Chris Cooper's Blog, page 39

Exactly How to Offload Every Task You Hate Doing at Your Gym

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Hey, Coop, tell me about the day your daughter was born. What happened?

Chris Cooper (00:05):
Well, of course it was an amazing day, and she was born around 3 a.m., and I spent a little bit of time with her and my wife, and then I went back to work before noon because I had a client, and I had nobody who could take the client, and I had nobody who I trusted to train the client. Nobody knew what the client’s program was, and we had no process in place for handing that off.

Mike Warkentin (00:27):
So you literally left the hospital to go work at your gym because the business was in your head and not on paper?

Chris Cooper (00:32):
Yeah. I can remember vividly walking out of the hospital parking lot because I couldn’t even afford to pay for parking, finding my truck, and driving down the street to the gym.

Mike Warkentin (00:42):
This is a true story, and listeners, if you’ve ever been in a situation even close to this, we’re going to help you today. We’re going to help you get your business out of your head, onto paper, and tell you how to get people to do what you want to your standards and run your business so that you don’t have to do it every single second of every day. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. With me is Chris Cooper, Two-Brain founder and CEO, and we’re going to get right into it because this is one of the most important concepts that we teach: how to systemize your business. No successful gym owner that I’ve had on this show has ever said, “I don’t have business systems.” Every single one of our top gym owners in the world have systems. So, Chris, walk me through the concept here and let people understand: Why are we doing this? Like, what is the purpose of systemizing a business?

Chris Cooper (01:26):
Yeah, so your business does not rise to the level of your marketing. It falls to the level of your systems. And what that basically means is how your business runs when you are not there: Do you deliver classes to the same level? Do you deliver personal training to the same level? If, heaven forbid, you got sick or injured as I did at another time at a powerlifting meet and you couldn’t go into work the next day, is there somebody else who could just show up, open up a book of instructions and say, “Got it. OK. I know how to train this person.”

Mike Warkentin (01:52):
You crawled into work that day, right?

Chris Cooper (01:54):
I did, yeah. Yeah, I knew it. I tore something at a powerlifting meet in a U.S. prison. It was a 510 deadlift, so 1,000% worth it. I had never done that before. But I had to put my powerlifting belt on to get in my truck in the morning, and my wife is like, “You can’t work.” And I’m like, “We need the money. Like, I have to go.” And of course, it was eye-opening to me. The clients didn’t even notice, or they might notice, like, “Hey, he’s wearing a powerlifting belt under his polo shirt—like, what’s going on?” But, you know, so what should have happened in that case is one text, “Hey Mike,”—who was working with me at the time or Tyler or Tim, one of the other trainers—“I’ve got Mavis coming in at at eight o’clock this morning. Can you take her? You know where her program is.” And they’d say, “Yeah, no problem.” And then, they know how to open the place up. They know how to check if she’s got sessions left; they know how to find her program, all of that. And none of that happened, and I had to go to work.

Mike Warkentin (02:50):
So this is literally like—this is the icon problem times 1,000 where it’s not just like you are the figurehead of the business, it’s like the entire business is in you, and if something happens to you, the business is done. No one can cover for you, right?

Chris Cooper (03:01):
Yeah. You’re very, very fragile when you’re in that state. You know, in the book, “The E-Myth,” the author says, “You haven’t built a business; you’ve bought yourself a job.” And that’s what it feels like. It feels like you’re constantly working for the landlord, working for the government. You know, you don’t own the business; the business owns you. And the way that you flip that around is you turn it into a business by getting every SOP, every task out of your head, writing it down, step by step by step, like 8-year-old easy, for somebody else to follow. And then you can just hand it to them.

Mike Warkentin (03:32):
And I’ll give you an example of this that’s going to hit home. Darren Thornton—one of your buddies there at Defy in Toronto, old school guy who’s joining our mentorship team—I emailed him to ask him to come on the podcast. He doesn’t even get his own email. His client success manager gets it and responds for him, or looks through the stuff that he doesn’t need to deal with and forwards him only the stuff that he needs to deal with. And that has happened to me when I deal with our Tinker gym mentors more than once. They have people that are screening for them, that are taking care of low-level stuff that they don’t need to do, deleting the stuff that doesn’t matter, and then they can focus. So, let’s talk about that: protecting time and focus. I need to hear about this because this is the concept—sell this to gym owners because a lot of us are going to say, “I don’t have time to get this stuff out of my head.”

Chris Cooper (04:15):
Yeah, well, so the very first thing is you need to buy back your time. You cannot grow your gym without these SOPs in place because you’ll always be reacting and doing all of the things. “Nobody’s going to clean the bathrooms like me. Nobody can run that class like I can. That trainer is not as qualified as I am to coach the client, so I have to do everything.” And so, what happens is you get in this routine of doing the thing and doing the thing and doing the thing, and your business never grows because you’re avoiding the job as the CEO to do all these other jobs. So, what you have to do is completely train these other people to do other things, buy back your time, so that you can work on marketing and sales or whatever your mentor tells you, and protect your focus. And you know, honestly, after having done this—I’ve had my gym now for very close to 20 years—I actually think that protecting your focus is even more important than protecting your time.

Mike Warkentin (05:06):
Do I need to order toilet paper? Like, that’s just not—it’s not a good thing. And there’s an ego aspect, right? Because I did this where, like, “Ah, you know, no one can organize the supply club as like I can.” And the truth is no one cares. Second of all, someone can, right? But I was like, I felt like I needed to have that to just be—that level of OCD that allowed me to exercise my control over things. Once I got rid of that stuff, things got way better. And I only did that with the help of a Two-Brain mentor because I was very much invested in doing these little stupid things, and they need to be done, but not by me, right? So, focus is a huge one. And especially like—give me a quick example. Now you’ve got your gym, you’ve got other businesses, you’ve got the Two-Brain mentorship company—if you don’t protect your focus, what happens to you?

Chris Cooper (05:46):
Oh, I’m done. And none of them grow. I mean, that’s the challenge, right? It’s like, yes, you need time to do the things that your mentor tells you, time to do the marketing, time to follow up with the leads, time to do the NSIs, absolutely. But you also have to have your focus because if you’re doing a No Sweat Intro and you’re thinking about “don’t forget to get more toilet paper; don’t forget to get more toilet paper,” you’re going to be distracted, and you’re not going to optimize the time that you have there. So, you know, it’s actually pretty easy to start. And we teach this in our mentorship program. There are some lower-level tasks where you can just kind of program your clones. You know, I stole that phrase from you, Mike. So, for example, you can write a very clear SOP for the cleaner, and it’s like, “Step one, step two, step three, step four.”

Chris Cooper (06:31):
Now, you can’t do that for running a class, but what you can do is create a framework, and then you can deliver that to your coaches and, and say, like, “OK, here is our culture now. It’s a culture of accountability. You have some freedom and some responsibility within this framework, and here’s the standard you’re going to meet.” Now we’re going to talk about evaluating them and stuff later, but what this does is it allows you to get this stuff out of your brain. And then what goes in your brain? You’re focused on growing the business. Most people, they’ll tell me like, “I just don’t have time to do this homework. I don’t have time to follow this guide. You’ve given us step by step. I just don’t have time to do it.” They’re not even sitting in front of their computer saying that; they’re in their car, but what they really lack is focus. And that’s an entrepreneurial skill. You have to practice it. So, my own rule, you know this, is first thing in the morning, do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. I don’t check email. I don’t look at Slack; I don’t even look at Facebook. I sit down and do one blog post or message five clients or et cetera.

Mike Warkentin (07:33):
There’s a trap, and I’ll lay it out for you listeners, because you will fall victim to this. I fall victim to this every day. You think as you’re doing something, “I don’t have time to tell someone else how to do this; I’ll just do it myself.” And that might be true one time, but it’s not true the seventh time and the eighth time and the 100th time. If you had just taken that five or 10 or 15 or even 60 minutes to get it out of your head that one time, you would’ve earned all that other time back down the line. You have to make the investment. And I literally know of a gym owner who did this, locked himself in a hotel room over a weekend to get all the stuff out of his head. Like this actually happened, right? And he said, “I’m going to rent a hotel room. I’ve got to get away from my family, everything, turn everything off. No one knows where I am, and I’m going to get this stuff out of my head.” And it was 100% worth it because this business was systemized. So, that’s what we’re recommending here—maybe not the deep submarine dive, but get it out of your head and make that investment. Chris, talk to me about how you’re going to do this. So how are you going to actually make this process happen and make sure that it sticks?

Chris Cooper (08:34):
Well, the first time I tried it, I did it just as your friend did, but I did it at my coffee table in my living room. And so, Robin would take the baby and visit the grandparents, and I would sit there for four hours and write and write and write. Now I do it differently. And so, what I do is I actually do the thing that I don’t want to do anymore. And I record every single step as I’m doing it. So, for example, like the first SOP that we have people write in in mentorship is: You’re going to get a pad of paper and a pen. You’re going to drive to your gym 10 minutes earlier than you normally would in the morning. You’re going to write down where you parked and why you parked there. “I parked far from the door to save the best spots for the clients.”

Chris Cooper (09:10):
OK, your staff doesn’t know that; you need to write that down. Which key opens the door? Which lights do you turn on first? Do you turn on all the lights or just some of the lights? And you’re going to go step by step and record every single thing that you’re doing. And that’s how you make a good SOP. In fact, if you want to, you could do it all with your phone. “Hey guys, you’ll notice I’m parked far away from the door here.” Whenever I’m doing anything now that I want my staff to take on later, I record myself doing it and say, “Do it like this.” And then later on, I check to make sure that they’re actually following that process. But I really think it’s important for you to do the thing once. This is why I don’t like gym owners just signing up with gym marketing agencies because they don’t even understand what they’re buying. They don’t even know how to measure success. They need to learn how to run that stuff themselves, and then they can choose to delegate it to somebody else.

Mike Warkentin (09:58):
So how do you archive all this stuff? Like do you have a giant staff playbook or a video file, or how do you do this?

Chris Cooper (10:04):
Yeah, so there’s a staff playbook, and that’s kind of the master document. So that’s what we call the “hit by the bus” test. If Chris is hit by a bus, you open the staff playbook, and you are good. Everything is there. And we’re going to show you how to deliver to the Catalyst standard. Within that binder, there might be some video links. So, for example, like the closing checklist, I did that on video this time, but in the binder, it will say, “Here are the steps one to 10. Here’s a video of Chris doing it. Click here.” And the reason that you have to do that, especially with cleaning, is that your standard of clean might not be their standard of clean. Anybody with a teenager knows what I’m talking about. Like you have to show them “Here’s the standard” and tell them how to get there.

