Chris Cooper's Blog, page 37

PT & Small Groups Drive Huge Average Revenue Per Member

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Average revenue per member. This is one of my favorite topics because this number is a force multiplier in gyms. This show is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe” wherever you’re watching or listening. Today we’re talking with an ARM leader who’s going to explain how he got on Two-Brain’s Top 10 leaderboard for ARM, which runs from $508 to $1,203. That’s not a mistake. I didn’t read that wrong. That number is actually correct in the number one spot. Everyone in our top 10 was over $500, and someone was over 1,000. So, my guest today, Yoni Leviton; he runs 3 Seasons Personal Training in Toronto, Canada. Yoni, welcome. How are you?

Yoni Levitan (00:38):
I’m good, thanks.

Mike Warkentin (00:39):
I’m excited to talk to you about this one. Like I said, this is one of my favorite topics in gyms because this number, you multiply it by your members, multiply it by length of engagement, all of a sudden, you start getting big numbers. So, talk to me a little bit about your number. How did you get on this leaderboard? Like how has your ARM number changed over time, and has it always been this high?

Yoni Levitan (00:56):
Well, so, I think the first thing to note is that we just do personal training. So, we’ve never had open gym, we’ve never done classes, and so we’ve just had two services, which are one-on-one personal training and the small group personal training with up to three or four people at a time. And, at different times, we’ve also offered fascial stretch therapy, which I guess we can get into a little bit. That’s one of the ways you can increase your ARM.

Mike Warkentin (01:31):
Very specific services, right? So, you’re not doing a ton of things. You’re doing very specific things.

Yoni Levitan (01:36):
I guess that’s fair to say.

Mike Warkentin (01:39):
OK, I like it. A lot of people, I made the mistake of doing the other thing. I did a whole bunch of stuff. I tried to have every program under the sun, and I had two people in each one, and it was not a good idea. But the more I talk to gym owners, the more I find that those focuses on very specific things seem to link up with ARM. So, tell me about your number. Has it grown over time? Did it start low? Has it always been high? What have you done?

Yoni Levitan (02:02):
It’s always been relatively high. I guess, a couple things that have helped it go up over time: one is, I’m not sure when we made this decision, but let’s say around two years ago I decided we would stop offering one time a week training. I’ve never had a client in my career reach their goals training one time a week, and even if you offer to give people homework, it just doesn’t seem to happen. And the pattern that was happening again and again is someone, whether it was because of time or budget, it wasn’t always because of budget that people wanted to train once a week, you miss a week because you’re away, and then you get sick, and then your kid gets sick, and then meanwhile you’ve been to the gym twice in six weeks.

Yoni Levitan (02:59):
And then you come in and maybe you tweak something, or you’ve been sedentary at home, and then, we have to start back from square one. So not only are you not treading water, there inevitably reaches a point where someone actually takes a step back because they’re moving their body so little. And so, the other thing that kind of—I don’t know, inspired is not the right word—the other context behind that is that the personal training studio I worked at before I started 3 Seasons, there was, broadly speaking, two buckets of clients. And so, let’s say I had—so there were too many trainers—I had maybe 80 hours a month, but 40 of those hours would come from clients who came three times a week and were very consistent.

Yoni Levitan (03:51):
And 40 of those hours would come from a rotating cast of clients who—you know, Joe might come 10 times this month, but three times the next month and six times, and then I don’t see him for two months, and then five times per month and then eight times. And same thing. Cindy would come eight times this month, eight times the next month, and then, I’d see them three times in a two-month span, and so those clients were at best treading water. And so, it might have been good for the business because there were more hours, like there was more cash flow for the owners, but as a trainer I could be making more money doing something else. I’m doing this because I want to help people improve their quality of life, get back to the activities that they love, avoid surgery, and be able to keep up with their kids or their grandkids.

Yoni Levitan (04:47):
And, so to me, helping someone tread water wasn’t meaningful, and it wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t interesting. And so, now that I’m the boss, I kind of get to decide who I want to work with. And I want to work with people who are not just interested in treading water, but people who are motivated enough and committed enough that they want to make long-term meaningful progress. And part of that means you might have a really busy stressful month where we hike back dramatically, right? Like, if you can normally bench press 135 for 10, maybe that month you’re doing 135 for five. But that way at least you’re taking a step to the side instead of taking a step back by doing something and at least keeping what you have.

Mike Warkentin (05:37):
You provided a really great example. We’ve talked before about raising ARM, and one ways you can do it is by removing your lowest membership tier. And someone could say, “Well, doesn’t that just cut out a bunch of people?” And the answer is, “Maybe,” but you just said that if you do that, you’re going to end up focusing to a greater degree on the people who you can help more. And that’s the really important part because if you get clients results, they’re going to want to stay, they’re going to want to pay more, they’re going to see the value in your training. And I had the exact same problem in my gym where I had a one time a week membership, and I think it was like $55 or something at the time. And I created it just in case people couldn’t afford the other options.

Mike Warkentin (06:15):
But here’s what happened, exactly like you said, every single time the one-time-a-weekers would miss a couple of classes, they’d fall off the wagon, and I would never see them again. Almost no one renewed that membership, and it was just like the kiss of death. When I stopped offering it. I got better retention, I got better results, and my ARM went up. So, you just gave me a great example of, if you’re thinking about it out there, guys, if you have a membership option that is just not linked to results, isn’t the greatest thing for your clients, consider getting rid of it and your ARM will probably go up. So that’s a really interesting one. Tell me a bit about your business. You mentioned a few things about what you do. How long have you been around; how much space do you have? How many staff members? Give me the 411, and what do you do at your space?

Yoni Levitan (06:53):
So, we’ve been training people out of the facility for four years. Started training people in the parking lot four years ago because of lockdown. So, we help people play the sport they love at the level they desire as long as they want. There’s a little bit less of like teenagers who want NCAA scholarships or pro athletes or anything like that and more—like one of our clients who I use as our male client avatar, he’s in his early forties, he works in finance. He works a demanding stressful job, and he basically cares about three things in his life. So, he cares about his wife and kids. He’s very devoted to his family. He cares about his career, and he loves skiing. And even though he is in his early forties, late thirties when he started—so August will be four years since he started training here—his goal is to take his future grandchildren on a ski trip to celebrate his 80th birthday.

Yoni Levitan (07:54):
So when I changed my mind about something, so this was maybe two and a half years ago, I was convinced by someone else that if you had certain mobility restrictions that pounding away at like barbell back squats and dead deadlifts wasn’t necessarily the best idea. And so, we tried—so we worked on his mobility for a while, more unilateral stuff, a ton of split squats, and then we went back to back squats. And without me even having to do anything, his squat was pretty much perfect. And he felt way better; his back felt much better. And so, trying to focus on people who have kind of an eye toward longevity, and they have a physical hobby that they really enjoy. So, usually it’s like skiing or golf or tennis, but it could even be gardening or something like that.

Mike Warkentin (08:52):
Yeah. So, people who want to perform at a level, however, whatever level that is in the sport that they enjoy, but they’re also family and busy people. So, like you said, not tailoring necessarily to athletes, but athletes for life. We’ll call them something like that. That’s a really cool avatar. And you’ve got it dialed in to the point where you can describe literally what this person does and wants to do. And I love the idea of skiing at 80. Tell me a space and staff, what have you got?

Yoni Levitan (09:14):
So, the main area is 1,530 square feet. And then we also have this office in another part of the building that’s 90 square feet. And we’ve got three, including me, three more or less full-time trainers. So, Daisy and myself are five days a week, Carrie is at four days a week. And then, we have two very much part-time trainers. One is only on Zoom, and one is Sundays and kind of acts as a bench coach. And, sorry, what else?

Mike Warkentin (09:44):
That was space and trainers, but I was going to ask you about your small group training. So, you said, groups of three or four. Are they doing the same workout, or are they doing their own workout in a group?

Yoni Levitan (09:54):
So everybody has a custom program, based off of their age, injury history, training frequency, training age, et cetera. So, they’re all doing something different, but because it’s in a small group setting, they’re having to track their rest. They’re having to write everything down. We’re just responsible for writing the program, for safety, helping a little bit with setup and putting things away, and then if you’re doing something like a bench press or a barbell squat, then you’ll wait for the coach to spot you.

Mike Warkentin (10:27):
Right? So, listeners, we often refer to this as semi-private training, small group training. You have people in a group, and in some ways, you could do a small group of three people who are all doing the same workout if that suits them. A different option that equals probably higher ARM is to have people doing their own programs in a small group and one coach circulates among them. So that means one person’s maybe working on deadlifts because he wants to be a powerlifter, or someone else over there is working on shoulder mobility because she wants to be a better tennis player and so on and so forth. Each person is doing their customized program, personalized program, and the coach is helping them saying, “OK, great rep there. Let’s try and tack on two more next time” and so on and so forth. Gyms that do the semi-private model are seeing dramatically higher ARM than ones that are doing the group model, which is one giant class. Everybody has the same workout. So that’s an interesting one. And then PT is also obviously a high-value service. Did you set your rates correctly right from the very beginning when you opened your gym in 2020? Or did you have to adjust things as you came along?

Yoni Levitan (11:26):
So there was two, sorry, just one thing quickly. The other thing that’s important for the coach in the small group training is calling the loads. So, telling clients, “That was too light. That was too heavy. You should do one more rep next time,” et cetera. But anyways, so there were two, not huge, but two small things that I had to change with pricing. The first was when we started, the small group training was half the cost of one-on-one. And I was just finding that it was—especially because everyone gets a custom program. It was—I’ve raised that to 60%, and now it’s at two thirds the cost of one-on-one. And the other thing was, and this is one of the reasons why the ARM is high, is when we opened the gym—so I just raised the rates of the other trainers for the first time in four years, but my rate has gone up a few times since the gym opened, like as the head coach.

Yoni Levitan (12:27):
And so initially my rate was $10 higher than the other trainers. And not everyone, but most people wanted to train with me. And so, then I raised my rate by $20, and then most people still wanted to train with me. And then, two things happened. So, one was I raised my rate by $20 again, so I was $50 more than the other trainers. And there was a change, there was some turnover. So, Jackie, came and joined the team, and someone else who wasn’t a good fit, a trainer who is very knowledgeable, but not attentive. And the thing I hang my hat on is that the one commonality that all the trainers on our team have is they put their phone away, and they give their clients their undivided attention. And then about a third of my clients were happy to switch to Jackie, and ever since—and before that, if I was away, a bunch of my clients would rather just miss their workouts.

Yoni Levitan (13:24):
And now, everybody’s happy to have one of the other trainers filling in for me when I’m away. And so that’s been—so I would’ve started with a bigger price difference between the head coach and everyone else. and I would’ve started with—you under-appreciate how much more work it takes to have three or four people training at the same time, both in terms of the energy it takes from you. Like I can knock out 10 one-on-ones in a day, and as long as I have a break in between like four or five clients, one-to-two-hour lunch, and then, four or five clients, max six people, in a row. I don’t like to do more than four or five in a row, but if there’s three or four people, it’s really hard for me to do more than two or three of those in a row. And I could not—well, we don’t have enough people anyways, but I couldn’t do 10 of those in a day. I’d probably be capped out at, I don’t know, let’s say six, maybe even five.

Mike Warkentin (14:26):
And that makes sense. It’s a slightly lower value service because you’re not getting one-on-one attention, but you’re getting a lot of one-on-one attention. You’re getting a customized program, and a lot of the elements of personal training, and maybe what happens is, like you do your set. I give you a form cue, and I tell you your next load, and then I move on to the next person. And all we’re doing is we’re cutting out that banter in between sets about the weekend, and we’re coming back to the focus part. There’s not a whole lot less attention. So semi-private training is a very, very high value service. And one-on-one is slightly higher value, but it’s still—semi-private still works very, very well. You gave yourself a $50 raise, so you gave you—it took a $50 raise, per hour, for you to get some clients to jump down to someone else, right?

Yoni Levitan (15:08):
So well, so then what happened is, about half of the people who were signing up still wanted to train with me. And so, this is one of the things is basically whenever I got to the point that I was anxious about getting more clients, and I actually would rather not get a new client than get a new client, even though I kind of needed the money, and that was my sign—there’s probably a better way to do it—but that was my sign to raise my rates. And so, the next step that I did in October was I said, “OK, a $50 spread is not enough.” I just was kind—so, I made my rate double the other trainers. And then from October until now, zero people signed up to have me as their lead trainer. People signed up with the other trainers. So, I delegated enough of the admin work that I have more time to see clients. And so, I brought my rate down to one and a half times the other trainer. And sure enough, the third consult I did after doing that, someone signed up to train with me.

