Chris Cooper's Blog, page 43

Why Two-Brain Uses One-on-One Mentorship

I could give you 10 years of fitness-industry knowledge all at once.

Without exaggeration, I could lay out everything I’ve learned in the last decade and tell you exactly how to build a business that would get you to $1 million net worth in about four years.

But here’s the truth about building a great gym:

Knowledge is not enough. You must take action.

Here’s another truth that’s been proven to me time and again:

Entrepreneurs are most likely to take action when working with an expert mentor one on one.

So that’s what Two-Brain offers.

Courses and Group Mentorship

Two-Brain could sell access to a course and big-group mentorship. Lots of companies do this, and it’s very lucrative. Group mentorship scales fast and generates a lot of money.

But it doesn’t produce the best results—and I care about results more than I care about money.

In my early days mentoring gym owners, around 2012, I connected with them one on one. We got results. When I hit about 55 clients, my time was maxed but I still wanted to help more people. So I sold a course through another company I didn’t own.

Money rolled in, and I was happy for a few weeks—until people told me that the course was packed with essential knowledge but they didn’t act on that knowledge.

I was crushed, and I went back to delivering help the way that I had received it: one on one.

Working directly with a mentor had forced me to dig in and do the work, and my actions saved my business and improved my life dramatically. So that’s how I would mentor others.

Now, I have a huge team of mentors around the world, and they all work one on one with their mentees. They help gym owners set goals, they create plans to accomplish the goals, and they hold the gym owners accountable.

This plan produces results: The average gym owner who joins Two-Brain can reach income of $100,000 a year in two years, one month and nine days, regardless of starting point. This is hard data, not fiction.

The process to get to $100,000 net owner benefit runs through three phases of one-on-one mentorship: Stage 1, Stage 2 and Growth. All along the way, a trusted mentor guides the gym owner to success and provides support, the right tactical resources at the right time, and lots of accountability.

Elite-Level Entrepreneurship

Only in our fourth phase do we alter the approach: At the Tinker level, we use group mentorship so we can leverage the expertise and connections within a smaller group of skilled entrepreneurs.

When you’re making $100,000 a year from your gym or the net worth of all your assets is around $1 million, you have lots of options. It’s important for these elite entrepreneurs to be exposed to lots of world-class experts and hear about the tactics used by their peers.

Our Tinker group meets in person quarterly to hear from top business experts in various fields. At this stage of entrepreneurship, needs are so diverse and options are so numerous that no one expert has all the answers. So we use a group format, and we might present a real-estate expert followed by marketing expert followed by a crypto expert.

But we still facilitate smaller groups and networking, and clients have biweekly accountability check-ins with a coach. One-on-one accountability is still important at this level.

In our earlier stages of mentorship, we do everything one on one because I want you to have that strong bond with somebody who understands what you’re going through, who knows your numbers, and who knows what you did last month and what you must work on now.

That high-touch, high-frequency, one-on-one mentorship is essential until you’ve built a very wide base to your pyramid. It is without doubt the best way to get results fast as an entrepreneur.

Where to Start

Two-Brain has the largest data set in the entire industry, and we publish huge amounts of content on a host of platforms.

In fact, we publish so much free help that it’s possible to turn a gym business around just by consuming our free resources. But that almost never happens. Here’s what’s more common:

“I had already done a lot of the work prior to signing up—just listening to the free, low-hanging fruit: the podcast and the Gym Owners United Facebook group. But I needed more,” said Two-Brain client Jaime Silva.

“My mentor helped me organize and triage my business needs. Then I was able to connect all the free tools I had absorbed and connect the dots, which created the systems I currently use to train and hire staff and market under my voice and vision. This ultimately created the business I had always dreamed of owning.”

The knowledge is available, but only an expert can determine “the best thing to do right now.” I want to help all gym owners grow their businesses, so we give knowledge away for free—and I hope it helps!

But inaction is the most common result of too much knowledge. Or people do the wrong things at the wrong time. Or they reach a certain level and just can’t go any further alone.

That’s where a mentor comes in.

When you buy mentorship, you are buying speed.

An experienced mentor takes all the available knowledge and builds a model that will help you accomplish your business goals. The mentor supplies the resources you need in the right order and makes sure you execute so your gym can become a wealth-generating asset for the next 30 years.

It’s a streamlined, tactical, high-speed approach that will get you from A to B fastest.

The proof? We’ve certified 48 millionaires so far, with more added to the list every month.

So I believe one-on-one mentorship gets the best results, just as I believe personal training helps gym clients reach goals faster. To take that simile one step further, group training is the budget option in a gym and when it comes to business coaching.

Knowledge is not enough. Action is the name of the game here, and a one-on-one relationship will produce the most action in the shortest amount of time.

If you want to take action and move fast, let’s talk about it.

The post Why Two-Brain Uses One-on-One Mentorship appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Buy Speed! Why Mentorship Is Important for Gym Owners

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Hey, I am Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business, the largest mentorship practice in the world for gym owners. And today, I’m going to walk you through what our mentorship practice consists of in all the various stages. But before we do that, I want to talk to you about why mentorship is so important. I spent years, 12 years, working with gym owners around the world, building this amazing team, building the largest data set in the fitness industry and writing all kinds of books about it that you can buy for really cheap on Amazon if you want. We publish blog posts every day, podcast twice a week, YouTube twice a week. There’s a lot of free stuff out there, and most people will say that our free stuff is better than anybody else’s paid program. And still, we give that stuff away for free because we are a mentorship practice.

Chris Cooper (00:47):
When you buy mentorship, you’re buying speed. Anybody has access to information. The problem is we’re all overwhelmed. We’re busy gym owners. We don’t know which thing to do first. We don’t know the exact steps. We put it off, we get distracted, the phone is ringing, people are coming in. Hopefully there are leads clicking through our website, and of course, then the toilet leaks, and then we’ve got to coach the class, and then we’ve got our own fitness, and we’ve got to get home for our kid’s violin recital. How do we stay on track? How do we know what to do first? Well, that’s what mentorship is all about. And we work one-on-one with you to take all of that data, all that knowledge and help you build a model that will work for your gym that you can execute on for the next 30 years.

Chris Cooper (01:31):
We have now produced 48 millionaires at Two-Brain Business, and most of these people did not start out successful at all. A lot of them were losing money, losing sleep. Some of them were saying, “I’m ready to give up. This is my last chance.” Now they’re very successful. And I want to walk you through the path of how we do that. One of the first tools we use is focus. And another of the first tools we use is momentum. We want you doing one specific thing at a time and then the next thing and then the next thing and doing that to completion and then adding the next thing. And then the next thing, instead of trying to do five different things at once, which is probably stopping you. Now, we’re going to say, “Do this right now.” We’re going to help you do a time audit when you start so that you know exactly when you will do the work that you are assigned by the mentor.

Chris Cooper (02:18):
So the very first phase of our program is extremely intense. So, if you’re going to be talking to a mentor every week, maximum every 10 days, you’re going to be building a better front-end offer. You’re going to be learning how to sell that offer and practicing with the mentor, getting some roleplay in so that you don’t feel weird about it. Then, you’re going to be putting it together in a valuable way and building three marketing funnels. The three marketing funnels that you’re going to build first are going to be an organic social media funnel, you’re going to build a referral funnel, and you’re going to be building an ads funnel. The reason we want you building these things together is I want you making money quickly in this program. Like that’s number one. This program is an investment that will continue to pay you for the next 30 years that you own the gym, but I want that investment to start giving you a clear return right out of the gate.

Chris Cooper (03:05):
I want you to make the money that pays for mentorship quickly, and so we’re going to teach you a good way to sell that doesn’t feel salesy; it feels like coaching. We’re going to teach you how to build three marketing funnels and get those going before we do anything else. That way you’re going to see some quick growth, some quick wins, start to feel some momentum and have the money to pay for the program. When you’re done with that—and that takes about six weeks—you’re going to go into what we call Stage 2. Now this is where we start getting into like the real nitty gritty and possibly fixing mistakes in your program. There are six really key areas that are essential for long-term success, and if we can get these solidified, that will create the foundation on which you can build for decades. So, we’re going to be looking at marketing; we’re going to add one more fourth funnel.

Chris Cooper (03:49):
We’re going to be looking at sales—at what options you’re actually selling and help you narrow those down and get really, really good at one or two. We’re going to give you some help on cost control so that you’re not going to be scared of your financials anymore. We’re going to give you the basics. We’re going to help you build a dashboard. We’re going to give you a retention system that you can plug and play step by step. We’re going to give you operational handbooks, meeting frameworks that you can use for your team. It’s up to you to just tweak these, customize them to your gym. You’ll want to change 10 to 20% of them max and then deliver them to your gym, get everybody on the same page working together, fired up for the future, and have your gym deliver with true excellence whether you’re there or not. And then, we’re going to give you some exercises for team building too.

Chris Cooper (04:32):
I want you to know how to make good careers for your coaches, right? This thing that is so important to you and to me, you need to know how to do it, and we’re going to give you the step-by-step playbook for that. During this phase, you’re going to talk to your mentor about every 14 days is the average, and they are going to build you a customized roadmap to get from where you are to where you want to go. That starts with tracking metrics, but don’t be worried. They will do it with you on the call if you want them to. If it’s easy for you to get your metrics or you even know how to read a P&L already, wonderful, we can go faster and get to the next stage, which is Growth. But before we start growing and really hammering marketing and adding staff and all that scaling stuff, I want to know that you’ve got a rock-solid foundation so that you can continue to build on your own or with Two-Brain for as long as you want to.

Chris Cooper (05:20):
So the next phase is what we call “Getting to Your Perfect Day” or “Getting to Growth.” The goal of this stage, the third stage of mentorship, is to get to 100K net owner benefit. That means we want you to focus on income. Now this doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a greedy gym owner who doesn’t pay your staff well or anything like that. The way that you get to 100K net owner benefit or your target income, whatever it is, is by making these opportunities and growing the pie for everybody. So, as you benefit, so do your coaches and so do your clients and of course so does your family. So, you’re going to be on a call monthly. The projects at this stage get a little bit bigger, they take a little bit more time. You’ll get on a call one-on-one again with your mentor, and they’re going to map out what your priorities are with you.

Chris Cooper (06:06):
They’re going to give you clear guidance on what to do. They’re going to give you all the tools, templates, everything you need to get the work done, and they’re going to check in with you for accountability. In fact, record scratch, I really want to show you how they do this, so I’m just going to break off script here, and I’m going to actually show you how we do this because this is so cool, and this took so much time and energy to build. So, what we do at the end of your second stage of mentorship is have you tracking metrics. I know maybe you’re scared. I remember days when I was scared to look at my bank account, but I don’t want you to be scared of your numbers because your numbers point the direction you need to go. So, we built this really cool dashboard, and this will integrate with some software.

Chris Cooper (06:47):
If you are using a piece of software we don’t integrate with, there’s a four- or five-minute video to show you how to get your metrics out of that software. And if you need your mentor’s help, they will do it on a call with you. I’m going to make this really simple for you, but what we’re going to do is we’re going to track your progress. So, you’ll see your ROI on mentorship, you’ll see your gym growing, and you’ll get to see all kinds of other things too, like your opportunities. So, you’ll see things like revenue expenses, how much money you’re making, all that kind of cool stuff. But you’ll also see opportunities. So right here on our marketing dashboard, I can see that this person had good lead flow. They had a lot of appointments set, they had a lot of people show up, but their close rate needs some work.

Chris Cooper (07:24):
So their mentor can say, “Let’s role play a little bit. Let’s work on a new close rate. Let’s boost those sales.” They can also do this: They can look at this chart, and I can look at this toolkit bigger here. What this does is it shows you where you are in relation to what your goals are. So, if you’re trying to make more money, we’re going to set a “Make more money goal.” If you’re trying to control your expenses better, we’re going to set a goal for that. Increase client value, get more value for your time, increase retention: We’re going to set goals for all of them. Then your mentor is going to help you identify your biggest priority, and then they’re going to get tactical. They’re going to get real tactical, and they’re going to say, “Here’s the best strategy for that.” For example, we have so many options.

Chris Cooper (08:06):
Each one of these is a specific course. So, if we say something like, “Hey, we need to get more clients.” We have separate courses for marketing funnels, for building Facebook and Instagram ads, for building Google ads, for using Google AdWords, for using AI, for producing content, for getting more referrals. We have separate courses for all of that, and your mentor will assign the right one to you and then follow up to make sure that you’re getting it done. This is not a learning program. This is not a course where we’re just going to dump more information on you and then hopefully you take action on 1% of it. This is a mentorship program, so when we assign you the work, we’re going to make sure that it actually gets done, and that’s how you get compounding results is from that action. So, in Phase 3, you know you’ll be in Phase 3 working away on growth, on staffing issues, on marketing, sales, retention until you hit your target income.

Chris Cooper (09:00):
Now, earlier I said that the target income is 100K net owner benefit. That’s not it for everybody. That’s just the most common answer that we hear. So, if you live somewhere where $50,000 a year is your target goal, we’re going to build you a specific plan to get there in your area. If you’re already over 100K net owner benefit and you want to get to 200, we’re going to build you a specific plan to get to that. The good news is that you don’t need to pull different levers; you just need to pull them at different times or different levers, you know, prioritize differently. And everything that you do, you do with your mentor so they can tell you exactly what you should be doing next. Alright, so that’s our third phase of mentorship, which we call Growth Phase. After that, some gym owners ascend to our Tinker program and the Tinker program is for people who are making a little bit more than what they need.

