So, Oskar, I’ve got to ask you this now because you’ve laid out the focus for these things. You’ve talked about hiring the right people. You hire a person now; how do you ensure—like what is your system for ensuring that these people regularly get points of performance and improvement? Like, do you evaluate them regularly? What do you do to make sure they’re moving from here to there?

Oskar Johed (14:44):
Yeah, so we’ve laid out a pretty extensive culture journey that starts well before someone becomes say—so before you put on your coach’s shirt, you have gone through our internal training, which is, we call it “Coach Basic Training,” where you look, in our case, it’s some material from the Level 1, some Level 2 stuff, some—it’s an advanced version of the Advanced Theory Course that most people run in Two-Brain. So, we kind of mix a bit of—we actually made an online course. So, we have modules, so they can just log in, and they can answer some questions about what we do. Yeah, because Karl did all of this by hand in the beginning; that was great, but right now we might have like 30 people in our system, and the cool thing now is that we have, it’s just an open funnel.

Oskar Johed (15:35):
So Mike, if you want to become a coach at our gym, in the past we had to sit down and interview you. What Karl’s done brilliantly is that he will send you a link. First, it’s actually going to ask you to record a session of a three-to-five-minute video on, “These are our values. We fundamentally want to improve the health and quality of life of our members and their families. How does that resonate to you? Why do you want to be a coach? Send us a video,” and if that one is not like an eight or nine out of 10, we’re just going to say bye.

Mike Warkentin (16:02):
That’s personality right there. You’re screening for personality.

Oskar Johed (16:05):
Yeah, and obviously everyone could make something up, but that’s perfectly fine. But then we send you a link, and you start going through some modules on what we believe is fundamental basic understanding of CrossFit. If you are a strength and conditioning coach, you don’t have CrossFit, or if you’re a member that’s coming up through the ranks, you might know the application of CrossFit because you’ve been a member of ours, but you don’t really understand the theory behind it, so we created modules where we go through what we are—like a very, very, very condensed slim down version of the L1 in like 15-minute chunks, like super small, right? Take some quizzes, and then after they’ve completed that, then we sit in. So, you might be coaching, and I have a newbie coach; we’ll sit in and watch you run a class, and I will explain to that person what you’re doing and what you’re doing well and maybe what you aren’t doing so well, what you should be doing, because— And then, after maybe one or two times, we then make sure that the newbie coach might be doing the general warmup, and then they’re walking right by you.

Oskar Johed (17:10):
So we gradually increase—if they’re doing well—gradually increase the responsibility they can take. So, then a more seasoned trainer—it used to be Karl, and he was not burned out, but he was all over the place doing this—so, if you’re a seasoned trainer at our gym, you can then mentor someone here, and then they might start doing the general warm up a few times, and then when that’s good enough, based on our criteria that we’ve written out and you giving feedback after each session—“Hey, you were moving well. You’ve got to be louder. You need to make it fun. Use more names. But the thing you got feedback on the last time, that was a huge improvement. Now you need to make sure you mention people by name, and you can’t be quiet.” So, and then if I coach that person next time, I know that feedback.

Oskar Johed (17:54):
“So, hey, I heard you aced the first part, but today you’re going to focus on names and being louder. Do you have a strategy for that?” I’m like, “Yes.” “Cool.” And then if I give feedback on that and when they pass the basics, they maybe get to the next step, which means a specific thing, and then the full workout, and then they do the entire session. And then when that is good enough, they then have the right to become a coach. In our case they have to have the Level 1 as well, and then we can put them out on the dance floor. What we saw in the spring, because we onboarded quite a few new coaches is that it’s very important for us to start on time and finish on time, right? Because our members are very, very, busy. So, for us, that’s a promise we’ve made. Like I know gyms that were more fluent, so to say, in—

Mike Warkentin (18:44):
I can’t stand it.

Oskar Johed (18:46):
No. Hey, and I understand, but that’s our promise. And some coaches, that’s fine, but for us, we said, “You know what? We’re going to start and finish on time because we know your life is very busy.” So, in the beginning they were really adamant of making sure of that, so they lost the fun. And they spent so much time focusing on the clock, so they kind of, they did some of the coaching and teaching part, but forgot the coaching, which is more about the seeing and correcting and that. So, what we do now is that your first 10 sessions, you’re going to be an assistant coach. So, all you do is just walk around and make sure you—pretty much on one thing. Like in the power clean today, I’m going to look at hip extension.

Oskar Johed (19:23):
I’m going to be looking at—if I see something that’s ridiculous or unsafe, of course you’re going to fix it, and you are free to fix something else, but you’re going to fix one thing per movement that you’ve talked with this more senior coach about who runs the class, and you’re just going to run around as an assistant coach and see and correct, so you get really comfortable at walking up to someone, “Hey Mike, shoulders back. Good job.” “Thank you.” “No, that’s not the shoulders. That’s your knees. Shoulders are there,” right? So, for about 10 sessions, you just want them to run around and get comfortable to get in someone’s face and say, “Good job. I genuinely mean it,” or “Hey, you need to work harder or do x, y, z.” And then maybe after 10 sessions, they can run the class by themself. Then, that’s when they’re like—now starts the fun part. Now, we are probably going to do weekly evaluations with them.

Mike Warkentin (20:11):
Wait, so you don’t just cut your new coaches loose in the gym and never evaluate them ever again? Because I did that.

Oskar Johed (20:17):
Well, that would’ve never happened in the past ever at our gym.

Mike Warkentin (20:26):
It’s so common though. It’s so common. You just—you’re desperate, so you put these people in place, and you’re like, “Godspeed, my friend. Coach the snatch. I’m out.” And then all of a sudden, everything goes wrong. So, you’ve documented, you have a progression for getting people into the gym, you have an elite-level progression where you’ve got everything documented in online modules, but then you’re actually going to evaluate and mentor these people after they become coaches.

Oskar Johed (20:46):
Oh yeah. So yes. Because with our product right now, our coaching is—I can confidently say to the clientele that we have, “Our coaching is almost too good.” So, when we have newer coaches who come in, they’ve been going through maybe six months of training before they get to step foot on the dance floor as a responsible trainer for that session. So, most of these trainers are far more experienced and better at the craft than a lot of the trainers that I see on the L2. But because of the standard that we have of really senior good trainers, there’s still a huge discrepancy. Our members are very patient, but if they’re not improving quick enough, we will hear about it. So, we’ve made our product almost too good, but we want to continue that. So, what we do is we’ve written down expectations per level.

Oskar Johed (21:41):
So we have seven levels from, let’s say six from when you’re like a coach, high five. You just hatched; you coached your first session. We only expect you pretty much by yourself—it’s going to be like, “Hey, start on time; finish on time. Make it fun; have fun. Make it as safe as possible,” right? That’s the only thing we ask for. When you run your first five or so sessions, when you’ve done that, maybe by sessions five or six to 10, start using names. Like when you teach something, you’re going to name it and show it. Like you don’t have to do anything more than that. We don’t expect you to have a refined eye on what you’re looking for. If you just go, “Hey, this is a power clean. It looks like this. Now do it,” that’s fine for maybe a few sessions, maybe two more weeks; then we might evaluate you again.

Oskar Johed (22:27):
OK, now you’ve taught the power clean. What would be one thing you want them to focus on today? “Well, hip extension.” Cool. Focus on hip extension. So, if you focus on hip extension and you teach it, maybe you should have a strategy to correct that, and you know what to look for. Yes. OK, so then you look for that. So, and that’s for teaching and seeing and correcting. And then you have the same—like if you look at something like presence and attitude, like we might just expect them to make it fun and have fun for the first few sessions; then you start layering the complexity by adding names. But eventually, when you’re a super elite level ninja, we want you to build meaningful relationships in class without stopping people and sitting down and drinking coffee, right?