Mike Warkentin (16:11):
I’ve got to ask you this because people are thinking it, what makes you good enough to charge that rate? What do you do to bring value to the client? Got any ideas?

Yoni Levitan (16:19):
So, there’s two parts to it. One part costs $0, but maybe 1% of people are willing or able to do. And then there’s the other part which is every spare dollar I had for the last 10 years went towards continuing education. So, the first five years of my career, I was investing $15-20,000 a year. Like if you include flights and hotels because Charles Peloquin, as he used to say, people say, “When are you coming to the West End of London, England?” And if you want to learn from him, you have to go to Phoenix or Toronto or Australia or wherever it is he’s teaching. And so if you want to go learn from him or Ido Portal or you want to take a kettlebell course with StrongFirst or learn from powerlifters, like Ed Coan or Matt Wenning, or you want to go learn from Stewart MacGill, like there’s only so many people who have that level of knowledge and expertise, and they only teach so many weekends in a year.

Mike Warkentin (17:27):
You have to go see them.

Yoni Levitan (17:29):
And so you have to be willing to get on a plane, or you need to rearrange your life so that when that person comes to your city or within driving distance, you make it so that you don’t exist to the world. You don’t go on a date, you don’t see your friends, you don’t have a family dinner. For those two to five days, you’re pretending that you’re in another country, and you’re 100% focused on the course that you’re taking. And then the other part of it is there’s three questions that I ask new trainers to ask themselves every day, or at least every week, which is, “What’s one thing I did really well today? What’s one thing that I made a mistake with, but I realized it myself, like I didn’t need someone else to point it out?”

Yoni Levitan (18:16):
“And then how am I going to fix that, so it doesn’t happen again? And then what came up today that I don’t know the answer to, or it’s like a problem that I can’t solve, and where am I going to go find the answer? Am I going to Google it, YouTube? Am I going to ask a colleague about it? Do I have a book that I think will have the answer? Do I have notes from a seminar that I’ve taken? Is there, you know,” and if you ask yourself those three questions, ideally every day, but even just once a week, you would accelerate your learning to an unbelievable extent. And I am, every six months, I am changing at least one important thing that I do with my clients, and I explain to them, “So I’ve changed my mind about this, and here’s why I’ve changed my mind, and I think that this is better.”

Yoni Levitan (19:08):

And, or “I’d like to try this. We’re going to do an experiment.” And so, I don’t see it as a fault in me or my training. The body is really complex. The same way that astronomers are figuring out the universe is bigger and expanding. We’re figuring out that there’s things happening on a smaller and smaller level in the body that we’re only beginning to understand. And, so, I am very hard on myself and always trying to improve and find the best possible methods to help my clients reach their goals.

Mike Warkentin (19:50):
So it sounds like a relentless commitment to professional development. And it sounds like you’ve invested financially, and now you’re seeing the rewards of that. You can’t just charge whatever your personal training rate is because you’re a pretty good trainer; you’ve got to be a great trainer, and you’ve got a huge bank of knowledge that you can use to tell people how to get the results they want. So, I love that. Tell me this, where does mentorship fit into that? You say you invest in professional development. Talk to me about business mentorship. When and why did you sign up for Two-Brain, and what are you getting out of it?

Yoni Levitan (20:16):
So I signed up for Two-Brain, I think it was September, we’ll say fall 2022. So, the one caveat with what I said about professional development was—so my dad passed away in August 2022, and it was a long four year, very painful decline. And so I was just trying any time or mental energy, anything I had to give just went to the business and my family, and both of my siblings have kids, and I don’t, so I maybe felt that I had to give a little bit more at times because I didn’t have anyone else who was I was responsible for, unlike my brother and sister. And, so my dad only really wanted two things for me, which was to meet someone, get married and start a family and to be successful in business.

Yoni Levitan (21:15):
And maybe if there’s a third thing, like be a good sibling, be a good uncle, like help take care of your mom, be good to your family. So, I knew that I had to do two things, which was catch up on my tax filings. As a retired accountant, I think that was the thing that probably caused him the most pain that I was doing or not doing. And finding a way to, like, if I couldn’t make it work without working 400 hours a week, I wasn’t sure that this was something I wanted to keep doing. And so, I was probably most months working 400 hours a month, not of clients, but bookkeeping, cleaning the bathrooms, billing clients, hiring trainers. And so, I knew I needed help there, and I knew it was very similar to how we help clients because clients know—like telling someone to eat less and move more is like not helpful at all.

Yoni Levitan (22:14):
“Oh. Like, it’s that simple? Like, oh, right?” It’s like the secret to getting rich is buy low, sell high. “Oh, I didn’t know that.” It’s not very easy to actually do that, right? People know that they need to eat more protein and drink more water and go to bed early and drink less alcohol and all of that. But it’s the accountability of their coach, right? They care about not disappointing me more than they care about disappointing themselves because they know that I care, and we have a good rapport with each other, and that if they don’t show up, I’m going to text them and be like, “Hey, is everything OK? I thought we were on for three o’clock today. I hope you’re OK.” And so, it’s the same thing. I knew that I needed to not do everything myself and delegate and build a team, but the easy thing to do is to just stay on the path that you’re on, and “Oh, it didn’t work with my first admin person, so I’m just—everybody’s—they’re all useless, so I’m just going to do it myself.”

Yoni Levitan (23:19):
Well, no, maybe you had bad luck, or maybe the person wasn’t trained properly, or you were giving them the wrong responsibilities. It should be like repeatable tasks versus giving them all of these one-off things that they don’t get a chance to master or whatever. So, right, I don’t know who said it, but the two ways you can tell what your priorities are is by looking at someone’s calendar and their checkbook, right? Like, where are they spending money and where are they spending their time?

Mike Warkentin (23:55):
So, two years. Who’s your mentor right now?

Yoni Levitan (23:58):
Right now, it’s Brian Bott.

Mike Warkentin (24:00):
So, he runs—Brian is one of our semi-private training experts. Has he given you some tips on that aspect of your business, or did you kind of have that figured out before you talked to Brian?

Yoni Levitan (24:10):
He’s helped me a little bit more. We’ve talked about it a little bit, but not a ton.

Mike Warkentin (24:15):
OK. That’s interesting.

Yoni Levitan (24:16):
It’s been more some other things that he’s been helping me with. So, one thing that’s different about my business is when people are paying for classes, they kind of understand that if they go away for a week or two, that’s kind of part of the cost of the vacation. But if you’re paying $120 or $150 or $180 an hour for personal training, and you go away for a week at Christmas, or you go to your friend’s cottage for a week, you don’t expect to be dinged for the week that you’re not here. Which I think is a very fair and reasonable expectation, just to be clear. And it’s not always possible depending on how long you go away to make up all of those sessions, right?

Yoni Levitan (25:03):
If you train three times a week and you go away for two weeks, you’re not going to come in six times the week before and six times the week after. And most of my clients have a lot of responsibility in life, like most of them are parents; they have stressful careers, so there’s kind of—for a lot of them, coming to the gym more than three or four days a week wouldn’t be beneficial anyways because of their recovery. And so, the billing has been kind of a hard thing to figure out, like striking the balance between reducing the admin burden on myself and our admin person and doing it in a way that’s fair to clients. And so, I’m about to implement a suggestion from Brian that I think will make things a lot simpler. Also, PushPress has dramatically, dramatically improved how the billing works in recent months. And I’ve just started digging into that, and so, I think that’s also going to make it a lot easier.

Mike Warkentin (26:08):
OK. So, you’re working on—you’ve got your average revenue per member super high, and you’ve got your training plan; you’ve got your avatar. So, Brian’s helping you uncoil some of the admin stuff and get the business running better, which is great because that has a huge reward too. And you can really make some great inroads by getting better ROI on the software that you’re using, reducing your admin time, making it smoother and improving the client experience. So, I love that Brian’s helping you with that. Here’s a huge question. You’ve talked about some of the rates, and you have a huge ARM; you’ve got great clients. Where do you find these people? How do you get them? Do you advertise? What do you do?

Yoni Levitan (26:40):
Pretty much all of our clients have come from two or three sources. So, the first two years of the business, it was pretty much entirely referrals.

Mike Warkentin (26:49):
OK and was that active? Did you go and ask the people to do it, or did you just let it happen? What was your plan there?

Yoni Levitan (26:55):
A little bit of both, but it mostly just happened.

Mike Warkentin (26:57):
OK. So that’s good.

Yoni Levitan (26:59):
So, the thing that I’m most proud of is if someone who is married or living with a romantic partner starts training here, I haven’t actually crunched the numbers, so this isn’t an exact number, but six months from when they start, it’s something like five times more likely that them and their spouse will be training with us then that they’ll have stopped.

Mike Warkentin (27:22):
Whoa, isn’t that interesting? Plus one.

Yoni Levitan (27:25):
So, and every single married person that I’ve trained has ended up referring their spouse. So, it’s not true with all of the people that have trained at the gym, but every single person that I’ve trained that’s married, their spouse has ended up coming.

Mike Warkentin (27:41):
Wow. So, that’s huge. And that costs you $0.

Yoni Levitan (27:44):
So, and then, two years in, so the last two years, pretty much every new client—or no, there’s still some referrals—is from Google. So just people search for “personal trainer near me” or “gym near me.” And we only have, I think it’s 32 Google reviews, but every single one is at least one or two sentences, and most of them are like paragraphs. And there’s only—there were two clients who kind of asked like, “Is there something specific you want me to say?” or “I want to write a review, but I don’t know what to say,” and I gave them like a couple bullet points, but you can tell if you look at it that these were all written from the heart, that this is straight from the—like, it’s their words. It’s not my words. And like one of our trainers, the gym that she used to work at has like 250 Google reviews, but five of them are an actual written review. It’s like they’re all either nothing, it’s just like five stars—

Mike Warkentin (28:47):
Plane emoji. Yeah.

Yoni Levitan (28:48):
No written text. Or it’s like, “Great gym,” or like “Johnny is an awesome trainer.” Whereas like, every single review we have is someone’s telling their story or saying something specific that they like about our gym and our team.

Mike Warkentin (29:06):
Do you ask your clients to write those reviews? Like, do you say, “Hey, could you write a review sometime?”

Yoni Levitan (29:10):
Most of them, yeah. So, usually what I do is at the three-month mark, I offer to take the client for coffee or to sit down in the office. And this is one of the few things I did well before Two-Brain. And I ask them, “What’s your favorite thing about your trainer? What’s your favorite thing about my gym? If you can change one thing about being a client of 3 Seasons or one thing about working with your trainer, what would it be?” I get feedback on the programming because it’s very much not just tailored to their goals, but their personality. So, do you like maybe planning your workouts? Do you find them engaging? So, I’ll get feedback, right? Like, some people only want to do full body workouts. Some people, there’s a few other—some people don’t like doing more than three sets of the same thing. They get bored. And then if they say they’re happy, then at the end I say, “Would you be comfortable writing a Google review?” And I try to say it in a way that it’s not—I’m like, “I understand if you want your privacy, and you don’t want people to know where you go, so I won’t be offended, but if you’d be comfortable, it would mean a lot if you wrote a Google Review.”

Mike Warkentin (30:18):
Wow. So, you were doing this even before Two-Brain. So, it sounds like you figured out the goal review system that Chris Cooper recommends almost on your own, which is pretty cool. And he’s got the same kind of questions there about asking clients, “What are your greatest challenges outside the gym?” and things like that and solving problems for them. And then the exact thing that Two-Brain recommends: If you have a great happy client in a goal review, ask them, “Can I make you famous?” And whether that’s a Google review or maybe it’s a testimonial on your website, maybe it’s a video, maybe it’s social media. I mean, listeners, that is your thing to do today. Take this from this interview. The next time you speak to a happy client in a goal review session—and if you’re not doing those sessions, start doing them.

Mike Warkentin (30:56):
But the next time you have a happy one, ask them to do something for you because they’re fired up, and they want to support your business. “Would you write a Google review?” Yoni’s doing that. And he’s got great lengthy Google reviews, five-star reviews. People are reading them, they’re finding his gym, and he’s getting his clients through Google reviews, SEO and referrals, not spending a ton of money on ads. Are you spending any money on ads? I’ll ask you that before I say it. Zero? Zero dollars on ads. So, guys, Yoni’s got a huge ARM in our top 10. He’s not spending any money on ads. His marketing budget is zero. He’s just spending time with his clients asking them for Google reviews. And he’s doing such a great job that he’s getting every single one of their spouses to come to the gym too. That’s a plus one every time. So, each client that trains with you, Yoni, is a two-for-one, essentially, right?

