Chris Cooper's Blog, page 47

When Staff Members Are an Investment, Not an Expense

As the CEO of a fitness business, you must create careers.

If you use an owner-operator model, you must create a career for yourself and ensure it allows you to live the life you want.

But if you choose to scale up, you’re going to need help. You just can’t do everything yourself, so you’ll have to hire, develop and retain staff members.

That isn’t easy, and many gym owners wince when they think about the endless cycle of hiring the wrong people, setting them loose in the business without support, and then covering for them when they pull the ripcord and exit without notice.

This solution: Create careers, not jobs.

Avoid Abdication

In the previous post in this series, I told you how to use Career Roadmap sessions to help your coaches see the path to success.

That’s Step 1. Step 2 is supporting your coaches as they walk the path.

I’ve learned this the hard way: You can’t just show someone the route to the top of the mountain and then walk away. Only a few very rare people will reach the summit on their own, and they’ll make tons of costly mistakes along the way. The vast majority will get lost and frustrated, and they’ll quit climbing.

It’s not enough to lay out a path. Remember, you’re a driven, creative entrepreneur who solves problems and takes action. You are rare. Your staff members don’t have your skills, and they’ll flounder without guidance. But you can mentor them to success. In fact, it’s your job as CEO to do so.

Here’s a real-world example of abdicating that responsibility:

A gym owner meets with a staff member and lays out a career plan that includes running a six-week weightlifting class every three months to generate a specific amount of revenue. The coach and owner are thrilled about the idea. They exchange a high five, and the owner moves on to the next meeting.

The staff member invests time creating a six-week program but only gets two people to sign up—because the owner assumed the staff person would think like an entrepreneur and market to fill the program.

It doesn’t work like that. You must teach staff members how to do things.

What if the owner in the scenario above created a marketing plan with the coach and role-played pitches to clients? That investment would have resulted in more sign-ups, more income for the coach and more revenue for the gym.

This is a simple example, but don’t ignore it. Most of the top Two-Brain gym owners have staff members who help them run the business and generate revenue. These staff members are actively mentored to build careers.

Eric Conner, for example, has two key full-time staff members who earn $60,000-$80,000 a year, with benefits (Eric’s story is here).

In Rune Laursen’s gym in Denmark, a client success manager (CSM) works to retain members with Goal Review Sessions. Rune gave her specific roles, tasks and targets, and then he measured length of engagement, average revenue per member and client count against the CSM’s work. He saw all the metrics were improving—and he now has hard data that shows the staff member isn’t an expense at all.  

So here’s a big question:

What are you doing to retain your staff members and mentor them to success?

Invest in Your Staff

New entrepreneurs often see staff as an expense. We teach gym owners that staff members should generate 2.5 times what they are paid—or free up the owner to generate that revenue.

If staff members generate more than they’re paid, it’s clear that they are not an expense. They are an investment.

I want you to invest in your staff to get a return. That doesn’t mean throwing cash at them and telling them to earn a 7th Level coaching certificate. It means giving them entrepreneurial tools so they can succeed on your platform.

One example: teaching them to sell so they can sign people up for a specialty program in an area of interest.

To kickstart your investment in your team, I’d like to invite you to bring your staff members to our annual summit—or send them if you can’t make it. It’s June 8 and 9 in Chicago, and all details are here.

We have a very special lineup of speakers for the coaches room, and each presenter was selected to help your staff members succeed in your business. They’ll learn how to retain and connect with clients, sell better, get results for clients faster, and use Career Roadmaps to chart a path to success on your platform.

If you’re not sure how to invest in your coaches’ success, let us cover the curriculum and teach them how to create a career at your gym.

See you and your team in Chicago?

The post When Staff Members Are an Investment, Not an Expense appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Developing Coaches: Forget Cues and Focus on Careers

Your fitness business is an incredible platform.

It can provide a great income for you and become a key part of your retirement strategy. It can also become a key part of your staff members’ retirement strategies.

That wasn’t always the case. Back in the day, a gym was a place where you worked while waiting for your acting career to take off. Or it was the place you worked before you got a “real job” selling houses or fighting fires.

Now, a well-run gym can shield staff members from risk as they create fulfilling careers that generate more income for everyone.

But that doesn’t just happen.

You have to give staff members opportunities to get started. You have to show them how to help other people and be rewarded for it.

You must do more than encourage them: You must actually show them the process and break down the math.

Step 1 

Start doing quarterly Career Roadmap meetings. Ask your coaches where they want to be in six months. How do they want to live? What will fulfill them long term? Learn what “successful career” means to each staff person.