Oskar Johed (23:11):
So even though you might only have a 20-second conversation with someone while you’re correcting their hip extension, you should still be cognizant enough to ask about how their day went, maybe how their kid is doing in school because last time we spoke they were struggling somewhat, and how’s the new job going—without taking away from the product. So obviously that’s far more than we can expect from a complete beginner. But there’s natural progression here that we have written out for everything. So, Karl has made a gargantuan job of like, “These are the bare minimum stuff, and this is what you have to do before you get to be on the dance floor. And now cool, awesome, high five, but now we want to get you here. Within like two and a half years now, you should be a CrossFit Level 3 trainer.”

Oskar Johed (23:55):
“These are the steps you’ve got to take.” So, when we hire people now, we can say, “This is—you are here now. We want all of this from you in the future. If you’re not willing to invest the time and be mentored by us, that is perfectly fine. But we expect you to do this because that’s what we genuinely believe is important to keep the product or the quality of it to the standard that we have made a promise to our clients about.” So, it’s very detailed, and Carl has made an enormous job in the last, I’d say probably 24/7 in the last three months or so.

Mike Warkentin (24:31):
So listeners, what you just heard here is an elite-level plan to improve your product at your gym. I’m going to boil it down for you in case you are not quite at this level. You may not have a Karl at your gym who can do all this stuff for you. Here’s how you do it. And Karl’s very rare, and this is a very top-level plan. What you need is regular evaluations. You cannot just set people loose and assume everything is going to improve on its own. You must evaluate your coaches regularly. Chris Cooper has recommended three every three or four months, six months, twice a year is better than no times a year, right? Do put a regular evaluation system in place. OK? So, that’s your first thing. The second thing: You need to be able to evaluate. You need an evaluation system. Chris has recommended writing down 10 different things that are essential for a great coach, ranking your coaches out of 10, and starting there.

Mike Warkentin (25:18):
The next thing you can assign—Oskar was big on this—focus. You can’t improve everything. Give them an area of focus. “We want to improve. This is your worst metric. It’s seeing and correcting or whatever it might be. We’re going to improve this, and we’re going to improve this at the next thing. Here are some resources for you. At the next evaluation, we’re going to talk about it.” If you do this stuff, you are going to get your coaches, they’re going to start improving. But you have to have these elements. You can’t cut them loose. You have to evaluate them methodically and systematically. That means you can’t just sit in your office and be like, “Ah, pretty good.” “No, you are a seven out of 10 in personality. You need to work on that and start being more engaging, using members’ names.”

Mike Warkentin (25:58):
Give them some numbers, document your starting point scientifically, and then give them resources; mentor them to get to the next level. Then check in with them. That process is exactly what Oskar’s doing. But you can do it at a very, very simple level. You might just have five things on your checklist to start. And like Oskar said, for you it might be show up on time, start the class on time, keep the whiteboard brief under four minutes, give the reason for the workout, use some people’s names, and improve one technical thing. Whatever system you have, make sure it’s there. Evaluate people regularly; mentor them to success. If you do that, you’re going to have a much better product. I’m going to ask you this, Oskar: Do credentials matter?

Oskar Johed (26:39):
In some contexts I think they do. Like I know the CrossFit space well, so in order to coach at a CrossFit gym, you do need a Level 1 or higher to be on the dance floor. So that’s because of the licensing agreement that you’ve signed. And there might be other franchise models or where like the compliance side of it, you might need it.

Mike Warkentin (27:02):
There are some insurance requirements. Sure.

Oskar Johed (27:04):
Sure. Yeah. That aside, credentials might not matter, but the pursuit of it does, I think.

Mike Warkentin (27:12):
So that’s an important distinction. Yeah, I get you.

Oskar Johed (27:14):
Because I’m intimately familiar with the Level 3 exam. It’s an exam that’s 160 questions. You sit down in front of a computer for four hours, and then I think it’s like A, B, C, and D. So, theoretically you could go in there and just go “ABACADABA, A, B, B,” and then you might pass it, right? And then you have the credential on the wall. Would that make you a better CrossFit trainer? Of course not. Everyone can understand that. But what I’ve seen if I look at our trainers, and when I went through that in 2017, is that I did it not because I wanted the credential on the wall; I just knew that someone said, “Hey, you should know all of this. If you know all of this and can apply it in the context that I’m in, that would earn you the right to call yourself this.”

Oskar Johed (27:59):
OK, sweet. And someone’s laid out what I need to know; let’s get after it. And personally, it would not make any sense to spend like six months, four hours a day to pass an exam, and they’re like, “You know what? I have all this knowledge now, and I’m not going to apply it.” That would just be ridiculous to me. You could technically do that. So, I can just look at—we had a coach who passed the Level 3 exam a few weeks back. And so, we have weekly study groups for our coaches that we could sit down, and we review a video or an article or so, or talk, look at videos of people moving, and I could see the shift week to week. We said, “Hey, let’s look at, in CrossFit, the eight common movement themes.”

Oskar Johed (28:40):
“Let’s look at midline stabilization.” Now we talked about that for an hour, looked at some videos, and then we said, “Hey, go out and apply that specifically. Look for that when you coach for the next few hours in the next few sessions and see if you can identify your eye and be better looking for midline stabilization.” Oddly enough, they get better at that, and then they keep doing that for every single thing. They read about the Zone because that’s a part of the test, so they want on the Zone diet for three days just to refine their eye and calibrate

this stuff to apply it, right? So, you would be a complete idiot if you did not apply the knowledge that someone is handing you. If you take the time to go through a certification, regardless of that’s weightlifting, gymnastics, or nutrition or mindset or whatever. So, no, the diploma doesn’t make any sense, but the pursuit of getting there, as long as there’s some kind of practical part to it, then I guarantee as a residual consequence of you earning that paper on the wall, you should be a better trainer.

Mike Warkentin (29:39):
Yeah. So, my position is very similar to yours. I think you need a bare minimum qualification that allows you to be insured, right? And you have to have some technical knowledge of some stuff. Like you can’t just be a fitness coach and have no clue about anything. You need to understand something. And in addition to that, you need to have a desire to improve your craft. Now, whatever that might be, because here’s the thing: If I get another credential—let’s say I decide I want to do a CSCS, and I’m going to invest all this time in studying for this exam and blah blah blah blah, but I’m still kind of a jerk and not very likable in front of my clients, it’s not going to make me a better coach because my clients are all going to leave because I’m an ass, right?

Mike Warkentin (30:13):
So here’s the thing, I would evaluate more credentials, but like this: Will this credential allow me to produce better results faster for my clients? If the answer is yes, get that credential. If the answer is no, you don’t need it because it’s just another thing on your business card. Coop’s written about this. He had this business card with all this alphabet soup on it. It didn’t make him a better coach, and he was very knowledgeable, maybe the best, most knowledgeable trainer in his entire town, but he said he was going broke, right? So, the idea is get the credentials that allow you to work, pursue improvement at all times, but that improvement may require credentials, like if you want to take an Olympic weightlifting course to be a specialty coach to help your clients qualify for the totals they want.

Mike Warkentin (30:55):
Yes. But you don’t have to get every single credential because you might be able to work within your gym system—like Oskar, you said Karl has set up. Working through that system will also allow you to become an excellent coach even without an additional letter after your name. So that’s, I think, a really, really key one. I want to ask you this, Oskar, as we close this out: We talked about focus. So, focus this for our listeners. What can a gym owner right now do to start improving a coaching product? And let’s keep it super simple. Help them figure out one thing that they could actionably do today at whatever level they’re at to start making their product better.

Oskar Johed (31:30):
Oh, one thing. It’s going to be—

Mike Warkentin (31:31):
I’ll give you a couple.

Oskar Johed (31:33):
Yeah, I’m trying to be as concise as possible. Like the number one thing—the number one rule I have is to never walk by someone without saying something, so the worst thing you can do is just ghost someone. Just not even acknowledging them.

Mike Warkentin (31:47):
Good lift.

Oskar Johed (31:48):
Slightly not—no, not even that. Slightly better. Slightly better is just like a good. At least you’re—and then slightly better than that is still like, “Good job, Mike.”

Mike Warkentin (31:59):
With the name. Yeah, the name, right?