Chris Cooper (09:51):
They’ve got a little bit of extra time and a little bit of extra money, and they’re going to choose how they invest that time and money so that they can build long-term wealth for their family, that they can buy investments like maybe the building that their gym is in or maybe some real estate or crypto or whatever it is. We help them with all those things. We also want to help gym owners, besides just build wealth, we want to help them get back in touch with their families again after grinding so hard and building their gym. We want them to have a better health span and a better lifespan. And so that’s what the Tinker program is all about. Once your gym, your first location, is paying you a little bit more than what you need and you’ve got a little bit of spare time, you have to think carefully about how you invest that time and money or else you just waste it and you go backward again.

Chris Cooper (10:34):
I know sometimes when you have a good month in your gym, you’re like, “I want to go buy five new rowers.” But you have to learn to think like an investor and say, “How will five more rowers help me grow this? How will I get a good return on that investment? Would I be better off doing something differently, adding some showers or something like that?” This is where you decide to buy the other gym, to expand to another location. This is where you decide, like, “What else do I want to do with my life?” And this is what the Tinker Program is all about. The Tinker program has two goals: to get you from income to investment. I want you to become a millionaire. I want you to build wealth. I want you to have assets that give you an income instead of working for the rest of your life.

Chris Cooper (11:17):
I want your money, your income, to come from your wealth, not from your work. And as quickly as possible, I want you to have free time to do things in your community, to go out there and help people, to volunteer, to give extra money away. I want you to have time to spend with your kids and to build a legacy for them. I want you to build multi-generational wealth so that they don’t have to work as hard as you do, or they can just do whatever they want, and it doesn’t matter. They don’t have to take a job that they hate. I want you to be able to impact your community. And so, most of us open up a gym for passion. We want to change people’s lives, right? We want to help people by teaching them health and fitness. And then we get sidetracked because we realize, “Oh, now I own a business.”

Chris Cooper (11:58):
“I need to learn how to own a business.” And so, we’re going to quickly have you making more money. Then, we’re going to fix up all the processes in your business and help you build a foundation, create a dashboard so you can always see how it’s going and build on that foundation for the next 30 years. Then I want you to build wealth to make sure that your gym doesn’t have to go away. You don’t have to get a job selling cars if you don’t want to, and you can give back. You can create an impact in your family and in your community, and then the lives of your coaches. That is the opportunity that entrepreneurs have that not everybody else gets. But it’s important that we seize that opportunity by asking for help, accepting that help, doing the actual work to grow our business instead of just dodging from responsibility, coaching a class all day and telling ourselves like, “If I just become a better coach, this will all turn around for me.”

Chris Cooper (12:47):
I had to learn the hard way that that wasn’t the case. A mentor saved my business. A mentor can now take you to places that I never dreamed gym ownership could even go a decade ago, and now there are so many Two-Brain clients doing that. Thank you for being part of our family. I know that an investment in mentorship, it’s not just an investment in your gym business. I know from personal experience that it’s an investment in your family and their future. It’s an investment in your coaches and their career opportunities. It’s an investment in yourself as a leader, so you can sleep better at night, and it’s also even an investment in your clients because you want them to have better experiences. You want to keep them around long enough to actually change their lives. That’s the investment that you’re making. Thank you so much for being part of the Two-Brain family. Let’s go out there and change the world.

The post Buy Speed! Why Mentorship Is Important for Gym Owners appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Mentorship: The Path to $100,000 Income and $1 Million Net Worth

We open gyms because we’re passionate about changing lives through health and fitness.

That’s why I opened a gym, and I know you had the same reasons.

But I discovered a way to exponentially increase my impact as an entrepreneur through mentorship.

I learned how to build a profitable, stable business that will last for decades, and then I learned how to build wealth so I can give back to the community around that gym in a big way.

All fitness entrepreneurs have this opportunity, but very few capitalize on it.

I want you to be an entrepreneur who changes the world, so here’s the secret:

Ask for help, accept the help, do the right work at the right time, grow the business quickly, build wealth and give back.

A mentor can take you places that were once off limits to gym owners. As proof, I’ll offer the 48 millionaire gym owners Two-Brain has certified. These fitness entrepreneurs are literally changing the world around them.

Here’s the exact path to joining their ranks. It starts with hands-on, focused, tactical work at ground level.

Stage 1

Essential Details

Timeline: About six weeks.Mentor contact: every seven to 10 days.Goal: Laser-focused work to produce quick wins and momentum.

Our program is an investment that will pay a return for decades. To start, we want you to see a clear return right out of the gate and make the money that will pay for mentorship.

Stage 1 is structured to provide rapid growth, quick wins and momentum.

We’ll teach you exactly how to make the money you need to pay for program. We don’t do this with wild, unsustainable strategies like bait-and-switch marketing or paid-in-full campaigns—this stuff actually guts a business and kills growth.

Instead, we help you build and sell a solid front-end offer, and we teach “non-slimy” sales techniques so you can capitalize on the three marketing funnels we help you build: organic social media, referrals and paid ads.

The goal is to make money quickly, and the pace is intense. That’s why you have regular contact with a mentor. The mentor will help you find the time you need to do the work and tell you “do this thing right now.”

In this stage, you’ll knock off tasks in order and literally feel momentum building. It’s a very exciting time.

Real client quote: “Only three weeks into my mentorship program with Two-Brain. I’ve already been so much more productive and focused with the help of (my mentor) and this program. It will undoubtedly change my life.” —Stephen Cornely, Triad Wellness Philly

Stage 2

Essential Details

Timeline: Variable—the work can be completed in 11 weeks.Mentor contact: About every 14 days.Goal: Build a rock-solid foundation so your business lasts for decades.

After you’ve got some quick wins and you feel momentum building, we get into the nitty-gritty in Stage 2. This is where we fix mistakes, build systems and create the structure your business needs to thrive long term.

You’ll work with a mentor in six key areas:

Marketing (build another funnel).Sales (focus your options to boost close rate).Cost Control (build a dashboard and understand financials).Retention (implement proven plug-and-play systems to keep clients longer).Operations (customize our battle-tested handbooks, frameworks and systems).Team Building (use done-for-you playbooks and exercises to create careers for staff members).

In Stage 2, your mentor will build you a customized roadmap to get you from where you are to where you want to go, and you’ll track metrics so you know you’re making progress.

This work can be overwhelming on your own. There’s so much you could do.

We simplify everything and lay out a step-by-step plan, and we provide world-class plug-and-play resources so you can move at very high speed. Your mentor will even do tasks with you if you want.

How much time does this process save? A lot. Example: You can spend months making your own ops manual. Or you can spend a little time customizing about 15 percent of our done-for-you resources so they’re perfect for your business.

If you get these essentials in place now, your business will be better off every month for decades. When you consider that, the reward for your work in Stage 2 is incredible.

Real client quote: “Celebrating a year with Two-Brain in two days. Implemented SOPs throughout my business, and I doubled my revenue and my membership base in that time. I significantly increased my confidence as a business owner and found financial security!” —Molly Purvis, CrossFit Burlington

Growth

Essential Details

Timeline: Variable–the average time to get to $100,000 net owner benefit (NOB) is two years, one month and nine days, regardless of starting point. Some entrepreneurs have moved much faster.Mentor contact: Focused calls monthly, with homework and accountability.Goal: Reach your Perfect Day and target income–$100,000 net owner benefit is a common goal.

With a foundation in place, it’s time to start working on larger projects. This is where you create opportunities and really grow the business.

It’s also where a lot of people get lost without expert help. You have so many options at this stage, and overwhelm, inaction and backsliding are very common when gym owners try to scale up without guidance.

A mentor is going to tell you the exact lever you need to pull right now to move your business forward—and you’ll get all the resources you need to move quickly and confidently.

You’ll be tracking key metrics in your dashboard, and you’ll get the tools you need to improve those metrics.

We get tactical in a big way. With your mentor, you’ll identify your priority and then take swift action. We have courses for everything from content marketing to recapturing old clients to developing nutrition programs. Whatever metric you’re focusing on, your mentor will assign the right course, provide the done-for-you assets you need and follow up: “Did you do the work?”

Remember, this isn’t a “learning course” in which we dump a ton of info in your lap and expect you to sort it out on your own. This is mentorship: We give you the exact right tools for the job, tell you how to use them and make sure you get the work done.

I’m not exaggerating when I say we regularly see incredible business transformations in this stage of mentorship, and it’s thrilling when a gym owner goes from earning very little to making six figures or more. That’s a life-changing evolution, and we see it all the time.

Real client quote: “All-time monthly revenue PR! We are up 103% since March of 2023 and I’m coaching less classes. My mentor, Karen, has continued to steer me into a focused direction to attack weaknesses. Cheers to higher goals and relentlessly eliminating weak spots in my business!” —Jacob Hudson, Rebar Performance

Tinker

Essential Details

Timeline: Variable—the average time to get to $1 million net worth after reaching $100,000 NOB is about two years.Mentor/peer contact: Quarterly in-person meetups with all Tinkers and world-class experts, biweekly accountability check-ins with mentor, group calls.Goal: Become a millionaire, earn money from wealth (not work), impact your community.

Only some gym owners ascend to this level, moving “from income to investment.”

Fitness entrepreneurs are ready when their gyms are running very well without constant oversight and they’re making a little more than they need.

With a little extra time and money, gym owners can learn to invest to build multi-generational wealth. Real estate, crypto, second locations, complementary businesses, stocks—it’s all on the table because these entrepreneurs have freedom of time and finance.

This investment isn’t just about money. Yes, we teach Tinkers how to build wealth in many ways—including use of our Tinker Toolkit—but we also help them improve themselves. We want them to live long, healthy lives so they can improve their communities. It’s about lifespan and healthspan—many years spent in great health, with a lot of freedom.

It’s also about personal development. We help Tinkers reconnect with families after years of grinding to build a business. We help them get fitter, find happiness, improve their leadership skills and plan for the future.

As of press time, we’ve certified 48 millionaires, with more added to the list each month. They are incredible, generous people who are changing the world around them for the better.

And you could be one of them someday.

Real client quote: “I tried to do it on my own. Even though I had the knowledge, I didn’t have success. I kept getting stuck and not moving the needle forward. I was tired of saying, ‘I only need 10 more clients.’ I hired a mentor and suddenly had a profitable business. I did exactly what they said even if it made me uncomfortable. I joined Tinker 15 months later and am now a mentor.” —Kourtney Brownlow, owner of Franklin Strength and Wellness, Tinker and Two-Brain mentor

Mentorship for the Win

You might be able to ascend to Tinker level on your own. It would be very tough, but there’s a small chance you could do it through trial and error and a lot of work.

Similarly, you can build a strong business and reach $100,000 NOB without help.

But how long will it take to reach $100,000 income or $1 million net worth?

And how many mistakes will you make along the way? How many dinners with your spouse will you miss? How many of your kids’ baseball games?

In a worst-case scenario, can you really weather a decade of grinding for little pay to get to the “good part”? Most can’t—and you don’t have to. We can help you reach your goals very quickly and shave years off “the grind.”

Real client quote: “I finally hired a mentor because after five years I had taken my business as far as I could alone, and I knew I needed a mentor if I wanted it to continue.” —Eric Conner, CrossFit Reform

Mentorship is an investment in your family, your coaches, your clients and yourself as a leader. And it has huge ROI.

When you buy mentorship, you buy speed. Everyone needs a goal, a great plan and someone to hold them to the plan. When all of that is in place, amazing things happen rapidly.

Our stats say you could be a millionaire gym owner in about four years if you do the right things.

To talk about a customized mentorship plan that will help you earn the life you want, book a call here.

The post Mentorship: The Path to $100,000 Income and $1 Million Net Worth appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

5 Times I Didn’t Think Like a CEO

To run a great gym, you must focus on the right things.

I failed to do that many times since 2011, and the price tag for my errors is well into six figures. If you compound the errors over time, the cost is into seven figures.

To help you spot your own errors and avoid costly mistakes, I’ll give you five snapshots of times I “majored in the minors,” failed to think like a CEO and let money slip away from my gym business.

1. I Personally Fixed Things Around the Gym

In the first year of business, I did this out of necessity: Our budget was tight.

But after that, I did this to avoid bigger problems: It was easier to obsess over a broken door than figure out how to market my business.

This error had a huge compounding effect in two ways:

A. I’m terrible at fixing things, so every project became a huge time sink.

B. If I had solved marketing issues in 2012, I would have acquired more high-value clients every year for more than a decade.

2. I Created a Staff Playbook but Never Updated It

Creating a staff playbook is true CEO work, so I get a little credit here. Writing a playbook allows you to offload lower-level tasks so you can do important, high-level work to grow the gym.

Letting the playbook rot put me right back to Square 1 in 12 months.

I should have updated the manual annually myself or assigned that task to a GM. Either approach would have secured my spot in the CEO chair.

With a stale, outdated playbook, I was right back to ordering toilet paper myself—and complaining about it.

3. I Never Addressed Sales

I got into the gym business because I liked coaching. I didn’t want to sell services, and I thought my coaching skill would take care of client-acquisition problems for me.

In the very early days, when competition was scarce and people were looking for new ways to train, the gym managed to accidentally acquire enough members to survive even though I was terrible at sales.

But I never addressed that gaping hole in my skill set, and I never delegated the sales role to someone who had the skills I lacked.

Had I been a true CEO, I would have learned to sell, then taught someone how to do it. That would have solved the gym’s growth problem and allowed me to offload a job I didn’t enjoy. Or I could have taken a shortcut and hired an expert salesperson to fill the role.

I didn’t do anything, and our sales suffered.

4. I Never Paid Myself

CEOs get paid. In large companies, they get paid a lot because they’re doing the most important work in the business.

I worked for free, and doing so made the “business” a hobby. Surprise, surprise: The gym’s key performance indicators reflected my casual approach.

If I had a time machine, I would go back and pay myself for my work in the CEO role. I would have started with a small salary—even $50 a month—and I would have increased it as the business grew. I might have even increased it at times as a forcing function: “I need to generate $X to cover my raise.”

My family would have appreciated the income greatly over the last decade.