Yoni Levitan (31:42):
Pretty much.

Mike Warkentin (31:43):
Wow. That’s like legendary. I wish I could have done that. You might have to be my personal trainer after this show ends; we’ll talk. I’m going to ask you a couple other quick questions here before I let you go. Do you have any simple add-ons that you use to drive up ARM like, renting lockers, selling T-shirts, or is it just training that you sell?

Yoni Levitan (32:04):
So, the one thing would be one of our trainers does fascial stretch therapy, or I think now it’s called Frederick Stretch Therapy, and she’s been really great at—some of the other trainers, so some of my clients and one of the other trainers, some of our clients have started seeing her once a week for special stretch therapy, and everyone’s happy because the client is getting faster results in terms of improving their mobility, their posture, getting out of pain. And then the trainer doesn’t have to spend as much time on mobility in their workout. They can just do the kind of meat and potatoes, strength training, or sometimes while stretching, she’ll notice something that leads to a change in the program, which allows the coach to write a better program, and the client to get a better result. But that’s really it. Like I was just looking at a financial statement that my accountant sent me. I’m just starting to get better with that stuff, and I actually lose money. So, we give clients supplements, like we don’t charge for that.

Mike Warkentin (33:07):
OK, that’s interesting.

Yoni Levitan (33:08):
I just say—like, during their workout; if they want to take something home, they pay for it. But electrolytes, essential amino acids, collagen, creatine, beef protein, whey protein, pea protein for after the workout. So, some clients are literally taking $5 or $10 of supplements every time they come to the gym. I just want them—right, we’re a high gross margin business—I want them to get the best results possible. I am giving them access to the same stuff that I use when I work out. And so, some clients buy stuff to take home, some don’t, but we haven’t—it’s not really something I’ve made an emphasis on, but we actually lose, when you factor in all the money I’m spending on the free supplements that clients get, we actually lose money on supplements. It’s 2-4% of revenue. So, that’s not a big part of what we do.

Mike Warkentin (33:58):
But that’s OK. You know, if you’re talking about—the average personal training rate is like 70 bucks. You’re charging more than 70 bucks, so you’ve got a little wiggle room to give someone a protein shake, right? Like that’s built in and that’s probably a retention tool. It’s a high-value service tool. It’s part of your service package. So, technically losing money on supplements, but like I’d consider that almost like a training cost. Would you?

Yoni Levitan (34:17):
Yeah, so, sorry, I’ll let you—I had some notes about some other things, but I think I should probably let you get through the questions.

Mike Warkentin (34:26):
Yeah, no worries. I was just curious if there was anything because sometimes, I’ll talk to a gym owner in Las Vegas or Hawaii or something, and they’ll say, “You know what, dude? I sell like $8,000 in T-shirts a month,” which is rare, but it does happen in certain locations. Didn’t happen where I was at where no one wanted to go. But it does happen in some certain places. So, I was just curious about that. But it sounds like for you, your meat and potatoes is you sell training, you’ve got that one specialty service, which is really great, and helping clients solve problems and get results faster is hugely valuable. Chris Cooper’s written about this infinitely. If you do that, you can charge more and your gym, Yoni, is the proof of that. Let’s close this out here by—I’m going to steal one of your things because you’ve already said it, and I’m just going to reiterate it: Start doing goal review sessions with your clients, and then if they’re happy, ask them for a testimonial. That is going to help you sell more training and more high-value training. What can you tell, listeners, Yoni, we’re looking at things like—there are people out there who think, “I can’t charge more than $200, $300 a month.” What are some simple things that they can do just to drive up their ARM a little bit? What are some starting points from a guy who’s on our Top 10 leaderboard?

Yoni Levitan (35:32):
So I just want to tell a little anecdote about one of my clients at my old job, and the day that I went from a commercial gym to a personal training studio, my rate went up by 50% even though I was the same person. And so, there was a little bit of wondering if I was worth the money at the beginning, so at the commercial gym I was $75 an hour, and then all of a sudden, I was $110 an hour. And so, I had a client who was so happy, and he had been to a Good Life, which is the big commercial gym in Canada and didn’t have a good experience. And you would think this would just be table stakes, but the fact that his schedule never got kind of like—like he just knew that these are my days and times, and you guys are super reliable, and you’re not going to be texting me all the time asking me to like move my time around, and you’re punctual, and I can just count on that.

Yoni Levitan (36:26):
And then like with my gym, someone knows that if they have a session at 6 a.m. that I’m usually here at like between 5:45 and 5:50. And if I’m here at 5:56, I consider that being late. And that they should be ready to start their workout at six. So just being punctual and reliable and keeping the bathrooms clean are very underrated things. Also, if you get good at getting people out of pain, then people will be very grateful, and they’ll want to tell other people, and they’ll have a lot of loyalty. One thing that’s been great for me in the last year was I started taking courses with a company called Exercise Therapy Association. And they give amazing supporting materials so that you don’t have to furiously take notes and kind of wonder what you were trying to write after the fact. And that’s been probably the biggest change in what I do in the last two or three years with clients.

Mike Warkentin (37:31):
So you’ve got elite standard of service—before you get to the last one—you’ve got elite standard of service, right? Where you’re doing all the stuff, even the little stuff. They clean the bathroom really well, showing up on time. That stuff is actually uncommon. There are so many people who take that stuff for granted, and they don’t clean their bathrooms, and they just show up late, mess around with their client schedules. You’re not doing that. You have an elite status or service. Then the second thing you’re talking about here is personal development and professional development, because getting people out of pain, not every trainer is qualified to do that. So, if you’re working on that side or scope of practice, you have to have your education, you have to have your qualifications, and you have to be able to do what you say you’re going to do for the clients within scope of practice. That requires—I would guess, that that reflects that $200,000 investment in professional development. So, if you get the right skills, you can definitely charge more because special skills are worth way more. So, listeners, professional development is a big one for you. What else is on your list, Yoni?

Yoni Levitan (38:21):
Just if you do such a good job that you get so busy that you either can’t fit more clients in your schedule, or you wouldn’t want more clients, then you’ll be able to raise your rates, as simple as that sounds, that worked for me at least.

Mike Warkentin (38:37):
It’s a simple economic one, and it feels a bit nerve wracking for people, but we do have a plan, listeners, to help people raise rates

Yoni Levitan (38:45):
And the not taking one-time-a-week clients here—so, I spent hours and hours and hours writing a blog post. I think it’s called “Free and Low-Cost Health and Fitness Resources.” And when someone doesn’t sign up, and they tell me the budget is the reason I send them the blog post, and I tell them, “If you go to the gym on your own or you work out at home and you have questions, I will answer your questions. I’m not going to bill you.” And not a single person has ever asked me a question. I maybe should start turning it into a Bitly, so I can tell if they even open it, but not a single—so, that tells you that it’s not just money. Unless there’s someone holding them accountable, they’re not going to do it.

Yoni Levitan (39:31):
And so, because I am giving people the free solution. These are the best podcasts. These are the best YouTube channels. These are the best books that you can get from the library. These are the books that you can’t get from the library that you’ll have to buy, but they only cost $10 to $50. It’s like a very detailed, very detailed. And so, you kind of have to ask yourself, “Am I going to offer what people say they want? Or am I going to offer what people actually need?” And there’s a difference between those two things. And especially if you’re offering—like a human, like you’re not building a software company. You can’t be all things to all people, and I’d rather help 50 people or 100 people make obvious, clear, amazing progress than help 200 people tread water or go backward, age more slowly or have their body break down slightly more slowly than—like, that’s not inspiring or interesting to me.

Mike Warkentin (40:31):
What I’m hearing here is like an overwhelming commitment to your clients, and you are getting results for them, and you’re unwilling to offer the things that don’t give results. Therefore, the things that you are offering get results, and you can charge more for them. Is that accurate?

Yoni Levitan (40:45):
I guess so.

Mike Warkentin (40:46):
That’s what I’m seeing is that you are going to the—like you’re just deciding exactly what is going to get your client’s results, put it in place, drive it home, show up exactly on time, give them great service, keep making yourself a better trainer and then charge more. So, guys out there, if you’re listening to this, Yoni just gave you a list of stuff that you can do to start moving in the right direction. And I’ll give you one more that you can do as well, if you’re talking about professional development. Work with a Two-Brain mentor; that mentor can help you be a better business owner. That will help you do all the things that you need to do to grow a great business. Yoni, I want to thank you so much for your time. I’ll let you get back to getting one client and adding a spouse. That’s an amazing story, and I love that you’ve been able to do that. That’s incredible.

Yoni Levitan (41:26):
Thanks.

Mike Warkentin (41:27):
Alright, my friends, thank you for listening. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m Mike Warkentin, and please subscribe wherever you’re watching or listening. That was Yoni Levitan, and he’s one of our ARM leaders. Two-Brain releases leaderboards every single month, and then we get the best of the best on this show to tell you exactly what they’re doing. So please subscribe so you don’t miss any of that. And now here is Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper (41:46):
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 PT & Small Groups Drive Huge Average Revenue Per Member appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

3 Easy Ways to Earn More Every Month

Inflation is still a thing, even if it’s not as bad as it was a year ago.

The easiest way to cover inflation and preserve or increase your profit margin is to increase the revenue you earn per client.

In the first post in this series, I shared our leaderboard for average revenue per member—ARM—for April 2024. Here it is again:

Today, I’m going to give you three battle-tested ways to earn more from your clients.

1. Implement an Annual Rate Increase

Simply add an annual 3 percent rate increase for all incoming members. Let them know when they sign up that rates increase 3 percent at the beginning of each year.

You can follow this plan with existing members, but most gyms need to make a larger jump right away because of very low prices, so 3 percent a year won’t cut it.

If your average ARM is below $180, get it there first, then move to annual increases. (I strongly recommend you navigate a rate increase with the help of a mentor.)

2. Switch to Biweekly Payments

Example: Instead of charging $200 per month, charge $100 biweekly. Your clients won’t really feel a difference.

If one of our gyms that charges $500 a month did this, it would collect an extra $500 from the client over the course of the year (12 x $500 is $6,000, while 26 x $250 is $6,500).

In some cases, biweekly billing matches up better with clients’ paydays, making it easier for them to budget.

3. Credit Cards: Move on or Pass On

Credit-card transactions are convenient but really a win for the processor: You’re giving a percentage away.

You have two options: Switch to ACH (automated clearing house) transfers or pass credit-card fees on to clients.

ACH: These transfers cost less than credit-card transactions. From Hubspot.com: “ACH payments typically charge a fee between 0.5 to 1.5 percent, far lower than credit cards’ fee that ranges from 1.5 to 3.5 percent.” 

The downside of ACH transfers? They generally take longer. Most online resources recommend you budget one to three business days for the processing of ACH transfers. And if a payment is declined, you might not find out right away.

Delays aren’t a problem if you watch your cash flow and plan for the lag. Delays are a huge problem if you’re relying on a Jan. 31 payment so you can make Feb. 1 rent.  If you go this route, make sure you have the cash reserves you need to cover payroll and other expenses.

Pass on Fees: Before you choose this path, quickly research your local laws. A few U.S. states don’t allow surcharging, and there are regional variations on surcharge limits.

Other countries and jurisdictions will have their own policies. Make sure you stay onside of all laws.

Resource:  “Credit Card Surcharge Laws by State Explained”

Here’s a chunk of text you might adjust for your business: “We are making changes to our billing process to provide new options: Starting [DATE], memberships paid by credit card will include a [X] percent processing fee. To minimize the fee, you can switch to ACH billing.”

If you don’t eat the cost of processing cards, that will boost your revenue by a few thousand dollars every year. Sample math: If you process $100,000 in credit-card transactions every year and give away 2.5 percent, that’s $2,500.

ARM: Your First Target

If your P&L statement is in rough shape, these options might not fix the problem. In that case, I recommend you work with a mentor to roll out a larger increase that will stabilize your gym.

But if your rates are in the right range and you’re looking for ways to boost ARM without a price change, these three options can move the needle.

Remember, your first targets are 150 clients and $205 ARM—but the leaderboard above shows that the right clients are willing to pay much more for incredible service. A mentor can help with that, too.