Oskar Johed (32:01):
Still pretty bad, right? Then slightly better would be, “Hey Mike, you’re rounding your back.” Like at least I’m acknowledging that you’re doing something wrong. That’s still pretty low. They would not even meet the high bar. But then like, OK, maybe, “Mike, chest up,” right? And then acknowledge, high five, better job. So, make sure you never walk by someone, and if you move systematically—if you coach more than one person, if you just make sure you move systematically. Like if you walk—you start from the whiteboard, and you keep walking clockwise in the room, and if you allow yourself to never walk by someone, as a rule of thumb, never walk by someone without saying, honestly say, “Good job.” Once again, “Only good job in terms of good effort. I see no improvement, but good effort,” or “Actually, that is an improvement in your mechanics.” Then everyone at the end of the class would have—like the total number of “good jobs” would be equal, right? So never walk by someone without actually acknowledging something. And if you’re going to say something, at least make it productive.

Mike Warkentin (32:58):
So that’s a really good one. That could be something in your coaching progression at your gym. So now Oskar, talk to me like I’m a gym owner and I’ve just reached the level where my systems are acceptable now. The gym is running pretty well, there’s no raging fires burning, and we’ve determined—you are my mentor, and I’m the gym owner—we’ve determined that it’s time to look at your product right now. Your sales are good, your retention is great, your length of engagement, your average revenue per member, all these numbers are really good, but your coaching maybe could get a little better. As a gym owner—I’m your mentee—what would you tell me? What is the focus starting point for me to start making my product better now that my business is pretty good?

Oskar Johed (33:34):
Number one is obvious. I think one of the pieces obviously is define the process. Like at some point you need to write out your coach journey to have something you can show for people. It’s going to—you also need to have your expectations or your SOP. Like, these are the minimum requirements, maybe just minimum requirements total or just by experience level. Start writing out your standards or your expectations. You’ve got to make it easier because then you say, “Hey Mike, you’re a newbie coach. You’re here right now. Don’t worry about all the other stuff. Focus on A, B and C period. Now we’re going to start moving you towards D,E, F, and these are the things, but don’t worry about that eventually.” So that thing obviously is very important. I think that something that’s also very, very effective fast is record your sessions.

Oskar Johed (34:20):
We do that. We mic ourselves up with a wireless mic because it’s great if your trainer or head coach can evaluate all your stuff, but you can’t because they’re on the weekends where you’re spending time with your family. Just mic yourself up with a wireless mic, put up your cell phone in the corner of the room, and then watch it afterwards. And it is going to be huge. So, if you as a coach or the head coach or the owner would do that and just put that—because you’re still probably the best, one of the best trainers in your gym, and then you can evaluate yourself. Like, “Team, here are three things that I think I did pretty well. Here are, I think, pretty bad things. These are things that I probably should improve on.” Because then you show that you’re pretty open and vulnerable to your staff, but they’re still going to think you’re amazing.

Oskar Johed (35:04):
And then that is a very effective way to get your coaches to level up, to watch yourself. Because it’s very uncomfortable to watch yourself. And then after that you start getting feedback from someone who’s better than you are. It could be in this case that you get your more junior coaches to record themselves coaching a session, they evaluate themselves, and you say, “I agree. Keep working on A, B and C.” You can also watch you, but get outside help. Like I’ve offered help to—I can confidently say that I’ve offered to review people’s coaching, like record a session and email to me, and I will give you feedback in a week. And I’ve probably said that for seven years, and I’ve had 10 or so people take me up on the offer. So, I expect and hope that this one might be the one where people go, “You know, what?”

Mike Warkentin (35:53):
A wasted chance.

Oskar Johed (35:55):
Yes. So do it, and I’ll do it. And that’s a very fast tactical way to improve your things. To your point, I’m not going to belabor this, but everybody needs to get better at everything, and everybody needs to improve everything in their business. But if you just focus on one thing, your clients are going to be noticeably changed in the quality of the product. You’re going to tell, “Dude, that was awesome. Thank you very much.” And that brings—even that smile that you just gave me is enough for—I’m going to go, “Dude, that was pretty fun that I spent two minutes before the session started figuring out a progression for the double unders or something, and it worked.” Dude, think about all the other things that I can improve the product by just spending a tiny amount of time to improve it. So, you record your sessions, focus on one thing, and try to get feedback from someone else. And if I attend—if I’m at a gym, if you coach a class, I am not a coach, I have to give you three things you did well and one to two things that I think you should do better. So, feedback rich environment. And it’s hard to say, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s very important.

Mike Warkentin (37:01):
So if you have a structure at your gym right now for coaching, a thing that you could take from this podcast and start doing is record or have your coaches record a session and evaluate it. Even send it to Oskar if you want. That’s a really cool thing that you could do if you have that structure. If you are just at that early stage that I said where I’m at, “Oh, my gym is finally running well, and I want to start looking at coach development and improving my product,” what you’re going to do is you need to set up an evaluation system. What is good, and what is better, and how are we tracking it, right? It’s got to be meticulous, and it doesn’t have to be an endless thing. Chris Cooper: 10 things essential for a coach. Rate them out of 10. The second thing that I would recommend you do: Set up that career journey. Exactly what Oskar said.

Mike Warkentin (37:46):
What is the progression of a coach through your gym? And that doesn’t have to be a million items either. It’s like an apprentice intern program, whatever it is, and then low level, intermediate expert level, whatever those things are. If you do that, you’re going to be well on your way. And the final thing I’ll say, every stage you’re at, regular evaluations are essential. If you just set it and forget it, it’s going to burn down in the background while you’re doing other stuff. You must do this regularly. You, the owner, the CEO, do not have to do this yourself. Someone has to do it. You could certainly delegate this role to a general manager or a head coach at some point. That is very acceptable. But someone needs to be ensuring that your coaches and your product are great. You as the CEO can assign that. Oskar, does that make sense to you?

Oskar Johed (38:30):
Yeah. So, and finally, one thing that I’m just going to end on: The way we do our evaluations now is that if you are the coach and I’m evaluating you, and I could be, to your point, the head coach, or I could just be slightly more senior than you—honestly, I could actually be less senior than you because it’s written down what I should look for because we agreed—and I’m just going to hold you accountable to what we agreed you should focus on. So, what we do is you coach a class; I’m walking almost right by you. We call it the Band-Aid approach.

Mike Warkentin (39:00):
Yes, I like this one.

Oskar Johed (39:01):
I’m walking by you. It’s kind of awkward the first few times, but you get around to it. Because then if you say to a newbie coach, “Hey, start time. Finish on time. Use names,” right? If I walk by you, every time you say a name, “Mike, good job. You said Sarah’s name.” Awesome. Pat shoulders. If you walk by someone and say, “Good job,” I’m like, “Good job. Oh, good job Steven. Good job,” right Mike? So, then we can speed up that feedback loop so much faster, right? And then you can give instant feedback, and then it might be only for the warmup. And then after five minutes, I alleviate the pressure by walking away because I’ve already made that session better. And next time, we do slightly more. Maybe we extend my stay where I’m close to you for slightly longer. And now if you’re experienced, I will walk by you every single—I will walk right by you and give you instant feedback all the time. Because I can talk in one ear, and you can apply that right away in your sessions. It takes some time. But that’s something that’s extremely powerful. And if someone wants to begin to do that or send me a recording of your coaching, hit me up, and I can link you up with myself or Karl, and we’d be more than willing to share how we do things.

Mike Warkentin (40:06):
Where would they send that?

Oskar Johed (40:08):
So Oskar with a K, let’s do at twobrainbusiness.com is going to be the easiest one. So oskar@twobrainbusiness.com. I do think, I don’t know if Karl—send it to me. And I don’t know if it’s Karl or Karl S. So, I don’t really know. Send it to me, and I will forward it to him if needed.

Mike Warkentin (40:24):
That is a huge bonus for podcast listeners. If you want Oskar to take a look at your coaching. Oskar interrupted his vacation to talk to me this morning and his afternoon. So, I want to thank you for doing that, Oskar. This has been super great. You’ve given people a ton of stuff they can use to improve their product at their business. Thank you.

Oskar Johed (40:39):
Thank you, my friend.