Step 2

Determine how much each staff person needs to earn to reach those goals. Calculate a goal number. A number makes it real.

Step 3

Work backward from that number. Use a spreadsheet (we have one for clients). Keep a running potential income total as you lay out opportunities to coach classes, complete programming or admin work, do personal training, run specialty programs, run semi-private or small-group sessions, create high-value platinum-level service packages, and so on.

Step 4

Determine the starting position. What will the coach need to learn to capitalize on this plan? Will they need a certification before starting a kids program, for example? Or would sales training be a better investment? Make a list and start crossing things off.

Step 5

Measure progress. Perform regular reviews as part of Career Roadmap meetings and help coaches learn how to keep building value. Example: “Ten of our clients mentioned they’re doing the 5-km fun run in June. Why don’t you create and sell a high-touch, high-value, three-month prep program, including running, strength training and nutrition?”

Communicate and Lead

The best way to help your coaches build careers is to mentor them to success.

Teach them how to serve clients and earn more while your business shields them from all the risks of entrepreneurialism. We call this “intrapreneurialism”: Staff members are mentored to “grow the pie” on your strong, stable platform.

I told you numbers are important, so here’s an example: Peter Brasovan helped someone develop a yoga program under his and his partner’s brand four years ago. The program grew so large that it contributed $190,000 to an annual gross of $1 million.

Almost 20 percent of gross revenue was generated by an intrapreneurial coach who saw free space, a market and an opportunity. And Peter is now on team of mentors, and he’ll be speaking on Career Roadmaps at our summit for gym owners in June.

I’ll go one step further: We recommend owners pay coaches 4/9ths, or 44 percent, of program revenue. If Peter paid the yoga program creator 44 percent of $190,000 gross, that’s an income of $83,600. The gym keeps about $105,000, which is divided between fixed costs and profit.

In this scenario, the clients win because they’re getting access to a service they want. The coach wins by earning more than $80,000 without having to lease a building, set up a business and build an audience.

The gym owner wins, too: In exchange for providing essential infrastructure and mentoring a coach to succeed on a stable platform, the business takes in more than $100,000.

This scenario isn’t made up—you can hear the whole story here.

But stuff like this doesn’t just happen.

You have to care enough to actually help your staff members. Instead of abdicating responsibility, giving them free space and hoping they figure everything out on their own, you must lead and coach.

You have to care enough to say, “I’m going to mentor you through this process of growth so that you can make this your career.”

The post Developing Coaches: Forget Cues and Focus on Careers appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Why Bring Your Coaches to the 2024 Two-Brain Summit?

Chris Cooper (00:02):
What do your coaches really want from you, the gym owner? There’s two things. Number one: They want to make a career. They want to stay invested in this place that they love, with the people that they love, doing the work that they love. The second thing they want is to feel important. They want to learn more. They want to feel smart. They want to feel like they’re part of the decision-making process, that they’re part of the growth of your business. This is really important, and this is why every year for the last five years, we’ve added a coaches’ stage to Summit. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and today, I hope to inspire you by giving you some topics and some ideas on how you can inspire your coaches or just convince you to let us do it for you, and bring your team to Summit.

Chris Cooper (00:44):
Five years ago when we first added our coaches’ stage to Summit, we thought this could be good. Maybe a few gym owners will bring a coach or two. The coach can get some activities; they can have some fun. And what it’s morphed into is something beyond our wildest dreams. Now, gym owners bring one coach, two coaches, even sometimes 12 coaches—I believe the record is 20 of their coaches to the Summit. They have a nice weekend; they take their staff out to dinner. Some even stay an extra day and have an annual planning session with their staff. And you can imagine what happens, like put yourself in the shoes of the coach for a moment. You’re working for somebody, they take you to Chicago, you get to see some of the top brains—the most exciting people in fitness for the whole weekend.

Chris Cooper (01:30):
They’re speaking in front of you; they’re doing exercises. They’re helping you become a better coach. They’re teaching you how to build a better career. They’re teaching you how to deliver better. They’re teaching you new things that you can coach to kids and legends and everybody in between. They’re teaching you how to coach nutrition. Anything that you want to learn, you can learn it. You’re going out with the rest of your crew from your gym, you’re having some great meals, and then the owner says, “Let’s work together and build a plan.” How important do you feel? I mean, if the guy who owned the gym that I left way back in 2005 had ever done that with me, I would probably still be there. Let’s face it. This is what makes the Summit so powerful. We’ve got the owners’ stage with some very well-known speakers every single year.