The post 3 Easy Ways to Earn More Every Month appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

$500+ Average Revenue Per Member: Secrets Revealed

How do you earn more per client?

By delivering more value.

Many gym owners severely undervalue their services. Call it a “self-esteem problem.” They just don’t realize that the coaching they provide and the results they produce are incredibly valuable.

Other gym owners don’t undervalue their services, but they don’t know how to generate more value.

Here’s an example: Let’s say a gym owner focuses on group coaching and charges $250 for a monthly membership. This is well above the industry rate of about $160—but the members are happy to pay the fee because they’re getting results and they love the classes, the facility and the coaching.

The owner does a small annual increase to cover inflation, but she’d still like to earn more per client. She’s confident that her group prices reflect her value for group coaching, and she isn’t prepared to increase them.

What can she do if she wants to earn more?

She can deliver more value and solve more problems faster for clients.

Instead of charging more for group coaching, she can add higher-value services, such as personal training, nutrition coaching, habits coaching and semi-private/small-group coaching. Service packages with these elements can generate huge average revenue per member (ARM).

To see how much value a gym owner can create every month, review our April 2024 ARM leaderboard:

Here’s what the leaders had to say when we asked them how they posted these numbers (note the “value” theme):  

High-value services: “We offer PT and small-group PT, so we are selling a higher-value service.”

High-value services: “We’re good with getting people pain-free and finding ways to safely work around injuries so clients can keep making progress. We’re able to ‘fix’ a lot of issues other gyms might refer out to a physio or chiro, but we still do refer out at times.”

High-value services: “I don’t do classes—personal training and small group only.”

Value: “We provide as much value as possible for our clients. We are in a high-cost-of-living area (San Diego), so our average member likely averages over six figures a year per household. But they have lots of options for training, with box gyms, Pilates, yoga, F45 and the like in close proximity.”

Value through results: “We emphasize professional development and program design as being important to keeping clients engaged and helping them get long-term results.”

Value through results: “Our approach to fitness is a bit unique in that most of our clients are not necessarily chasing an aesthetic but injury prevention, pain-free movement and performance enhancement—as opposed to weight loss or just looking good.”

Simple focus on value: The keys are “clean bathrooms and attentive personal training sessions!”

Personal development: “I have invested an extraordinary amount of time and money into continuing education: over $150,000 and approaching $200,000 in nine years.”

Staff assistance: “Trainer pay is based on commission rather than salary, so they are incentivized to increase client attendance and drive up ARM. Coaches are paid on a sliding scale, where the percentage they make goes up the more hours they train, so their pay incentivizes them to retain more clients, push for referrals and encourage attendance.”

Knowing the avatar: “We use a lot of what Two-Brain teaches in our vetting process for clients (price is often the deciding factor for leads that we do not close).”

Knowing the avatar: “I don’t let clients do one time a week. If they insist, I refer out. Or if they aren’t coming consistently anymore, I ask them to recommit or I ask them to take a break from training (if I like them). Or I fire them as a client.”

Do This Today

To drive up your ARM, deliver more value.

Your starting point: Take your five best clients out for coffee. While you’re with them, ask this question: “What’s your greatest challenge outside my gym?”

The answers will tell you how you can serve your clients more and create more value for them.

Solve their problems, and your ARM will go up.

The post $500+ Average Revenue Per Member: Secrets Revealed appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Huge ARMs: What Clients Pay Per Month at Top Gyms

I love revealing our average revenue per member leaderboard every six months.

“ARM” is an incredible thing in a gym, and our leaders show you what’s possible.

In the fitness industry, it’s all too common to undervalue services. That’s because a lot of gyms charge $20 or $30 a month for access—and people think all gyms should be priced like that.

But if you’re reading this, you already know access and coaching are different.

“Use my dumbells and treadmill for 40 minutes”—that’s what $30 gets you.

But coaching is worth much more. You’re giving people exactly what they need to accomplish important health and fitness goals in a group, small-group or one-on-one setting. That’s worth hundreds of dollars a month.

Many old-school gym owners didn’t realize that. We priced our coaching at $100 or $150 a month. Back in 2010 or so, we thought that was a lot.

In 2024, we know those prices were far too low. They didn’t reflect the value we provided.

Our top gyms are now so good at creating value that our Top 10 ARM leaderboard is incredible. It’s packed with numbers that would have blown my mind in 2010.

Get this: the numbers are going up. In July 2023, the Top 10 average was $533, and the No. 10 gym earned $430 from each client. Those numbers were similar in December 2023.

But check out the leaderboard below. The Top 10 average is $692, and the No. 10 gym hit $508. Can you believe those numbers? (Don’t worry: We verified them!)

What should these numbers tell you?

1. Gyms just like yours have found ways to acquire clients who are willing to pay a premium for world-class service and swift results.

2. Coaching is very valuable; it’s worth way more than $100 a month.

3. It’s possible to improve ARM quickly. Think about what would happen if 25 percent of your group clients bought just one personal training session a month and another 10 percent signed up for nutrition coaching.

In the next post in this series, I’ll tell you exactly what our leaders did to generate these incredible ARM numbers.

Here’s your task for today: Set an ARM goal of $205—isn’t the right target for every single gym. But it’s probably the first target for most gyms.

If your ARM is over $205, congrats! Set a goal of adding $10 to it—or talk to a mentor about targeting an exact number that’s tied to the life you want to live.

And you need to know this: Most of the gyms on the leaderboard started where you are right now. They had underpriced services and they doubted their clients would pay more if they created more value.

All of them, happily, have now seen the reality: If you create more value, you’ll make a greater impact for everyone.

The post Huge ARMs: What Clients Pay Per Month at Top Gyms appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Value-Driven Tips for Maximizing Average Revenue Per Member

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Imagine every client in your gym paying you $508 a month. That’s not a dream. That’s actually the 10th place gym in this month’s leaderboard. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and every single month we pull the data from the thousand gyms in Two-Brain worldwide, and we look for the best in each category. We interview them, and then we share their secrets with you. It’s kind of like you were looking at the fittest people on earth, and you pick the one with the highest deadlift, and you say, “What’s your program?” And you look at the one with the fastest 5K and you say, “How do you do that? How do you train?” And then you publish that for free. That’s what we do every single month, and this month we’re focusing on the metric ARM, average revenue per member. I’m going to share how these gyms are getting such high average revenue per member, and the recurring theme that you’re going to hear is value, value, value over and over and over again.

Chris Cooper (00:58):
Before I get into their top tips, I want to share their numbers with you so that you have a real sense of what’s possible—not to shame you, not to make you say, “Oh, this doesn’t apply to me. My ARM is under $100 a month,” but to show you what’s actually possible with mentorship and applying the systems that we use in Two-Brain. So here we go. Here’s our top 10 in reverse order. In 10th place, this gym is in the States, they do $508.14 per member per month. What’s really interesting about these numbers is it’s a three-month average. We call it a rolling three. So, it’s not just like they sold this one big package once a year and then they have to kind of live off that revenue all year long. They’re doing this month after month after month after month.

Chris Cooper (01:47):
No gimmicks, no big promotions, no giveaways—just consistent execution of what we teach in Two-Brain and delivering amazing value to their clients. In ninth place, also out of the States $528.33 a month ARM. Incredible. In eighth place, also from the States: $537.27. Now, before I get into the seventh place and up, I want to share with you that we transfer all of the ARM into U.S. dollars so that we’re comparing apples to apples here. There’s no sense reporting in Canadian dollars for Canadian gyms because the Canadian dollar is worth about 35 cents less than the American dollar right now. So, we convert everything to U.S. dollars so that you know that these rankings are legit. We also exclude gyms who only have a couple of clients. Look, if you’re a personal trainer working with a celebrity, and they are your only client, you can charge them $2,000 a month and have amazing ARM—or more.

Chris Cooper (02:51):
However, these are all gyms that work with at least 50 clients. They might be doing personal training. They might be doing semi-private. They’ll even be doing group training like CrossFit. You’ll see that coming up, and they’re crushing it. Their ARM is super-duper high, and the way they do that is they exchange value for value. Their clients are paying a premium because they’re also getting premium value. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here. In seventh place, and this place is out of Canada: $553.31. This place is really niched down. They help athletes develop better speed. That’s important, and we’ll be coming back to that later. In sixth place, out of the States, $590.40 per client per month. That’s their ARM. Impressive. Fifth place, I really love this because these guys started out as a big group training.

Chris Cooper (03:45):
They’re some of my favorite people, and despite all the challenges they’ve had over the last few years, their ARM is now $638.32 per client per month. That means their clients value them. They’re not showing up late for their sessions. They love the gym, they love the owners, and vice versa. It’s mutual. In fourth place: $729.85 per client per month. Now it’s interesting because this gym really focuses in on reducing pain in its clients. They’re not providing therapy at their gym. They’re not pretending to be something that they’re not, but that is their focus is on pain reduction. It’s very impressive how these different gyms have completely different niches, but the act of being the best in their niche is what drives up client value. They’re really solving problems for people. In third place, this is a personal training studio.

Chris Cooper (04:40):
Their ARM is $762.47 per month. Very good. In second place: $881.53 per client per month. And in first place, this is out of Canada, but this is in U.S. dollars. Their ARM is $1,203.07. Again, these are all gyms that have over 50 clients. They’re not just personal training gyms. Some do groups, some do semi-private, and what they’re all doing is providing excellent client value. So, what we did was we went to these top gyms, and we said, “How’d you do it? What are you doing? Why do people want to pay this much money?” Not, “How are you extracting? How are you extorting people into paying you this? How are you tricking them? How are you selling this big bait-and-switch package?” None of that. It’s all an exchange of value. And here’s what they told us. The theme, again, is these guys create a ton of value.

Chris Cooper (05:38):
They don’t just raise rates until people are unwilling to pay more. They build value by solving problems and adding speed to the solution. So, here’s what leaders had to say when I asked them, “How did you post these numbers?” The first said, “We offer personal training and small group personal training, so we’re selling a higher value service.” That’s very interesting. If you’re a CrossFit gym owner listening to this, go back to my original interview with Greg Glassman from 2018. It’s twobrainbusiness.com/greg, and what you’ll hear is that Greg was doing small group training, which means he was charging personal training rates to a small group of people at once, and he’s broken that down on other podcasts and stuff. We don’t have the exclusive insight into that, but there are CrossFit gyms out there who still do that original CrossFit method. They’ll train four to six people at once.

Chris Cooper (06:28):
They’ll call themselves a CrossFit gym. They’re using the CrossFit methodology. People are not just paying for privacy; they’re paying for the tailoring of results. And so, the way that Greg would do his programming is he would look at this group and say, “OK, by and large, this group is good at deadlifting. They’re really poor at running. Their programming for the next six, eight weeks is going to have more aerobic capacity work.” And then the next group, you know, they’d all have a different problem. They’re all weak at pull-ups. We’re going to include more pull-ups in their programming, and so you get both the benefit of working in a small group with the attention of the coach. You don’t get this in a group of 12 people, let alone 30 people where a coach is circulating and trying to spot the flaw. You get this from real coaching in a small group setting, and it’s very valuable for people, and there are a lot of people who are willing to pay for this.

Chris Cooper (07:22):
I do semi-private training at my group now with a small group. Ours is a little bit different in that we’re all doing our own program, but we’re doing it together. We’re sharing a coach. There are four of us with very diverse backgrounds and very diverse goals, and all of us are paying between $400 and $600 a month for it. The next person on the leaderboard said, “We’re good with getting people pain free and finding ways to safely work around injuries so clients can keep making progress. We’re able to fix a lot of issues that other gyms might refer out to a physiotherapist or a chiropractor, and we still do refer out. We have an amazing partner network.” Another person on the leaderboard said, “We don’t do classes. We do personal training and small group only.” There’s a bit of a theme here, but this is possible.

Chris Cooper (08:04):
My gym still runs classes, but you boost up your ARM with the people who want to do personal training and won’t go into a class. Another person said, “We provide as much value as possible for our clients. We’re in a high cost of living area in San Diego, so our average member likely averages multiple six figures a year per household, but they have a lot of options for training with big box gyms, Pilates, yoga, F45, and the like in proximity. We focus on the high-value clients receiving a very high-value service.” Another person said, “We emphasize professional development and program design as being important to keeping clients engaged and helping them to get long-term results.” That focus on results is really, really, really important. I am not a product guy. I am an outcomes guy, and that means that I don’t care what methodology we use as long as the client gets the result.