5. I Didn’t Hire Experts to Increase Speed

I assumed that a gym owner had to figure everything out personally, so I slogged up the learning curve too many times to count. I ran into obstacles, I made huge mistakes and I got frustrated.

I could have avoided all that by putting on the CEO hat and making an investment in outside assistance. For example, I could have hired a mentor to teach me how to set up a marketing funnel fast or hire staff to free up my time.

Instead, I made slow, erratic progress toward vague business goals. And I started to lose interest in running a gym.

Be a CEO

If any of the short stories above hit close to home, I have a CEO task for you. It will take one hour.

Here it is:

Book a call to talk about mentorship. You can do it here.

You don’t have to commit to anything or buy anything. Just spend 60 minutes in the CEO chair and talk to an expert about how you can grow your business.

Yes, you could spend that time mopping the floor, posting to social media or making the coaching schedule. But that’s not really CEO stuff.

Figuring out how to build a stable, profitable business is CEO stuff. And if you get the info you need now, you’ll be able to live the life you want and retire wealthy.

If you avoid CEO work, you’ll have an empty bank account, a struggling business and a lot of stories like the ones I told above.

Book the call today!

The post 5 Times I Didn’t Think Like a CEO appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Ben Bergeron: Will Being a Great Coach Make You a Great Gym Owner?

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Being a good trainer does not make you a good gym owner. We’re going to debate that statement today, and I’ve got one of the top coaches in the world to help me do it. It is Ben Bergeron. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. Please subscribe so you don’t miss a show. Now, Ben doesn’t need much of an introduction. I’m going to give you the short version. He’s the founder of CrossFit New England and CompTrain. He’s the author of the book “Chasing Excellence,” which you can find on Amazon. He has coached CrossFit Games and Affiliate Cup champions and a host of other Games athletes. He retired from coaching in 2023 at that level, but he’s still a major force in the industry, and we’ve got him coming to speak at the Two Brain Summit June 8th and 9th in Chicago. Please get tickets via the show notes so you can see Ben in person. Ben, welcome here. I’m excited to jump into this one with you.

Ben Bergeron (00:43):
Thanks, Mike. Yeah, equally excited.

Mike Warkentin (00:45):
I’m fired up because I made a huge mistake back in 2008. I think you and I and Heather met in 2009 for the first time at the ranch in Aromas when we were all slugging it out in the dust there. A year before that, I made a huge mistake, and I thought that just being a great coach was going to make me a great business owner, and that thought maybe cost me, I don’t know, $500,000 over the next few years. So, take me back to like 2008, 2009. You were in earlier than that, I know, but what did 2008 Ben Bergeron think of that statement? You know, being a great trainer is going to make your gym successful.

Ben Bergeron (01:16):
Yeah, I think that’s what we were—that’s kind of what we were all sold essentially is that was the prerequisite. If you love this, if you’re passionate about this, if you’ve gone and done your Level 1, certainly if you were going to or sending people to the Games, it was like you’ve got to open an affiliate, and you’d be successful. And there’s—that’s not not true. Like, it is important to have passion. It is important to have ability, but fast forward 25 years or whatever that is, 17 years, and we know that it takes quite a bit more than that. But yeah, in the 2008 world, that was the prerequisite, and that’s what we thought the right thing was, and I still to this day do think that that is—if there’s two sides of the coin, and that’s the why I think it now, it’s just that you can’t have one without the other.

Ben Bergeron (02:12):
So it’s not you need to be—there’s this phenomenal book called “Unreasonable Hospitality” by Will Guidara. He was the—he ran Eleven Madison Park in New York City, which got voted best restaurant in the world. And the thing that I really took away from that was, there are two aspects to being a successful restaurateur, and that is to be restaurant smart and business smart. And gosh, if there was ever a good parallel for us as gym owners, restaurants are it, like, it’s the same model. You have a product that you hope people come to on a daily basis, and they’re served it by somebody, a coach or a waiter. There’s the programming, which is the food. There is the ambiance. There is the excitement. There is the vibe. There is—it’s a really, really strong parallel for us. So, you know, that’s the not so well-kept secret at this point: that it takes both sides.

Mike Warkentin (03:13):
Yeah, and you’re right, because my gym didn’t go under. Back in 2011, we opened it after I did training on the side and bootcamp stuff. We opened this gym, and I tried to be a great trainer, and I guess I was good enough that I kept clients and stayed open. The reality was that there were only two gyms, CrossFit gyms, at the time in a city of 700,000. So, by default, I got half the athletes, and we managed to survive. As competitors started to show up in the market, I realized that, whoa, marketing and retention and all these other systems just—I didn’t have any of them. And I was still getting by trying to be a great coach. And I started to think, “Maybe there’s something else I’ve got to do.” You know, when did that realization start to hit for you? Because for me it was maybe like three or four years after I opened my gym in 2011; it was about 2014. Other gyms started popping up and competition started happening. And the market was not just me and somebody else. What happened with you?

Ben Bergeron (04:00):
Yeah, it wasn’t—it probably wasn’t as binary as like all of a sudden going like, “Oh, OK, I need that.” Mine was a little bit more like a turning of the seasons. It was a little more phased because I always had an interest in the business side, but my business side wasn’t complete. I was only—when I thought of business, I was like, I still thought it was: hire and develop great coaches and create a great culture/community. That’s what—and that’s really where my efforts went into in terms of creating systems and processes and standardization and trying to really drive towards a mature business. But it was really—there were definitely a few sort of key moments for me. So, I affiliated in 2007. 2009 is when we went from doing it as a part-time business to getting a real gym, our own location, hiring, training coaches—not just Heather and I running classes.

Ben Bergeron (05:04):
So that was the first kind of step to like, “OK, we are true business owners. We’re not doing this on a part-time basis.” That was at 2009. Had some early—that’s where we met you at the first ranch. Had some early success of the Games. We won the Affiliate Cup in 11, I think, which kind of put us on the map. And then we ran a really competitive gym. We had a lot of members and ran a really competitive gym for about the next four or five years. And it was really centered around the sport of CrossFit, and it was really centered around hiring really high-level athletes as coaches—that were great coaches. They were—we had great coaches that were great athletes, but that was the first really eye-opening moment for me was about 2015 maybe. I was running an event called the East Coast Championships. The ECC.

Mike Warkentin (05:54):
I remember it. Yep.

Ben Bergeron (05:55):
Yeah. And we had at the time probably six or seven full-time coaches, which is crazy. Like I don’t—I’ve won now, you know. I just paid—the other part of that was I just paid no—when I said like early on, I was paying attention to culture, I was paying attention to doing things the right way in terms of putting on a good product, but I had no idea about the finances side of things. That was the biggest missing gap for me, way more so than marketing or retention or what’s your CAC or LEG or—all of that stuff to me is still not the most driving factors. Digressing back, we had the ECC, and we were doing the load in for the ECC, which is basically what we, the gym—CrossFit England was the staging ground where we kept all of the stuff year to year that we had then load into U-Hauls to bring down to the World Trade Center in Boston.

Ben Bergeron (06:47):
And this was like the “Aha!” moment for me. We had great coaches, and we had a good community and culture in the gym, but we didn’t have the right culture in terms of running a business. And when we did the load in, it’s a big project. I mean it’s four U-Hauls; you know, it takes two days to do the thing. And we’re loading it in, and we kind of run this dual business where we have some people at CrossFit New England that are also helping run this. But then we have a bunch of other coaches that aren’t; some of them are competing in the event, but as we’re loading it in, it’s only three of us that are doing all of the loading. And the other coaches are kind of just doing it—like one’s, you know, making some food, the other one’s plugging away on the internet and the other one’s working out, and we’re just walking by them, and they’re not looking to help a hand at all.

Ben Bergeron (07:37):
And that’s when I realized that was the “Aha!” moment for me of in terms of what I thought I was creating for culture is not culture. I thought I was creating culture in terms of like a place where people are positive, they don’t complain, there’s no gossip, there’s no drama. All of those are very important—very, very important. And you can’t not have those for a really strong culture. In my mind, what I yet to define was truly what it meant to be someone that would excel in a team environment. And that to me was the real—I took a big step back and had a come-to-Jesus moment with my staff. We call it the picnic table talk, where I brought them outside maybe a few weeks after the ECC, and I would say, “Hey guys, you know, things are going to change around here a little bit.”

Ben Bergeron (08:25):
And I think that you’ll be really surprised in a year from now how few of us are here.” And that kind of like—to that point, we had had next to zero turnover in four years. Nobody left. And why would they?

Mike Warkentin (8:38):
It’s a great job.

Ben Bergeron (8:39):
Yeah. Full-time employment. You coach two classes a day, and you get paid for 40 hours a week. And that’s where I was like, “I’m not running this business. I’m just not—like, I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.” So I went like full circle, like all the way back. And we had—again, we had about eight employees. I fired one. All the others left on their own except for one. Wow. So, at the end of the year, no turnover for four years, realized what I was doing with mistakes I was making without firing anybody.

Ben Bergeron (09:12):
Everyone—so six of the eight left on their own. All on great terms, but they just—I told them, “This might not be for you, and I don’t blame you because this isn’t what you were hired for. This isn’t what I said you were signing up for. So, if you don’t feel like this is for you, I get it. I get it. Like, go do something that lines up with what it is that you truly want to be doing, but this is not what we’re going to be doing going forward.” And to your—very similar to your like “all of a sudden” this—the business started being a business.

Mike Warkentin (09:45):
Wow. So that was actually known in CrossFit New England lore as “the picnic table talk”?

Ben Bergeron (09:49):
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Warkentin (09:50):
Wow. Yeah. And like listeners, let’s not forget. Like Ben at this time, I mean, you’re still like—I think you were doing Level 1 seminar staff at that point as well probably. You were running, or at least—

Ben Bergeron (10:01):
I was doing Seminar Staff. I was doing Seminar Staff, I think, in like 13, 14.

Mike Warkentin (10:05):
Yeah. Because I remember interviewing you in like CrossFit Minneapolis on a tire in the back or something at some point around that area. And like, so you’ve been doing that, you’ve got top athletes, you’re running the ECC, you’ve got a gym, you’ve got all this stuff going on, and then you kind of have this screeching halt. You’re like, “Whoa, this business is not doing what it should.” And then you go from these long-term staff members to you said you kept one. Like, that’s incredible. And I had a similar thing, not on the same scale, obviously, as you were doing, but we had a moment where we’re like, “This is just not going well.” And that’s actually how I ended up connecting with Chris Cooper. I’m like, I haven’t paid myself ever. This gym is losing $5,000 a month, and I am in trouble. And if I don’t do something, we’re done. You know? And so that was real; that was my come-to-Jesus moment where I had to start thinking like a business owner. And luckily Coop was able to help me and fix that. What did you do? So that’s a huge speed bump where you just draw this line in the sand between the previous version of CFNE and going forward. What changed? Like what did you change, and how did it—what happened with the business?

Ben Bergeron (11:00):
Yeah, so the first thing, I mean, first thing: I took full responsibility, like it’s totally on me. Yeah. It was totally on me. It wasn’t their fault at all. The coaches we had were phenomenal, amazing people. I mean, it’s like people would know the names, you know; it’s the Rachel Martinezes, it’s the James Hobarts, it’s the Kevin Montoyas. Like they’re—it was awesome. We had like an all-star studded staff. I think at one point we had like five or six L1 staff members coaching at the gym. You know, Mel Ockerby, Mat Frankel.

Mike Warkentin (11:30):
Yeah, all these big names from history.

Ben Bergeron (11:31):
Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. It was amazing. But the basic—what I started with, what I thought was the most important thing is, and I still to this day think this is the most important thing, is to get the right people. And what I deemed as right people was a miss. And it wasn’t that they weren’t awesome people. It wasn’t that they weren’t awesome coaches. What I needed to do—and it was, these people might still be these people, meaning that the people out that left, but I wasn’t clear enough at the onset. So, I totally revamped what we stand for. Like what does it mean to be a coach at CrossFit New England? And it became crystal clear, and it was to be here, you’re a team player. Like just through and through, super simple, like crazy simple.

Ben Bergeron (12:20):
So then you just start to create the characteristics of “What does it mean to be a good team player?” Humble: It’s not about you; it’s about team wins. And we started defining these things and started creating all these like, “So what does that mean?” Like, we want people to stand up for what they believe in. If you’re on a basketball team and you’re a player, and you think that against the next team you should be playing zone defense, God, you better go up to the coach and say, “Coach, I think we should be playing zone.” But if the coach decides to play man-to-man, you still give all of your efforts, everything you have when you go to that game and play man-to-man, even though you didn’t get your way. So yeah, everyone gets a say, but not everyone gets a vote.

Ben Bergeron (13:01):
Like that’s what being on a team is about. It’s about team wins, not your wins. If you’re on a team, and you know, it’s really easy because we’re in athletics; it’s a perfect parallel. Like it’s what we do. We coach people to compete. If you’re on a team and the team wins the first round of the playoffs, but you had zero points, one rebound, one assist, and you only got in the game for six minutes when you normally play 36 minutes, and you’re sulking in the locker room, that is not a team player. That is not what it looks like. That is not. And the reason it’s not is humility. Do you define wins in team wins or your own personal success? The biggest characteristic of humility is somebody that embraces, looks for and seeks feedback. Teach, tell me how to be better. I don’t have this thing figured out.

Ben Bergeron (13:45):
I’m coachable. Like I want to learn, I want to grow. So, we have that one. Next is work ethic. Like good teammates work hard. No one has to poke, no one has to pry. No one has to say, “Hey, can you do—?” Like, they’re going above and beyond. They’re looking for ways to help the team. They’re looking for ways to expand their role. They’re looking for ways to take on more responsibility. They’re looking for ways to not only do what they do, but to not make their own position better, but make the team and the organization better. So, it’s people who don’t look at the clock, and it’s people who want to be at work. And the last one is people with emotional intelligence, people smarts, good communicators, don’t make things socially awkward. They don’t gossip; they don’t complain.