Mike Warkentin (10:46):
So here’s a question for you. I’ll play devil’s advocate here. You got a gym owner who says, “If I write out all these crazy details, I’m taking all the freedom away from my staff to kind of just be good employees. What do you say to a gym owner like that who maybe is really hesitant to take all these details and make it like the McDonald’s French fry checklist?

Chris Cooper (11:04):
Well, what you have to do is you have to standardize what good means—what a 10 out of 10 is for you—because that’s different in everybody’s head and they can’t read your mind. So, while they might think that they are pursuing virtuosity and delivering to 10 out of 10, it’s not like your standard, and they don’t know what you know. And so, what you want to do is make it easier than it has to be. The people who are wicked smart and just say, “I get it.” They’ll just read it faster. The people who struggle to make little leaps doesn’t mean they’re dumb. They just think differently than you do. Like they need those steps; they need screenshots. Open up, Zen Planner, log in here, here is the password, click here. Like you’re way better off to make this simpler than it has to be than to skip steps and have people guess because nobody’s good at guessing, especially not me.

Mike Warkentin (11:50):
And I’ll give you—I’ll answer my own question, my devil’s advocate question here, like, I’ve received video SOPs from you for Two-Brain stuff, and it’s great. We go through it and then usually what I’ll do is I’ll make something on a checklist or document or tracking system or something like that, but then it becomes very streamlined where once that thing is in place, and I know that Chris needs this on this date and this thing needs to happen, it’s all very streamlined. I don’t have to go through your SOP every single time, but that established the backbone and now we can cruise through it, and because I can remember it, we make sure it happens. The analogy that I like is the field of play, like a baseball field, and it’s like you can hit the ball anywhere in this diamond. If we’re outside these foul lines, it’s out of play and we’re going to talk about it, but anywhere in here is good. So, I think with some employees, you give them, like you said, these very clear checklists and some employees love checking boxes, like it stimulates them to just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And they love it. Other employees kind of want that field of play. But if it’s all there and you have options for people, I think it works pretty well for both sides. What do you think?

Chris Cooper (12:48):
Yeah, well, there’s a three-step process to acquiring any skill. And ultimately what you want is for your staff not to do it differently, but just to get better and better and better at doing the same thing, right? Like, you don’t want them suddenly saying, “No, Mike, I’m going to hit it like over the dugout.” It’s really like, “I’m going to try and put it right between center and right field every single time.” So that’s a process of skill acquisition. The first step is always just learning from a teacher. So if you think about how you learn how to tie your shoes, maybe your parents sang a little nursery rhyme to you so that you could remember, or like, “OK, the bunny goes through the tree around the,” you know, like there was a checklist, and it was hard, and you were like, “Oh, I’m not getting this.”

Chris Cooper (13:29):
The second phase is when you’ve got a little bit of autonomy, and you can reliably do it yourself, but you can also look at it and say, “That wasn’t my best work. I tied up my shoelaces, but they keep coming undone. Maybe I need another approach. That kid’s doing a double knotting; oh, I should try that.” And then the third level is basically virtuosity, where you’re so good at the skill that you don’t have to think about it anymore. And this is kind of a trap, and this is where coaching really comes in because I’ve got coaches who’ve been with me at my gym for 15 years—they can run a B+ CrossFit class with their eyes closed, right? The key to good leadership is now practicing virtuosity and now digging into that B+ and saying, “How can we make this an A?” And that’s uncomfortable for people because they’re like, “I’ve been doing this so long, man; I got it.” You know, but this is something that you often do for me with writing is, “Well, you know, you could still fix that.” So I could be comfortably competent without being really, really, really good. And a good leader will show people their true potential and pull or push them to get there.

Mike Warkentin (14:33):
Two-Brain mentor Oskar Johed from Sweden said that when he evaluates coaches, no matter who they are, they get three things they did well and one thing to improve. And if you know that going in, that’s kind of great, right? Because you’ve got an established coach who knows, even after 15 years, I’m going to get three things I did good and one thing that I can improve. And that’s a great way to do it. Right? Like I love that concept. And I’ll tell you this, listeners, take this one down. You’re going to do the process one time yourself, and you’re going to write down everything, and you’re going to deliver that SOP to the staff member to offload it. That is the most effective process. And I’ll tell you, I literally Two-Brain everything around my house, because I’m crappy at home repair. Whenever I do something like my Christmas lights, I write notes to future Mike, and it’s the SOP of how I did it last time.

Mike Warkentin (15:15):
Yeah. I can literally show you a picture on the box of Christmas lights that shows the entire diagram of how it goes and like, “Don’t screw this up. This cord goes here. Do not plug this there.” And I took that from Two-Brain, and it works in my personal life and also works in a business. Now Chris, talk to me about how we ingrain this thing and how we make sure that this system doesn’t fall by the wayside because it’s really great. I made a huge mistake. I created an SOP playbook. It was amazing. Never updated it, and it fell apart. What do you do?

Chris Cooper (15:42):
Yeah, so what you’ve got to do is set yourself up an audit cycle for yourself and for your staff. So, some SOPs, you write them once, you don’t really have to update them anymore, right? Like, “OK, here’s how you mop the floor.” Unless you move gyms, you don’t have to change that SOP; it’s one and done, easy project. Yeah. But what you have to do is evaluate their performance on that. So, what we found with cleaners is the first three months, spick and span, the gym smells amazing; right at the nine-month mark, I’ve got a camera video of this, kid’s looking at his phone, he’s dragging the mop behind him, walking back and forth. Like, I literally have a camera of this. Or another time we had this poor woman, she was with us for about six months and one of my coaches shows up at 9 p.m. because he forgot something, and she’s there cleaning, and she says, “Hey Mitch, how often does Coop look at the security cameras?”

Chris Cooper (16:32):
And at that time we didn’t have security cameras, but Mitch is whip smart and he says, “Oh, every day.” And she goes, “Uh, I’m fired,” and she just left. We have no idea what she did. Right? But the point is that if you’re not checking occasionally, that standard is going to drop to comfortable competence instead of virtuous. So, you know, the cleaning was one example. Another one is the classes: The coaches get familiar with the people who are in there. Yeah, we’re starting on time, but it kind of feels like, “Hey everybody, glad to see you. Here’s everything you need. The workout is up on the board. Is everybody familiar with everything? Cool, cool, cool. Hope you had a great weekend. OK, I’m going to start the clock.”

Chris Cooper (17:21):
“Just go as hard as you can. OK?” Like this familiarity breeds this kind of complacency, but if they know that you’re evaluating them every three months or whatever, they just bring their attention and their focus back to delivering at an A+ level. And this A+ level is not like, “Oh, if I get my CrossFit Level 3, I’ll just deliver better.” No, it’s more like, are you being evaluated, and is the owner of your gym helping you pursue virtuosity at that skill with objective feedback? Because if you don’t have that feedback, it doesn’t work.

Mike Warkentin (17:55):
So evaluation, regular evaluation to make sure that your SOPs are being done to the right standards is essentially—you cannot just set it and forget it. You can set it, but you have to evaluate and make sure things are going correctly. Now, you do not have to do that. If you trained a fantastic CEO or gym owner to work beneath you as the owner, you could delegate that task. That’s doable. You’ve got to find the right person because you’ve got to make sure the standards are at your standards, but you could definitely offload that task as well. Chris is off to talk about the value ladder. You want to offload those easier jobs first, like cleaning—that’s a great one to get rid of first—and then kind of work your way up the chain. But eventually some of our top gym owners get to the level where they’re offloading GM and even some CEO tasks because they just don’t want to do them anymore, which is really cool. Now Chris, talk to me. You mentioned it, but let’s dig into it a little bit more: mentorship and coaching. So, let’s say you’ve got these evaluations in place. How do you start getting people to like “come to Jesus,” as we might say, or get better or improve, or if you’re bad at it, how do you get them to maybe get out?

Chris Cooper (18:55):
Well, low-level tasks are just a scorecard. So, “Your mopping is an eight out of 10,” right? I’m not going to coach you on your mopping, but higher-level tasks like sales, that’s where it’s less of a checklist and more of freedom and responsibility within a framework. And so, what I’m going to do on sales is actually provide some coaching to you. So, I might record your last five No Sweat Intros. I might sit with you during those. I might just look at your close rate, and then what I’m going to do is I’m going to coach you to get better. So, “OK, Mike, we’re going to do role play today. It’s the second Monday of the month. We’re going to sit down. I’ve got five objections here. Are you ready? Go.” And your staff isn’t reading verbatim from a script, but they are operating within a framework. It’s like bumper bowling.

Mike Warkentin (19:41):
I’ll go back to Oskar again because he’s so passionate about coaching. And what he does is he does evaluations. He walks right beside the staff member, he calls it the Band-Aid approach, and he’s like stuck on them. And rather—and I thought this was a really cool concept from Oskar. He said, “What do you often do? You evaluate a coach, you take some notes, then you wait about a week, then you schedule a meeting, then you get them in, and you talk to them, and at that point everything is faded. He’s like, “I want to be right next to them.” And so, I’m going to talk to them. And so, when they say something, and they’ll do, like, “OK, I want you to get some barbells.” Everybody goes off to get the barbells. And Oscar will be like, “Hey, what you could have said there is ‘I want you to get the barbells and be back in 30 seconds because we’re starting the workout in two minutes,’” and he’s giving them immediate feedback. So, that’s an interesting technique, but it proves your point of constant evaluation so that people can improve. And it’s not—you’ve said this one—it’s not abdication; it’s delegation, and you can’t just push it off into the wilderness. I’ve done that; it didn’t work. You have to coach people to get better. Are some staff members uncoachable?

Chris Cooper (20:39):
Well, no, I think it’s really up to the owners to create a culture where they know that that’s part of the culture. You know, for example, if you work for the CrossFit seminar staff, you know that’s happening. Like that’s just part of the culture. You get that. But if you just kind of start doing evaluations out of the blue—and I made this mistake—you stand there in the corner like this, and you’re watching a class, “Oh my god,” you know, you’re rolling your eyes, after the class, that coach is completely keyed up. They’re playing defense. They’re ready to like fight you. And you’re like, “You didn’t do this, this, this, this, this.” Instead, what you want to do—my approach is you have quarterly career roadmap meetings where you talk about “Where do you want to go?” then we say, “Here’s where you are,” and that’s where you deliver the evaluation. And then you say, “Here’s the next step for you.” And that’s what you’re really measuring. I have gone—I’ve flown to Stockholm; I’ve watched Oskar do that with his coaches. It is super-duper powerful. And actually, the clients know that that’s part of the culture too, and so, they expect it too.