Chris Cooper (08:57):
There’s no holy grail that I’m going to bow down to and say, “We only do this method. We only do yoga. We only do CrossFit.” What we’re going to do is incorporate whatever it takes to get my clients results. And often focusing on those results gets lost in the dogma of the method. If you focus on client results and say, “What tools do I need to get them there? That is what drives up value for a lot of clients.” Look, they’re not coming to your gym to do sled pushes. They’re not coming to your gym because they want to try a bootcamp. They’re coming to your gym to get a specific result, and the tools that you use, including sled pushes and including bootcamp, yoga, nutrition, whatever should be aligned with that result. If not, they’re going to churn out because they’re not getting the result that they came in for.

Chris Cooper (09:45):
They’re trusting you as the coach to say, “This is the tool that will get you that result.” Not, “Hey, do you want to try CrossFit?” The next value is a simple focus on value. The next client said, “The keys are clean bathrooms and attentive personal training sessions.” So again, you’re hearing people with high ARM are doing a lot of personal training in small group. This isn’t to say that you can only get a high ARM with personal training, but if you’re not including personal training, even as part of your CrossFit gym, you’re excluding people who don’t want to do group. They’re open to doing CrossFit. They’re open to doing whatever method, whatever tool you prescribe them, but they’re not going to do it in a group. And I get that. Another person says, “I’ve invested in extraordinary amount of time and money into continuing education—over $150,000 and approaching $200,000 in nine years.”

Chris Cooper (10:35):
What’s interesting from this respondent is they’re not just talking about getting more certifications, going to more seminars, getting better at teaching technique. They’re talking about education and building value for clients in business, in marketing of course, but also in coaching and being an amazing coach and not just what to sell, but how to deliver really, really, really well. Amazing. Hey, by the way, the certifications will help, but at the surface level, nobody comes into your gym and says, “I’ll pay more because you’re a Level 4 instead of a Level 1, or I’ll pay more because you’re a black belt and the guy down the street has a brown belt.” That doesn’t matter. What matters is how the certification helps you get the client to the outcome that they want. Again, I’m an outcomes guy. Anything that gets the client a better outcome faster, I’m all in and I’ll invest, and this gym owner is the same.

Chris Cooper (11:26):
Next, staff assistance: “Trainer pay is based on commission rather than salary, so they’re incentivized to increase client attendance and drive up ARM. Coaches are paid on a sliding scale where the percentage they make goes up the more hours they train, so their pay incentivizes them to retain more clients, push for referrals and encourage attendance.” This next person on the list said that they know their avatar: “We use a lot of what Two-Brain teaches in our vetting process for clients. Price is often the deciding factor for the leads that we don’t close, and we’re OK with that.” Finally, here’s another one—knowing the avatar: “I don’t let clients show up only one time a week. If they insist, I refer them out to somebody who will let them do that, or if they aren’t coming consistently anymore, I ask them to recommit, or I ask them to take a break from training if I like them, or I might even fire them as a client.”

Chris Cooper (12:18):
We often think that anything that we can get from the client is good. If they’ll train once a week, OK, they’ll fall in love with it, and then they’ll train twice and three times and four times a week. But the reality is that our job as coaches is to tell people, number one, “Here’s what you need to do.” They’re counting on us to do that, and number two, when they’re not doing it, to say to them, “You are not doing it.” It takes a lot of guts to be able to say to a client, “Look, I don’t want to just take your money for the sake of taking your money. Coming once a week is not going to help you. Do you want to take a break, or do you want to go to another gym?” That takes guts, but it also takes honor as a coach to know that your service is not going to get them the result and being unwilling to just take their money when you can’t possibly provide the outcome that they want, and that’s really what value is.

Chris Cooper (13:10):
Value requires a lot of trust, and when you say to a client, “I’m not just here to take your money. If you can only come once a week, this probably isn’t for you,” that builds trust in that client and all the other clients that you’re talking to. If that’s part of your core values, that’s going to show, and frankly, you don’t have to be rude about it. You can be tactful, you can be polite, but you have to be honest with a client if you want to build value. Building value builds a very high ARM. It helps you get away from the whole churn cycle of, “I need 300 clients to make a good living here,” and it helps you attract the right clients who will help you make a good living for yourself and for your coaches. High ARM is really the key to a lot of gyms for their growth.

Chris Cooper (13:54):
They’re selling often like a low-priced group training program only with high churn, very high marketing demand, high burnout for coaches, and high burnout for the owner because it’s not sustainable. In fact, if I were to give most gyms a bit of advice, it would be to focus on improving ARM however you can do it, whether that means raising rates and that benefits you or raising value, as these leaders have talked about which benefits the client. Focusing on high ARM will guide you to a better product, a better client experience, better clients, and a better gym. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” If you want to talk about this, just go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free public group. There are 9,200 gym owners in that group. They’re sharing, they’re supportive, they’re caring, and they’re here to help you grow your gym too. Thank you for your service.

The post Value-Driven Tips for Maximizing Average Revenue Per Member appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Your Post-Summit Media Challenge

Ever wondered if you’re screaming into the void on social media?

I can assure you of this: People are watching and listening.

We produce a lot of media at Two-Brain Business. Our daily output is very high on a host of platforms, and we track metrics carefully. But you don’t always know if your media is making a difference at ground level.

Does a single Instagram view mean anything?

Well, that view might be attached to a very special person. I met lots of them in Chicago at the Two-Brain Summit.

Over three days and the recent summit, I talked to many coaches and gym owners, and I got a ton of feedback on Two-Brain’s media output.

It was thrilling to connect with members of the audience to find out what they had seen, what they like and what they want more of (we’re creating it already!).

All the conversations reminded me that audience building and content creation have incredible value—even if it isn’t obvious immediately.

At the gym level, it’s very common to make a short, frantic investment in content creation, then fall off because you’re “not seeing results.” I understand: Publishing regularly is tough when you don’t get 500 likes, 100 comments and 50 DMs on every post.

But people are listening. (Thanks to everyone who reminded me of that in Chicago!)

If you keep telling your gym’s story every day and offering free help, you will connect with people. And eventually they’ll become members.

It’s a long game, but it’s worth playing.

Publish!

The worst thing you can do: Publish inconsistently. That’s a waste of time, and you won’t get any results with a half-assed commitment to content.

The best thing: Make a publishing schedule for your gym business and stick to it. Start with four posts a week: one blog, podcast or video, plus three related social media posts. That’s a great start.

The eventual target: Publish one thing every day.

That might feel like a lot, but here’s another tip based on many conversations at the summit:

You don’t have to overthink it, and you don’t have to create a masterpiece every single time. You just have to get something out the door.

Protip: Just post pictures and videos of smiling clients, and break that up with simple health and fitness tips. That’s it. This plan can be executed in five minutes a day.

Real results: One of our top gym owners uses a very simple plan like this, and he produces some of the best metrics in the entire Two-Brain family. He doesn’t overthink it. He just has staff members publish basic, on-brand posts regularly. And his key performance indicators are off the chart—that’s proof you can use a simple media plan to support a well-run gym.

Businesses that publish inconsistently look dead.

Businesses that publish daily look vibrant, and those that show off happy “people like me” eventually acquire clients through media. Lots of them.

My Challenge

My post-summit media challenge to you is this:

Create a simple posting schedule that works for you—minimum four pieces of content per week.Generate content fast—when in doubt, take a pic of smiling clients and explain why they’re smiling.Publish according to the schedule for three months without fail.Ask all leads and new members how they heard about your gym, and make note of references to your content. If a new member says a certain post motivated them to take action, make more posts just like it.Scale up publishing when you’ve nailed the schedule for three months and are starting to hear that your content is connecting with members of your audience.

If you stick to that plan, you’re going to discover the value of consistent media output.

And then you’ll have motivation to scale up just a little—with an eventual goal of getting out one piece of content per day.

To start connecting with your audience today, go publish something right now. Literally walk into the gym, take a picture of the first smiling person you see, and post it.

Then do the same thing tomorrow!

The post Your Post-Summit Media Challenge appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Ben Bergeron: The Simple Solve for Team Accountability

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
You are going to need a team to grow your business. So how do you keep team members on track, and how do you tell them their performance isn’t up to standards? Ben Bergeron has the answer in this special episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” recorded live at the Two-Brain Summit in Chicago on June 9th. Tickets for the 2025 Summit are on sale now. Click the link in the show notes. Now, here’s Ben Bergeron with “The Simple Solve for Team Accountability.”

Ben Bergeron (00:23):
It’s an honor to be here. It’s inspiring to be around so many people who are here to learn, grow, and evolve. It’s a thing that I hold one of the closest to my values and my principles is this continual growth and evolution and always trying to be better. So, the fact that I’m surrounded by a thousand other like-minded people is incredible. So, thank you guys for allowing me to be up here. This is something I don’t take lightly, and I’m excited to share with you guys my journey and the lessons that I’ve pulled out of it because I’ve certainly made more mistakes than most of you have. So, rewind about 20ish years, I’m in my mid-twenties, and I’m living and working in Boston. I am working in the financial district, and I live in Boston’s North End. It’s a great place to live, especially in your twenties.

Ben Bergeron (01:17):
You’re on the waterfront. You’re surrounded by restaurants and bars and parks. I’m only a 10-minute walk from work, which is in State Street Bank. I’m on the 11th floor. I’m working for the Foreign Exchange Trading Division. So, I’m supporting the traders who are moving money around the world, and one Tuesday morning I’m walking to work. It’s a day just like today. It’s sunny, it’s warm, but it’s not hot. It’s amazing. The fact that you can wake up and walk to work is such a privilege in itself, and being in a beautiful city and walking to a job that is kind of what I thought I was going to be doing for a long time. I went to school and did business in school, got out and got a job in finance. And when I got to my desk, this was way back when, and I was sitting at my desk early, I worked foreign exchange trading, so there was no off time.

Ben Bergeron (02:13):
The markets around the world are always going, and I get there about 7:30, and about an hour into work I’m listening to—before Howard Stern was on America’s Got Talent, he had his own show—I’m listening to Howard Stern of all things, which was just so weird, and I hear on “The Howard Stern Show” that the World Trade Center is on fire. And it was weird, but it wasn’t what we now know it to be, and they continued to do the little jokes, but it was tempered, and there was a lot of confusion. They were trying to figure out what it was. Then there was another report that it was because of plane fluid, and they were trying to figure out: Was it a drunk pilot? What was it? Was it one of those little private planes?

Ben Bergeron (02:59):
And then they hear that it was a jumbo jet, and they are able to look out their own—they’re in New York City—look out their own and look at it, and now it’s like, they’re like, “Oh my god, you can see the smoke piling out.” So, I get up and walk to the trading floor where the TVs are, and as I am watching it, we see the second plane hit and the voice across the room said, “We’re under attack.” And somebody else said, “We’re at war.” The next few moments after that, if you guys remember this, if you guys are close to my age, we’re all in the same boat. That day changed everything. It changed the way we view the world, changed the way we thought about good and evil, changed the way we travel. But over the course of the next two hours, two more planes went down, and two buildings collapsed.

Ben Bergeron (03:57):
And by the end of those two hours—that all happened from 8:17 in the morning until about 10:30—I knew that what I was doing was not what I wanted to be doing. Living in Boston, walking to work, even on a beautiful sunny day, to go up to the 11th floor and sit at a desk and push money around on a computer was not the thing that was going to fulfill me. I didn’t know what that thing was going to be, but I knew it was something more than that. And I knew I wanted to have impact in some way on a human level, not with zeroes and ones, not with pushing and trading euros and yen. It had to be something more, it had to have impact, and I was not going to allow myself another moment of that stagnation, another moment of the rat in the wheel, another moment of ants marching.

Ben Bergeron (04:49):
So I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I took the time to move out to Wyoming and live in the monks of nothingness for a year. I had a lot of different thoughts come through my mind: I should join the military; I should become a firefighter. I was so inspired by the heroic acts of that day, that week and the months that followed. But I actually felt like I could have the strongest impact if I helped people become healthier and happier themselves. I’ve always had this weird inside of me thing that I want to help other people try and find their purpose, their passion, the thing that sets them on fire. So, I was the weird kid that could talk about glycemic load and index way back in the 1990s. So, I eventually decided to become a trainer, and I just worked with people in their homes.