Ben Bergeron (14:30):
They have really good sense of group dynamics. So, you put those things together, and we became, I became—as people were leaving, as people were coming in, I was so over the top. I called it like—it’s from a great book called “The Hard Hat” about being a great teammate and I—Cornell lacrosse—and I learned that this is one of the ways that they, Cornell lacrosse, is like a powerhouse, yet they’re in upstate New York, and they play in shorts and the season starts in the 1st of February outside. So, what do they not want to get? They don’t want to get these divas that are just there for the spotlight and want to be— So, they tell them in the recruiting process, like, “Hey listen, we’re going to be straight up with you. We’re in upstate New York. Practices start February 1st.”

Ben Bergeron (15:19):
“We’re practicing in shorts. A lot of times we have to ourselves shovel the field from snow before we go on the field.”

Mike Warkentin (15:25):
In shorts.

Ben Bergeron (15:26):
“In shorts. And guess what? I know that you were a stud in high school. You’re going to sit for the first year. You’re not going to play. If that doesn’t sound like something you are excited about, this is not the place for you.” And they call it the hard hat because it’s about going to work. Bring your lunch pail. They have a workman-like attitude, and they’re just very clear. So, what do they get? They get the people that fit their team. And that’s why I just wanted to—so we did what we call a core value speech in the hiring process. After they went through a couple stages from send us a video, send us a letter, come in and have a call.

Ben Bergeron (16:00):
OK? Then somewhere in between having an in-person meeting, I would give the value speech, and it would go something like—try to scare them away. You know, “Hey, just so you know, this doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s just the way we operate. If you’re going to be uncomfortable with a couple things, this is not going to be the place for you. After every single class for the first three months, I’m going to give you feedback on things that you could do to improve. Now, some people don’t like to hear that. It doesn’t make them a bad person. It’s just going to make you really awkward. It’s going to make it really awkward and uncomfortable for you if that’s something you’re not excited about. We work really hard here. When we’re prepping for an event the next day, no one asks anyone to be here, but everyone’s here at 8 p.m. on a Friday night.”

Ben Bergeron (16:43):
“If you have family obligations, obviously, it doesn’t make you a bad person, it’s just, it’s going to be weird if you are not here and it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. And we don’t whine. We don’t complain. We don’t make excuses. Like we wear bracelets, white bracelets, that say that on that. It’s a real thing. Yeah. If you get off on talking about people behind their backs, you know, and not in a bad way, just like that’s how you connect with people. You gossip about people when they’re not—hey, like this is going to be a weird place for you. You’re not going to like it.” So, from there, all of a sudden, like fast forward a year, and the people who are rolling in, it’s a different ball game. And now when, instead of the ECC load in where it’s, you know, three people working and six people doing their thing, now it’s like these crazy—a good example of that is—it popped out because it was so obvious to me. But because it was very shortly after, that coaching staff rolled out and a new coaching staff rolled in. Conor Nugent and Dan Lupo were two of them. Conor Nugent was coaching the 5:30 a.m. class, and he is coaching the Filthy Fifty. Anybody that’s ever run Filthy Fifty in a class knows how much setup that takes.

Mike Warkentin (17:54):
That’s chaos.

Ben Bergeron (17:55):
And yeah, it’s 10 different stations. So, and we have classes of 25, 30 people, so you have to be there, so our members start showing up at about 5:05, 5:15 for a 5:30. So, he shows up at 4:30, which is awesome in itself. Like that’s what we want. He shows up at 4:30 to start helping, so that’s what we want. Dan, who was working the front desk that day, who doesn’t need to be there until 5:30, at 4:45 walks in the door. Conor’s like, “What’s up man? What are you doing here?” He goes, “It’s Filthy Fifty—thought you could use some help.” It’s like no one told him; no one asked him. But like contrasting those two things of like one—it’s just getting the right people on the bus is more than what people think it is. It’s not just getting talented people. It’s not just get—you know, and it’s all about the entrepreneur. It’s all about the business owner. It’s all about the founder. It’s all about the entr—and I thought I was doing a great job of it before, but I wasn’t doing it intentionally enough to drive the behaviors that we wanted.

Mike Warkentin (18:56):
Wow. So, you really cleaned house, got a brand new thing in place and really, it was like shades of Dave Castro there where he was given the briefing of like, “You may not want to be here after the first day,” like that ring the bell, get out of here, kind of thing, right? You’ve seen that a hundred times at the Games, but you got these people and said, “This is the deal. You’re going to get feedback and laser focus on this team building aspect.” For me, it became, I need—I realized that it wasn’t so much about my team building, it was like I needed to put some structure in place for my team members to thrive. So, for me, I started looking at like, I had no standard operating procedures. I had no plan for how people do a class, how things were structured.

Mike Warkentin (19:32):
The finances were a complete disaster. And that’s where I really had to start focusing. Talk to me a little bit about that end of things. So, you’ve now got the people in the bus, and you’ve got these amazing people that are showing up early and doing the culture. How does the nuts and bolts and the finances go on your end? Like, do you start to see a real change there where things get better? Because for me, I had given nobody any structure. I was paying too much, not taking enough in. I was giving people classes I shouldn’t have. I was bleeding revenue. I didn’t know how to get new members, and I was scared to tell them I was—I didn’t want to bounce a paycheck. How did that stuff go for you? And did things improve?

Ben Bergeron (20:04):
Yeah, the operating procedures, that’s what I kind of liked to do. So, I had an operations manual for, so we had that in place, but if you don’t have the right people, like, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Like, you know, you’re supposed to clean the rig on these days, but no, they coach your classes and work out. Like, so then I’m like—and I just get frustrated because I didn’t know how to lead. No matter what you have in terms of SOPs or expectations, roles, responsibilities, checks and balances, QC, no matter all of that stuff, it has to start with the people. And the people starts with the hiring process. Even with the hiring process, you’re going to get it wrong. I’ve gotten it wrong so many times. Just—I mean this is the, talk about timely—hired someone two weeks ago, let them go yesterday.

Mike Warkentin (20:57):
OK. So, you’re quick to fire now if someone’s not right. OK. Yep. That’s hard for gym owners, and that’s excellent though.

Ben Bergeron (21:05):
It’s hard. Really hard. It sucks. Like it sucks. Like it’s the worst part of the job. OK. But then just to answer your question more pointedly, finances was—so again, opened in 2007, full-time 2009. Embarrassingly, probably didn’t get finances dialed until COVID hit.

Mike Warkentin (21:24):
Really? Hey?

Ben Bergeron (21:25):
Like 2020.

Mike Warkentin (21:26):
OK.

Ben Bergeron (21:27):
12 years in, really didn’t have much eyes on P&Ls, budgets, projections, where the money was going, and that’s—we had a big business, so we got away with it, but it was so suboptimal.

Mike Warkentin (21:43):
OK. Like that’s fascinating. I know people wouldn’t assume that.

Ben Bergeron (21:47):
I didn’t even know. I was like—that’s why we ended up with eight coaches because I was like, “Hey, you’re a cool dude. You’re a good athlete. You want to coach for us?” “Yeah, yeah.” “You’re in.” “You know, I met you at the Games, and you want to move to Natick? Like, this is really cool man. You’re awesome.”

Mike Warkentin (22:00):
They were like, “Payroll is out of control here.”

Ben Bergeron (22:03):
Right. It took until COVID when it was almost like a forcing function that you had to because we’re going to go out of business. So, you know, that’s the biggest thing. In hindsight, if I was to go back from day one, that’s the thing I would’ve paid way more attention to. Like, you cannot run your business without your eyes on finances. Like, you just can’t. And again, we got away with it, but to your point, we’re doing a million dollars a year in one single location, one location, million bucks. And I was, a lot of times, I was taking home less than my coaches. A million-dollar gym in some of these years. I’m taking home 40 grand because I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t know that. And I was like, you don’t know where it’s going. You don’t know what it’s doing. Now, as you said, I had other business revenue streams. But that was something like I—sometimes good comes from bad. COVID, bad. Learning finances, good.

Mike Warkentin (23:01):
Well, Chris Cooper had a similar experience where he had his CrossFit gym going and his personal training studio down the road was floating the boat because that was losing money and the PT studio was working, and you know, he got in the same spot where he realized that he coached, I think it was something like 13 PT sessions in a row and still was arguing with his wife about expensive cheese. And he’s like, I cannot work more. I need to do better. And started putting an eye on those things. And then we started during COVID, the same thing. There were a lot of gyms that, you know, we were coasting along, and you had to make some really tough decisions to start. Like if you didn’t, you were dead. Right? So, I guess I want to dig into that a little bit. Like when you, so 2020 then, what do you start doing? Like how do you start getting excellent at business? And you said it wasn’t a passion of yours to like look into spreadsheets and P&L and all that stuff. How did you get excellent or achieve excellence in that realm so that your business could thrive and survive and create careers for people?

Ben Bergeron (23:47):
Actually, I actually like it. Yeah, I think the P&L tells stories. It’s—I like projecting it out. I like seeing what, you know, changing a number and seeing what will happen, and “What if we move this?” You know, I think that in most—I was scared of it. It was a thing, and I didn’t understand—let me say it another way. I didn’t understand how easy it is and simple it is. It is not confusing. It is very simple. I just didn’t have an understanding of how easy and simple it was. And I didn’t have an understanding of how impactful it was. So, I just went like, “Hey, that’s not the way I do my business. I’m just striving for excellence. You know, I’m just trying to make a great user experience, get my members results, and make a place that people want to be at, that don’t want to leave after the workout.”

Ben Bergeron (24:32):
That was the aim. But it was sim—like when COVID hit, it’s like you had to go, “Where’s the money going to come in from? Where’s the money going out? How can we create any additional revenue stream?” So rent out equipment, do Zoom classes, like do whatever we can to stay alive. And you had to become really crafty. You had to figure, you had to figure it out. And it’s now, it’s pretty simple, honestly. I mean, once you get the template laid out of what a P&L looks like, and you get the numbers on month to month, and you put them in, it’s fun.

Mike Warkentin (25:10):
It’s not bad.

Ben Bergeron (25:11):
It’s like, yeah, no, it’s like you get to see the rewards for your effort. You get to see what’s happening. And man, it feels so much better to be making these educated decisions instead of just like throwing darts in the dark. You know, maybe this will work, and maybe we can do this, and I don’t know.

Mike Warkentin (25:28):
And that’s where the coaching excellence, the actual boots on the ground in the class with the chalk on the bar, that’s where that starts to get amplified. Because if you’ve got your systems and structures and everything else in place, that excellence is still there. Because that’s hard too, right? Like that’s the thing where you can’t make a good—great coaches are hard to create, right? Because they’re these people that have this thing in them that makes them great. If you can put the business around those people and then put the right people in the right spot, it’s like rocket fuel, right? But if you have these people and they’re great and they’re just—you still can’t pay the bills, that’s not going to help. I guess going back to like 2008, 2009 or even earlier for you, maybe it wasn’t so much about chasing excellence just as a coach, but chasing business excellence as a whole, you know; would you agree with that? Like it’s trying—and you’ve written the book “Chasing Excellence,” but would you agree that that was a more accurate interpretation where we have to be excellent trainers, but we also have to make sure that we pay the bills and achieve excellence in the structure of a business?

Ben Bergeron (26:22):
Are you saying that that was the—are you asking if that was the—

Mike Warkentin (26:26):
Is that what we should have thought back in the day? Because when I saw excellence, I was like, if I’m a great trainer, if I’m a great coach, people are going to come here, and they’re going to want to train with me.

Ben Bergeron (26:34):
OK. Got it.

Mike Warkentin (26:35):
Yeah. And maybe what I needed to think back then was like, what if I’m a great trainer, and I run this incredible business where the burgers are made the same way every time. They’re always delicious. The staff is always asking, “How are you doing?” They’re always giving you an extra perk. You want to come back to my restaurant, to use your analogy. What if I looked at it not just as a great coach, but as that whole thing back in the day?

Ben Bergeron (26:56):
Yeah. Right. So that gets back to that restaurant smart and business smart. You’ve got to be gym smart. Gym smart is the coaching. It’s how to run a great class. It’s how to connect with your members. It’s the how to see, demo, correct, teach, and group management, build relationships—all the things that go along with being a coach and a leader in front of a class or one-on-one, however your gym is formulated. But the business smarts is something that we were told in the beginning did not matter, like in this community. Like we were just—you know, it’s very, very—you know, we were told “chase excellence, not clients.” That was literally, that was literally the verbiage that we were handed. And man, I bought that tooth, line, sinker. But I’m glad that it was the thing. Because I don’t know if I would’ve fallen into this community if it was otherwise.

Mike Warkentin (27:44):
It screened some people out for sure.

Ben Bergeron (27:46):
If this community was about, like when I came in, if it was about, “OK, now create your SOPs marketing funnel, here’s the—create the standard operating, create your retention programs create this, here’s how to do the P&L and the forecasting.” I’d have been like, “I don’t—” Yeah. I fell in love with “improve human movements and build community” was the mission statement from day one. And that’s what I fell—and I’m glad that that was the thing, you know, and then if it was excellence, it was how clean are your bathrooms?

Mike Warkentin (28:18):
Yeah, I remember that one. Yeah.

Ben Bergeron (28:20):
That’s what I went towards. And that’s not wrong. It’s not wrong, but to your point, it’s not complete. And a lot of people thought that that was the complete answer. And there is excellence in terms of the gym smarts. And that’s what it is. Are your bathrooms clean? Do you have a good customer journey in place? And are the customers excited to show up and be there every day or delivering results? That’s what the gym smart part is. But then as we’ve—as you and I have both experienced firsthand, it’s a rocky road, and it’s a short road. It’s going to be less than a decade if you’re not paying attention to the other parts.