Chris Cooper (02:12):
And we’ve also got the coaches’ stage. And we do that because we know that improving your product is really important to growing your business, but making your coaches feel excited and empowered is even more important. And so, I want you to bring your coaches to Summit. If you decide you don’t want to come to Summit this year—you can’t make it, or you can’t bring your coaches, or you’re coming by yourself, or you’re just going to bring your spouse—no problem. Use these topics and speakers as inspiration for later so that you can create your own little miniature summits within your gym. You might be the only presenter, or maybe you just take them to a little offsite at the beach and do an annual planning session or whatever. Use this episode as an inspiration on how to reinvigorate your team. Show them that you’re invested in them, and keep them getting more educated all the time, and keep them excited to grow your business.

Chris Cooper (03:01):
So, here is the list of Summit speakers and their topics for 2024. Again, if you want to get Summit tickets, you go to twobrainsummit.com. I’m mentioning that right now instead of the end of the episode because we’re 670 tickets in; our cap is going to be about a thousand. So, it will fill this year; it will absolutely sell out, especially the hotels will fill soon. We’ve got two hotels. We’ve got an amazing one where the Summit is held, and there’s a beautiful Hilton right next door, so you can get a room. But if you want to get in our room block, if you want to make sure that you’ve got seats, and especially if you want to bring your team, it is wise to book your tickets right now. OK, let’s talk about the speakers just on the coaches’ side at Summit 2024.

Chris Cooper (03:41):
First is Chris Plentus. Chris is a longtime mentor in Two-Brain. This guy has a background both in counseling and in engineering—a real “two-brain” mentor, right? The left side, the right side. He’s talking about unreasonable hospitality in the microgym industry. I love this topic. In our Tinker program, the book “Unreasonable Hospitality” was very popular. And if you’ve ever watched the TV show “The Bear,” that’s what that show is about: the book “Unreasonable Hospitality.” And it is really the story of how somebody took a fairly average restaurant and grew it into this Michelin-Star-rated restaurant and then did it again. And what you have to actually deliver for that to work and how you can deliver that in your own team. Chris is a master of this. He’s a great speaker, and this is such an amazing topic because it gets your team fired up to deliver unreasonable hospitality to your clients.

Chris Cooper (04:35):
Imagine them delivering way better than you ever dream possible and being excited to do it. That’s what Chris is going to deliver to them. The second speaker—and these are not in the order of appearance, but they’ll all be on stage—is Matt Temby. Now, Matt is actually the head of our sales department here at Two-Brain, and Matt is constantly being mentored by professionals on sales. He is not just great at sales, but he is great at coaching other people at sales. And so one of the biggest roadblocks for a lot of gym owners is, they can teach other people to coach the classes, they can definitely hire other people to do the social media or sweep the floors, but when it comes down to selling the product, they get stuck in that seat forever because they’re the only ones who can do it well.

Chris Cooper (05:17):
And what Matt’s going to do is teach your coaches to be good at sales, probably even better than you, so that they can replace you in that chair. This does a couple things. Number one: It gets you out of that chair and working on other things. Number two: If you’re not comfortable in that chair, it puts somebody into the chair who might be better than you anyway. But number three: It gives your staff the view of the client’s goals from the moment they come in the door. Now, what that’s going to do is it’s going to frame the client’s journey a lot better. So, if you don’t have a sales process or your staff aren’t informed about a client’s goals, all your staff can really do is just like go out there and teach a great class. But if they know the goals of everybody in that class or they know the goals of that personal training client or the goals of that person in your semi-private session, they can tailor every single workout to that person better.

Chris Cooper (06:07):
That makes every single workout, every single appointment, every single session more valuable to the client because the coach knows their goals. So, for example, if we say, “OK, today we’re doing a workout called Elizabeth. It’s a 1,000-meter row, 1,000 thrusters and 50 pull-ups, 100 thrusters”—whatever Elizabeth is. Now the coach can look around the room and say, like, “What are the goals of the people in the room?” And he can say, “OK, look, if your goal is improved fitness, your job is to try and do this whole workout unbroken in under five minutes. If your job is to get stronger, then take your time on the rower and really focus on the thruster. If your goal is to lose some weight, burn some calories, then what we want to do is maintain a heart rate below zone two.” Whatever.