Ben Bergeron (05:41):
I started a business where I moved back to Boston, and I would go from one suburban home to another to another, and business was good. I had a wait list, but it was also very lonely. I was the only person, I was the only person doing my job, and I would basically be with a client in my car to a client in my car with a client until the day ended. So, I wanted some other connection. I wanted coworkers. So, I got a job at a Boston sports club and became a trainer there. Built my business up there to where I had a wait list again, didn’t quite still feel fully fulfilled and knew that there was something more. So, I thought, “I’ll get my CSES and become a strength and conditioning coach.” Started working with high school kids, did that for a couple years, always all the time trying to get more knowledge, more understanding, trying to look for the next greatest, best thing.

Ben Bergeron (06:36):
And I didn’t know what I was searching for until I found CrossFit. I know probably half of us here are CrossFitters, half of us aren’t. This isn’t here to sell you on CrossFit, but when I found that, I found something I didn’t even know I was looking for: the methodology, the community, the programming, Greg Glassman’s amazing ability to distill these really complex theories into really digestible bits. And when I found that, I knew overnight—I can remember where I was. I was living by myself in apartment on the third floor, and I would just search all night long looking for the next thing. So, I was a part of forums and mail lists and all these different communities, and someone was like, “Hey, I found this thing,” so I went there and checked it, and I stayed up the entire night, even though like clients, just digesting and seeing this stuff.

Ben Bergeron (07:31):
The very next morning, I put my clients through the Filthy Fifty workout, just like let’s fucking go. I was doing all of the stuff that they were doing but just on a really bad level. I knew I wanted to like leaderboard and measure. I knew I wanted to do these things, but I would have my clients at the globo gym do 10 minutes on those folding stair things, and I had a clipboard, and I’d be like, “You got X number of stairs. Jim who did it this morning, got this many.” I was doing the thing but never at a level of virtuosity that Glassman was doing. And when I found that, man, it just spoke to my heart. I knew then I had found my thing. I knew then I was going to do the thing I was going to do the rest of my life.

Ben Bergeron (08:15):
Within a year, I got certified. Within a year, I opened up my own gym. Very early on, I was drawn to the competitive aspect of CrossFit because I was coming out of trying to qualify for the IRONMAN World Championships. I had done two IRONMANs, done OK in them, and I thought, “That’s the pinnacle of athletic achievement because it’s three sports. If you can swim, bike and run, there’s nothing more fit that you can do.” But I knew that there was something more because I also wanted to be strong. I also wanted to be explosive. So that’s what drew me to CrossFit, and I saw Jason Khalifa win the Games. I was like, “That’s the thing. That’s the thing I want to be a part of.” I didn’t do another triathlon after that until I was training my team years later, and we did it for training purposes, but I didn’t do another one after that.

Ben Bergeron (09:05):
Instead I threw my hat into the ring of building athletes, coaching athletes, and myself trying to train for that sport. We had a lot of early success. I had the ability—my wife was a top 10 individual athlete. From that, we also did really well on the team side of things. That provided me a lot of opportunities. I believe—I don’t know this but I was one of the first remote coaches, wasn’t even coaches in the space, but Chris Spealler hired me to be his coach. We were both on the Level 1 seminar staff. I became Chris Spealler’s coach and then Becca Voigt’s and got a lot of opportunities to work with these really high-level athletes. All the while, my business is starting to off. I go from 40 or 50 clients to 50 or 60, little while later, six months, we’re at the 150 mark.

Ben Bergeron (09:58):
Within a year or so, we’re about 300; within two years, we’re at 400. As we go through this, and with the competitive drive, with also the focus on community, it was our two biggest things. Let’s compete; let’s build community. The gym has a lot of opportunities, so we hire a bunch of coaches. We hire a bunch of coaches who are phenomenal, amazing human beings. At one time we had six red shirts, six people on the Level 1 seminar staff who were part of our community. These are the best of the best coaches. They’re the coaches who train other coaches. We are hosting Level 1 seminar staffs. I’m doing business seminars. We have teams that are winning the CrossFit Games. I have top 10 athletes, and the gym is exploding like this. There is so much from the outside to look and point at and go, “Wow, that’s awesome.” From the inside, I am dying a slow death.

Ben Bergeron (11:01):
All of that success—and even though I was following my greatest passion, it’s the two big things. I’m doing what I’m set out to do. I’m doing what sets my heart on fire. I love work, hate school. I love to work especially when I enjoy and I feel purpose behind it. So even though I’m doing this thing, I love, that I feel like I was put on earth to do, and even though we are having all this success: million-dollar business, coaches making 100K, we haven’t had a coach leave in four years, we have nine full-time employees. Inside myself—and I wasn’t a good enough leader; I wasn’t vulnerable enough at the time to express this to anyone, including my wife—I’m dying. I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m doing everything. I have nine people on staff, but no one is doing anything other than coaching a class or two a day.

Ben Bergeron (12:12):
It looks like the business is a well-oiled machine, but it’s not. It’s a facade. So that slow, painful, agonizing quiet secret was kept until about the time, 2015ish, when I started working with Katrín Davíðsdóttir, and we won the CrossFit Games. Between that and then working the next year with Katrin and Matt, and they both won the individual side, I started to really learn and understand more about coaching, about leadership, and what I needed to do to make a change. And I was so enamored with these high-level coaches, and everyone said to a T, “You’re going to go as far as fast as your team.” And I realized I didn’t have a healthy team. I had a team of incredible coaches and incredible athletes, and we had an incredible community. We would do events, and we would have 150 people from the gym at these events, no matter what it was:

Ben Bergeron (13:26):
Let’s go to an apple orchard, let’s go to Boston, let’s go have a Halloween throw down. The community rallied around everything. We got into charities. We built six different homeless shelters, a place basis in homeless shelters in our community. We built two schools in Africa. Right now on the outside of the schools, it says, “CrossFit New England,” on the outside of those schools. Like we were doing amazing stuff. But myself, I was experiencing entrepreneurial regret. I had gotten to this place where I thought we were all supposed to try to get to, and what I realized is it is not about that. We are not supposed to be searching for the million dollars, the 400 members winning the CrossFit Games or any of those things. What we all want—this is what we all want as human beings.

Ben Bergeron (14:29):
I’m going to take a stab at this—and with enough soul searching and pulling back, you might agree, or you might disagree—I believe that what we are all searching for is peace of mind. It’s what we want. It’s why most of us got into this business because it feels good when you do good things for other people. It feels good when you have the freedom to do things your way, be an entrepreneur. It feels good to be in front of a group of 15 people and leading them through a class of rowing burpees and thrusters. It feels good to be excited to go to work every single day. And those feel-good moments are the moments that we have peace of mind. That chattery voice in our head that we all have—we all have it all the time—that just when it gets a little bit quieter, that’s a feeling of love. It’s a feeling of a flow state. It’s a feeling of doing your passion. And although I was doing my passion, that chatter was louder than it ever has been. I’ve since experienced it two more times. One of those times was COVID.

Ben Bergeron (15:41):
But that was when it was the loudest. Before I was doing a thing, I loved going to work, and then I started to dread and regret it. Here I am doing this thing I love the most, and my realization was even though I have this amazing team, these team of my best friends, I’m in their weddings, our coaches are getting married, and they’re the best coaches I could possibly ever have. I was in full-blown entrepreneurial regret. So, 2016 I took all of my coaches during one of our coaches’ meetings and brought them—because again it was a, we had these beautiful days for kind of these pivotal moments—again, it was a beautiful day in New England, and we rarely do this, but we did our coaches meeting. We do a once-a-week coaches meeting; it’s a full staff meeting, and we pulled them outside, and we rarely do this. So, this is now known as “the picnic table talk.” Brought them up to the picnic tables outside, and I started our meeting with something very different than I had done in the past. Usually, we start off with call outs, meaning like let’s share some cool things that we saw from the past week, then we go through the events of the week that are upcoming, we go through some of the numbers.

Ben Bergeron (17:05):
Instead I sat all the coaches down, I looked at all of them in the eye, paused intentionally and said, “I think in a year from now, we’re going to be surprised how few of us at this table are still here. Not your fault. Totally my fault. I haven’t led you guys, I haven’t shared with you guys the vision of what it is we’re trying to create, and I haven’t held anyone accountable for the way that we’re going to get to that vision. This is not your fault, completely on me, but things are going to change, and I understand if it’s not something you want to be a part of because it’s not something you signed up for. So, if you want to leave between now and then, I totally get it.” Between then and a year later, we only had one full-time and one part-time coach still on staff. Everyone else did leave. I fired one of them, so of the nine, six left on their own, I let go of one and two stayed. What I realized was I didn’t want just a 400-member gym. I didn’t want just a million dollars in revenue. I didn’t want to just win the CrossFit Games. I wanted to come to work every single day having peace of mind. And the thing that when I pulled back a few dominoes back, what did I think was the thing that was going to get me there the most? It was having a healthy team.

Ben Bergeron (18:42):
Now health is something that we are very, very comfortable with. We’re very, very knowledgeable about. There are a few different things that go into health, but if you train right, if you eat right and you sleep right, you’re going to be fairly healthy. That’s how simple health is. There’s other things, and we can dial down into the strategies and the tactics for all of them. But that’s the three pillars. That’s the three pillars of personal human health. It’s that simple for team health: It’s your culture, it’s the vision and it’s accountability. That’s what team health comes down to. Now accountability is the one that really puts it all together, but you can’t have accountability without the other two. And I’ve tried it. I did try to do this the other way. During COVID, our business was completely reshaped, and I stepped away from the business, the gym business, completely for a while and put it in the hands of somebody else. When I came back into the business, we just tried to do accountability, and it did not work. When I came back into the business, we had to start from the beginning, and the beginning is your culture. And now if you hear this at this point, you go, “That’s a really big, long story Ben, to get to this eye roll moment of culture. We’re going to talk culture? That’s like so soft, so fuzzy.” It is soft and fuzzy until you put it into action.

Ben Bergeron (20:26):
“Culture will eat strategy for breakfast.” Peter Drucker, father of modern-day management. It’s so true, meaning that great culture will outperform great strategy every single day, and bad culture will override and pull down any good strategy. You won’t be able to execute on it. So, when you think about culture, you start with what is important to you. And what I had done in the past was I wasn’t intentional enough, I wasn’t aware enough of what those things were, so I allowed it to be anything that kind of the momentum took us towards, which was competition and community. And that was one of those things that drove me off the path of what I wanted to do. But we were so intentional about it. We had multiple teams going to regionals every year. I was coaching a half dozen individual Games athletes. We had masters athletes all over the place. We had an incredible community, but it didn’t lead me to where I want to be because culture’s like a garden or a jungle: It’s going to grow, and unless you cultivate it with your actions, it’s going to grow into something that maybe you don’t want.

Ben Bergeron (21:43):
So how do we do that intentionally? It starts with understanding what’s most important to you. You the entrepreneur, you the business owner. So, what is that thing to you? For me, it was the health of a team. For me, and this doesn’t—this is not a talk. I’m not up here to tell you what your values are. I’ve had a couple conversations around outside in the halls, and I keep coming back to that. Your values are your values. For me, those values were: I want to be a part of a high performing team. That’s when I feel my best. So, I need to understand what that looks like. What makes up a great team? Fairly obvious, great team players. What are the characteristics of great team players? To me, humility, hunger and happiness. Those are the three driving factors. Those are people I want to surround myself with. Humility: It’s not about me, it’s not about my wins, it’s about the team. People who think, “If not me, then who?” People who are open-minded and looking for feedback. That’s what humble people do. Hunger: People with work ethic, drive, pursuit of excellence. People who would rather be at work than not. People who don’t need to be micromanaged.

Ben Bergeron (23:06):
Happy: We have bracelets that we all wear—some people in this room have them on now—that say, “Never whine, never complain, never make excuses.”

Ben Bergeron (23:17):
Happy: Don’t complain, don’t gossip, don’t whine. Glass is half full. It’s a beautiful day outside. I don’t want to be surrounded by toxicity or drama or anything else. Do you lift people up, or do you pull them down? Are you a fountain or a drain? Binary: one or the other. So now that we have that framework in place of what it means to be a great team player on a great team, if we do nothing more than put it on posters, put it on coffee mugs and hang a poster in the gym, we have done nothing.