Mike Warkentin (29:05):
Like, so fast forwarding now, like when you started there were probably, I don’t know, 100 CrossFit affiliates or less or whatever; you’re probably very early on.

Ben Bergeron (29:11):
I think I was around like 450. I think I was under—one of the first 500. And now because so many have fallen off, so many have fallen off, I think I’m one of the 100 originals now.

Mike Warkentin (29:21):
Yeah, so you’ve moved way out with like early adopter, the whole thing and that—you know, so you get in with that passion. Let’s look at it now. Like a new gym owner out there right now is looking at this and doesn’t have that same early-adopter, 2007 kind of mentality where it’s just like all about the passion and whatever. You’re going into a saturated market in many cases with a ton of competition. Functional fitness is no longer this Marc Dwight warehouse kind of thing. It’s like right in front of you. It’s being commercialized in like F45 and all these other studios. How do you meld that passion now with the business excellence side? Like how do you make that perfect restaurant? Like if you were advising someone who says, “I’m thinking about opening a CrossFit gym in San Diego,” what would you say to that person?

Ben Bergeron (30:00):
First thing I’d want to know is what are your expectations—what are their expectations? You know, so “I’m opening up a CrossFit gym in San Diego.” “Great. What do you—how many classes do you plan on coaching a week? How many members do you plan on having?”

Mike Warkentin (30:17):
So your nuts-and-bolts business plan right away.

Ben Bergeron (30:19):
Yeah. “What’s the rent in the space? Do you have a space? What’s the rent?” So, it’s the two biggest things. What are your—so you need to know: Does this person have expectations for profitability? So, it’s—and the two biggest costs are people and facility. So just start there. Like, how much is the space going to cost, and how much are you going to pay your employees?

Mike Warkentin (30:45):
Well, this is mind-breaking stuff, Ben. In 2009, when I was thinking about this, it was like, “I need a warehouse, and it’ll be full.” That was my whole thinking, you know? So, this is—what you’re saying now is crazy.

Ben Bergeron (30:54):
Mike, actually, my suggestion is always when somebody says that first, my first question to them is, “How many clients do you have right now?” And if you don’t have 40 clients that are—you’re going to open up the doors, and they’re going to be there to sign up on day one, do not open a gym. You can’t open it. We could do it back then because we were opening up in 600 square feet. Right. And if you were the only CrossFit gym in the space, they’re going to find you to do that thing.

Mike Warkentin (31:19):
30 soldiers will be knocking on your door tomorrow.

Ben Bergeron (31:21):
Yeah, exactly. But when you open up now and you’re opening up with 4,000 square feet, 6,000 square feet, and you’ve got to buy the 10-person rig, and you have to have six rowers; like, our all-in startup costs were under 50K.

Mike Warkentin (31:36):
Yep. Mine too. Exactly. Same thing.

Ben Bergeron (31:38):
And everyone’s was then, and we opened up one of the biggest; you know, we did a build out, so I was a little bit different where we built some bathrooms, and we spent about 80K to build bathrooms. But the thing that I was able to do was when I opened up, I had 60 clients when I opened the doors, and I knew 40 of them were coming with me when I opened the doors. And 20 of them bought lifetime memberships. 20 of them gave me $3,000 each.

Mike Warkentin (32:04):
Are they still around by chance?

Ben Bergeron (32:06):
I have about, I have about, I’ll say 70% are still here.

Mike Warkentin (32:11):
Look at that. Wow. Yeah. Do you ever regret giving them lifetime membership?

Ben Bergeron (32:15):
No, I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Yeah. I wouldn’t be here. Yeah. You know, so that’s what—so, but the biggest thing is I opened up and on day one we had classes running and revenue coming in, and we had people out in the streets praising us and talking to other people about what this place was all about. If you open up thinking “I built it; now, they’ll come,” like, yeah, you can work, you can do a lot with paid ads and working the funnel and all the rest. It’s just not, it’s not an effective day one strategy. It’s just not. And when you lay out first, last, security, and you have to hire some lawyers to do some things for zoning or whatever it might be that we had to do, special permits. You lay down the rubber floors, you buy the rowers, you buy the rig, you hire a couple people, you buy a front desk, and you’re into this thing for 100K on day one, and on day 30, rent for number two is due.

Ben Bergeron (33:13):
And so is payroll. Like, unless you got—unless you got 40 people walking on the door on day one, don’t do it yet. So, then what do you have to do? You have to go and build your business being a trainer and a coach and create a reputation. That’s the way I would—but I’m a grassroots guy. That’s what—the other way you do it is you take on investors. I just think that’s a—partners, investors and the amount of people. You know, I do a lot of consulting for gym owners and the number of people, the percentage of people that have started this with partners that want out of the partnership is so close to 100%, it’s crazy.

Mike Warkentin (33:52):
It’s really tough. Chris has written about this. It’s an option, but it’s not the greatest option. The better option often is to just go to the bank because when you pay the bank back, they’re done. They don’t have to be around. And they’re not trying to make, push you into decisions and so forth. And I’ve seen some gyms, and I’m sure you have too if you’ve done consulting, four or five, six partners—those are tough to run. It’s tough to make decisions. You’re splitting this pie; you’re razor thin. If your profit margin’s not good and all of a sudden you’ve got three—a million dollar gym, three owners are taking home 10K a year or something like that. Those are out there.

Ben Bergeron (34:22):
So if you’re going to go open up a gym with four or five partners, the goal can—you really need to get on the same page, alignment of vision and values. Where are you going to be in three years? Where are you going to be in 10 years? What’s the North Star? A lot of business jargon, right? You really have to get laser focused on that. And if the goal is to open up one gym, really well-define what are the roles and responsibilities of each partner and get down right to like, OK, are each of us paying a membership? Are our spouses paying memberships? Are our kids paying membership? Like, you have to go like right down to the nitty gritty of all of it.

Mike Warkentin (35:02):
That’s the SOPs.

Ben Bergeron (35:04):
And if it is to open up one gym, I’m telling you right now, in 12 months, not everyone will be there. You’re going to end up buying people out. People are going to buy out other people. Because it’s not going to work. It just—it will not work. If the goal is to open up 30 gyms in the next decade, that’s a different thing. You need the capital. People can play different roles. They can be silent partners; they can be pure investors. That’s a different team dynamic than “Let’s open up one gym.” Because and people are like, “I just want to be there to work out and do this thing.” But they actually have a lot of say in the programming, and they think they show up at class at this time because that’s when they want to be there. That’s a rat’s nest.

Mike Warkentin (35:44):
I’ve got to ask you this one because this is—I think you’re the probably the best person on earth to answer this question. People sometimes think that having success in competition, putting an athlete in the CrossFit Games is going to make their gym successful. I made that mistake. We put a person in the CrossFit Games, and the gym was losing $5,000 a month. Is it possible? Is that a viable business model to think “If I get someone in the Games, my gym will be successful”?

Ben Bergeron (36:08):
Mike, can you name—how many people can you name from last year’s Games that finished 20th to 40th place?

Mike Warkentin (36:14):
I can’t name a single one.

Ben Bergeron (36:16):
There you go. No one knows. No, no. Honestly, it will—now here’s the deal. If you send 10 people to the CrossFit Games and three of them win the CrossFit Games, which is the case where we were, that does impact the business.

Mike Warkentin (36:34):
That’s a different story.

Ben Bergeron (36:35):
It does. People are dropping in from … whenever they come to Boston. You know, we had 52 drop-ins last week.

Mike Warkentin (36:44):
You’re a flagship affiliate, flagship affiliate.

Ben Bergeron (36:46):
Yeah. And people drive past six affiliates to get to us. You know, but it’s because of that. But if you get one athlete to the Games, it will have a zero impact. It’ll have an impact inside of your affiliate. There’ll be a lot of pride. But in terms of getting members and even in terms of retention—in terms of retention, I would actually say that your churn will probably go up if you get an athlete to the Games.

Mike Warkentin (37:09):
Why? Why? Tell me why.

Ben Bergeron (37:10):
It’s a division of focus. You as the leader aren’t focused on the average member.

Mike Warkentin (37:17):
It happened to me exactly like that.

Ben Bergeron (37:18):
Exactly right. And the members will feel it, and as much as you try to do otherwise, churn will probably go up. So, it’s really—the question is twofold. A member to the CrossFit games, zero impact, probably negative. 10 perennially, like you’re always sending people, you win the CrossFit Games, you get named “Fittest Gym in the World” a couple years in a row, you’re always sending people, then all of a sudden, the competitive athletes start to try to seek you out a little bit, and it’s a little bit different. But I’ve really got to triple down on the message: You getting one athlete to CrossFit Games, you getting two to CrossFit Games will have no impact.

Mike Warkentin (37:56):
Yeah, because I mean, I won’t call it a lottery win because there’s skill involved, but like how many Invictus gyms are there? Like how many CrossFit New Englands? How many—they are just not that many. Like what you did is so rare that you can’t plan that. It’s not a viable business model, right? Like you just can’t do it.

Ben Bergeron (38:11):

Right. But people travel all over the world to go and train at Invictus, and people travel all over the world to come and train here. It’s like—so yeah, it’s just like—but that’s got to be a decade-long plan. And you’ve got to get—like, you have some pretty early successes to say like, “This is the route I’m going.” Meaning, essentially, you’ve already done it. Unless you’ve already gotten multiple athletes there, that cannot be the business plan.

Mike Warkentin (38:36):
I remember having a conversation with Rob Orlando back in the day, and we were on the phone, he was yelling at me; he was like, “It is literally my job as a coach to tell people you are never going to the CrossFit Games.” He’s like, “I do it all day.” And I laugh because that’s probably the best thing in some cases that you could do and focus on your business. I want to wrap this up, Ben, I’m not going to keep you too much longer, but I want to ask you a couple of quick ones as we finish this out. CrossFit’s got 10 general physical skills. Everybody can list them all. I’m sure you’ve had them on the top of your head. Give me a couple of essential business skills for a gym owner in 2024. What is non-negotiable now?

Ben Bergeron (39:09):
Let’s start with the ones we’ve already discussed. The ability to build and lead a team. Like there isn’t a—I mean that’s 1a, and 1b or 2 is so far down the list, it’s not even there. But I would say the next one is to have a grasp of your financials.

Mike Warkentin (39:27):
So you’re talking team building, and you’re—sorry, team building and financials are the two.

Ben Bergeron (39:31):
Yep. Yep. And then the third is you have to be or you either need to get a high-level coach. Like you have to be—someone’s got to train the other coaches. And if it’s not you, somebody has to get coaches to understand more than just the points of performance of a squat, how to find the second position of a clean; they have to know more than just what is the catch and receiving position of a row stroke. You have to have somebody that can really lead some classes. Like really know how to lead group classes. Those would be my three.

Mike Warkentin (40:09):
OK. So those are three big ones. That’s the equivalent of like power, strength, stamina, those kind of things in the CrossFit list. And we’ve talked about this and bumped into it a whole bunch of times during this conversation. You are speaking at the Two-Brain Summit: “The Simple Solve for Team Accountability.” Can you give people a little bit—we’ve talked about, I mean, you’re invested in building a team; obviously, you’ve done it. You had the picnic table talk, brand new staff. What are people going to learn from you at the Summit on this topic?

Ben Bergeron (40:34):
Yeah, accountability. I mean, I think it’s the biggest number one thing with teams. Like people always talk about the power of delegation, like you can’t do it all. This is the e-myth thing, right? You’re like, you can’t, if you want, if you’re going to be a—if you like to bake pies, awesome bake pies. Once you create a business where you’re selling pies, OK, you can sort of, you can still be the one kind of like doing the thing, but if that business is going to expand, you can’t be doing all the things. You can’t be at the cash register, you can’t be doing the marketing, you can’t be talking to—doing the other stuff and also washing the dishes and doing the pies and paying the bills. So, you have to delegate. OK? Like, but after delegation—this is what I think everybody misses—so we’ve got the SOPs in place. Cool. Like, and you delegate to a person. How do you hold them accountable? Like how do you actually get them to do the thing? That’s what we’re talking about.

Mike Warkentin (41:29):
And that’s huge because there are gym owners listening right now who have a staff member who’s crappy, who’s not doing the job and they don’t know how to, A, get rid of that person, or B, get that person back in line. And those are the two options because the third option of just letting it go is a disaster in your gym, right? So, if you can solve that problem for gym owners—

Ben Bergeron (41:47):
Just like the other stuff, it’s really—compared to teaching someone to coach, it’s really simple. It’s a framework. It’s really, really simple stuff.

Mike Warkentin (41:56):
OK, listeners, Two-Brain Summit, Ben is going to be there. He’s going to solve problems for you and help you keep your team accountable. Please get tickets via the link in the show notes. Ben, I can’t wait to see. It’s going to be in about three months. We’ll see you in Chicago, and you’re going to solve problems for gym owner. Thank you so much for being here and sharing all this stuff. This was awesome.

Ben Bergeron (42:10):
Excited for it. Thanks Mike.

Mike Warkentin (42:12):
My pleasure. I’m Mike Warkentin, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Please hit “Subscribe” on your way out so you don’t miss another show just like this. And now here’s a final message from Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper.

Chris Cooper (42:22):
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 Ben Bergeron: Will Being a Great Coach Make You a Great Gym Owner? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Gym Owner: It’s Time to Think Like a CEO

In most gym businesses, the owner is the CEO—but most fitness entrepreneurs don’t realize it.

If you ask them to list all their roles, you’ll get stuff like this: group coach, programmer, PT coach, on-ramp coach, accountant, cleaner, social-media manager, GM and so on.

All the roles are important, but the CEO role is most important, and it often doesn’t make the list.

From Western Governors University: “Chief executive officers are responsible for leading an entire organization or company.”

It’s really hard to do that with a plunger in your hand and a PT client waiting in the lobby.