Mike Warkentin (21:40):
Yep, to summarize here guys, what we’ve got is you need to standardize your business, get it out of your head, to protect your time and your focus. If you do not do this, you will never be able to ascend to upper-level tasks that include working on the business instead of working in the business. You are going to do this by doing the job yourself, then writing an SOP, then you’re going to give that SOP to a staff member. You’re going to mentor them to success in certain roles. In other roles, you’re just giving them the checklist of “the mop bucket goes in the corner,” but you’re going to give them this stuff, and then you’re going to evaluate down the line, and you’re going to evaluate at intervals forever to make sure that this stuff doesn’t go away. So that’s your quick summary of how this is going to go. Chris, so let’s send people off with something they can do today. Like a simple one step, “do this now,” to start this process. What is it?

Chris Cooper (22:29):
Yeah, perfect. So, this weekend, let’s say that you’re going to do a deep clean on your gym. Just go to the gym with a notepad and write down every single step that you take. And then on Monday, what you’re going to do is hire somebody else to do that job for you. And while they’re doing that job, you’ve bought back your time, hopefully you’ve bought back some focus. While they’re doing that job, you are going to work on your business. You know, for me, I had to do it this way: Our first cleaner was named Sean, and while Sean mopped at 9 p.m. at night, I would do email marketing. I would sit at my desk and send that email, and the first night I did it, I made $300, which to me felt like a lottery ticket. He was getting paid $20. And I’m like, “There’s something to this,” you know?

Chris Cooper (23:09):
So, buying back your time is the one thing, and the other thing is buying back your focus. You know, my biggest flaw when doing personal training a lot was that I would be thinking like, “OK, Patty’s in front of me, but Billy owes me money. I see him over there. I can’t let him leave the gym without talking to him about his membership.” I’m not paying attention to her, and my service sucks. So, then you need to say, “OK, well, here’s the next thing I need to offboard. I need somebody else taking care of these payments so that I’m not thinking about it when I’m working with Patty.” And you just kind of work your way up the value ladder that way.

Mike Warkentin (23:39):
And I’m going to give you the sniff test on this one, guys, because some people will be like, “I don’t know about this process.” Here it is, and this, you’ll get this immediately as a gym owner. You’re spending an hour cleaning gum off your rowers and scrubbing your floors and your toilets. If you pay someone $20 to do that for you, could you sell one hour of personal training at $75 in that hour? Yeah, you could. You could—like everyone knows this. You could do that with your current clients. All of a sudden, you’re $55 ahead, and all you did was trade an hour for better work. And that’s just a low-level thing. You could do what Chris did, work on email marketing and make thousands of dollars. But that’s the sniff test. And if you don’t believe it, try it. Ask some of your members today, “Hey, you’re struggling with muscle ups. You want to book a personal session with me next week for an hour, and we’ll take care of it?” $75. At least offload a cleaning hour. There you go. Done. Chris, thank you so much for this. We’re going to get gym owners to standardize their stuff and move forward. If they want to go further and learn more, where can they do it?

Chris Cooper (24:36):
Gymownersunited.com is probably the best bet. A lot of my books actually focus on this, like the “Gym Owners Handbook,” and I couldn’t resist, Mike: the original “Two-Brain Business” book. Yeah, there’s only like one copy of this that I own, but that’s really what the book was about. You know, the first lesson from my mentor was: Your business is not good enough to start marketing. You need to fix your ops first, and this is the first step.

Mike Warkentin (24:59):
There you go. Gym Owners United. If you do one thing at the end of the show, join that group, gymownersunited.com, and you can talk to Chris and Two-Brain mentors and other gym owners all day every day. And we screen out all the jerks, so it’s just good people giving good advice and helping you guys out. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” That was Chris Cooper. I’m Mike Warkentin, and please hit “subscribe” on your way out, and make sure you make your way to Gym Owners United.

The post Exactly How to Offload Every Task You Hate Doing at Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Gym Owners: How to Protect Your Greatest Assets

What are your greatest assets as a gym owner?

If you said “my equipment” or “my staff,” I understand. Those are valuable.

But your greatest assets are your time and your focus.

These two things are finite, precious and essential for entrepreneurial success.

Here’s how to protect them.

Get Your Gym out of Your Head

I’m not going to give you sexy, inspirational window dressing. It’s easy to tell you to narrow your focus, do the stuff that really matters, be a boss and use the #crushingit hashtag.

Instead, I’ll give you dirt-under-your nails stuff you can use today to protect your time and your focus.

Here’s the secret: If your business is “all in your head,” your time and focus will disappear quickly every day. To preserve your greatest assets, you have to get your business “on paper.” That means you systemize everything, document those systems, assign tasks to people and hold them accountable.

Here’s a simple example: A gym owner is trying to grow the business. She’s in her office trying to figure out how to acquire more clients. A staff member knocks on the door and says, “We’re out of toilet paper.”

The owner loses focus, picks up the phone and spends five minutes on hold before getting to the order desk. Then she spends five minutes trying to find the credit card or account number.

After the order is placed, the owner notices an email from a member: “Can you see if I left my wedding ring at the gym?”

The owner goes to look for the ring and sees a coach eating lunch on the reverse hyper while clients are warming up.

And then a prospective client walks in the front door and starts looking around.

I’ll stop the spiral there—you know how it goes, and you know I’m not exaggerating the situation. This kind of thing happens all the time to entrepreneurs.

Here’s the real problem in the scenario above: The gym owner hasn’t systemized the business, so she must do everything personally. She loses focus by 5:55 a.m. every day, races around frantically for hours and runs out of time to grow the business or just take her kids to the pool.

Imagine if she had a clear, updated staff playbook packed with roles and tasks, checklists and SOPs. Do you think she’d need to order toilet paper? Of course not. The cleaner would have placed the order the week before, when he ran through the supplies checklist and saw the last box was open.

The client success manager would have found the wedding ring and greeted the prospective member at the door, and the lunch-eating coach wouldn’t exist because all coaches would know that meals are eaten before classes, not during. Any coaches who “missed the memo” would have been reminded in quarterly evaluations done by the GM.

And the owner would be in the office finishing off a marketing plan that’s sure to bring in five new clients in the next five days through referrals.

Systemize Your Business!

I won’t try to make systems sexy. They aren’t.

But they are the backbone of every successful gym business.

If you want to run a good business, grow your gym, earn more and get home in time for dinner with the family, systems aren’t optional.

Two-Brain mentors help clients build gym systems fast. I know systemization is tedious, so we’ve streamlined everything with our own systems. We provide exact instructions, templates, done-for-you-resources and accountability so the business gets out of the owner’s head at warp speed.

And then we tell the gym owner what to do next to grow the business.

In the next post in this series, I’ll give you an exact procedure you can use to systemize your business.

To talk about stomping the accelerator and preserving your time and focus, click here.

The post Gym Owners: How to Protect Your Greatest Assets appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Do Not Underprice Your Kids Programs!

Here’s a specialty-program revelation that might save you thousands of dollars:

Programs for kids should cost more than programs for adults.

This is a known fact in the sports, gymnastics, cheer and martial-arts worlds.

But for some reason gym owners never got the message.

I personally discounted kids programs at my gym for no good reason, and many, many gym owners have made the same mistake.

Here’s why you should charge more for kids programs.

If you make an appointment with a general practitioner doctor, you can expect to get in sooner than if you make an appointment with a specialist. Special expertise is rare and in demand.

Same deal in the gym: Great kids coaches and programs are highly specialized. Kids aren’t small adults. They’re completely different, and leading them requires a different skill set. It’s not easy to manage rangy, often moody kids who might prefer AI and a VR headset to a kettlebell.

Anyone who has ever taught a kids class knows this—but many of us still discount these sessions for some reason.

There’s more: With kids, you have increased safety concerns. Things that are obvious to adults are not obvious to kids, and greater supervision is needed. I once saw a visiting kid climb up on a plyo box, stick his finger in a hole in the squat rack and jump. He had picked a low hole and avoided injury, but I’m sure you see the point.

Growing kids also move differently from session to session, and you must watch them like a hawk. A kid who has a great squat most of the time might take big step back during a growth spurt and get buried under a light bar that was lifted with ease a month ago. And puberty brings all sorts of other considerations.

In reality, kids coaches must have the skills required to work with three very different groups: tots, teens and the “in-betweens.” If a coach uses physical testing with a tot, you’ll have tears. Try a fun fitness game with a teen and you’ll get eye rolls. Only some kids coaches are great with all three groups.  

Then we have equipment needs: Most kids don’t use the standard 15- and 20-kg barbells. To run a great kids program, you’re going to need light fitness equipment, and a good program probably includes some fun stuff like parachutes, scooters or other “fitness toys.” You might even need paper, markers and other supplies to keep some age groups engaged.

Class prep is also more involved. It isn’t just putting together a warm-up that fits before 5 sets of back squats. Your kids coach will need to be much more detailed, perhaps including games and back-up games if the first game is “booooooring.” Crowd-management skills are tested ruthlessly in kids classes.

With all that in mind, it should be clear that a single skilled coach might not be able to handle more than eight kids even though he can manage more than a dozen adults with ease. That alone suggests your rates for kids classes should be higher.

I could go further, but you get the point.

Charge for Value

It’s so tempting to run a kids program for about $100 a month, especially when you think “I should give current members a break if they sign their kids up.” But a rock-bottom rate doesn’t reflect the value you deliver in a world-class kids program.

And remember that fees for kids sports can be very high. Hockey registration fees start in the mid-hundreds and rocket in the thousands very quickly.

I’m not suggesting you gouge parents, only that you don’t undercut yourself.

Kids programs provide incredible value: They teach young ones to move and develop a lifelong love of fitness. They give parents some much-needed time off. They help kids build self-esteem, accomplish athletic goals and avoid diseases related to inactivity.

Isn’t all that worth more than $100?

Chris Cooper’s new guide will help you sell out a kids program. To get it, follow the instructions here.

The post Do Not Underprice Your Kids Programs! appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

CrossFit Kreis 9: $0 Marketing Costs, 340 Members and a Waiting List!

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Can you believe that some gym owners take home more than $20,000 a month from their businesses? Like that’s what they take home, not what the business grosses. I’m going to tell you how they do it today. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. I want you to subscribe so you don’t miss a show because we are literally giving away the cheat codes to gym ownership on the show every single time. Now at Two-Brain, we track net owner benefit, and we do it over three months and give you a monthly average because we want sustainable numbers. So, this is not just flash-in-the-pan, “I paid myself a huge dividend, and I’m on the leaderboard.” These are three-month numbers that show sustainable income levels for gym owners. Now again, it’s not gross revenue. So, when we talk about these numbers, it’s not what the business grosses. Back in the day, my business grossed $20,000. Our gym owners now, our top ones, are taking home $20,000 in their bank accounts. Now this is net owner earnings. So, it could be salary, dividends or any combination of whatever the tax code allows in certain countries, but the numbers are legit, and they are verified. My guest today is one of our net owner benefit leaders. Her name is Saara Snellman, and she owns CrossFit Kreis 9 in Zurich, Switzerland. Now I didn’t say that properly. Say it for me please.