Ben Bergeron (23:53):
In fact, if that’s where you leave it, you’ve done yourself a huge disservice because your actions might be contradictory to that, and there goes your worth; there goes your integrity. The key to culture is to create it, to do it in action all the time. To me, this starts with the hiring process. When I came back in after COVID and my gym had gone, people have been hired for this without me in it—I’m in the process right now of redoing this; I’m essentially redoing the hiring process with people who have been on our team for 18 months. Because if you don’t do it on day one, it’s like an old dog, new tricks. It’s way harder to do it this way, which is basically where you guys are if you’re going to follow through with this.

Ben Bergeron (24:44):
But it’s hard, and it takes incredible intentionality. And what that means is during the hiring process, we essentially try to scare them away with our values. And what ends up happening is people who aren’t humble, hungry and happy will see themselves out of the candidacy process. But people who are go, “Yes, this is the thing I’ve been looking for. This is the thing I want to be a part of.” And the way we do that is one of my roles as the owner during that process is to give what we call a “core values speech.” And I tell them straight up, after all the pleasantries, and we find out about them and what they’ve done in the past and why they want to work here, I let them know what working here is going to look like. I tell them that we are looking for team players, and for us a team player is somebody who’s humble, hungry and happy.

Ben Bergeron (25:45):
What do I mean by humble? Mostly, I mean that you’re looking to grow, growth-minded, open-minded, that you’re looking for feedback, that you don’t have all the answers, and you’re here because you want to learn, grow and evolve every single day. For the first two months, 60 days, for the first two months after every class you coach, I’m going to sit with you for about 20 minutes giving you feedback on things that you could have done better. I’m not going to criticism sandwich it; I’m not going to make it soft. I’m going to give you ways to be better. This is what high performance coaching looks like. If you were to go watch the Yukon basketball, if you were to go watch the—I used to always say the New England Patriots, and I can’t say that anymore—if you were to go watch the Florida Panthers, if you were to watch high-level sports, the coach gives feedback.

Ben Bergeron (26:44):
The coach is there to show the gap between where people are and where he expects them to be. That’s my job as your coach here. If that’s going to be uncomfortable for you, I get it. That’s not for everybody. If you’re here because you want to work at CrossFit New England and maybe you can learn something, that’s not enough. You’ve got to be humble enough to want it all the time and know that it’s not about you looking good; it’s about you wanting to be good. It’s not about your ego or your identity; it’s about the growth, your growth as a coach. And if this isn’t going to be comfortable for you, I get that. I understand it. I totally get it. It’s not for everybody. What we mean by hunger is—again, this is the talk I’m giving somebody during the hiring process—is we’re hiring people that would rather be at work than not.

Ben Bergeron (27:41):
We’re not hiring people who are looking at the clock. No one here says TGIF, thank God it’s Friday. No one’s like, “Oh, just waiting for the weekend.” No one goes, “Oh Monday.” Everyone loves being here. And if we have an event on Saturday, without us even asking, just so you know, all of our staff is going to be here probably till eight or nine or 10 o’clock at night the night before just because they’re here to make sure everything’s right. If you are not here, that’s going to be weird. And I don’t want this to be weird for you, but if you’re a person who you want to work, you love work, this is going to be, this will be phenomenal. In terms of the happy part, if you are a person who sort of like gets off on complaining—I saw this thing with Seinfeld recently on “The Tonight Show,” and he’s like, “I just like to complain.”

Ben Bergeron (28:37):
“If you get my act, my act is just me complaining. That’s it.” I just like—that’s not us at all. Never wine, never complain, never make excuses. If you are that type of person, doesn’t make you a bad person, Jerry Seinfeld’s not a bad person, you’re just going to stick out like a sore thumb. It’s going to be uncomfortable when we are constantly snapping this in front of you to create awareness that you are hurting us with your complaints. This is what it looks like when you start to actualize the values. First step one to actualize your values, to actually create culture, is in the hiring process. Then in the onboarding process, hunger. For us, hunger is you want to learn, grow, you do the work. We have people in the hiring process read three books during the hiring process. Now they’re short, and they’re super fast, but we have them read three books.

Ben Bergeron (29:32):
If they don’t read those three books—we’re here to, this is our method of learning. This is our method of growing. We believe in reading. You can audiobook, that’s fine, but if that’s not something you’re going to be interested in following through with, this probably isn’t going to be the place for you. Can you create the culture? Not with posters, not with stickers, not with saying it, but over and over and over again bring it to life. The way we start every single one of our team meetings, everyone goes around the room and does a core value shout out of something they saw from our staff in the last seven days. There was a representation of humility, hunger or happiness, and we’re trying to bring it what you look for. You see more of: What else can we do to bring this thing to life? The bracelets and everything else.

Ben Bergeron (30:21):
We are constantly reading the new book about this. We just read—there’s a talk, next door I think it was, on “Unreasonable Hospitality.” That’s a book we just read. So, we’re constantly reinforcing this, reinforcing this, reinforcing this. The culture will eat strategy for breakfast. You want to make sure your culture is strong. It’s not just “what grows.” Be intentional with it. The next one out of that when we get culture is your vision. Before we get to accountability, we need vision. It’s got to be a shared vision. And again, I tried to do this the other way as well. It doesn’t work unless you go culture, vision, then accountability. For vision, it’s: What are we trying to create? What is this thing? And the simple part of that is if you have a leadership team and you haven’t done this work, and you guys aren’t dialed in, dialed in on what it is you’re trying to create, it’s essentially you have an eight-man boat, and everyone’s rowing just a quarter of a second off.

Ben Bergeron (31:27):
Everyone’s working their tails off, everyone is a super high performer. But if in that eight-man boat, everyone’s rolling a quarter of a second off, you have no shot. There is no shot. It is more about precision than it’s about strength or speed. You need precision on where you’re going. That comes down to, first, the really detailed: In three years, what’s this business going to look like? Are you going to still have one location, or are you going to have five locations? Is this going to be trying to drive towards 500 members, or are you going to cap it at 150? Are you going to have 10 people on staff or two people on staff? Is this going to be about driving revenue or driving service? None of these are binary. It’s not one or the other and you can’t have others. But what we want to do is create it as simple as a bullet point list of 25 things of: What’s this going to look like?

Ben Bergeron (32:29):
“We’re going to have one location. We’ll be running 12 classes a day. Average class size will be 18 people. We will have nine people on staff. Four of them will be part-timers. We will have a kids’ program, both elementary, middle school and high school. We will have a front desk with smoothies. We will do outsourcing to other partnerships.” If we don’t have this dialed in and shared amongst the entire staff, they don’t know where you’re going. We live with this vision in our heads at all times: in the car, in the shower, when we’re answering emails. We have this thing that we’re trying to build and create. We sort of assume that other people are along for the ride. They are not. We need to get it out of our heads, and this is your job as the entrepreneur, as the leader, as the owner, as the founder.

Ben Bergeron (33:21):
It is your job. You are the visionary. Your job is to share the vision. In fact, it’s your most important job. Culture and vision. This is what the founder does: culture and vision. Culture and vision. In the EOS model, the entrepreneurial operating system, a phenomenal model to help run small businesses, there are actually two people that run the business. There is the visionary, and the visionary’s job is to create the vision and create culture and big partnerships, big problems and nothing else. These are the passionate founders. They’re the people who like to take businesses from zero to one. Underneath the visionary, there’s an integrator, essentially a COO, a person who brings the vision to life.

Ben Bergeron (34:18):
Your job as the entrepreneur is to ensure that there is crystal clarity around that vision. And you work up from: What’s this going to look like in three years? By the way, those aren’t goals. You’re not creating goals because at the end of this year, you’re going to redo it. It’s this constantly moving target that you’re having other people chase towards, and things change. The economy changes, your opportunities change, your business changes. So, we want to constantly be reshaping this and sharing it. From that three-year picture for vision, we also want to understand: Who is our target market? Who are we serving? What is our go-to-market strategy, if you have one, or marketing strategy in general. And then on top of that, you want to have, and this is another eye-roll moment, business jargon, a mission statement, but some powerful thing that’s going to guide the directions of decisions in your business.

Ben Bergeron (35:14):
And every word should matter in it. It should be memorable. Not something that someone has to look up, and it certainly shouldn’t be five or six sentences long. I went to—yeah, I’ll pass on that. I was going to—here’s ours. We are creating a family of humble, hungry, happy people who kick ass into our nineties. Once you understand that, and once you understand what each one of those words means, you know where the business is going. Now, it’s very different than just having that nice kind of snazzy tagline: building a family. Everyone has different definitions of family. What does family mean to us? It’s an acronym: forget about me, I love you. Forget about me, I love you. Now what is love? Love is something different for everybody. Love for us is when you do something for someone else not looking for anything else in return.

Ben Bergeron (36:19):
So what are we trying to create? A group of people who care about each other to the point where they’re looking for ways to do things for other people, not looking for anything in return. That’s what we’re trying to create. That group of people. How do we want those people to act beyond caring in a family? We want them to be humble, hungry and happy. We want them to be humble. We want them to be here to learn. It’s not about me; it’s about the greater thing. We want them to be—no shortcuts. Work for it. Drive, pursuit of excellence. And happy: no complaining, no gossip. We’ve fired clients for gossip. This is when you know how to make decisions. Creating a family of humble, hungry, happy people gives you decision points. We no longer have any competitors in our gym. Zero competitors in our gym because that’s not what we’re trying to do.

Ben Bergeron (37:11):
It makes the decision point easy. When someone comes in and says, “I’d like to—you guys have bumper plates? You know, I don’t really, I’m not into taking classes, but I’d love to work on my Olympic lifting in the back.” We have a huge back room. “Is it OK if I do that?” The answer is really clear. The answer is no because they’re not here to grow with us, learn with us, or be a part of us. They’re not going to be a part of our family. It makes the decision points really, really easy when each one of those words means something. What does kicking ass in your nineties mean? It means that you can kick ass in your nineties. How are we going to get there? By how you eat, sleep, train, think, and connect. We have a prescription for that. Now we know exactly what it is we’re trying to deliver to each one of our members.

Ben Bergeron (37:55):
Now we have a vision, a mission, a marketing strategy, and what is this going to look like in three years. Now that you’ve established your culture, now that you have this vision, now you’re ready to put it into practice. Now you’re ready to put it into place. Now you’re ready to hold people accountable to making that thing go. It’s the hardest one. It’s actually the hardest one of all of them, and it’s the one that I fell prey to missing for a very long time. I was affiliated in 2007. I didn’t have that picnic table talk until 2016—nine years before I felt comfortable going, “This is how we’re going to do things,” because I wanted people to like me, and the people who were working with me were my best friends, and I felt really weird telling my best friends what to do.

Ben Bergeron (38:48):
Said in another way, I was a very poor leader. That’s what that means. If you have a hard time holding people accountable to your standards of excellence and having them understand what those are, you are a bad leader. That was me. That was a hard pill, and it’s something I’m still trying to work on to this day. I’m not done. I’m not there. Everyone’s a work in progress. I have at least a little bit more awareness of what a leader is supposed to do beyond just make it an exciting work environment that people feel well compensated for and no one wants to leave. That was not it at all. When you create accountability, it comes down to really two things. It is ambiguity, or I should say, the reason that accountability doesn’t happen is because of two things: ambiguity and fear of rocking the boat.

Ben Bergeron (39:51):
In terms of ambiguity, the way we get past that is by clarifying exactly what we want and we expect, and we don’t do it—we co-create this with them. If you have someone on your staff, they should know exactly what their 90-day quarterly objectives are. What is the primary thing that they’re responsible for? The singular thing. What is the one thing that they’re primarily responsible for in the next 90 days? Is it instilling a new onboarding process? Is it a new marketing campaign? Is it raising prices? Is it hiring a new staff member? Is it getting a kids program up and going? What are their responsibilities in the next 90 days? From there, together, you build out exactly what those strategies are and the tactics to achieve each one of those strategies. It goes: objectives with a KPI. What is the objective? What is the key performance indicator that we can say a numerical figure that we can say, “Yes, you did this, or no, you did not.”

Ben Bergeron (40:55):
Then from there, what are the strategies, one, two, or three strategies, we’re going to use to achieve that? And then what are the tactics used to achieve each strategy? Every single week we’re going to have a meeting with that person. This is how accountability happens, beyond job descriptions and checklists. What we’re going to do is every single week we’re going to have a meeting with that person and ask them, “Are you on track?” It’s a simple yes or no question. There doesn’t need anything beyond that. “Are you on track to hit your quarterly objective? Yes, or no?” We’re going to do that—there’s 12 weeks in a month—we’re going to do that every single week. We’re going to get either 12 yeses, 12 no’s or something in between. If it’s a yes, cool; if it’s a no, this becomes our top priority for that meeting. What can we do to get you back on track?