What Would a CEO Do?

I get it: In a small business, an owner must wear a lot of hats—at first.

But your goal is to get out of the early stages of entrepreneurship as quickly as possible, and that requires vision and action. That’s CEO stuff.

You just can’t obsess over squat cues or the cleanliness of your floors and hope growth takes care of itself. You have to generate growth—and you can pay someone else to obsess over coaching and cleaning because it is important.

Yes, your gym should be clean. And your coaching should be A+. But those things are insufficient for entrepreneurial success.

I know great coaches with pristine gyms who are bleeding money and planning to leave the business. It’s heartbreaking.

To succeed as an entrepreneur, you must think like a CEO. Here’s today’s exercise:

Fire yourself from every job for two hours. Make the commitment, block off the time and pretend you got fired from all your gym jobs.

Now imagine you’ve been hired as the new CEO of the company, and you have been expressly tasked with expanding the business and improving profitability.

For the next two hours, think about every aspect of your business. Walk through the building if you need to, but don’t ignore the stuff you can’t see on your tour. Pull up your metrics, review your profit-and-loss statement, dig into key performance indicators.

Keep asking this question: What would make this business better and more profitable?

Write everything down. You’re going to get stuff like this: “Change burned-out light in lobby.” And this: “Scrape gum off squat rack.” But you should get stuff like this, too:

Repair email automations so “welcome” emails don’t go to three-year members. Cancel second, third and fourth unused music subscriptions.Create client avatar and adjust marketing to appeal to this avatar.Review client journey to find common cancellation points and make adjustments to improve retention.Cancel poorly attended 9:30-a.m. class.Create a 50+ program for retirees.Plan bring-a-friend event to generate leads and book free consultations.Build and test lead-nurture sequence.Sign up for sales course to improve close rate.Practice five free consultations.

And so on.

In the last 10 minutes of your two-hour block, do this: Review your list and organize it. Select the easiest action that will bring the greatest return on your time investment and put it in the No. 1 spot. Order other tasks below it.

Then block off CEO time tomorrow to address that task. Keep working on it until it’s done, even if you have to work in intervals over a few days. Then hit the next task on the list. Repeat. When you’ve hit everything on the list, make a new list and start again.

Now you’re a CEO.

Need Help?

Here’s a common issue that pops up when people do this exercise:

“I’m overwhelmed. I have a list, but I don’t know what to do and I can’t find time to do it.”

That’s where a mentor comes in. A mentor can help you organize your list, add critical stuff you missed and find the time to take action on priority items. A mentor will tell you exactly what to do and provide time-saving checklists and resources.

For example, a Two-Brain mentor might tell you to hire a cleaner so you have time to build a nutrition program to generate more revenue (you’ll cover the cost of the cleaner with some of that revenue). The mentor will supply our plug-and-play 21-day nutrition challenge and a huge pile of of social-media content you can use to promote it, as well as other key done-for-you resources. You can get that program running fast.

A mentor will also check in and keep you accountable: “Did you do that thing yet?” This part is essential. Your clients need a coach to stay on track. You need one for the same reason.

The best CEOs have mentors. I have one.

And I know 1,000 CEOs of fitness businesses who have mentors. They are Two-Brain clients, and we help them get major results fast.

Want to take a big step toward becoming a great CEO? Book a call here.

The post Gym Owner: It’s Time to Think Like a CEO appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Does Your Business Actually Own You?

Some small business owners don’t really own anything.

In reality, their businesses own them.

Here’s a test. Have you ever:

Opened your business personally before dawn and closed it after dusk?Worked extreme hours because of staff shortages or because “no one else can do it”?Missed important life events—or even just a kid’s baseball game—because you had to take care of the business?Gone so long without holidays that you don’t remember what time off is for?Been accused by a spouse of being “not present” because you can’t stop thinking about the business?Committed yourself to “the entrepreneurial grind” but kept grinding for four or more years without getting any momentum?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, your business probably owns you.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Grind

Starting a small business is tough, and it’s a lot of work.

In the beginning, you’ll probably sacrifice some sleep, you’ll work long hours, and you’ll donate a lot of elbow grease. That’s OK. But you should work to get out of this stage of entrepreneurship as quickly as possible.

“The grind” is a thing, but it shouldn’t be a forever thing.

The grind is actually a high-intensity period of investment. In this stage of your entrepreneurial development, you put in a lot of effort to build the momentum that will carry the business forward for decades. In return for this investment, you should eventually receive some freedom of time and money.

That doesn’t always happen. It’s common for people to grind for a decade or more without taking very many steps toward freedom. (I was on this path until I got a mentor.)

On the other hand, in the fitness business it’s now possible to grind for a relatively short amount of time, build a very profitable gym, create an income stream of $100,000 a year and achieve a net worth of $1 million.

Many Two-Brain clients have done all this in about four years. Some of our clients move faster, and some take a little longer, of course. But I have data that shows this evolution is very doable in four years—if you minimize mistakes, do all the right things and have someone to keep you on track.

With a good income stream and a net worth of $1 million, you’ll have a measure of freedom. And you’ll have the tools to get more of that. Many of our upper-level gym owners start scaling by buying gyms, opening second locations, investing, buying real estate and so on.

At that point, they have a lot of freedom. Their finances are great, and they can take a lot of time off. Some can even “retire” if they want to. Whatever they choose, these owners certainly don’t miss their kids’ birthday parties—the GM can handle the problems at the gym.

They are business owners—emphasis on the last word—and they enjoy the benefits of owning a business.

Own Your Business

So how do you become a business owner?

You must build a real business, not “buy yourself a job.”

That means you don’t mop the floors every night while dinner gets cold. You hire a cleaner.

You don’t do staff members’ jobs because they messed up again. You do the job once, you write out an airtight SOP, you teach the staff member to follow the SOP, you review performance, you mentor the person to succeed, and you replace them if they just can’t succeed.

You don’t hope new clients show up this month. You create a marketing plan to add the exact number of clients you need.

This stuff is really hard.

But I have good news for you: You don’t have to figure things out on your own. A mentor can tell you exactly how to build a business, lay out step-by-step instructions and provide accountability so you take swift action.

Earlier, I said you can build a business that pays you $100,000 a year, and I meant it. On average, it takes Two-Brain clients just over two years to do this—regardless of starting point.

So if you’re tired of being owned by your business, take the first step toward being a business owner: Book a call with my team.

The post Does Your Business Actually Own You? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Parkour Gym Owner & Mentor Backflips Into Profitability

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Jimmy Davidson, welcome to “Run a Profitable Gym.”

Jimmy Davidson (00:05):
Hey Chris, thanks for having me on.

Chris Cooper (00:06):
Yeah, man. It’s been a while. So, what we’re going to start with today—before we get into your parkour story and your parkour gyms and what Motion Mentors—is what the hell is parkour?

Jimmy Davidson (00:16):
Yeah, so parkour is a type of martial art, but instead of fighting, it’s the martial art of movement. So, you would see athletes learning how to climb over walls, vault over obstacles, land safely, roll—basically a parkour athlete can go in pretty much any direction from where they’re starting from quickly, efficiently, and safely. And it’s specifically tailored to what you would find out in the real-life outdoor environment. That way it’s practical and useful, and that’s why it’s also a martial art.

Chris Cooper (00:47):
I’ve never heard it called a martial art before. That’s really cool. Now, did parkour have its origins in free running, or do I have those two reversed?

Jimmy Davidson (00:56):
Parkour came first, and then free running came later on when this dude named Sébastien Foucan, who was part of the original founders of parkour coming out of Paris—when flips and more acrobatics, less efficient things, started being added, free running was coined just to sort of be an inclusive term for that. That way it wasn’t just strictly like you have to train like a martial artist; you have to be militaristic about it. But nowadays, modern parkour, you know, at least here in the States, we don’t really use the word free running. That might differ depending on your specific region, but most parkour people just say it’s all parkour, flips included.

Chris Cooper (01:36):
OK, this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And if you’re a gym owner listening to this and you’re saying, OK, I don’t run a parkour gym, or I’m not really super interested in learning parkour myself,” I’m going to tell you why you should be listening to this because Jimmy and other parkour gyms do millions of dollars in revenue every single year. And we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of that. Jimmy’s actually a mentor for Motion Mentors, and he works to help other parkour gyms grow their business. Jimmy, before we get into the nuts and bolts of what is a parkour gym, can you just differentiate parkour from ninja gyms, which are—they seem to be kind of the Disneyfied version of parkour maybe, or maybe I’m wrong—but they’re cropping up in a lot of cities around North America especially.

Jimmy Davidson (02:21):
Yeah, so it kind of goes down to the fundamental difference between parkour and Ninja Warrior training. Parkour, if you look at it as an umbrella term, it can refer to really any discipline involving how you move your body and move through space. So, if you want to get really technical, like dance or even swimming could be parkour, arguably, but really, it’s climbing over walls, moving through space efficiently and with speed. But Ninja Warrior is within parkour, but Ninja Warrior itself cannot fully define what parkour is because Ninja Warrior, when you zoom into it, it’s very niche obstacles that are manmade. And by that, I mean specifically designed for the sport. So, if you go outside and train parkour, you’re not going to find like giant inflatable bungees or spinning things you have to grab onto or else you fall into like water.

Jimmy Davidson (03:14):
That would be a probably a way more fun designed city, but just not how humans do it. And that’s why they’re different fundamentally, philosophically, but then when you go into a parkour gym versus a Ninja Warrior gym, a Ninja Warrior gym, while still super fun, is typically a predetermined course that the athletes go through. They’re predetermined obstacles and predetermined challenges, whereas a parkour gym is much more of like a 360 open space, and although there are like set obstacles that a parkour athlete might expect to see, like different shapes of blocks and bars and things, there’s no one way to overcome any of the obstacles. In fact, you can make up your own moves as you go. You can make up your own pathways as you go. So, it’s very freestyle and very freeform.

Chris Cooper (04:04):
What does the inside of a parkour gym look like? Paint us that picture.

Jimmy Davidson (04:08):
Yeah, so if you walked into one of my parkour gyms—and they’re called Freedom in Motion, and we have three of them right now—you would walk into, it’s almost like a three-dimensional rock-climbing course. There’s platforms, there’s stuff on the walls, there’s bars to swing off of. There’s a lot of movable objects, so some are like big, larger things that you would need multiple people to move around. And those are like big kind of tubular platforms. Other ones are smaller; one person can move it, just like trapezoidal—we call them vaulting blocks—and you can arrange them all however you want. If you’re a coach, you can kind of customize your class for the day and make whatever courses you want to. And then there’s even like little, smaller obstacles, like ground-level balancing rails to help new athletes just learn how to balance at all safely. And there’s a lot of care paid to what the beginner’s experience would be, so there’s a lot of approachable, a lot of easy, a lot of DIY obstacle courses that you can create or a coach can create for you. Yeah, it’s—any parkour athlete would know that parkour is much easier to show than it is to tell.

Chris Cooper (05:18):
Yeah. We’ll get some photos up here for the YouTube video for sure. And so, if you’re listening to this on a podcast, if you pop over to the “Run a Profitable Gym” YouTube channel, you could see some of these photos of Jimmy’s gym, which is awesome. What made you want to open a gym instead of continuing to be a parkour coach or athlete, Jimmy?

Jimmy Davidson (05:37):
Yeah, so I was originally a professional parkour athlete. I was on what was regarded at that time as like the American team. There was a company called American Parkour. I was on their team, and while traveling around the country doing performance and things— When I was back at home, I had just a ton of private lesson students, and our community in Temecula, California, Man, we had like a hundred plus people who were in network. If we threw an event like 50 plus people would show up. And that’s a lot for—this is back in 2011 when no one knew about parkour or even sooner. We started in 2007 actually. So, at a certain point I just had a bunch of students who I was teaching, and the first ever couple of parkour gyms had begun popping up around the world.

Jimmy Davidson (06:24):
The first one that I was aware of was in Seattle, Washington, and then a popular one popped up in LA, and I was 19 at the time—out of high school and just wondering what I’m going to do with my life and figured, “Well, I’m already doing this, so let’s figure out how to start a parkour park or a parkour gym.” And before actually landing on a parkour gym, I approached the city of Temecula’s mayor at the time—and keep in mind, I’m 19; at the time I was 19. I had this really adorable binder, like my school binder with printed out images of like, “This is what a parkour session looks like. This is my type-up of what parkour is,” just all on like at home computer paper. And I showed it to our mayor at the time, and he looked through it; he humored me, and at the end of the meeting, he just looked at me, and he is like, “I don’t know what this is. I’ve never heard of parkour. Sounds like a liability nightmare. The city will not have a parkour park,” like a skate park, even though they exist in other parts of the country. And he just advised that I do it on my own in a private sector. So, I went home and looked up, “What the heck does private sector mean?” Like, “Oh, it just means you open up your own gym.” And off to the races, and maybe two years later, we opened our first gym in Murrieta, California in 2014.

Chris Cooper (07:40):
That’s cool. And that gym now does well over a million in revenue, right?

Jimmy Davidson (07:44):
Yeah, yeah. So, our whole network of gyms—we have three right now—our goal for this year is to get to 3 million in revenue. So that’s each individual gym; we’re trying to get it to that 1 million mark. So, they’re just under that now, but we are on our way.

Chris Cooper (07:57):
That’s amazing. So, Jimmy, a lot of people who listen to this podcast, as you know, they’re around a third to half of that in a year for gross revenue. Let’s start there. Like why does the average gym owner need to pay attention to this? What are they missing that parkour gyms are doing really, really well?