Mike Warkentin (40:40):
Oskar Johed. My name is Mike Warkentin, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Thank you so much for watching or listening. Please hit “subscribe” wherever you are. And now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper (40:50):
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 Million-Dollar Gyms Don’t Have 10-Cent Coaching appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

When Is It Time to Improve Your Product?

I was the most-certified, most-credentialed, most-studied trainer in town.

I almost went broke anyway.

That’s when I realized that I was a 9-out-of-10 trainer and a 1-out-of-10 business owner. I didn’t know how to read a P&L and was too scared to look at my bank account every day. I was posting to a blog, which is why I ranked a 1 instead of a 0.

When we bring gym owners into Two-Brain, they’re usually focused on improving their product. They want to be good coaches, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But many also believe that improved coaching skills alone will cause business growth.

Unfortunately, we all eventually realize that being a good coach is necessary but insufficient for gym growth.

Being a coach is different than being a gym owner. Each role has a very different skill set.

This misguided focus on coaching is so common that it even has a name (“the technician’s curse,” if you want to go that deep).

Everything I’ve just said counters what trainers hear from their certifying bodies, such as CrossFit HQ. But CrossFit and similar companies are in the business of selling more certifications, so they have a heavy incentive to repeat the old myth that “being a better coach will make you more money.”

That just isn’t true.

I had to learn the truth the hard way, and my mission now is to kill myths like this that drive gyms out of business.

The horrible effects of the myth: Most gym owners I meet deliver good service but are starving to death, just a few bad months away from leaving the industry even though they’re changing lives.

Their coaching is an 8 or 9 on a scale of 10, but their business is a 2. They have more 8-out-of-10 coaches on staff, but they personally can’t read a P&L, and they don’t post media regularly or answer their phone. They struggle with rudimentary business skills.

With this imbalance in mind, most gym owners should maintain their level of coaching and pursue business growth, at least for now. They’re already good enough at coaching. They need to get better at business.

Richard Simmons died in mid-July at 76. He made more money from coaching fitness than anyone in history. He did not have a master’s degree, and he wasn’t CrossFit Level 4 certified.

You might not want to be like him, but you can’t just focus on your coaching skill or your gym won’t survive.

Also, it should be noted that you can’t improve both coaching and business skills at the same time—especially if you’re already overwhelmed by daily tasks.

At best, you have one hour to invest in your gym every day. Invest it in tasks that will measurably grow your business, not in earning your Level 3 or getting a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Those credentials will not grow your business or fend off starvation.

When the Time Is Right

So what happens when you finally fix your business—when you’re earning a great income, you’re providing meaningful employment for a coach or two, and your clients are getting great results?

In other words, what do you do when you’re running a 9-out-of-10 business and your coaching is still an 8?

That’s when it’s time to improve your product—not before.

Good news: Doing so is amazing and fun. In this series, I’m going to tell you how to do it.

In the next post, I’ll teach you how to evaluate your product. After that, I’ll explain how you can use four client avatars to tailor your coaching to specific types of members.

Finally, Mike Warkentin will talk to mentor and gym owner Oskar Johed about how he trains his coaches to focus on the basics and deliver amazing service to clients every day.

The post When Is It Time to Improve Your Product? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Figure Out Exactly How Many Clients You Need

It’s better to have more clients, right?

Maybe not.

When I started out as a gym owner, I thought “more” was the answer to every problem.

In fact, I rented an overly large space and believed I could grow to fill it.

I thought every new member would make that 6,000-square-foot space more affordable, and I figured it would be easy to fill classes with 12 people every hour on the hour.

More than a decade later, I only want about 60 clients.

Here’s why.

When I set my vague initial client target—”more”—I didn’t have a real plan or business model. I had a space and a love of fitness, and I thought lots of people would want to work out in my functional fitness playground. That was Plan A.

In the words of a character from the obscure Canadian cult film “FUBAR,” “Plan B is just to keep on given ‘er.”

Neither plan was solid.

People did want to train in my playground—one of only two similar spaces in a city of 700,000—and we grew. But that growth overwhelmed me and my systems, and we started bleeding members. That happened as other gyms like mine opened up, and our growth slowed.

I didn’t have a marketing plan of any kind. I thought I would attract clients by being a great coach. I know now that this is one of the greatest myths in the coaching business.

Suddenly my quest for “more clients” became a desperate play for “enough clients to break even”—and I wasn’t paying myself a dime at the time.

The situation sounds brutal, but the switch to a “breakeven mindset” was actually a positive: For the first time, I was thinking about the exact number of clients I needed to break even.

I was just a step away from determining exactly how many I needed to actually earn money from the gym.

And I was only two steps away from determining exactly how many I needed earn a good living from my business.

I should have done these calculations much, much sooner. The ideal time: well before I signed a lease and set my prices.

How Many Clients Do You Really Need?

Don’t make the same mistakes I did.

Get rid of the words “more” and “lots” when talking about your client count.

Instead, run your numbers, working backward from your ideal income as a gym owner.

Simple equation: If you want to earn about $100,000 and you have a profit margin of 33 percent, you need $300,000 in gross income. Divide that by 12, and you must gross $25,000 a month. If you have an average revenue per member of $167 (this is too low, by they way), you need 150 clients.

If your ARM is $205, you only need 122 clients to gross $300,000.

I’m skipping past staffing costs, rent expense and so on to keep it simple, but you can dig into full spreadsheets by requesting Chris Cooper’s guide “5 Ways to Make $100,000 From Your Gym” here. 

Plug in your numbers and make adjustments to see what’s possible for your business. It is 100 percent possible to make $100,000 a year with just 150 clients.

My point: I didn’t need “more” clients. I needed a certain number with a certain ARM—and a plan to get there.

Then, while earning a reasonable living, I needed to stay there until I was certain my systems and staff could handle calculated growth. Or I could have stayed at that number and worked on delivering more value to clients to boost ARM.

During the COVID lockdowns of 2020, my wife and I had time to revise our business model. We used this exact process of reverse engineering to determine we needed about 60 high-value clients to earn what we wanted if we got rid of the cavernous warehouse space.

We talked to our mentor, changed our model and reduced our space to handle only the clients we needed to earn what we wanted. That last part alone dramatically improved our financials: We were no longer paying rent on a 6,000-square-foot warehouse that sat mostly empty for 22 hours a day.

Because our member target was below 100 high-value clients, we were able to create simple but effective systems that didn’t involve lots of staff people and moving pieces.

With a hard target, everything was easier.

Run Your Numbers, Set Your Targets

If you haven’y figured out exactly how many clients you need, do it today.

You don’t have to sandbag it, either. Dream up your perfect day and put a price tag on it. Then plug your income requirements into your spreadsheet.

Calculate what it will take to provide that income. Then create the revenue.

Here’s the key part: You might come up with numbers and question marks. If you can’t see clear a path to earning what you want, speak to an expert. You don’t have to figure it out on your own.

A mentor can look at your numbers and say, “Here’s exactly how we make it happen.”

To find out more about that, book a free call here.

The post How to Figure Out Exactly How Many Clients You Need appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

He Had 270 Members But Earns More Now With Fewer Than 200!

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
A gym with a huge number of clients. It sounds great, right? Multiply clients by average revenue per member, keep growing steadily, yada, yada, yada, buy a yacht, retire like a crypto baron—except it almost never happens like that. My gym reached about 230 clients before we slid backward big time. And I’m not alone. This happens all the time when growth strains a gym’s systems. My guest today went from 100 members to about 270 members really fast, and now he’s comfortable in the 160 to 200 range. I’m going to work him for info on stable growth and to find out what the right number of clients is because more isn’t always better. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe” so you don’t miss a single episode because we’re committed to helping you run a better business on this show. Now, Kieran O’Dwyer, Two-Brain mentor. He runs Bathurst Strength and Conditioning and Orange City S&C. He’s in Australia. It is an ungodly hour down under right now, but he’s here to help you run a better business. Kieran, have you slept tonight?

Kieran O’Dwyer (00:58):
Just a little bit, Mike. Just a little bit.