Saara Snellman (01:07):
That was perfect, Mike. CrossFit Kreis 9.

Mike Warkentin (01:09):
OK, that’s not bad. I’m going to ask you to share your secrets today. Are you ready to do it?

Saara Snellman (01:13):
I am ready.

Mike Warkentin (01:14):
OK, so here’s the thing. Back in the day, I started a gym in like 2011; we all thought we were going to be able to get hundreds and hundreds of members and have these giant gyms and these giant warehouses. I wasn’t able to do it, but you’ve done it. You’ve capped your membership at 340 members, and most of your revenue is coming from group classes. So, I have to know: How have you succeeded here when so many affiliate owners have failed?

Saara Snellman (01:36):
Basically, I think it comes down to two things. The first one is that if you are a 100-member gym with a goal of growing to 300 members, you need to make all the decisions keeping this in mind from day one. So, everything you do, you do using the filter: Will this work with 300 members? You need to have your systems, your operating procedures, and your gym rules all reflecting that goal. Second, when you actually are a 300-plus-member gym, you need to be able to serve them the same way as you were serving your 100 members. So again, it comes down to the same things: your SOPs, your procedures, and also when you are a 300-plus-member gym, you need the manpower to do all the tasks and the roles that are not only coaching but the running so that you have the time to run your business and not just running around.

Mike Warkentin (02:43):
Yeah, I mean, right away you pointed out exactly the mistakes that I made. I made the decisions based on the number of members that I had and “How do I manage this number of members?” I never said, “How would I put the stuff in place to build the 300?” and consequently, I could never get over. I think we capped it at 220 or something like that, and it was more than I can manage. The second mistake that I made that you highlighted, I didn’t have standard operating procedures. We tried to do that as I started working with Two-Brain, we got that in place, but I didn’t have that originally, and I coached way too much, and I didn’t build my business. But you’ve gone the exact opposite way. So, did you sit down originally and say, “I want to have a 300 member gym”?

Saara Snellman (03:20):
I don’t remember, to be honest. We’ve been open a while, but we always had the capacity space-wise and, yeah, capacity to go there.

Mike Warkentin (03:30):
OK. So we’re going to talk a little bit later on, and we’re going to get into some of the details of how you’re retaining members and acquiring them and all this stuff because it’s a huge number that so many businesses can’t do it, and I can tell just by looking at your numbers that you’re obviously a good business owner because you have the systems and structures in place to retain and keep and build to those numbers. Whereas many of us got to like 150, and then we fell to 130, then 170, then 140, and it was always back and forth. So, we’ll talk about that, but I want to know a little bit—first give me some business details. Like how much space do you have, staff members—like what do you sell besides group classes, and who are you looking for? What’s your avatar?

Saara Snellman (04:04):
So our main gym is 490 square meters, and we have a smaller space, which is about 100 square meters. We are a small staff, so we are only eight people, of which six are coaches or in combined roles—coaching and something else. 90% of our revenue comes from group classes. So, we also offer PT and nutrition coaching, but those are rather small things. And our avatar client is a highly educated, busy professional, and we actually have a really, really cool niche, which we call the “daddy men.” So, for some reason we are able to make fathers of small children happy, and that’s what we are doing.

Mike Warkentin (04:52):
Wow, OK. Now did you decide to target the “daddy men,” or did they come to you and then you just labeled it and done more of them?

Saara Snellman (04:58):
No, no. I think it grew with the time. So, some of the members actually became fathers while members with us, but quite a lot of people who walk in through our doors these days are these people.

Mike Warkentin (05:15):
OK. So, when you started to realize that you had this group of people and that was your avatar, did you start to make changes to your offerings to serve them better and to acquire people like that? 

Saara Snellman (05:25):
I think we streamlined a bit.

Mike Warkentin (05:27):
You cut out the stuff that you didn’t need.

Saara Snellman (05:28):
For instance, we were running an advanced class four days a week. Now, it’s still there one day a week, but we realized that that was not serving our main audience, and we streamlined and cut some of the offer we had, and now we are better in line with the avatar clients’ needs. 

Mike Warkentin (05:51):
Yeah. I went the other way. I added programs and added programs and thought I would acquire more and more clients because I was giving them everything from yoga to fitness to this to that to the other. And it fractured our offering, and people didn’t know what was going on. And we had like classes of two people here and two there and whatever. In your space, what is an average group class? How many people are in there?

Saara Snellman (06:09):
So, we run the classes up to 14 people with one coach and up to 24 with two coaches.

Mike Warkentin (06:16):
Wow. It’s so cool to talk to someone—because this was the goal for so many CrossFit affiliates, but very few of us ever were able to do it consistently. I had one class where I had 15 or 17 people in it. It was my five o’clock class. The rest of my classes had twos and fours. So it didn’t work out that well. PT: Do any of your members do group and PT, or is it a very strict dividing line between group classes and personal training clients?

Saara Snellman (06:43):
So, we have some personal training clients who only do personal training. That’s the minority, and the majority of the personal training clients do group classes, and they do PTs for certain goals to achieve whatever it is: a pull up, a muscle up, handstand walk, Olympic lifting—usually has something to do with the skill. They are wanting to get faster to their goal, and that’s the majority of those PTs that we offer. And on-ramp, obviously, we do the foundation program and the foundation training as PTs, and that’s what we’ve been doing for nine years already.

Mike Warkentin (07:22):
So listeners, this is a great way—even if you run a group model, all of your group clients would be served by one PT session a month just to help them accomplish a specific goal or to brush up on some technique. It’s called a hybrid membership in a lot of different places, and it’s very high value, right? If you think about your group rate, tack on one personal training session per month, all of a sudden, you’ve got a pretty great rate, and your clients are getting better service. So, that’s an interesting thing for you to think about, even if you focus on a group model. Saara, your group memberships, what’s the approximate rate? Even if it’s in euros.

Saara Snellman (07:54):
Mid-range, four weeks would be, yeah, 205 Euros. Well, we talk about Swiss francs, but that’s OK.

Mike Warkentin (08:03):
I’m sorry. Pardon me. Yeah.

Saara Snellman (08:04):
That’s close to Euros, so let’s say $220.

Mike Warkentin (08:08):
OK. So, that’s a great rate. And then what’s a PT session cost generally?

Saara Snellman (08:12):
150.

Mike Warkentin (08:14):
So, there you go. So, if you think about and you know in your—you know, listeners wherever your gym is, you can think about your rate and your other rate for PT, add them together once a month, and that’s a pretty great average revenue per member, which equals a pretty great revenue total, which then equals a great net owner benefit total. So, let’s move into that, and let’s talk a little bit about your net owner benefit. How has that number changed over time? But for me it started at zero, and it stayed pretty close to zero until Two-Brain to help me get it above that. How has your number changed?

Saara Snellman (08:43):
So, we opened our doors in June 2015. We were profitable from the beginning. I was taking salary pretty fast. I think at month six or so, the net owner benefit was steady or steadily small until the pandemic. We got through the pandemic pretty nicely, but after the pandemic, things got kind of hard. So, once we opened the doors after the second lockdown, things were not picking up as fast as they should. Obviously, we had a lot to make up for, so I was chasing my tail for a year maybe and then joined Two-Brain in June 2022. And it’s been steady growth ever since. But make no mistake, it’s been steady growth for the gym and for the coaches as well.

Mike Warkentin (09:41):
And see that’s an important thing, and whenever I speak to gym owners at your level and they have great net order benefit levels, they always mention staff wages because they’re trying to create careers for staff, not just part-time jobs. And I’m going to—I’ll say this, and you tell me if I’m wrong: It seems as though in these gyms where the owner’s making a lot of money and the revenue is high, that career-oriented staff members are a huge part of it. Do you agree with that?

Saara Snellman (10:04):
100%. 100%. So, we’ve moved from part-time coaches to full-time coaches and career coaches, and it’s made all the difference.

Mike Warkentin (10:14):
It seems to, and that’s not to say you can’t have part-time coaches. My gym, I had a lot of part-time coaches, and many of them were excellent. And lots of gyms do exist on that. But I do speak to a lot of top gym owners, and one of the things they’re always concerned about is creating great careers to retain long-term coaches for now years. And some of them will be 10 or 14 years or something like that. How long has your longest serving coach been there?

Saara Snellman (10:37):
That is a good question. I would say it’s a couple of years right now. So, we’ve had this change from part-time coaches to full-time coaches, and that’s been a full circle.

Mike Warkentin (10:52):
OK. So, that’s interesting. So, let’s dig into it. You talk to me: 2022, you hire a mentor, and you start changing things because you were struggling a little bit out in the post-pandemic period. What were some of the big things that you did that noticeably made a difference and started moving your numbers up?

Saara Snellman (11:07):
We had some gaps in the membership types. That was definitely the first one, so tying up those gaps in between those times where people are traveling and saying, “I will cancel my membership” and this and that. We started offering travel workouts and restructuring the memberships a little bit since our capacity is the same 365 days a year. So that was one of the big things. The second thing was obviously the changes in staff or hiring the right people for the right seats. These people, they love what they do, they do it well and it is their primary job. And that’s where I think the biggest gap is between full-timers and part-timers because those part- timers live off something else, and that something else comes first, which is understandable, but doesn’t serve our audience the best possible way. 

Mike Warkentin (12:08):
So did you have—before 2022, did you have structures and systems and standard operating procedures that needed to be improved, or did you not have them at all at that point?

Saara Snellman (12:17):
We had some, but most of them lived in my head as per usual.

Mike Warkentin (12:21):
Yep. Yeah, I had the exact same problem. I thought I had them, but no one knew them.

Saara Snellman (12:27):
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Warkentin (12:27):
Was that one of the first things you did with the mentor? Was that laying that stuff out? 

Saara Snellman (12:31):
Definitely. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (12:33):
What happened when you did?

Saara Snellman (12:35)
I started having more time to work on the business instead of in the business automatically. And I stopped doing the work for my coaches. I was not the one who always said, “I’ll do that. I’ll take care of that. I’ll take that off of your list of things.” So, they started sharing, I started sharing with them, and they started sharing with me on a new level.

Mike Warkentin (13:04):
It makes a huge, huge difference. And that was the biggest lesson for me was that I do not have to do every single thing. The toilets need to be cleaned, but I don’t need to clean them. And if I hire someone to do that, I can then use that time to make more money to pay for the cost of the cleaner and generate more revenue for the gym. So, tell me some of the stuff: When you got all these procedures out of your head and you gave them to your coaches and you didn’t have to work in the business and you started working on it, what did you start doing, and how did it affect your revenue?