Jimmy Davidson (08:16):
Yeah, so one thing I want to point out is parkour gyms on average don’t service the same target audience as like a CrossFit gym. Parkour gyms on average are working with kids, typically ages 12 to 13 or so. And the parents are really the person paying, whereas a typical CrossFit gym, you’re working directly with the adult athletes. Whether or not you have a kids’ program, you know. The kids’ program at the parkour gym most of the time is the bread and butter. So that’s kind of the main thing to get. And I would say maybe on both sides of this equation, whether you’re a CrossFit gym owner or whatever fitness or parkour or anything working with kids, if you started as the athlete and you open the gym as the athlete, I’ve noticed that a lot of times the entrepreneur athlete doesn’t take that transition from going from, “I open this box because it’s my passion; I open this box with my friends, and I’m servicing my friends.” There’s seldom that transition from that starting point to, “OK, I need to get out of the coach; I need to climb the value ladder. I need to learn how to actually run a team, how to actually make sales, the psychology of sales.” Yeah. You know, Chris is shaking his head big time on the video here.

Jimmy Davidson (09:33):
Yeah. And so, making that transition from athlete to gym owner and then from gym owner to like real entrepreneur. You know, working on the business, building the teams underneath that and getting to the higher rungs of the value ladder, time and time again, whether it’s a parkour gym or not, that seems to be the fundamental key that needs to be dived in on, discussed, we need to figure out exactly where that business owner is, what rung are they on, maybe even stuck on, and how to get them methodically to the next rung and the next level.

Chris Cooper (10:06):
Let’s start there. So, you know, one problem that I had was I thought that I was my own best client, like the target demographic was me—forgetting that I was broke, noisy, messy, loud, like the worst customer that I could ever ask for. What do you suggest to somebody who’s opening up any kind of gym? How do they get out of that mindset that they are their own best customer?

Jimmy Davidson (10:31):
They get out of that mindset of you are your own best customer? Man, there’s two ways that I see. The more painful and more common way is trial by fire. You show up, you build it, and you realize just because you built it, they don’t come.

Chris Cooper (10:46):
Yep. Guilty.

Jimmy Davidson (10:47):
That happened to me for sure. And there comes this point where you’re servicing people like you; you’re servicing your friends, and eventually your friends—especially let’s say they move on. Five years pass. They move away. They start their family. Their lives change. And then you’re kind of left with whoever’s left over. And a lot of times those remaining people who fit that demographic just aren’t paying your bills. Maybe they’re showing up for open gym or drop-in, or they’re occasionally coming just for the community and the culture, but they may be paying, geez, like 20% if you’re lucky of the total revenue you need just to keep the lights on. And so, then there comes this sort of come-to-Jesus moment of like: These other clients that I have—so in my parkour gym—these parents with these kids, they are actually paying our bills.

Jimmy Davidson (11:37):
And me the entrepreneur, I need to pivot to servicing them, and I need to make them my focus and then provide a space around that for the community to come into and to make it fulfill that need. But so, that’s the trial by fire: You fail, you realize it’s not working, and then you discover how to pivot. And obviously the faster way is: You get a mentor, someone who is in the space, who’s seen this before, who can discuss with you right here and now what challenges you’re facing, and then they can just open up their plethora of experience and stories and just point out to you without the pain and trial by fire. Like, this is where you’re going; this is where you could go. Here’s the options I see for you. And they lay out a path.

Chris Cooper (12:18):
When did you realize, “Hey, my target market is actually kids; it’s not dudes like me in their twenties”?

Jimmy Davidson (12:25):
Yeah, “When did I realize?” is different than, “When did I fully take that on as the truth?” You know?

Chris Cooper (12:32):
Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Davidson (12:35):
So yeah, when did I realize? Pretty early on, maybe 2014, 2015, first year or two. We just started getting a lot of interest. A lot of parents coming in, and those were the people signing up. So, it was pretty obvious for us pretty early on. But it wasn’t until doing the “Seed Client” exercise, which I first heard from Mike Michalowicz of just—and for those of you who don’t know, the “Seed Client” exercise in a nutshell is you take the top 10 people who are your best clients in terms of revenue, and you write that down on a list. The next list, you take the top 10 people of clients who you just love working with the most. And a lot of times people will show up on both lists. They’re paying you the most, and you love working with them, and those are your seed clients.

Jimmy Davidson (13:18):
And if you really dive in and analyze that and you optimize your gym for those seed clients, you optimize for people who are paying you the most and who you love working with the most. And the really awesome flip side of that is the people who hardly pay you or maybe who just like really don’t work with your gym’s culture, they’re not weeded out; they’re just not planned for, and then they self-select out. And you end up with this really great product, this great experience and something that for you as the business owner feels good and doesn’t constantly burn you out.

Chris Cooper (13:52):
Let’s talk about how you made that transition because I think a lot of people get that conceptually: “OK, my seed clients are youth or kids, but I’ve got this program for adults.” Like how did you make that transition yourself?

Jimmy Davidson (14:05):
Yeah, so in the parkour gym we—it kind of made the transition organically. You know, we’d get 50, then 100, then 150 different families coming with their kids. And that was, it just was growing. So it was out of necessity that we add more teens classes here, more kids’ classes here, more pre-K classes here. Eventually some of those kids started getting incredibly talented. We’ve been open for a decade now, so now a lot of those kids are absolutely insane if you watch them; it’s really, really cool. So, then we started adding competition teams, and you know, if you’re just responsive and you pay attention, it becomes and it blossoms into the thing that it needs to be. And so then with the adult classes, kind of the same thing. You know, the ones that stuck around, we kept a couple adult classes on the schedule.

Jimmy Davidson (14:54):
It’s important to us at Freedom in Motion to always have an open gym or two on the schedule a week for teens and adults because, me personally as the athlete, that’s how I got started was I trained outside for five plus years until we discovered that there was a local gym in town that had an open gym. And that was really awesome. It was like a weekly meeting spot for me and my friends at that time. So, keeping that on the schedule and keeping a couple of adult classes. And I know that at one of our locations, one of our female athletes has actually kind of wrangled in a lot of the different parents, a lot of the moms specifically. And now there’s an adult women’s class that’s just on the schedule now because those people showed up, and there was interest. So, that side happens organically too. It just unfolds that way.

Chris Cooper (15:39):
Well, I think—I don’t think you’re taking enough credit there because when most people say, “I’m responsive,” what they actually mean is they acknowledge what their market is telling them. They don’t actually pivot their product to get good product market fit because that’s hard. You actually did that though. You looked at like, “Here’s what the market wants. They want more afternoon classes. OK, well I’m going to have to cancel an adult class.” I think a lot of us resist that, so good on you Jimmy. What I’d like to talk about now is: What are the biggest problems that parkour gyms have? And I think a lot of listeners to this show will say, “Oh, well, even though I don’t have a parkour gym, I have a CrossFit gym, or I have a strength and conditioning gym,” or whatever. They’re going to recognize that they have the same problems, and Jimmy is an amazing mentor. He is great at fixing these problems, and so hearing it from him might make a big difference to you. So, Jimmy, let’s start with: What are the biggest problems that parkour gyms face?

Jimmy Davidson (16:36):
Yeah, so at this point, through Motion Mentors, which is our mentor practice specifically for parkour businesses, we’ve worked with maybe like 10 plus gyms so far. We just got started. And every single time, the first issue has been pricing and the actual offer itself. So, on pricing, every single time, every single person we’ve worked with, they do the whole classic look-around-the-city: “They’re charging 80 bucks; they’re charging 80 bucks. OK, we’ll charge 75 bucks.” You know, and while that seems logical, it’s only based on this arbitrary assumption that their pricing model works. Even though that other gym probably also just looked around the room and said, “Everyone else is charging 85 bucks; we’ll charge 80 bucks.” But if you start with an underpriced product, you really signal two things. One to the audience, to the parents coming in, that, “This is a budget class. This is a commodity.”

Jimmy Davidson (17:34):
“We’re comparing this to soccer; we’re comparing this to baseball. And the only thing that stands out here is that parkour is kind of cool.” But if you can bring that up to be, “Actually no, we’re not just a commodity, park your kids here for an hour or so. We are a community of coaches who are deeply passionate about parkour, yes, but also the results that we’re getting with our client. We’re trying to teach people that they are people who can do hard things. That even though they walk in with this preconceived notion of like, ‘Oh, this is too difficult,’ or ‘I’m a klutz,’ or ‘I’m not as good as that guy over there or that girl over there,’ that we will bring you through lessons and through training to your highest level of athleticism and show you your potential.”

Jimmy Davidson (18:19):
And if you can get a parent to realize that that is actually the product, that we, the coaches, are being mentors for your kids, and that through learning these life skills, they’ll be sick at parkour, but they’ll also do a lot better in school; that’ll follow them through life with the increased confidence. And if you can really tell that to a parent through your marketing, through just what you convey and through your actions and your words, you can charge way more for that. So, if you compare the price model to like an occupational therapy clinic, they’re charging like 400 bucks an hour. And so, if parkour is essentially doing that same thing, physiologically and mentally, why are we charging 80 bucks? When you fix that, you signal a way higher value, you get better clients, you get parents who are more dedicated and more motivated, and they’ll help their kids stick with it, which is vital.

Jimmy Davidson (19:06):
Yeah. And then on the other side of that, you as the business owner, like you finally actually have money to pay your coaches so that you can keep the best people around. You can actually grow your business. And if you don’t have a drinking fountain, finally install one. Or if you hadn’t bothered to build a front desk because this whole thing is bootstrapped, like you can finally build a desk that looks good and makes a proper first impression, which then just increases your sales. You know, so this flywheel just comes out of nowhere once you just fix those fundamental pricing and offering issues.

Chris Cooper (19:35):
OK. Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. And we see this in CrossFit strength and conditioning and fitness gyms all the time too. Their pricing is so low that they hamstring themselves, and they can’t even deliver a good product because they can’t afford to. So, that’s problem number one, Jimmy. And how do you usually address that with a gym? A gym comes in your program, their prices are half what they should be. How do you change that?

Jimmy Davidson (19:57):
Yeah, so kind of depends on where they are at. A lot of times—I’m actually taking this $80 number out of reality. That seems to be where a lot of parkour gyms are, kind of anywhere from, “We charge 80 to 100 bucks a month.” My gyms are a lot more than that, and a couple other gyms that are successful and actually get incredible results with kids and families are a lot more than that, rightfully so. So, if we take those prices that we’ve seen work, maybe compare them to the city’s median average family income. So, that’s one thing we can compare it to. Compare it to: How much is your rent? Because you know, if you look at your profit and loss statement, you want to try to see like, “According to my revenue rent is maybe 15% of that or less.”

Jimmy Davidson (20:41):
And if your rent is more than that, you’re probably not charging enough. So, there’s like a fixed line item that you can actually compare it to. That way it’s a little bit more logical and a little less guessing. And there’s a few other strategies that we’ll look at. But from where they’re at, we’ll set out a game plan to, “OK, let’s get you from here to—” Geez. “If you’re at 80, let’s get you to 120.” Even though that’s more than the 15% that you would typically advise someone to increase your prices by, when you’re that low—you’re only in the eighties—you have to do something now. If you do 15% every year, you’re not even going to catch up until year six, you know? And so, from there we have seen something really incredible happen.

Jimmy Davidson (21:24):
We’ll work with our parkour gym owners to craft this heartfelt, empathetic letter that goes out to the members that lays out, “Here’s what’s going on. We’re increasing prices, but here are all the additional benefits that you’re going to get and receive and immediately notice in the gym,” you know, like that drinking found that they were missing. Lay all that out. And then parkour business owners—it kind of reminds me of yoga people—always have that really admirable soft spot of, “OK, but half of my families, I don’t think, can afford this.” But a lot of times—you know this Chris—they’re self-projecting. It’s because you can’t, because you’re coming from a place of being broke, you know. And so, what we do is we have people offer that, “Hey, client, if this is a financial impact for you, if you cannot do this, we want to make sure that our program is accessible to you, the family, and the community.”

Jimmy Davidson (22:15):
“So, we are raising prices; however, if you need to, we’re going to let you lock in your rate if you prepay up to six months or up to a year, and then after that, then you jump up to the normal rate.” And so that gives families time to stay at the normal rate, provided they prepay, but then they feel that change in increased value over the year, and then by the end of that year, they’re there with you anyway. And so, we just had a parkour gym do this. They only had like a small handful of people, less than my fingers, cancel. And a ton of other people opted into that six-month, one-year prepay, and they made 15k turning around. It was like four months of revenue for them, and they left all their clients stoked about it.

Chris Cooper (22:58):
Yeah. And those clients are there for six months, et cetera, et cetera. Like it sounds like a great plan. So good, man. OK, so problem number one, pricing. You’ve explained, “Here’s how we fix it in parkour gyms.” What’s the second biggest problem that you see in parkour gyms?

Jimmy Davidson (23:12):
Yeah, so I mentioned the offer. I’ll touch on that briefly because it’s a little bit connected to the pricing structure, but there is definitely something after this. So, on the offer, a lot of times parkour gym owners sometimes will just try to do way too many a la carte options. Like, “Oh, you want to come once a week, twice a week, three times a week, three and a half times a week, unlimited.” You know, they’ll have all of those, plus some weird, complicating open gym, yes-or-no factor.

Chris Cooper (23:39):
Hang on, what’s three and a half times? Like you can park your car in the lot but don’t come inside?

Jimmy Davidson (23:44):
So I mean, that’s half joking, but this is a little bit making fun of myself. I did have, back when I first started, my cheapest option was like, “You can come twice but if you don’t want to come both of those just let us know, and we’ll remove it.” So, it was just kind of—we were just really trying to get members, so we were just being as flexible as possible to our own detriment.

Chris Cooper (24:07):
OK. Sorry to interrupt you. Keep going man.