Mike Warkentin (01:01):
And I’m making jokes. I know you just got off office hours where you’re helping Two-Brain business clients with marketing. I really appreciate you staying up a little bit extra before you start your official day. So, thank you very much for being here. We’re going to talk members, and I know you’ve got a great story, so I’m going to get right into it. You started small, got big really, really fast.[1]  What were you unprepared for when you almost tripled your client count?

Kieran O’Dwyer (01:22):
Yeah, man. So, the three things that we were mostly unprepared for were administration, member correspondence, retention, and love, 100%. And then also what a lot of people forget is general maintenance and upkeep of a facility when you have so many people coming through daily, the sheer hours needed for that, and then also replacing things. That was terrible when we got to 270.

Mike Warkentin (01:51):
Yep. And I’ll give you my basic example. Toilet paper—all of a sudden, you’re always out of toilet paper every single day, right? And it is just like a function of having more people in the business, but that’s just a very small example of what happens to the entire system, right? You talked about retention, like when your retention started to suffer with larger members, did you start to get really afraid?

Kieran O’Dwyer (02:11):
Well, maybe not, quickly enough, but yes.  You just think—because you get stuck in this cycle of more members, more people[2] —so you’re like, “Oh, I can just get more people. I’ll do the challenges. I’ll do the free membership giveaways.” All the things that I did to kind of get these, I would say, lower quality leads in the gym—before Two-Brain, obviously—you just kind of get in that cycle, and yeah, retention had a huge hit, and I didn’t realize until it was like on the way down really quickly, and to touch on it, that administration was a huge part of it because membership handling, enforcing policies, and in order to get people to that number mark—270 is huge—we had a very small onboarding, like two PTs.

Kieran O’Dwyer (03:04):
And we only enforced it like 50% of the time if they had experience, so even things like getting people on board with how the gym runs and having to talk to people and helping put memberships on hold—even those little things across the board, dude, it was a lot to keep up with, that’s for sure. Because we were focused on all that, we forgot the service, which is not just the coaching, but it’s the personalized attention. It’s making them feel like they have a home away from home, you know?

Mike Warkentin (03:38):
Yeah. We didn’t grow as fast as you did. What was the timelines there from 100 to 270? That was COVID, right?

Kieran O’Dwyer (03:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was, it was just under 100 during COVID, before COVID. And obviously all that happened. Yeah, just under 100. And then after COVID, because everybody started to like health again—that’s a whole other thing—yeah, because they started to get back on the bandwagon, they—and we put a lot of marketing measures in place, maybe not the same ones that I would enforce now, but we put a lot of that, so it was awesome. We just boomed and boomed and boomed. But there were a lot of discounts in there as well. A lot of little trial things, like discounts across the board: students, families, what else? Oh yeah, firefighters, all that kind of stuff and all that. We were getting heaps of members and paid-in-fulls with 20% discount grandfathering. We were getting heaps. And then the profit was like—where was that?

Mike Warkentin (04:41):
What profit?

Kieran O’Dwyer (04:43):
Yeah, man. Because especially the sheer amount of personal effort from the leader to handle that is quite insane for that many members in a year or two.

Mike Warkentin (04:55):
Yeah, we grew much slower than that, but it still was just getting bigger, getting bigger, getting bigger, and then all of a sudden, just cracks started happening, and then all of a sudden, everything disintegrated, and we didn’t get into a really bad spot for a little bit. It took us a while, but we lost—I think in one month we lost like 30 or something members, like a large number. And that was troublesome, and then we weren’t able to put them back. We bled out more members, and all of a sudden, we were losing about $5,000 a month, and I was panicked. And that’s when I started to talk to Chris Cooper and get into Two-Brain, because I knew I was in major, major trouble. And it was almost for the exact same reasons that happened to you. I didn’t grow as big as fast, but I still reached this number that was larger than my systems could handle, and I was in big trouble. Is it fair to say that your systems got completely overwhelmed when you hit 270?

Kieran O’Dwyer (05:37):
Not only fair, that’s 100% correct. Completely overwhelmed. And because most of the revenue was like above 90% group as well, there wasn’t a profit margin that you’d get from like PT where it’s very fixed because the amount of administration, like we talked about, to handle everything—I didn’t have a management layer either for that many people. I just had me and then my coaches.

Mike Warkentin (06:02):
So, you’ve got retention problems that are caused by this. You’ve got admin problem; you’re probably not billing people on time, missing things. You’ve got discounts; you said you’ve got maintenance and just general upkeep problems. You’ve got all this stuff going on, and you’re without a mentor at this point, you said. So how did this affect you personally? Like, were you scrambling for staff and patching leaks all day? Like, were you just up longer than you are now just freaking out?

Kieran O’Dwyer (06:24):
Yes. Yes. So, we were doing well. I was at the gym all the time. Because there weren’t systems and leadership especially, it was still on me to push. So, I’d be here in the morning and the afternoon just before I got with Peter, my Two-Brain mentor, and one of the things I remember happening was that we were in this cycle of: Our classes were filling out, so we needed more equipment, right? And we had two assault bikes break because if you have like 30 seconds max effort on an assault bike for eight classes a day, man, that just tears them apart. So, we’d have the handles all loose, we’d have the pedals fall off, and we got stuck in this cycle where we’d be like, “Our answer is just to buy more, and buy more assault bikes so we can have more classes,” or stuff like that. But because there wasn’t money in the account for that, we’re like, “Nah, there’s something wrong.”

Mike Warkentin (07:19):
So were you stressed?

Kieran O’Dwyer (07:20):
Yeah, totally. 100%. Because it was also—to take a quick step back, because we didn’t have a slower onboarding process or a slower personal training process where you control the flow, we didn’t have very strong sales. It was just like: Ring them, get them in quickly as you can at all times of the day no matter what. That was it. And because we didn’t have those processes, it was extremely reactive. And because we knew that people were going to leave like that because there was no guarantee that they would stay, we would then panic, and we would be doing stuff—like I was doing stuff on a Sunday and a Saturday because it was so important that I get them in to maintain this number. That was everything. So, I remember doing stuff on a Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. anyways just talking to them, like it wasn’t even like at NSI; it was just like, “Oh, hey, I’m free on Saturday. Can we just talk about your memberships?” Or a Sunday. Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (08:17):
This is so common. And back in the day when I started running a gym in 2011 kind of thing, the big plan was: Get a ton of members, run a big gym, fill your group classes, make a bunch of money, and almost no one did it. There were a very few people who did it, and most of them got very frazzled; a lot of other people slid backward. There’s very few that are running great big gyms. And Sara Snellman, one of our mentors, she runs a model like this. She’s got 341 clients over in Switzerland. Excellent retention. She loses 10 per month. But this is a like—she’s a unicorn. I wrote an article about this—like, she doesn’t exist very often in the world. This model is mostly unsustainable, and and I are proof of that, but for people who are out there, just know that chasing more clients for the sake of more clients is not the best plan because your systems are going to implode unless you are excellent with systems, and most people aren’t, especially business systems because you don’t know how to build them.

Mike Warkentin (09:13):
So here’s the thing: Chris Cooper, I talked to him the other week, and he said to me, “No one scales retention as they grow.” So, you bought more equipment; you scaled up your equipment. I hired more coaches; I scaled up my coaching. I never once scaled up my retention plan, and it cost me, and like you said, I didn’t realize until it was too late, and I was bleeding people, and I was losing $5,000 a month. So, do you have any retention numbers from this period? Like can you talk to me at all about retention and length of engagement or what happened when you grew that fast?

Kieran O’Dwyer (09:38):
Yeah, 100%. Real quick, is the reason why maybe some of the European gyms have those bigger numbers—I think Coop mentioned this—is because CrossFit and the group training is still essentially booming over there?