Saara Snellman (13:31):
Creating more systems and writing more SOPs and obviously working on the content of blog posts and Instagram and all that kind of organic marketing that usually gets done if it gets done when everything else is done.

Mike Warkentin (13:50):
Yeah. So, you were able to prioritize marketing, important stuff that was an afterthought for most gym owners who focused on coaching, right? 

Saara Snellman (13:57):
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And also dedicating time for the coaches. So, mentoring them actually being the leader. And that has made a huge, huge difference.

Mike Warkentin (14:08):
So, are standard operating procedures, is that the backbone of your business, would you say? Or is it something else?

Saara Snellman (14:13):
At the moment? Yes. Finally.

Mike Warkentin (14:14):
Yeah, and that’s funny because again, I speak to so many gym owners about this, and every single one who’s on our leaderboards talks about their standard operating procedures. Every single one. It’s never happened where someone’s like, “Ah, I make a ton of money, and I just do it on the seat of my pants.” It doesn’t work like that anymore. That might’ve been the case maybe 10 years ago, but now in a saturated market with tons of coaching gyms, it’s standard operating procedures. And so, listeners, you’re out there and you’re thinking, “What can I do to get closer to the levels that our top gym owners are at?” start systemizing your business. And if you do that, you will definitely make steps towards the metrics that you want. It happens every single time. I’ll ask you this: What’s your net owner benefit strategy? And again, it might be different in Switzerland because all tax codes are different around the world. Some gym owners just take a straight wage and are employees of the business; others are owners and take dividends. What kind of stuff do you do?

Saara Snellman (15:06):
Well, this will be the shortest answer ever. It’s salary and certain work-related costs as mentoring fees. That’s it.

Mike Warkentin (15:13):
There you go. So, that’s an easy one. And there are lots of different ways that you can do this stuff. When we talk about net owner benefit, one of the things we think about is: What other things besides wages do owners get? And sometimes it’s like a vehicle; the gym pays for a vehicle, or the gym pays for cell phone costs or internet costs or other things like that. Maybe a home office. Check with your accountant if you don’t know what’s allowed in your country. But if you do have an accountant who’s clever, that person can tell you, “You can write this off; you can take this benefit,” and that all comes into it. But of course, the big numbers usually are wages, which is salary or dividends or something like that. How did mentorship—we talked about a little bit—how did mentorship really help you start moving this number up? Because a lot of us—like I didn’t pay myself anything, and it took a mentor to say, “Dude, you need to start paying yourself something.” How did mentorship help your number move?

Saara Snellman (15:58):
This is going to be a long one. I can talk about it for hours.

Mike Warkentin (16:02):
That’s OK. This is the secret.

Saara Snellman (16:03):
This is huge. So, I know that it’s different for different business owners. I was a seasoned business owner when I started my journey with the mentor. My dream was financially healthy or at least financially stable. So, and I had the free time that many people or many business owners are lacking. I had the free time from the beginning. For me, the biggest change has been in between my ears. So, the mindset, and the mentor has just played a huge role in it. She has guided me to solve my problems permanently instead of just patching things up. She has also not let me dwell in my so-called problems, but led me into hard conversations and hard decisions to solve those issues once and for all. And I mean the whole curriculum is there. Two-Brain Business gives you everything you need from emails, whatnot, SOPs, but the one-on-one mentorship, that’s what makes the difference. So, my mentor has been my decision-making filter. My parents sometimes when I needed it. But that’s what makes all the difference.

Mike Warkentin (17:31):
Who’s your mentor?

Saara Snellman (17:33):
Lisa Palmer was my mentor in Growth.

Mike Warkentin (17:35):
Very nice. She’s wonderful, yeah. And so, the question, I guess, is if we had just given you this giant pile of resources because there’s so many resources that are out there and just said, “Do this,” would it have worked, or you said it was the one-on-one mentorship that was critical. Why is that?

Saara Snellman (17:49):
Well, of course it works if you are so good at decision making and everything that you don’t get overwhelmed, the information is there. But if that was the case, if it worked alone, nobody would need nutrition coaches. Nobody would need personal trainers. Nobody would need any kind of coaches because all of the information is out there and available. You need that one person saying, “Do that now. Do that first. Once you’ve taken care of this, we’ll move on to this, this.”

Mike Warkentin (18:21):
And so even though you were a seasoned business owner, you still needed that guidance for someone to say, “Hey, let’s do this right now and then move on.”

Saara Snellman (18:28):
Yeah. I personally needed someone to tell me, “Leave it, move on.” Not necessarily what, but just, “Stop dwelling in your issues. Just get it done.”

Mike Warkentin (18:40):
What did you do before? What did you do as a business owner before the gym? 

Saara Snellman (18:44):
We have another business. So, we have a small retail company as well. We sell sports gear or apparel. But I was working in the forest industry, so that’s what I studied, forest economics, and that’s what I was doing.

Mike Warkentin (19:01):
OK. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there that think, “I can do it myself,” and I guarantee there’s someone listening who’s on that fence of like, “Ah, I’ll just figure it out. I don’t need a mentor.” What would you say to that person?

Saara Snellman (19:11):
Do you want to get where you are going faster, and do you want to be sure that you get where you want to be? It’s that simple. I’ve made all those mistakes everybody talks about except the one that I never treated my gym as a small gym. That was the one that carried us until 2022.

Mike Warkentin (19:33):
I’m going to ask you this one. And it’s not a net owner benefit question, but I know that you can’t generate a lot of revenue and owner benefit without retaining members. In a 340-member gym. How do you retain people?

Saara Snellman (19:46):
These days, really well, first of all. So, we have about 10 people leaving every month, and five of those will return. So those 10 who leave are replaced by 10 new ones, of which five are returning customers.

Mike Warkentin (20:06):
OK. That’s a huge stat. So, you actually know how many people are leaving, and then you actually know that five of your customers are, we’ll call them “boomerangs.” They’re coming back that have been there before, and they’re coming back to you. Yeah. So that means you only have to five find new clients per month to maintain your membership.

Saara Snellman (20:21):
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why we have currently a waiting list for new customers.

Mike Warkentin (20:27):
A waiting list? That’s just going to make so many gym owners jealous, hearing you’ve got a waiting list. So, OK, I’m going to dig into this. I didn’t tell you I was going to ask about this stuff, but I’m going to—I have to ask because this is such an important topic.

Saara Snellman (20:35):
Yeah. It’s fine. It’s fine.

Mike Warkentin (20:38):
How do you get your former clients back? What do you do specifically to get those five people back every month?

Saara Snellman (20:43):
I think what we’ve been concentrating on in the last years is that when people leave, we want to make them feel good about leaving. It’s not that they are betraying us; we don’t own them. They are not ours to keep. So, when they leave, they should feel that they are welcome back anytime. 

Mike Warkentin (21:05):
So, they leave with a hug when they go out the door.

Saara Snellman (21:07):
Hopefully. Yeah. Or more than one hug. Also, when they come back, they will for sure know that they are welcome back, and we’ve been basically waiting for them to return. 

Mike Warkentin (21:22):
How do you stay in touch with them? 

Saara Snellman (21:23):
Sometimes we do; sometimes we don’t. That’s not something we have systemized. It is more about letting them actually know that, “Hey, when you’re ready, we are here. You know where to find us. We are here for you.” Why do so little people leave? This has been the trend since last summer that people are actually not leaving. We have systems in place to keep in touch. We do the goal reviews, we know about them, and having those full-time coaches, in my personal opinion, is the key because every single coach coaches hundreds of classes a year. So, the person who coaches the least coaches eight classes 48 weeks a year. So, they know their members without it being fully systemized. They actually know that Lisa here has a bad knee, and Saara here has a bad shoulder, and David just got his first baby. So, we do know them sometimes better than they know themselves. 

Mike Warkentin (22:35):
Yeah. Do you think that your waiting list has a retention effect? Meaning like, if I leave your gym, I might not get back in. Does that have an effect?

Saara Snellman (22:44):
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. For the members we have now, it has that effect. But for the new ones, no. Though sometimes people, before they reach out to a gym, they’ve been thinking about it for a long, long time. And when they finally pick up the phone, and they get a “no” from us, it’s not a great feeling. So yeah. It works to some extent.

Mike Warkentin (23:11):
I just think that’s so incredible because you wouldn’t want to leave.

Saara Snellman (23:14):
Yeah, hopefully.

Mike Warkentin (23:15):
You know, I can’t get back in. I can’t leave; I can’t give up my spot. So, that’s a great thing. And then, so I’m going to guess—I’ll just throw this out: So, when you need to replace those five people, do you just go to your waiting list?

Saara Snellman (23:28):
Yes, that’s what we do. We reach out.

Mike Warkentin (23:30):
Do you market at all? Do you have any marketing costs?

Saara Snellman (23:32):
No, we don’t do paid marketing. Oh, except we’ve done a little bit of paid marketing for “Babies and Barbells,” our only specialty class that we do for moms because we are so big on dads. So that keeps the moms coming. But that’s—nothing else. No paid marketing whatsoever.

Mike Warkentin (23:55):
Wow. So, 340 members with a waiting list; you only lose 10 per month. Replace five with former members; you replace the other five by just hitting your waiting list. That sounds like a dream.

Saara Snellman (24:06):
It is; it is.

Mike Warkentin (24:07):
Wow. I’m going to dig in, before we close out here, into the retention because that is just such an incredible number. Do you have a client success manager, or is that duty delegated to various other staff members? 

Saara Snellman (24:19):
Yes, we have a client success manager.

Mike Warkentin (24:21):
OK. Would you mind telling listeners what that person does? Because your numbers are incredible, and they should understand why this is the case.

Saara Snellman (24:28):
That person is the liaison between us and the members. So, when somebody doesn’t show up to the gym for a while, she reaches out; she sends birthday cards. She’s also responsible for event planning because that’s what she loves doing. And she has some ops tasks as well. But basically, she makes sure that the coaches are up to date on what’s going on with the members: Who’s new, who left, why they left, are they maybe coming back? Should we reach out later? And so on.

Mike Warkentin (25:06):
How many hours does a week or month—pardon me—does she spend on retention duties? Is that full-time?

Saara Snellman (25:11):
I’m not going to tell you the number because she’s so efficient. She’s the most efficient person like on earth. So, her numbers are not relevant for anyone else.

Mike Warkentin (25:23):
That’s fair. It’s not about the time; it’s about the results. So, that’s really—I love that you said that because if you said like six hours, people would think, “Oh, I only need six hours.” And it’s not that; it’s probably about—

Saara Snellman (25:32):
I would need three times the amount of time she needs.

Mike Warkentin (25:36):
So, you’ve got an excellent staff member. I’m going to ask you this specific one too. You said you reach out to clients when they haven’t shown up. How long does it take for someone to notice that a client hasn’t been around?