Ben Bergeron (41:48):
What are your blockers? What can I do to help you? That’s what the job of a leader and a manager is to do is to find out why somebody is having trouble achieving their objectives and to help them, to unblock things, to give them more resources. That’s what we’re doing. Then from there we go, “Are you on track for your quarterly objective? Yes, or no?” If it is no, we move on. If it’s yes, we pause, “What are you blocked on?” If the answer is no, then it’s, “Great. Let’s review what we together decided you were going to accomplish last week. You had weekly to-dos,” which I’m going to get to. “We had weekly to-dos. You had these four weekly to-dos. Did you accomplish those four weekly to-dos? Yes, or no?” If they say yes, cool. You don’t need 100% percent on this. 80 percent’s good.

Ben Bergeron (42:42):
If it’s 100% percent all the time, you might not be tasking them with enough; they might be overworked. 80% for to-dos are good. Then from there, the remaining part of the discussion of that meeting is “What else is on your mind? What issues are coming up? What opportunities do you see? What are you unclear about? What can I help you with?” And then finally, “What are your top priorities for this next week?” So, a weekly meeting goes really—this is accountability. This solves the ambiguity part of a weekly meeting. It’s as simple as, “Are you on track for your quarterly rock? Yes, or no?” “Let’s go through last week’s to-dos. What’d you do last week? Cool. What’s on your mind? What’s your top priority for next week?” Those then become the next week’s to-dos. Bye-bye, ambiguity. That’s it.

Ben Bergeron (43:37):
Every week you’re tracking. If every week they’re tracking and they are on track for their quarterly rocks, you’re getting big stuff done every 90, every seven days, you’re getting stuff done. Two or three things, to-dos, every seven days. Two or three things done every seven days. Two or three things done stemming up to a big thing every quarter. Now you have a healthy team. This is what health looks like. What we were looking for, remember, was peace of mind. You know what the thing that eats us up, you know the thing that causes drama in your organization? You know the thing that causes toxicity is when you go, “Why the hell isn’t she doing that? Like I talked to them. Why aren’t they doing it?” This is the thing that eats us up. This is the thing that ate me up for nine years.

Ben Bergeron (44:24):
The second part of accountability is the thing I fell into as well, which is you just don’t want to rock the boat, and strangely enough, the closer you are with people, the harder this one becomes. When you are really good friends with the people you work with and someone’s not doing their job, it becomes so much harder to lean into that hard conversation. We can’t fall for that trap. As leaders, as coaches, this is our job. This is what we do every day with our members. Every day with our members, they walk in, we don’t assume that they know the best way to get themselves healthy. They’re coming to you for that purpose, for that reason. It’s our job to show them where they are, where they want to be, highlight the gap and say, “This is what we need to focus on.”

Ben Bergeron (45:21):
That’s the job of a coach. It’s the same thing for us as leaders. It is our job to say, “This was our shared expectation. We created this objective and these strategies together. We built this. We’re not there. You are not fulfilling the expectations that we set together. This is what every high performing organization in the world does. If we want to run a high performing organization, it is our role, it is our responsibility, to show that gap and show when people are not meeting our expectations. When we do anything otherwise, we’re actually being so cruel. That’s the meanest thing that we can do. Remember that clear is kind. You would do it with your kids. If your kids were not acting, were not performing, up to your expectations, whatever that might be, manners, school behavior, you would call it out. You would do it with your dog.

Ben Bergeron (46:35):
If your dog isn’t supposed to be on the couch and they’re on the couch, you call it out. For some reason, we have this inherent fear of entering the danger with our coworkers. We have to be brave enough, we have to be leaders, to step into that danger and call it out. If we are able to do that, we remove the ambiguity. If we have this crystal clarity in terms of what people should be working on every 90 days and every week, and we’re tracking it every seven days, and we’ve built out the vision and the culture of excellence that we all want to lean into, well then, we have the businesses that we all set out to create. Then we have the peace of mind. Then we’re following our passions, and then we’re doing what we truly set out to do. Thank you guys.

Mike Warkentin (47:28):
That was Ben Bergeron on “Run a Profitable Gym.” To join us in Chicago for the 2025 Two-Brain Summit, click the link in the show notes. Tickets are on sale now.

The post Ben Bergeron: The Simple Solve for Team Accountability appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Golden Age for Gym Owners

Gym owner, I want you to have a long and glorious Golden Age.

This period is the peak of life, when you have both the freedom of wealth and the health to enjoy it.

At the recent Two-Brain Summit in Chicago, I laid out the path to the Golden Age for gym owners.

Here’s the good part:

As entrepreneurs, we have the unique opportunity to get into the Golden Age very early in life. Most of your friends will be working at 60. You won’t have to.

Your wealth can produce your income instead.

You Deserve to Thrive

Our parents usually lived in the Golden Age for about eight to 15 years, on average. That’s not a large portion of their lives, but it’s more than their parents had. Did your grandparents retire wealthy and fit, with a lust for life? Probably not.

And if they did, they were probably on some kind of pension that had them counting pennies. If they had a Golden Age at all, it was very short. They made that sacrifice so you have a greater opportunity now.

Sadly, most in our generation won’t capitalize. The average Golden Age is shrinking. Most members of our generation will reach financial security earlier than ever before, but our average health span is shortening, so we won’t be able to enjoy it.

But as a fitness entrepreneur, you have a chance to spend more time in the Golden Age of health and wealth than anyone in history.

You know how to use fitness to preserve or improve health, and your business is a wealth-generating vehicle that can fund your retirement or give you a launch pad you can use to create wealth through other entrepreneurial endeavors.

As a mentorship practice, we’re producing new millionaires every month—and we celebrated a bunch of them at the summit. You can see many of them in the photo at the top of this page—that’s our Tinker group for upper-level gym owners. Many of these entrepreneurs are already in the Golden Age—and they’re far from old.

Take that picture as proof that we can teach you how to escape the grind and earn the money you require to live the life you want.

When you have freedom of money and time, you can do great things to improve the world. Or you can just pursue the things that interest and fulfill you—learn to play guitar, speak another language, spend time with your family.

For me, the Golden Age is the Thief Phase I wrote about in “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief.” This is where I get to play Robin Hood, make lots of money and give it away. I do that through donations and mentorship.

For you, it might be Queen Phase, Pirate Phase, Zen Master Phase or Writer Phase.

Whatever it is, you can’t waste the opportunity to achieve it.

Great Wealth and Great Waste

Your parents worked for years to pay for college, they worked through college, and then they stuck with a job they often hated for decades. They saved every extra dollar and hoped to retire at age 65 with a few years of mediocre health left to them. They did that for you.

Now the poorest person in the Western Hemisphere has access to resources and information beyond a king’s wildest dream only five generations ago. We can build wealth fast, and we can actually stop working and still survive. We can build up a nest egg and have enough to relax for a decade or two at the end of life.

And, for the first time, we can use money to buy time: We can accumulate an abundance of wealth so fast that we can stop working while we still have our health. We can accumulate resources that build more resources for us. We can stop working at a younger age and survive longer than ever before.

But this ease has led to new problems. The killers of our generation are the problems of abundance: For the first time in history, we have too much. While our lifespan continues to extend, our healthspan is shortening.

More and more, the last few years of life are beset by chronic health problems such as disease and immobility. We can survive to age 90—triple the life expectancy of our great-great-grandparents—but the last 20 years are often bad. Some regret reaching an advanced age. Without health and freedom, they can become depressed. Instead of enjoying the freedom they’ve created, retirement becomes the worst years of their lives.

Here’s what should happen:

You accumulate enough wealth to stop working at a young age (while you still have good health). You keep good health for as long as possible and die in your sleep after a full day of skiing with your spouse and friends.

Between those two points, your life in your Golden Age is full of laughter, experience and a sense of purpose that you’re making things better for your kids.

We know how to extend lifespan. We know how to stay healthy almost right up till the end. And we know how to build wealth.

But most don’t do it because it’s complicated. Or it was.

Now it’s not.

And there’s no excuse for failure.

To hear more about how a mentor can help you live the life you want, click here.

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Two-Brain Summit: 4 Simple Marketing Tactics That Work

The Two-Brain Summit is all about taking action.

I’ll prove it—and I’ll help you get moving today.

Early on Day 1 of the summit, we had mentors Kieran O’Dwyer and Nick Habich talk about sales and marketing. The pair laid out clear, simple but deadly effective marketing tactics, and they encouraged owners to take action right at the conference.

They didn’t settle for “I’ll do this stuff eventually.”

It was literally “do this stuff in the break after we leave the stage!”

I know that the gym owners who followed Kieran and Nick’s instructions started conversations with prospective or former clients and are now earning more revenue from the members they acquired or reacquired.

In fact, Kieran sent me a bunch of messages he received from gym owners who are using the tactics and getting results.

Here’s one: “Here are the results (of the 5130 post my staff member made after the summit): 20 leads, 5 No Sweat Intros, 3 closes, 2 more conversations continuing. Front-end revenue: $800. Length of engagement for her PT clients is 26 months—$20,800. I spent $800 for her to come to summit. Do the simple stuff!”

After the conference, Chris Guerrero, another Two-Brain mentor, sent a message out to his clients to ensure they’re taking action. I’ll present a version of that message below with a few links to help Two-Brain clients take action at warp speed.

Easy Marketing Wins—If You Take Action

The Two-Brain Business summit was incredible, and I hope you’ll join me there next year.

The sales presentation by Kieran and Nick was great and highlighted some things we should all be doing on a regular basis to increase sales.

Here is a breakdown you can use starting today to increase your membership count.

1. Lead Magnets

Once per week, send everyone on your “leads” list an email referencing a lead magnet. The Content Vault in the Growth Toolkit is full of these magnets, and you can also use AI to generate more.

Just send a mass email to everyone with something like this: “Hey, I just made a free sleep guide to help improve your sleep. Reply with ‘SLEEP’ and I’ll send it over.”

The idea: Start more conversations. Put this on your agenda once every week. It takes 5-10 minutes max.

Two-Brain clients: The Content Vault is here.

2. 5130 Posts on Social

Once per month, make a “5130 post”—code for “5 people who want to do 1 thing in the next 30 days.”

Vary the target each month—you could promote personal training, small-group training, weight loss, youth programs or something else. Be specific with your posts, and use email, Facebook and Instagram to increase your reach.

I made this post this week and now have three new nutrition clients: “I’m looking for 5 guys between the ages of 35-55 who want to lose 10 lb. heading into the summer.”

One 30-second post made me $600 in monthly recurring revenue.

Two-Brain clients: The complete Organic Social Media Funnel is laid out here.

Some of these people used these tactics right after the session ended!
3. The 10-Word Email

Once every quarter, send out the “10-word email” to all leads. Here it is (this version has nine words):

Subject: Quick Question
Body: Are you still interested in getting fit in 2024?

Many people won’t respond, but I’ve used this every year to pick up two to three new people. The purpose is to start more conversations.

Two-Brain clients: For a huge pile of done-for-you email and text scripts, click here.

4. Sell by Chat

Use social-media DMs to start conversations and acquire new members: One of my clients used this tactic yesterday and immediately signed someone up for a $500, eight-week remote challenge.

Pick a certain number of people (he chose 30) and send that number of DMs every single week. Target people who follow your personal account or business page.

Don’t be weird. Be casual and start a conversation. Let them know what you’re up to and ask what they’re doing to get fitter. Then offer to help them solve their problems (Help First!).

Two-Brain clients: Your sell-by-chat resources are here.

Get Moving!

Here’s a reminder from Chris: “All four of these strategies cost absolutely nothing and take minimal time. During your weekly CEO time, spend at least 30 minutes using these free marketing tactics.”

What would have happened if you had taken action right at the summit, as Kieran and Nick recommended?

What would happen if you used these tactics today?

And what would happen if you had a mentor like Chris Guerrero to say, “Did you use those tactics yet?”

You know the answer in all cases: You’d have more leads, more members and more revenue.

To get your tickets to the 2025 Two-Brain Summit, where we’ll have more tactics just like this, click here.

To hear more about how a mentor will provide a plan, accountability and done-for-you resources to help you grow your business, click here.

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Two-Brain Summit Recap: Virtuosity in the Gym Business

The post Two-Brain Summit Recap: Virtuosity in the Gym Business appeared first on Two-Brain Business.