Mike Warkentin (09:52):
Yeah. So that’s the early adopter thing. And Chris has talked about that. And that’s kind of going in a wave where, you know, that happened. Like when I grew like this, I was one of two gyms in a city of 700,000. So, you went to that one, or you went to mine. I was shooting fish in a barrel, and I survived solely because there were two of us. That doesn’t happen anymore in North America. In Europe, that’s still kind of happening, and there are some—I know of some big European gyms with lots of members that have lower average revenue per member. So, Sara, I don’t think is in that situation, but that is a common thing too, where some European gyms charge less, than—like they’re not charging say $200, $300. It’s less than that. So that sometimes explains it too. But there’s the 150 model that we talk about where you can make $100,000 with 150 clients. We’re going to get to that whole thing. But I think you’re exactly right. There is some early adopter stuff still happening in parts of Europe where you can get away with some stuff. And again, Sara’s a very special example that doesn’t show what’s possible—well, she shows what’s possible, but not what’s common.

Kieran O’Dwyer (10:46):
Yeah. And I would say here in Australia, we are past that early adopter phase. Even if the industry with all the group gyms popping up like the Yard gym and F45 are letting you believe otherwise, we’re definitely fast pass that. And I felt it, and I have here some numbers. There was like a—this is almost embarrassing considering I’m a mentor, but hey, we all have to learn from our mistakes.

Mike Warkentin (11:09):
Well, you learned and you got, you’re a mentor because you learned, right?

Kieran O’Dwyer (11:12):
Oh man. So, there was a four-month period where there was one month, and we were on the up, right? So even though we’d be losing a fair bit, because we were getting more in, I just thought we were bulletproof, but there was one month where we gained 11 and lost 30, so that’s a net of what, -19?[3]  The next month was dead even. And I actually remember being like, “Oh, we’re OK. It’s dead even. That’s fine.”

Mike Warkentin (11:37):
Hold on, dead even still costs you all that intake and marketing though, right? All that time.

Kieran O’Dwyer (11:41):
One hundred percent, but I thought that it was OK. I just thought that when it got hotter, we could get more in. But then the next three months—and these were during good months in Australia, like the beginning of the year—gain 15, lost 22, net of -7; gain 14, lost 29, which is a net of -15.[4]  That’s when I knew that our goal of 300 to 400 members was not going to—I actually forgot to mention that we moved into this gym, which is bigger than our last gym because we wanted to get up to the big numbers. We did the whole moving thing, and we almost tripled our rent for that decision.

Mike Warkentin (12:29):
Oh, so you’ve got pressure; you’ve got financial pressure. Now you’re thinking, “I need more members to pay the bills.” And I got into the same thing where I rented a space that was larger than I needed with the anticipation of filling it. “If you build it, they will come.” Right? It’s nonsense. Doesn’t work. I never filled it except for my 5 p.m. class or maybe my noon class; the rest of the time it was mostly vacant. I was losing money, and I’m like, “I need more members to get more revenue to pay for this space that’s too big, and I have too much equipment and all this other stuff.” I did the same as you. I bought SkiErgs. My mistake was SkiErgs, yours was Air Bikes. I bought too many of those. They’re kind of cool. I still like them, but like they’re a great product, but I didn’t need them at the time. I needed better systems, right?

Kieran O’Dwyer (13:05):
Yes.

Mike Warkentin (13:06):
So, those are real retention numbers where you’re bleeding clients out, and you’re working super hard to acquire more.[5]  You’re wasting tons of sales and marketing time getting these people in. They’re not staying very long, and you’re losing more than you’re getting. So, you’re pouring people into a leaky bucket at the same time as you’ve got this massively increased lease and all the stress; your systems are falling apart, nothing’s going right. So, let’s talk about the transition. You have fewer clients now, so how did you determine your ideal number, and did you have to take a financial hit when you scaled back? Because I think you’ve got some interesting insight here.

Kieran O’Dwyer (13:37):
Yeah. So, to break the glass, actually no, in terms of financial, and actually net owner benefit improved as we scaled back.

Mike Warkentin (13:44):
We’re going to have to dig into that.

Kieran O’Dwyer (13:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The way we transitioned was through Two-Brain—so, I came to Two-Brain when we were at the height of our member numbers, and my goal was still just to keep going. And I just thought that Peter would just somehow fit more people in. Peter, my mentor, we kind of turned it around. We worked on things like our onboarding. We made it longer. Yeah. We introduced more specialty projects. We pretty much really focused on our current members, but not just by giving them love, like more community, more events, more equipment. It was more like introducing things like goal reviews and rewarding them for their milestones. It was things like having a longer onboarding process, which took some convincing, I would say. And now I spend all my time convincing people about the longer onboarding.

Kieran O’Dwyer (14:41):
And then it was having things like hybrid memberships, PT, and then options—and this blew my mind—options for current members to spend more money with us. Like, whoa, why would we want that? Because I had that same CrossFit mentality, even though we’re not a CrossFit gym, we brought up in it that we’re essentially a public service. Like we’re supposed to be giving the cheapest possible membership, right? And work your ass off to make the world a fitter place. And yeah. So, when we transitioned, we used a thing called annual planning, which is essentially you decide what you need to get to your net owner benefit, right? What you need in terms of your specialty projects, the onboarding you need, the adult members, the youth members, and then you kind of work backwards. And when Peter did that with me, an early version of that, that really helped me say that I could achieve what I wanted without just getting more.

Mike Warkentin (15:38):
Aha. So it sounds like you built business systems; you’ve put in place all the stuff that you should have put in place and I should have put in place when I started my gym, and you backfilled a bunch of stuff and then—should have done this first as well—figured out, “What do I need to earn to have a life that I want that makes me fulfilled and makes me want to keep getting up and coaching people and running a gym?” You got that number. And then you start chipping back and saying, “How much do I need to charge how many clients to earn that?” And if you do that, all of a sudden, it’s not necessarily 500; it starts to look more like 150 clients at $205 with a retention of maybe 13 months, and then I can earn $100,000, and then if I want to go further, I can start playing with those numbers and doing that. But it doesn’t have to be 300, right? Is that the process for you?

Kieran O’Dwyer (16:24):
Yeah, 100%. And it is also because once you start to diversify into other things, especially personal training and especially specialty projects, it’s more expensive obviously. Like you start to understand that your group model is your budget option. It’s for people who can’t be with you one-on-one and that actually some people want to be with you one-on-one, and they need you to. So, when Coop said that in his podcast, and Peter obviously hammered into me after calls, the personal training side of our gym increased, and that actually meant that because there was a profit margin on that, a very clear one that we talk about in Two-Brain, I was able to then use that in my net owner benefit. And because the PTs were more expensive for the client—not in a bad way, but obviously just in a more value way—our staff pay went up too. So, it was just like—it was like a win. And then they started to get more ownership, and once they got more ownership of the clients, because of the more one-on-one interaction and their own specialty project, they started wanting to lead certain parts of the gym, which led me to having a management layer. So, it was like this nice little evolution.

Mike Warkentin (17:34):
So, fewer high value clients after years, after saying, “I’ve got to get more, more, more, more, more,” and being very good at it—because you’re an expert at marketing and now you teach Two-Brain clients how to do that—you could get more clients, but you’re bleeding them out. You start getting fewer high-value clients and retaining them longer. Your net owner benefit, what you earn, goes up. Your staff members start earning more. You have more space and time to put systems in place without the fires, actually build some things, check on stuff, be a CEO rather than a firefighter running around putting out blazes, and all of a sudden, you’ve got a real business that’s running properly. Now it’s counterintuitive, right? Like would you have thought this was possible in the early days when you’re like, “I need 350 members?”

Kieran O’Dwyer (18:13):
No, no. I was always very skeptical. I was just chasing the one thing, which was just more members. The industry really shoves it down your throat.

Mike Warkentin (18:21):
More group members, right?

Kieran O’Dwyer (18:22):
More group. Sorry, the answer was—yeah, I thought the answer was more group members because smaller time, just fit more people in, and it makes sense.

Mike Warkentin (18:31):
Yeah. Classes of 20 sound great.

Kieran O’Dwyer (18:33):
Yeah. But it really lowers the value for the individual in those classes. So, no wonder you can have 200, 250 paying like 50 bucks a week. We were charging 51 per week—I don’t know what that is in monthly. That’s like four times, 4.3. Anyways, and then we had students on as low as $42 a week. We removed the students—and this is where the increased staff pay and that benefit also comes in—we remove the students slowly, and then we slowly increased our membership pay. And for new members at the moment, for our group, it’s $69 per week. A slow purposeful transition, and it’s because our coaches got so much better at the same time because they could focus on a few less people in a class, like 12 people as opposed to 27. And if you’ve got 27 people in a class, you’re a body pump instructor. You’re just, “Woo!”