Saara Snellman (25:45):
It depends what we are looking for. So, there is no standard answer to this. We have members who are on different patterns, and for some we know that they are traveling, and they are doing this and that, so this once again comes down to not only the systems, but how well do you know your clients?

Mike Warkentin (26:02):
OK. So, but you do notice when someone’s not around for a bit, you’re like, “Oh, he was traveling. No, that’s cool. He was doing his workouts in Berlin” or whatever. “That person has no excuse. And we know that, and we contact.”

Saara Snellman (26:15):
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (26:16):
OK. Do you give gifts to your clients? Does this client success manager give them gifts or celebrate them in any way?

Saara Snellman (26:20):
Sometimes. Sometimes.

Mike Warkentin (26:23):
OK. The reason I dig into this is because retention is just, like in a 340-member gym, you would expect—there are gyms that have that many members that bleed out like 50 people a month. And then that creates this marketing problem and a huge marketing expense. And you’re constantly replacing people, and they’re blowing out the back door faster than you can get them in the front door, and you spend all your time marketing and spinning plates and no time actually satisfying clients. And it gets worse and worse and worse. And all of a sudden, those gyms collapse, and you’ve done the exact opposite where you have a waiting list and are just feeding people in. So, I’ll ask you this; I’ll put you on the spot. I want you to be like Lisa for a minute and be a mentor: Gym owners are out there, and they’re saying, “How would I possibly take some steps in this direction?” Again, we’re talking about net owner benefit, but I’ll just put you on the spot and say: What would you recommend to a gym owner out there today to make their business just a little bit better and move in the direction where you are?

Saara Snellman (27:14):
Well, concentrating on the members who are in the gym. Those are the members that don’t cost you any extra money. And the time you invest in them, you will save later in the marketing cost, and the time as well you put in marketing. Even if we are not talking about Swiss francs or dollars or paid marketing, but what does it take you to get a new member in? So that would be—and the second advice is: As soon as you can get staff to help you out with the retention tools and things, get those people in because—

Mike Warkentin (27:54):
And I’m—oh, go ahead. Finish that off.

Saara Snellman (27:55):
I cannot manage 340 customers on my own, even if I was working day and night, 52 weeks a year. It’s just not possible. And if you are a bigger gym and your whole staff is just coaches and you and maybe a cleaning person, no, it’s not going to work.

Mike Warkentin (28:16):
And I’ll just suggest that the reason that you’re able to rely on your staff is because you’ve taken the business out of your head and put it into a playbook and you can actually say, “Hey, great staff member, here’s your list. Can you crush this?” And your staff members are like, “Yes, boss.” And it’s done. And then you can do the other stuff. So those three things, I think, are going to be—like, if any gym owner listening takes any steps on those things, I think we’re moving in the right direction. What do you think?

Saara Snellman (28:38):
Definitely, definitely.

Mike Warkentin (28:40):
Thank you for sharing this with me. I have never—I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a CrossFit affiliate owner who’s had this level of success and retention, like this number of members and this great retention. So, I really appreciate your insight into this. Thanks for sharing your time with us.

Saara Snellman (28:54):
Thank you, Mike. It was my honor.

Mike Warkentin (28:56):
We’ll have you back. I think you’ll be on the leaderboard again for some of our other metrics. That was Saara Snellman. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” This is where the world’s best gym owners tell you exactly how they’re doing it so that you can have the same success. Please subscribe for more episodes on your way out. And if you’re on YouTube, I would love if you’d hit that “like” button for us. And now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper (29:15):
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 CrossFit Kreis 9: $0 Marketing Costs, 340 Members and a Waiting List! appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Your First Small Step to Earning More as a Gym Owner

I’ve showcased some huge gym owner earnings this month.

The numbers in our Top 10 for monthly owner income are impressive—from $16,215 to $37,935—and they can be intimidating if you’re nowhere near them.

So I’m going to give you a simple secret to help you start earning more from your business. It’s a surefire, do-it-today, works-every-time piece of advice:

Start paying yourself for every job you do in your business.

“But I already pay myself,” you might say.

And I’m sure you do. But many gym owners don’t pay themselves for all the jobs they do.

Here’s what’s common:

A gym owner takes a highly variable “salary” that’s determined by the balance in the bank account after staff and bills are paid.An owner takes a regular salary but just keeps adding jobs without increasing pay.An owner simply works for free at times because of a noble but unsustainable desire to help clients get healthier no matter what.

Here’s what I want you to do:

Write down every job you do—include owner tasks, manager tasks and things like coaching, programming and cleaning.From there, note the number of hours you spend in each role, and multiply by a fair hourly value. For example, if you coach 20 classes a month and pay your other coaches $25 an hour, multiply 20 x $25 to get $500.Add up the amounts attached to every role to get a total that covers everything you do.Pay yourself that much each month.

I know—“There isn’t enough money!”

I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, I’ll tell you what happens if you don’t pay yourself:

1. You are admitting that you are donating your time and not running a real business.

2. You are ensuring that you can never offload the unpaid tasks you do. If the business can’t pay you, it can’t pay someone else, right?

This stuff is really bad. It’s what drives gym owners to become firefighters or real-estate agents.

The problem is that it’s very easy for hard-working gym owners to just absorb work, grind it out and hope things will improve.

But they rarely do. Things will only change if you change your behavior.

Show Me the Money!

So here’s where the money comes from:

When you assign yourself fair compensation for the work you do, you must start thinking like an entrepreneur. That means you figure out how to generate the revenue you need to cover expenses and turn a profit.

That might require you to do something hard—like raising rates—but CEOs must do hard things.

Or you might have to get creative—CEOs do that, too. Maybe you create a specialty program for older adults as a test to see if an ongoing membership might create a new revenue stream and fill the gym during dead hours.

Or you might “climb the value ladder” and make a brilliant investment as CEO:

Pay a cleaner the $100 a week that you pay yourself to mop floors. With the 20 hours you reclaim each month, work on the business to generate $600, which will cover the cost of the cleaner and more (20 one-hour PT sessions at $75 generate $1,500 in gross revenue, by the way). Then repeat this process with another role.

That’s where the money comes from: You create it. And not in that ethereal, “if you build it, they will come” way.

You create money by doing hard things and investing—by behaving like a CEO.

Get Some Momentum

I understand that this process can be terrifying if your business is barely breaking even on the strength of your unpaid labor.

So just make one small move today: Give yourself a $25 raise.

It might be a drop in the bucket, but it will be symbolic. Just pay yourself for one class you used to coach for free. Or add $25 to your too-low salary.

Your gym can afford $25, right?

So take that cash. You deserve it.

And if you want to take one more step, do this: Sell one PT session to a current group member at $75. Just say this: “I can help you with that skill in a one-on-one session on Thursday. What do you say?” Then add one PT session to the member’s bill.

You just more than covered the $25 raise, and you’ve created a hybrid membership option—group plus one PT session a month. Start telling your members about it.

These tactics work. They’ve been rigorously tested, and we have dirt-under-your-nails proof of success from gyms around the world.

I’d encourage you to take a small step like this today. (And give yourself a raise even if you’re not a struggling gym owner—you deserve it.)

Get a small win. Build momentum. Smile.

And when you’re ready for more wins, bigger wins and a precise plan of action to help you earn what you deserve, let’s talk about that, too.

The post Your First Small Step to Earning More as a Gym Owner appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Your First Small Step to Earning More as a Gym Owner

I’ve showcased some huge gym owner earnings this month.

The numbers in our Top 10 for monthly owner income are impressive—from $16,215 to $37,935—and they can be intimidating if you’re nowhere near them.

So I’m going to give you a simple secret to help you start earning more from your business. It’s a surefire, do-it-today, works-every-time piece of advice:

Start paying yourself for every job you do in your business.

“But I already pay myself,” you might say.

And I’m sure you do. But many gym owners don’t pay themselves for all the jobs they do.

Here’s what’s common:

A gym owner takes a highly variable “salary” that’s determined by the balance in the bank account after staff and bills are paid.An owner takes a regular salary but just keeps adding jobs without increasing pay.An owner simply works for free at times because of a noble but unsustainable desire to help clients get healthier no matter what.

Here’s what I want you to do:

Write down every job you do—include owner tasks, manager tasks and things like coaching, programming and cleaning.From there, note the number of hours you spend in each role, and multiply by a fair hourly value. For example, if you coach 20 classes a month and pay your other coaches $25 an hour, multiply 20 x $25 to get $500.Add up the amounts attached to every role to get a total that covers everything you do.Pay yourself that much each month.

I know—“There isn’t enough money!”

I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, I’ll tell you what happens if you don’t pay yourself:

1. You are admitting that you are donating your time and not running a real business.

2. You are ensuring that you can never offload the unpaid tasks you do. If the business can’t pay you, it can’t pay someone else, right?

This stuff is really bad. It’s what drives gym owners to become firefighters or real-estate agents.

The problem is that it’s very easy for hard-working gym owners to just absorb work, grind it out and hope things will improve.

But they rarely do. Things will only change if you change your behavior.

Show Me the Money!

So here’s where the money comes from:

When you assign yourself fair compensation for the work you do, you must start thinking like an entrepreneur. That means you figure out how to generate the revenue you need to cover expenses and turn a profit.

That might require you to do something hard—like raising rates—but CEOs must do hard things.

Or you might have to get creative—CEOs do that, too. Maybe you create a specialty program for older adults as a test to see if an ongoing membership might create a new revenue stream and fill the gym during dead hours.

Or you might “climb the value ladder” and make a brilliant investment as CEO:

Pay a cleaner the $100 a week that you pay yourself to mop floors. With the 20 hours you reclaim each month, work on the business to generate $600, which will cover the cost of the cleaner and more (20 one-hour PT sessions at $75 generate $1,500 in gross revenue, by the way). Then repeat this process with another role.

That’s where the money comes from: You create it. And not in that ethereal, “if you build it, they will come” way.

You create money by doing hard things and investing—by behaving like a CEO.

Get Some Momentum

I understand that this process can be terrifying if your business is barely breaking even on the strength of your unpaid labor.

So just make one small move today: Give yourself a $25 raise.

It might be a drop in the bucket, but it will be symbolic. Just pay yourself for one class you used to coach for free. Or add $25 to your too-low salary.

Your gym can afford $25, right?

So take that cash. You deserve it.

And if you want to take one more step, do this: Sell one PT session to a current group member at $75. Just say this: “I can help you with that skill in a one-on-one session on Thursday. What do you say?” Then add one PT session to the member’s bill.

You just more than covered the $25 raise, and you’ve created a hybrid membership option—group plus one PT session a month. Start telling your members about it.

These tactics work. They’ve been rigorously tested, and we have dirt-under-your-nails proof of success from gyms around the world.

I’d encourage you to take a small step like this today. (And give yourself a raise even if you’re not a struggling gym owner—you deserve it.)