Jimmy Davidson (24:09):
Sure. So, we try to get parkour gym owners to do one, a few things, but at least do these two things: One is remove the unlimited option because if you have people just—especially because we work with kids, right? So, if it’s unlimited, you are now the daycare, and you have those families that just drop off their kid from when you open to when you end, seven, six days a week. And if you look at the price per class that they attend, now that family is actually paying you like four bucks a class, and then that child just feels like they live there, and the level of respect becomes a little bit hard to manage. Yeah, it’s a slippery slope. So, I don’t advise unlimited classes. And then, the next one is just boil it down to three membership options. We like to do a once a week, a twice a week, and then a three or four times a week, your choice.

Jimmy Davidson (24:58):
And then there could be like a competition, team membership after that, but that’s not what you offer on day one. And then like specifically how you price those, especially the middle tier option, if you price the middle tier option a little bit closer to the highest tier option—kind of like when you go to the movies and you order a popcorn, and they’re like, “Oh, Mr. Cooper, it’s only 50 cents if you want to upgrade to the large,” and you’re like, “Oh, OK, it’s only 50 cents. Let’s upgrade to the large.” You know, if you nail your pricing down, you can kind of have those same conditions to bump people up to the coming more frequently times a week. So yeah, just those little strategic things we can help parkour gym owners work their way through.

Chris Cooper (25:36):
That’s cool man. Do you want to give us one more example of challenges that parkour gyms face? Because listening to these, I’m thinking this is verbatim what a fitness gym would face too.

Jimmy Davidson (25:48):
Yeah, it is super similar. OK, so if we look at there, there’s—obviously dealing with parkour curriculum, that would be extremely specific to a parkour gym. And something that might be there would be, if you look at your leveling system—so in martial arts it’s like white belt, yellow belt, it ends at black belt. In parkour, we’re not wearing belts because you’re going to get caught, and it’s going to be a bad time. So oftentimes we’ll just say like Level 1, Level 2, and you’ll get a wristband or something, but you want the kids to experience progression, and you want the kids to experience that they are claiming ownership of the sport, and the sport is becoming theirs so that then they stick with it. And so, we’ve seen a few parkour gyms make       Level 1 just wicked hard for beginner students.

Jimmy Davidson (26:37):
You know, you get a little 10-year-old in here who’s like maybe a little overweight; maybe parkour is his first real sport, and some gyms are wanting him to, or wanting her to, climb all the way up on top of a wall from hanging, which is pretty brutal even for adults. Yeah. Or like do a move called a Kong Vault, which is a fundamental move, but for a beginner it’s really complicated. So, removing those gatekeeping moves from your curriculum, specifically so that your client journey just feels better so that kids can rank up sooner, so that kids get that sense of ownership sooner. And it hugely increases your length of engagement. Just when you think about the psychology that’s happening for these kids and for the parents who are watching their kids progress. And you can really affect that by removing those—”gatekeeping moves” is what we call them—and just placing them at more appropriate intervals on the client journey.

Chris Cooper (27:28):
Well if you think about how even video games work with kids—I mean the first few levels are so quick that they’re winning right off the bat. It makes a ton of sense that you want these kids to leave as quickly as possible with some kind of win.

Jimmy Davidson (27:39):
Yeah. Yep. They need to win; they need to feel good, and then parkour becomes theirs, and then it’s their journey, and you no longer have to hold their hand. They show up motivated, and they tell you what they ate, what their goal is for the month. And as a coach, that’s wicked awesome, but as a parent, Chris, that’s the juice. If you signed your kid up for something and then they show up with their own goals, they got out of bed and got their socks on that morning, and they showed up with their full personality, as a parent, that’s the juice. That’s what you’re paying for.

Chris Cooper (28:08):
Absolutely. Yeah. That’s one reason I used to like coaching kids was most of the positive feedback came from the parents. They would say things like, “I tell my kid this same thing, but they’ll do it if it comes from Chris Cooper,” you know, or one parent even told me like, “You should charge more for the classes that you run in the evening because it gets my kid to bed on time.” I’m not a good kids’ coach, but it is fun to do it once in a while. So, Jimmy, tell us about Motion Mentors. Like, what’s the need that Motion Mentors is serving? What’s its place in the market? You know, why are you doing it?

Jimmy Davidson (28:42):
Yeah, so Motion Mentors is our mentoring practice for parkour business owners. So not just parkour gyms—it could be outdoor coaching services; it could be someone with a podcast, and they want to grow an audience, and they want to get sponsors. We—one of the gyms, one of the parkour business owners in our network is business-to-government, which is really cool—trying to get parkour into schools, and they’re seeing some great success with that. That’s American Parkour. Give them a shout out. So that’s super cool. And so, Motion Mentors is trying to connect with those parkour business owners, those parkour entrepreneurs, and through them, achieve our goal of having 1 million people learn parkour. But not just learn how to vault and climb. Like actually get that what I just called a second ago. That … that personal passion and that transformative life experience of learning parkour and what that can now unlock for yourself mentally and physically.

Jimmy Davidson (29:38):
We’re trying to give that to a million people. And from my parkour gyms, Freedom in Motion, like we can do that, but we have to have like 10,000 gyms to actually give that to a million people. And I’m going to try my best, Chris. But in addition to that, if we can empower other parkour businesses to run a profitable model that they feel good about, that actually has an impact on society and the clients that they’re serving, that is a much faster and more inclusive path to growing the parkour industry and creating something here that is worth building a career out of.

Chris Cooper (30:13):
What’s really interesting, I think, and you can tell me if I’m wrong here, but if you can give a kid a sport like parkour, not only will they be better at every other sport for the rest of their lives, but now they’ve got something that they’re passionate about that they could really do forever, right?

Jimmy Davidson (30:29):
Yeah. Parkour is, I struggle to think of any other sport that is more of an athletic-intelligence-building sport that can be easily transferred to any other sport. You know, your proprioception, your ability to sense where you are in space is vital and is constantly being challenged in parkour. If you fall—a whole segment of parkour called ukemi, the art of falling—if you fall, parkour athletes just instantly know how to maneuver into a safe spot, land however is most optimal for where they are, roll if you can and immediately get back up and continue down your obstacle course. And then that’s sold with climbing, jumping, swinging, precision landings, so it’s really transferrable to anything else. So great off-season sport. And yeah, as you said, it’s an individual sport. So, when a kid shows up and they have their fears, and they have their apprehensions and after a couple of sessions with a coach, they become the kid who is doing those really cool jumps, flowing it right into some other vaults, flowing into some flip that they eventually learned.

Jimmy Davidson (31:34):
And they have that they are an incredible athlete, the kid does—that lives in their soul. Now that sticks with you forever, you know. That confidence and that self-esteem—you show up to a job interview 20 years later, and you still have that you are a capable, creative, and just cool person, and you bring that into your relationships throughout the rest of your life. And so both of those things, athletic intelligence and those skills that you just gain from the juice of parkour, it’s really something, and that’s why I’m so motivated to give this to a million people because that’s what I got when I was 14, and that’s why I’m on the call with you right now.

Chris Cooper (32:16):
Ah, so amazing. So, Jimmy and his partner Christopher are great mentors. If you have a parkour business at all, just go to motionmentors.org, and he’ll be happy to help you out. Jimmy, thanks so much for coming on, man. I think gym owners of any type of gym can learn a lot from the lessons that you’ve just shared here.

Jimmy Davidson (32:35):
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m super stoked to talk with any parkour business owners, or anyone who—really, if you deal with kids, I can help. If you’re listening to this and you’re on Facebook, we have a group for parkour business owners; it’s called Parkour Business Owners. So, look that up. We’re on Instagram too. Motion Mentors and happy to help. Shoot me any free questions. I’ll jump in there with you.

Chris Cooper (32:55):
Thanks, Jimmy. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and no matter what kind of gym you have, if Two-Brain can’t help you, we can definitely refer you to a brilliant mentor like Jimmy who has niche-specific expertise and can help you grow really fast. Thanks, Jimmy.

Jimmy Davidson (33:11):
Thanks, Chris.

The post Parkour Gym Owner & Mentor Backflips Into Profitability appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Did You Start a Business or Buy a Job?

A potentially deadly trap is baked into the fitness industry:

Passionate trainers often open gyms to make enough money to create careers that support families.

Why can this be deadly?

Because passionate trainers are not skilled business owners, and the low barrier to entry is followed by a very steep learning curve.

The curve is so steep that it’s very common for amazing trainers to open businesses, grind for years and then quit to “get real jobs.”

I know this because I lived it, and I was very close to disaster.

The only thing that saved me: Finally realizing that being a great coach isn’t enough to float a business. You must be a great business owner.

Buying a Job Vs. Running a Business

Opening a gym seems like a great idea when you’re sick of coaching classes for $20 an hour or don’t want to accept a revenue split that doesn’t allow you to support a family.

The problem comes when you open a gym and plan to do everything in it yourself.

Don’t get me wrong: The owner-operator model can work.

We have a business model that lays out a path to a six-figure income with minor contributions from one staff member, but this model is very fragile. Holidays are rare, illnesses are disastrous, 60-hour weeks are common, growth is often impossible due to a lack of time, and burnout is always looming.

If you plan to wear every hat in your business, know that you are buying yourself a job.

If you follow our owner-operator model, you might earn good money, but you’ll still work a lot, and at some point you might want to get home for supper with your spouse.

If you don’t follow our plan, or if you make mistakes, you will eventually feel stuck in a low-paying, high-stress job with a really cranky boss (yourself).

You might be a great trainer who gets spectacular results for clients. But your business will fail if you’re A+ when it comes to working in the business but D- when it comes to working on the business.

Remember, I’ve lived this, and I’ve seen the scenario play out far too often over the years.

These are facts:

New clients don’t just appear because you know lots of squat cues.Your training credentials don’t move any numbers on a profit/loss spreadsheet.Your gear collection doesn’t help with retention.A clean gym is great but your choice of floor scrubber won’t generate more revenue or improve retention.

Only business skills make a gym survive, grow and thrive. So if you want to run a gym, realize that you are trading the opportunity to be a full-time coach to help more people as a fitness business owner. You’re going to need new and improved skills.

It took me over a decade to realize this.

If you realize it today, you could be earning $100,000 annually in about two years, and you could become a millionaire a few years after that. (This isn’t hyperbole—we track these timelines for client progress in our mentorship program.)

At that point, you will have all the options in front of you. You’ll have increasing freedom once you’ve built a stable business that helps clients achieve goals and runs without your constant oversight.

Can you still coach classes? Of course. And you can even coach a lot of classes if you want. Hire a CEO and teach muscle-ups every day! Or open another gym, invest in real estate, travel the world, learn to speak German—whatever you want.

Whatever you do, don’t make the mistake I made.

If you want to run a great gym, improve your business skills and become a true business owner, not a just a great coach with a struggling gym.

We can help: Book a call.

The post Did You Start a Business or Buy a Job? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Tough Year Ahead for (Some) Gym Owners

“Gyms face tough year as key January growth screeches to a halt”—that was a BNN Bloomberg headline on Feb. 11.

The article stated that January 2024 gym traffic was flat vs. traffic in January 2023. This indicates an abrupt plateau after a few years of dramatic post-pandemic growth: The article stated January club visits had increased by 40 percent in 2022 and 2023.

The Bloomberg piece was light on sales stats, and we all know “visits” don’t really mean a lot when you’re dealing with access gyms such as Planet Fitness. In big boxes, you can have a lot of members and very few visits.

Nevertheless, both Xponential and Planet Fitness are not experiencing great first-quarter growth, according to Bloomberg.

So what does that mean for microgyms?

Almost nothing.

The Race to the Bottom

Author Cameron Baker and quoted TD Cowen analyst Max Rakhlenko suggest the poor January stats might be partially attributed to Planet Fitness’ attempt to increase membership fees above its standard $10-a-month rate in some markets.

This increase always seemed like a tough play for a struggling company that’s been the flagship for rock-bottom rates for years. (I wrote about this in September 2023.)

It’s just really hard for a company based on “cheap” to become more expensive, and $10 a month is a nice, round number consumers are tied to.

With all that said, this line from Baker is suspect: “That may signal the industry will be hamstrung by low prices in the future.”

So is this one from Rakhlenko: “A $10 price point is really where investors and the industry is gravitating toward.”

All that might apply to big-box gyms looking to acquire members at the lowest rate possible—Planet Fitness, etc.

But it doesn’t apply to microgyms and premium gyms.

Selling Value

Later in the article—which you can read here—Baker reported that some gyms are posting improved numbers:

“Visits to Equinox were up 12 percent year on year, according to a company spokesperson.”

Recall that Equinox memberships are relatively costly: Popsugar.com prices the Equinox Select tier at $220-$252 a month, with an annual commitment.

And Two-Brain’s microgym data suggests the right consumers are still very willing to pay more for high-value services.

Around the beginning of 2023, only the top five gyms on our average revenue per member (ARM) leaderboard were over $400.

In July 2023, every single gym in the Top 10 was over $427, and the Top 10 average was $533.

In December 2023, every gym was once again over $427, and the Top 10 average increased to $537.

So is the industry really hamstrung by low prices?

No—access gyms that promote themselves as the cheapest option are hamstrung by low prices.

Gyms that market coaching and focus on value are not tied to low prices.

If you run an access-only model and pursue high-volume signups at bargain-basement rates, the Bloomberg stats might give you something to think about as 2024’s second quarter begins.

But if you sell coaching, I wouldn’t pay much attention to the big-box traffic data from the first quarter.

If you want real microgym data that will help you improve your business, you’re reading the right blog.

Two-Brain publishes hard, verified microgym data every single month, and we interview the top gym owners so you can find out how they posted their incredible stats. To see our most recent leaderboard (number of clients), click here.

We’ll release sales and marketing data (set, show and close rates) on April 22. In late May you’ll find out exactly what top gym owners pay themselves.

Keep following along so you get the best microgym data available.

And if you ever want to know exactly how to improve your own key performance indicators with the help of an experienced mentor, click here.

The post Tough Year Ahead for (Some) Gym Owners appeared first on Two-Brain Business.