Mike Warkentin (19:33):
That’s exactly what you are. It sounds to me like—I didn’t do the exact math in my head here, but it sounds like your ARM almost doubled. Am I right on that?

Kieran O’Dwyer (19:41):
Well, yeah, yeah. Especially because we—actually, if we were to look at the numbers, it probably did almost double if we were to include the PT on top of that as well. And then the onboarding, and then we actually did nutrition for a while when I had a coach who was nutrition. So, yes. Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (19:56):
So, and you run your own numbers, listeners, in your head, but if you doubled your average revenue per member, how many clients do you need to hit your number? It’s way, way less. And that doesn’t mean you can’t serve a lot of people, but no one is served if you get so frazzled that your gym implodes and you want out. And that literally happened to me; Kieran was close; many others were out there where it’s just—it’s not fun anymore, and you just feel like you want to go, and no one wins when that happens. Serving a small number of people and earning a good living is not a greedy thing to do. It’s actually a pretty great thing to do because you give better service and help a smaller number of clients get faster results.

Mike Warkentin (20:32):
I will qualify this by saying that if you are a gym owner and your business model does involve a large number of clients, a Two-Brain mentor can help you figure out exactly how to do that.[6]  And it’s going to be based on numbers. It’s not going to be, “I want 500 because.” It’s going to be exactly the process that Kieran talked about, right? You’re going to work through it and figure out, “Why do I want 500 members? What systems do I need to do to make that happen?” And our leaderboard recently came out, and the top Two-Brain gym had 941 members. We can serve big gyms. And we’re not saying you can’t, but you should start small and target a small number first, get your systems in place and then grow on purpose, steadily, without losing all your clients. Because Kieran and I did it the opposite. It is not the right way to go. I’ll ask you this: When you—and I know the answer; I’m going to ask you to tell the story because it’ll be fun for people to hear—what happened to your retention and your stress levels as a person when you dialed back your client count?[7] 

Kieran O’Dwyer (21:24):
Yeah. So, retention improved significantly,[8]  100%. Yeah, like of course it does. And then also the quality of the people in the gym improved. Not because we had people on lower rates or anything like that, or just these people that weren’t onboarded properly were bad people. It’s just they weren’t kind of brought in the right way, so they weren’t up to speed with our processes; they weren’t up to speed with our values. They didn’t really know the coaches, so they kind of—and it was just like a shit show to be honest.

Mike Warkentin (21:54):
Well, you didn’t know their goals either. You weren’t doing goal review sessions; you had no clue what they wanted. You couldn’t help them as much.

Kieran O’Dwyer (22:00):
Yeah, like of course we thought we were doing a consult, but it was just like a, “Hey, what are your goals? Oh yeah, you’re free to jump in the next class.”

Mike Warkentin (22:06):
Yeah, group classes. Go Fran, go.

Kieran O’Dwyer (22:08):
Yeah, 100%. So, our retention improved a lot, especially as people started to bond closer with more people around them than they used to as well. Familiarity. My stress definitely went down when I didn’t have to be here as much. [9] A lot. And I also didn’t have as many people to manage, and especially because since we didn’t have that management layer, I thought that everybody’s—and we weren’t as good a coaches, and we didn’t have the systems, especially the onboarding, which I’ve got to say really help—because we didn’t have that, I could feel that people’s experience were to do with how much energy was in the class and then their relationship with me, not the coaches, because the coaches were just almost like herding cattle. They were still coaching, but they were really just helping. So, they weren’t making the bonds. And then we moved down; they developed more one-on-one bonds with people. It was just awesome. It was just much better.

Mike Warkentin (23:08):
So retention is much better. Length of engagement is increasing. And keep in mind listeners, this is length of engagement at a higher average revenue per member per month, meaning every month that these people stay, they’re paying—I think close to 300 bucks or something like that. If your ARM—if had the math right, it’s in that range. That’s huge. Length of engagement, you stretch out a great ARM over a great LEG, and all of a sudden, your lifetime value starts looking very good, and you’ve got great profit margins. Two-Brain targets 33%. All of a sudden, you’re making a great living, and you’re not stressed, and your hair hasn’t falling out. So, did your stress levels bleed off quite a bit at this point?

Kieran O’Dwyer (23:43):
Well, yeah, yeah. That’s why I’m able to be a mentor now because I was able to open up my time, and especially when the staff took more ownership because they had more connection with not just the community, but with the individuals. That’s when shit—sorry, my language. That’s when it all turned around, and it was, yeah, it was great.

Mike Warkentin (24:03):
Alright, listeners, I’m going to give you a couple things to do, and then I’m going to ask Kieran for some advice. First thing, Two-Brain has a guide: “How to Make $100,000 a Year With 150 Clients.” I’m going to put a link in the show notes. You can go into the Gym Owners United Group, and you can ask for that guide. And Chris Cooper will lay out a ton of models, five of them to be exact, that will show you exactly how to make a really good living with a certain number of clients. There are spreadsheets in there. You can then work your own numbers and figure out, “What do I need to earn? How many clients do I need to do it?” all that other kind of stuff. Start doing that process. It’s critical that you do that. And if you don’t know how to do it, my second thing is book a call; talk to a Two-Brain mentor.

Mike Warkentin (24:45):
They’ll tell you how they can help put you on this path. You might even end up working with Kieran. That’s the plan. You can start with a simple resource, figure out what you need to do, go further faster by clicking that “book a call” link and figuring out how your business can scale up. Now I want to ask you this, Kieran, your advice. So, you’ve got a gym owner out there who’s listening right now, has 100 to 150 clients and thinks, has dreams of “get going bigger.” What do you tell that client? How do they do it properly?

Kieran O’Dwyer (25:15):
Firstly, they need to decide clearly on what they want as a person, number one. So, it’s like when they talk to their clients who sit with them for a consult or an NSI or just a goal setting session, that the person will say, “I want to lose 10 kilos in one month and be skinny,” and then you find out that they really just want to feel better. They want to have more energy for their kids. So, in this case, it’s the same idea. What do you want? Do you want more members because you want to just have more, or do you want more profit and to impact more people personally? And once you realize that, then you can kind of put things in place, especially with us in Two-Brain with annual planning and Stage 1, Stage 2, you figure out how you actually get to the profit and impact more people without just shoving more on your plate as you develop more systems. That’s essentially what we do. We get very clear on the numbers first, get clear on what you actually want, and then you open up options for yourself.

Mike Warkentin (26:14):
When you work with clients and you’ve seen them follow this plan to get to 150 members at their gym, ARM of about 205, what does that gym look like? Does it look like the hair on fire stuff that you and I were doing? Or what does that gym look like when it’s set up properly from the start?

Kieran O’Dwyer (26:31):
Oh, if I was sitting in my chair, it’s literally, it’d be like the gym owner sits back, and they’re just more relaxed. I literally have seen something like this within the last couple of weeks where they’re getting more people in their onboarding, right? So, in the higher value, which is a higher amount to start with. And then they’re upselling people into their weekend class or whatever, and then you just see them kind of sit back, and they just feel more relaxed. That’s kind of what happens. And it’s just good. It’s like a feeling, and it’s really good to see. And then they’re not as focused on, “Hey, I want to get to 170 or 200,” because again, once you get above 150, like Chris has talked about, the amount of then staff and things you need in place to even manage that is hectic. Yeah. At 150, they just sit more relaxed and seem better, essentially.