Get a small win. Build momentum. Smile.

And when you’re ready for more wins, bigger wins and a precise plan of action to help you earn what you deserve, let’s talk about that, too.

The post Your First Small Step to Earning More as a Gym Owner appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Our Highest Paid Gym Owners Spill the Tea

Our top gym owners earned between $48,645 and $113,805 USD in the three-month period running from January to March 2024.

We present one-month averages on our leaderboards, but to get that data we track net owner benefit (NOB) over three months. We want to present sustainable numbers, not one-hit wonders.

For example, we don’t want fill the leaderboard with owners who take single $50,000 payments in one month but don’t earn anything for the rest of the year.

We want to show reliable, sustainable income.

One of our leaders did have a larger payment in one month, but it was balanced by significant payments in the other two months we included in our rolling three-month averages. He still would have made the Top 10 without that lump payment.

Another leader reported his number is actually lower than normal because he didn’t take a distribution in a month.

One leader said his NOB is actually down a little from previous highs because he hired a GM to greatly increase his free time. That reduction in financial benefit has a huge time benefit—and brilliant entrepreneurs with free time tend to use it generate more income or greatly influence the communities around them. (I love it when great gym owners have money and free time!)

Another leader has sustained this income level for a couple of years, and she’s a model of consistency.

The point: The leaderboard you’re about to see shows monthly numbers that are sustainable.

I don’t like to project. Stuff like this is too common in our industry: “His gym made $50,000 in one month and he’s on track to crack $600,000 for the year!”

Except the $50,000 month was the result of a bait-and-switch marketing campaign and all the clients demanded refunds in Month 2.

Be that as it may, the fifth-place gym owner on our board earned $19,116. That will be $229,392 in a year.

I feel confident in that prediction because I know how these gym owners earned this money—and I’ll tell you how they did it.

First, here’s the leaderboard:

And here’s why the leaders are the leaders:

Systems: We focus on “consistent client success, processes, standards and high-quality staffing/coaching.”

Systems/Mentorship: “We haven’t really done anything different from what Two-Brain teaches. We have just been operating for a long time and have been able to refine our systems and processes.”

Systems/Mentorship: “We don’t really do much different than is taught.”

Systems/Mentorship: “We are pretty simple in following Two-Brain Business.”

Systems/Investment in Staff: “We do have online training modules that help ascend our newer staff, providing them with a pretty good level of base knowledge so that we can maximize the time we do spend training them in person.”

Focus on Avatar: “I don’t do any nutrition work, and we’re very anti-competitive. So we really focus on bringing in beginners and folks that haven’t felt at home in more competitive gyms.”

Average revenue per member (ARM): “I’ve most focused on climbing up the value ladder and increasing ARM. By doing this, I’m only performing high-value roles, and a high ARM gives me a better NOB.”

ARM: “We focus on high-value services like PT and nutrition to make sure we have a high ARM. We are super consistent in all areas.”

ARM: “We added higher-level services to maximize our gym utilization via individualized design.”

ARM: “We are in the process of moving all PT clients to membership, which will … create consistency and predictability in revenue.”

You’ll note a lot of our leaders said similar things.

And you might note that many say, “We follow the Two-Brain plan.”

That plan works, and it produces sustainable numbers like the ones on our leaderboard.

That same plan can help you earn more from your business. Your first target is $100,000 a year or $8,333 a month. Once you hit that, we’ll help you set your next income goal, and we’ll tell you how to hit it.

To find out more about how a mentor can help you earn what you deserve, book a call here.

The post Our Highest Paid Gym Owners Spill the Tea appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Top Tips From Gym Owners Earning $16,000+ Per Month

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Imagine having a $37,000 profit from your gym this month. What would you do with it? Would you reinvest in your gym? Would you do something for your family? Would you pay off some debt? Would you hire more coaches? Now imagine that happening every month. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and this is our monthly leaderboard show. When I share what the best gyms in Two-Brain are doing, exactly how well they’re doing, and then I interview them and ask them, “How’d you do that?” and share it with you. Look, when you’re making decisions about how to grow your gym, you need to start with bedrock truth. You need to go to the people who are actually doing the things, can prove it, and then ask them what they’re doing instead of just believing all the hype and the ads you see on Facebook about flooding your gym with leads.

Chris Cooper (00:49):
This is how we do that. Every single month we track six metrics in Two-Brain. We look at who’s doing the best with those metrics and then say, “How’d you do that?” and we then we teach it to everybody else. This is what it means to base decisions on data, and this month is one of my favorite leaderboards because we’re talking about net owner benefit. That’s how much you take from your gym—profit, salary, those two things added up, but also the things that your gym pays for, like your car, your cell phone, et cetera. This is really why you open a business instead of just coaching for somebody else. You want to have this leverage of entrepreneurship to create these opportunities for wealth for your family, to create opportunities for your staff, to make better gyms for your clients, and maybe to even open up more gyms.

Chris Cooper (01:36):
To do that, you need profit, and that’s why we want to hear from the best people in the world. So, let’s start with the leaderboard, and then I’m going to share with you exactly how they got there so that you can do it too. I’m going to go in reverse order through this leaderboard as I like to do. I like to kind of build the suspense. The number 10 gym in Two-Brain last month took home $16,215. Now, we take all of these currencies around the world, and we put them all into USD so that you know that we’re comparing apples to apples. This gym is from Norway, and the owners took home $16,215 U.S. last month. Now, these are not the big flash-in-the-pan things, but if you’ve been around the gym industry for a while, especially 2018, you would see these gym owners doing these six-week challenges and super membership launches with ad agencies, and they would have one big month and then the next month would be kind of mediocre again, and by the third month, all those gains would be gone, and they’d be struggling again.

Chris Cooper (02:35):
This is not that. We use a rolling three average to make sure that the gym is consistently making this much money before we ask them for advice. The number nine gym on our Two-Brain leaderboard is $16,530 net owner benefit. They’re from the States. That’s a personal training gym. Congratulations. Number eight: $16,823 in one month of net owner benefit. That’s a CrossFit gym also from the States. Number seven: $16,858 U.S. in profit, net owner benefit, in one month. Congratulations. Number six: yay, Team Canada—but this is in U.S. dollars, remember—$18,330 last month in net owner benefit to the owner, a husband-and-wife team. So proud of them. Next in fifth place: $19,116 U.S. This is a CrossFit gym too. Number four was $22,206 U.S. This is a CrossFit gym in Switzerland, which has a slightly different model than the CrossFit gyms would in the States because that’s what we mentored them to do.

Chris Cooper (03:43):
Number three: $22,696 U.S. take home for the owners last month. Number two: go Canada; this is $23,262 U.S. take home from their gym last month. So awesome. And number one: 37,935 USD last month in net owner benefit. That’s salary and profit to the owner. Congratulations. That’s a strength training gym by the way. So amazing and also amazing that you’re willing to share your lessons with everybody else. So, I’m going to get into those right now. Now keep in mind that this is take home. This is not top line revenue. There are people out there who will say, “Oh, I have a successful gym because I’ve got $50,000 a month in revenue coming in.” But what really matters is what’s left over at the end. What’s the bottom line? If you’ve got 50 grand in revenue coming in and you spend it all, you can still go hungry.

Chris Cooper (04:40):
What measures the efficacy of your business is profitability because that’s the number that lets you hire more people or expand or open more locations or help serve other people. That’s the measure of your business’s fitness. And so that’s why these are so important. When you see somebody online trying to sell you something, their ad agency or whatever, and they’re talking about their revenue or even worse, their MRR, their run rate, those are imaginary and sometimes even irrelevant. What really matters is how much they’re actually profiting, and that’s what we want to help you focus on too. So, let’s look at their advice. OK, first off, we ask each one of these owners, “Is this your normal, or is this kind of a one-off deal?” Because again, we don’t want to take advice from people who have had one good month ever and then just expect that to continue forever.

Chris Cooper (05:28):
You know business is up and down. We want people who are doing this consistently. We want to get advice from them. So, this guy said that this month, his NOB was a little bit higher because he had a bigger draw. He had a really amazing few months previously, but his average every single month would still put him in the top four. That’s amazing. And this actually does happen. Like what’s really important is not how often you have these really peak months; it’s what you fall back to on average in between these peak months, right? Your business is not as good as your best month. It’s as good as your worst month. And so, when you’re falling back down and you’re winning the leaderboard this month, but you fall back down to top four every month, you’re doing great.

Chris Cooper (06:15):
Another person said, “This is on par with our yearly average. It used to be higher, but I hired a GM, and that brought our net owner benefit down, but I’m not in the gym as much, so it’s a trade that I would happily make every time. I believe this will increase as we go.” Fantastic advice. Get your net owner benefit high first; then, hire a manager if you want to because what you’ve done is you’ve proven that your business is successful enough to support at least one person, you, and based on what you’ve built, it can grow to support another person. Too many people hire a GM before they’re even paying themselves a good salary, which means that you’re asking somebody to risk their career on an unproven model. It’s crazy. Like get yourself a high net owner benefit, prove you can do it, and then think about hiring a GM to buy back your time.

Chris Cooper (07:03):
Another person said, “Even though I was in the top three this month, this number is actually lower as I didn’t need to take a distribution,” so for tax purposes, he left more money in his business. And this is a Canadian business where the tax rate is slightly lower for the business than it would be for a person, which is different in the States and different in other countries too. So, keep that in mind. And another quote was, “This has been our run rate for a couple years.” She takes from the business what she wants to make from the business, reinvests the rest or invests in other things through the business, and again, when you’re making this much money, the number one thing that you can do to grow your profitability and grow your wealth is keep more of that money by optimizing your tax strategy.

Chris Cooper (07:47):
So, what’s interesting is what these guys are actually reporting as net owner benefit could be higher, it’s just they’re doing things to leave money in the business, reinvest in other things, and defer tax payments basically. So, how did you do it? This is maybe the most important part of the show today. How did you get to that high net owner benefit? First, our leaderboard people said, “Systems. We focus on consistent client success processes, standards, and high-quality staffing and coaching.” The next person says, “Systems and mentorship. We haven’t really done anything different from what Two-Brain teaches. We’ve just been operating for a long time and have been able to refine our systems and processes.” The third person says, “Systems and mentorship.” I’m seeing a theme here. “We don’t really do much different than what Two-Brain teaches.” The fourth person said, “Systems and mentorship.”

Chris Cooper (08:37):
“We are pretty simply following Two-Brain business.” The fifth person says, “Systems and investment in staff.” They said, “We do have online training modules that help us ascend our newer staff, providing them with pretty good level of base knowledge so that we can maximize the time we spend training them in person.” How do they get time to train their staff in person? By having good systems and probably mentorship; they’re mentoring their own staff. That means they’re receiving mentorship from a business coach. The next person said, “We focus on our avatar. I don’t do any nutrition work, and we’re very anti-competitive athlete. So, we really focus on bringing in beginners and folks that haven’t felt at home in more competitive gyms.” Huge. Another theme that we saw in the responses was that these gyms did not focus on client headcount. Their model is not “get 400 clients in a group training program.”