Mike Warkentin (27:24):
It’s a position of power. When you get to that 150 with a good ARM and a good length of engagement, you can sit there and then say, “What do I want to do next?” And that’s a great position to be in because you could make a great living. You could open a second location, you could open some other business, you could take more time off, you could hire people—there’s all sorts of options. You could scale up with a plan. You have tons of options because things aren’t going crazy. And I’ve seen this. What generally happens from my perspective is I see gym owners in Growth get to this level, all of a sudden, they’ve got a little bit extra time and they’ve got a little bit extra money, and they start figuring out what they want to do next. And inevitably, they join our Tinker group for elite level gym owners, and they start doing some really cool stuff like opening a whiskey distillery or starting a sports beverage company or getting into crypto or getting into Airbnbs or any other kind of things. Some of them just run even better gyms and replicate them. There’s all sorts of options, but you don’t have those options when the place is on fire. So, I love it, Kieran. You said right now—what are you looking at for your ideal member count right now? What are you thinking right now is perfect for your gym?

Kieran O’Dwyer (28:27):
For our gym, we’ve mapped out how we can maintain because we’re losing just—we have coaches who are moving across the country, and for those who are in North America, Australia is absolutely massive.

Mike Warkentin (28:38):
It’s large.

Kieran O’Dwyer (28:39):
With very little people in comparison to how big it is, so we have two coaches who are leaving, and they’re like almost full time. So, obviously we’re just planning for what it would look like at legit 150. We’re still above that right now, but we’re planning, in case we need to, what 150 would look like, and it looks good.

Mike Warkentin (29:00):
And are you going to be in the poor house because of that?

Kieran O’Dwyer (29:03):
The poor—no, no. No, I would not be in the poorhouse.

Mike Warkentin (29:06):
So, that’s the thing guys. Listeners, if you take one thing away from the show, it’s this: Target a small number of high value clients and work on holding them for a long time.[10]  The numbers, I’ll give you: 150 clients, $205 average revenue, 13-month length of engagement. If you get to those numbers, you can pay yourself $100,000 a year. We have spreadsheets and models that prove it. Then you can do whatever you want. A mentor can help you grow, do other stuff, or just live the high life. Whatever you want, but target that first and then figure it out with a plan. Kieran, what do you think of that? Sound like a solid plan?

Kieran O’Dwyer (29:39):
Yeah, it sounds like the exact thing that I work on daily with people that works. It’s awesome.

Mike Warkentin (29:44):
Thank you so much for sharing your story. I appreciate it.

Kieran O’Dwyer (29:47):
Thanks Mike. Thanks.

Mike Warkentin (29:48):
This has been “Run a Profitable Gym.” My name is Mike Warkentin. Please subscribe so you don’t miss a show. And now I’m going to encourage you to go to Gym Owners United and get that guide. We’re looking—the link will be in the show notes. Get that guide, and if you want to go further faster, book a call. And now here is a final message from Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper.

Chris Cooper (30:05):
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 He Had 270 Members But Earns More Now With Fewer Than 200! appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

3 Elements of Good Gyms (Missing Any of Them?)

Check out this diagram:

You’ll note that client count is a big deal in a gym—but it’s not enough to ensure success on its own.  You need great average revenue per member (ARM) and length of engagement (LEG), too.

I’ll show you what’s possible when it comes to client counts in coaching gyms, then I’ll dig into the three elements of a good gym.

Here’s our Top 10 leaderboard for clients in May 2024:

And here’s how ARM, LEG and client counts combine to support a strong business.

ARM (average revenue per member per month) is a measure of client value. Your clients must pay enough to make your gym profitable. If you have 300 clients with low ARM, that means you’re trying to compete on price—and losing to brands like F45, Nike, Revel and the next gym to offer an $89-a-month deal for group classes.

LEG (length of engagement) is a measure of client retention. Your clients must stick around long enough to make meaningful improvements and change their lives. If you have 300 clients in big groups, that can mean more than just high churn: Clients in big groups often don’t stick around long enough to see impressive results, make big changes or refer their friends.

Clients is a measure of headcount. Even if you have high ARM and LEG numbers, you can’t make a living off one client. If you have too few clients, your business is fragile: One family moves away and you’re in serious trouble. This is the challenge faced by many so-called “high ticket” programs: They sell a client a $2,000 program once, and then the client leaves. Uh oh.

To have a good business, you must have strong metrics in all three areas. According to our data—the best in the industry, by far—the baseline for a good business is 150 clients at $205 ARM and 13-month LEG.

That’s still not ideal, but it’s enough to pay you $100,000 per year, ensure you work fewer than 45 hours per week, and allow you to pay another full-time coach and half-time helper.

After you achieve $205 ARM and 13-month LEG with 150 clients, you can then add more members—but keep working to extend your LEG and offer more value to drive up ARM.

In the leaderboard above, take a look at the number of clients who train at our No. 10 gym. It’s 341. I can tell you that gym’s ARM is well above $225, and Two-Brain clients hold members for an average of 20.7 months (the industry average is 7.8).

That means the gym takes in far more than $75,000 a month, and each client is worth about $5,000.

That’s a perfect example of this concept in the real world:

I know you want to be a great gym owner—so are you missing any of these elements?

If so, we can help.

The post 3 Elements of Good Gyms (Missing Any of Them?) appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Want Lots of Clients? Focus on Retention!

How do some gyms acquire a lot of clients?

By holding onto their members for a long time.

I’m not brushing aside sales and marketing.

You need to sell if you want 500 members.

But holding clients is more important.

Do the quick math: If a gym with 500 members loses 5 percent of its clients every month, that’s 25 people who need to be replaced.

You must add about one member per day just to stay at 500.

That’s tough. Making a sale a day requires a very greasy funnel that pushes a huge number of leads into free consultations where sales reps close at a high rate.

Systems like this can be built, but they’re uncommon. And they eat up money and time. 

So if you want to get a lot of clients, you’d be better off scaling retention first so you can limit churn, reduce marketing costs and spend less time in the sales office. Then slowly but surely add a few clients above replacement every month, always ensuring that your growth doesn’t overwhelm your systems and spike churn.

Example: One of our Top 10 gyms for client count only loses 10 members a month from a roster of 341.

Replacing 10 people in a month is very doable. Replacing 10 and adding two is also doable. Replacing 25 and adding five is less doable.

(This gym, by the way, has a client cap. The owner replaces five departing clients with people from its waiting list. The other five are replaced with former clients who are returning. The gym has marketing costs of $0!)

Before I give you real quotes from the Two-Brain gym owners with the most clients, I’ll show you the leaderboard:

Quotes From the Leaders

Here’s what the leaders had to say—you’ll note that a lot of quotes focus on retention, sales and value:

Consistency/retention: “We have been around this number for 12 months. It is a low point, being winter in Australia.”

Consistency/retention: “The membership is very stable with a low churn rate. It’s continually building.”

Sales: We attribute the number to “sales and marketing.”

Specialty programs: “While our general-population classes form the bulk of our membership, we also offer highly attended, specialized programs such as legends (for those over 60), mom-fit (postnatal fitness), and our youth program. The legends classes run every weekday, with 18-25 participants daily. The mom-fit classes are held three times a week, with 20-25 mothers attending, and our youth program is extremely popular as well.”

Focus and operating at scale: “Our specialization is in ‘group training,’ and we strive to be the best at it. We offer 30-, 45- and 60-minute classes throughout the day, starting as early as 5:25 a.m. and running right through until 8:30 p.m. We have busy classes, with some peak times seeing up to 80 participants in a class—this would be in our more bootcamp-style class. But in our more traditional strength-and-conditioning classes we can still have 30-plus attending.”

Client experience: “I’ve incorporated many principles from professional sports into our gym operations to make them appealing to the general public.”

Client experience despite size: “We are focusing a lot on improving the service and coaching experience at our gym.”

Client experience despite size: “Our first rule is that our members need to leave the box with a bigger smile than when they came. Next to that is that we put a big effort in remembering our members by name.”

Find and Keep Clients for Years!

Retention, sales and value—those elements are critical in gyms with lots of clients and gyms with fewer clients.

To be successful in the coaching business, you need to retain clients for a long time. And you must be able to find and onboard new clients.

It’s much easier to acquire and master these skills when the stakes are lower. That’s why I advise gym owners to first target 150 clients with an average revenue per member of $205.

That formula can pay an owner $100,000 a year while they lock in the systems required to go further—if they want to.

The post Want Lots of Clients? Focus on Retention! appeared first on Two-Brain Business.