Chris Cooper (09:28):
They really focused on high value services to high value clients. That’s ARM, not headcount, and while they have to have both to get the revenue that creates the profitability that we’re talking about here, they prioritize that high ARM because you’re going to have lower churn, you’re going to have better margins that can be used to pay coaches and be able to buy back the owner’s time to focus on growing the gym. So, there’s a massive correlation here between the ARM of your clients. The worst thing, the thing that you never hear from people who are doing really well is, “I have 500 clients at a very low rate for my coaching program.” That just doesn’t happen. Here’s what the leader said, “This month I focused on ARM and climbing the value ladder. I’m most focused on climbing up the value ladder. That means buying back your time and focusing on high value uses of that time and increasing ARM.”

Chris Cooper (10:24):
“By doing this, I’m only performing high value roles and a high ARM gives me a better net owner benefit.” What they mean specifically is that they are not cleaning their gym. They’re probably not coaching their group classes. They might not be doing the billing or the payroll. They are probably still doing sales for their gym, and they’re working on marketing and getting a great return. I happen to know that this owner is still doing personal training just because they like it. The next person said, “We focused on ARM through a lot of personal training and nutrition. We focus on high value services like personal training and nutrition to make sure we have a high ARM. We are super consistent in delivery in all areas. The third person said, “We sell high ARM, valuable services. We added higher level services to maximize our gym utilization via individual design.”

Chris Cooper (11:13):
Again, you’re providing the value that clients want to buy. They’re not tricking people into buying a high value service. They’re finding out what their clients want and the problem their clients want to solve and solving that for them. Instead of just saying, “We’re selling group training,” because all of the other gyms on your street are saying, “We’re selling group training We’re selling group training. We’re selling group training.” That creates commoditization, and the client just picks the lowest price. It’s a race to the bottom. These leaders in net owner benefit are the opposite. They’re anti-commoditization. They’re setting themselves out by serving a narrower niche better with more value. The next person said, “We have a high ARM. We are in the process of moving all of our personal training clients to a membership which will create consistency and predictability and revenue. We got rid of packages.”

Chris Cooper (12:02):
Hey, if you’ve got a personal training studio or you’re selling personal training, it’s time to stop selling packages. OK? Most of us stopped doing this years ago. I wish I had never sold packages, and get people onto recurring memberships. When you’re in Two-Brain in the mentorship program, this is one of the things the mentor’s going to tell you, and it’s such a simple fix, but there’s multiple steps involved and you have to be guided through that process if you want it to work effectively. Look, the reason that you opened a gym was to help people get healthy and fit, but the measure of success of your gym is how long you can stick around and help those people. If you’re just running crazy ad strategies once a year, once a quarter, you might boost your revenue for a month, but you’re going to damage yourself long term.

Chris Cooper (12:49):
The real measure of your gym’s fitness is the net owner benefit that you receive in profit. That can be reinvested for staff, it can be reinvested for wealth, it can be reinvested for impact, and you can help more people. You know my mantra is, “Make lots of money and give it away.” When gym owners make lots of money, that’s what they do with it. And that’s why I’m so proud of these gym owners for leading the way and giving back to you so that you can do it too. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and if you want to talk more about this, just go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free public Facebook group. It’s helpful; it’s productive. Everybody in there is positive. There’s no sarcasm and stupid names and waste of your time. You can get in there, you can learn something today, you can act on it for free, and improve your business. Thank you for serving humanity, and I hope this serves you.

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Gym Owners Can Earn $50,000 Per Quarter? Yes!

How much does your business pay you as owner?

Remember, when you open a gym, you stop being a coach. You’re the owner, and that’s a completely different role with a different skill set—and a different pay structure.

Success hinges on you and your skills. Your gym will fail if you’re a great coach and a bad entrepreneur.

On the other hand, if you’re a good coach who becomes a good entrepreneur, you can quickly build a business that pays you $100,000 per year and lasts for decades.

That’s your first goal: $100,000 a year in net owner benefit.

If you become a great entrepreneur, you might earn much more than $100,000 per year, and you might even do it in four or five hours a month.

Many of our upper-level gym owners are essentially “retired”: Their gyms pay them a lot for just a little oversight.

I’ll show you what’s possible when you become a great business owner. The numbers in the table below are monthly averages from a three-month period, so everyone on this list is earning great money every month, not “once in a while”:

Some of these entrepreneurs take salaries. Some take profit distributions. Some charge their gym rent as a landlord. To avoid overtaxation, some have their businesses pay their bills (like their cell phone or their car loan). Some do all of the above. Net owner benefit (NOB) is the total of salary, profit and the “extras” your gym provides for you.

For example, a gym owner might make $100,000 in NOB this way:

$66,000 salary ($5,500 per month)$20,000 profit ($5,000 quarterly distributions)$6,000 health insurance$6,000 vehicle$2,000 cell phone/extras

Total: $100,000 NOB (or about $8,333 per month)

Others might just take a salary.

I’ll do the math for you: Everyone in our Top 10 earned almost $50,000 in the last quarter and is on track for about $200,000 in a year.

So how did they do it? The paths are all slightly different, but I’ll give you one huge commonality:

All these gym owners spend time working on the business, not in it.

That means the toilet at the gym is clean, but the owner didn’t clean it.

The PT sessions are coached at an A+ level, but the owner isn’t delivering the service.

The clients receive birthday cards and congrats for PRs, but the owner isn’t doing the sending.

If you want to take a single step toward earning more today, offload a low-value role—cleaning is an obvious role, but there are others—and use the time you reclaim to improve your business.

What should you do to improve your business? That’s where a mentor comes in. An expert coach will tell you exactly what to do “right now” so you can earn the income you want.

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

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Are You Relying on a Franchisor to Tell Your Gym’s Story?

What happens when any company ends the conversation on its media platforms?

Nothing good.

Here’s your experiment: Check out local gyms on social media and visit their websites.

What do you think about a gym that updates its blog and posts to social media every day?

And what about a gym that hasn’t made a post in nine months?

Gyms that tell their story every day feel like vibrant, growing, professional businesses, right?

Gyms that don’t feel lifeless and stale. They look like rickety operations that are a sneeze away from closing.

It’s the same thing with large, global brands, including those that sell franchises and affiliation.

Think of a company like Subway. The franchisees sell sandwiches. The franchisor sells franchises but also collects 12.5 percent royalties on sandwich sales (4.5 percent of that is for advertising), so it wins when:

1. Entrepreneurs view the brand as a great investment and open more franchises.

2. Franchises sell a ton of sandwiches through direct marketing and kick greater royalty payments up the ladder.

That’s why Subway advertises so much, pays top-shelf talent like Steph Curry to appear in the ads, and posts to social media all the time (the company has 1.4 million followers on Instagram).

It’s all about raising the status of the brand overall and making it easier for the business owner on Main Street to sell subs.

Fitness, Advertising and Branding Concerns

The principle is the same in the fitness industry.

For example, Planet Fitness franchise owners pay initial fees as well as ongoing royalty and ad fees (breakdown here). The parent company builds the brand so more people open gyms and more local clients buy memberships at those gyms. It’s supposed to be wins all around.

So what happens if the conversation stops—or goes really badly?

Well, I imagine the franchisees would immediately demand a reduction in royalty/ad fees. “What am I paying for if you’re not supporting my business?” Or, “That ad campaign is actually driving people away!”

At that point, the franchisees would have to start telling their own stories fast. Smart owners are already doing that.

Some structures make this easier than others. For example, you can’t find social media accounts for individual Planet Fitness locations; they rely on the mother corp.

But lots of F45 franchises have their own social accounts that are separate from the corporate account with the big, blue checkmark.

I like the latter approach better. It’s a hedge against missteps or abandonment by the franchisor. And it helps you connect with real local people. Franchises are supposed to be ultra-replicable, but it’s a mistake to think a slick national ad campaign is a complete replacement for a great trainer who can tell a local mom “I can help you get stronger at my gym.”

Unless a license agreement specifically forbids it, gym owners are wise to double down on corporate messaging so they can build local audiences and tell a unique story, even if it has elements in common with the other franchises.

If you’re a 100 percent independent gym owner, you should be telling your story loudly and daily on any platform your clients and prospective clients use.

If you’re involved in any structure, I’d still encourage you to build your own audience in any way your license agreement allows. Support from a franchisor/licensor is great. But if it’s misguided, or if it vanishes completely, you’re on your own.

Remember, the mother corp wants each associated entrepreneur to succeed, but that’s really a secondary concern. Parent corps are ultimately self-interested: They want improved share prices and dividends, jacked-up and ever-increasing value if the company isn’t public, and more revenue from the franchising/licensing stream. The corporate story will always be more important than the story of a single gym owner.

It’s not uncommon to see lawsuits involving franchisors and franchisees. In a 2017 suit that’s particularly relevant to this discussion, “a franchisee called 1523428 Ontario Inc. alleged that Tim Hortons increased charges for administrative costs after the merger (with Burger King). Charges rose even though the company let go of nearly half of the employees responsible for promotional activities, whose compensation was previously charged to the fund.”

Second Cup, a coffee chain, ran into a similar suit in 2018.

Chicken chain Bojangles ran afoul of franchise owners in 2024: “Such (marketing) funds can become sources of tension when franchisees believe the money is being misused, or is being used for the franchisor’s purposes, such as selling franchises or for general corporate purposes.”

With that in mind, wise entrepreneurs always evaluate the value provided by a parent company. And they do anything they can to tell their own stories daily and build their businesses.

Tell Your Gym’s Story

The best defense against missteps by a parent company: Tell your story every day on your own platforms. Don’t abdicate responsibility for that (unless your agreement forbids you from doing so).

Most gyms, especially coaching gyms, are free to build their brands as they see fit, and I’d suggest doing so is not optional. You must take responsibility for building a local audience and connecting with prospective clients. (The content pipeline is one of four funnels Two-Brain mentors help gym owners build.)

If you don’t know what to say in your content, just make your existing clients famous: Post success stories and photos of smiling clients so viewers know “people like us do things like this,” to quote Seth Godin.

And if you’re a Two-Brain client, dig into the Content Vault. The monstrous pile of done-for-you resources in there will help you tell a great story daily for more than a year with almost no effort at all. Your mentor will also help you ensure your content marketing funnel is clog-free.

Whatever you do, don’t rely on anyone else to tell your story for you.

If you choose to rely on someone else, what happens to your business when the parent company goes silent?

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