Chris Cooper (06:54):
The idea here is that your coaches should know your client’s goals so that they can tailor their coaching and their advice to the client. And if the client’s not achieving goals, then you can change their direction. You can recommend more personal training or, or more nutrition coaching or whatever that is. But if your coaches don’t know the client’s goals, then you can’t do any of that. You can’t tailor the client journey. You can’t deliver a bespoke service, a high-value service. That’s just one reason to get your coaches doing NSIs, but there are a lot more. So Matt, who is the master of NSIs, is going to teach this to your coaches. That to me alone is worth bringing my coaches to Chicago. Next, Brian Bott is going to lead a session on semi-private training called “Beyond Workouts: A Guide to Creating Client Winning Semi-Private Programming.” So, what he’s going to do is teach your coaches how to program for clients in a semi-private setting.

Chris Cooper (07:47):
But this also applies if they’re doing personal training or group training. A lot of your coaches want to talk programming; Brian is a master of it. If you’ve ever listened to this podcast and heard the four avatars episode, that came from Brian Bot. If you’ve ever been to Summit and said, “Oh, my favorite speaker was the semi-private guy,” that’s Brian Bot. Brian is really showing us what the future is for a lot of gyms, especially if you’re running a personal training studio, this is how you scale your business. And if you’re a business like mine that’s been around for a while, this is that beautiful bridge between selling your time doing one-on-one and trying to fill big groups. Semi-private is an amazing gift, and Brian is the expert; he’s the subject matter expert at Two-Brain. He’s going to teach your coaches how to deliver it and how to program for it.

Chris Cooper (08:35):
Next, Peter Brasovan—who was the MC on the coaches stage last year—he’s going to run a session on a career roadmap. What he’s going to do is have this conversation with your staff about how they can make a career in your gym. The big threat in the fitness industry is twofold. Number one: People say, “I can’t make enough money as a trainer; I’m leaving the fitness industry,” and you’ve invested time and resources and care into making them good coaches, and now they’re gone, and you’ve got to start over. The second big threat is they say, “I can’t make a career here.” And so, what do they do? They go out and open up their own box. Hey, that’s how I got started. Maybe that’s how you got started, but you don’t want that cycle to keep perpetuating itself. Instead, what you want to do is be able to make good careers.

Chris Cooper (09:21):
Now, you as the owner should know how to do these career roadmaps. We teach that in our mentorship practice, but the reality is that Peter is going to teach your staff how to map out a career. What he’s really doing is he’s doing a massive favor for you. He’s showing them how it’s possible for them to make an amazing career in fitness with you. So, if you see Peter, buy him a coffee after that session with a big thank you. Then, next up is Oskar Johed. Oskar owns one of the most successful CrossFit gyms in the world. And I don’t mean he’s got one bazillion clients. I mean, he has the revenue and the profit numbers that every other CrossFit gym in the world wishes they had. He, though, is also on the CrossFit Seminar Staff.

Chris Cooper (10:08):
And so, he travels most weekends teaching L1, L2. He runs study groups for Two-Brain for the L3 exam. And he’s just an amazing, passionate promoter of the CrossFit brand and method. What he’s going to do is teach exercise movement, teach how to run a better class, teach how to teach, how to make your coaches better at coaching. And so, these are always hilarious seminars, but they’re always also very interactive. Coaches love just being around Oskar for an hour. He is such a positive dude, and they will learn how to coach better with him in the room. Next, we are going to bring Alex up to the stage, and she is going to teach guiding clients to change. So, Alexandrina is in—she’s in Germany right now. That’s where she lives. She runs this really, really, really successful nutrition coaching business in Europe.

Chris Cooper (11:00):
But she knows that her business is really the change business. It’s not the “teach people what to eat” business. It’s not the diet business. It’s teaching people how to change and managing their behavioral change. And so, what she’s going to teach your coaches is how to guide clients to behavioral change. Look, the bottom line here is: If your clients stay longer, it’s for one of two or three reasons. Number one: They see their progress; they’re making gains, and they see it. Number two: They love the atmosphere of the community. And number three: They love you, the owner, right? Like they relate to those things. The number one thing though is if they’re not seeing progress, their time with you is limited. There’s going to be an expiry date. For them to see progress, they have to make behavioral change. You and I both know it, like we can’t change their entire lives in two to three hours a week.

Chris Cooper (11:48):
That two to three hours a week where they’re exercising with us can inspire them to make the bigger changes that will affect their life. And Alexandrina is going to tell us how to do that. She’s going to share how to take the workouts and turn that into long-term behavioral change that actually changes lives, actually keeps people engaged and in your gym, and extends their health span. Then we’ve got the crew from Mayhem speaking. So, Mayhem is going to be running our morning workouts at Summit this year. So, you can sign up in advance. They usually take about 100 people at a time, and they do this massive group workout. It’s super-duper fun. Jason Khalifa did an amazing job with this last year, and he’ll be back in the future. This year, Mayhem is going to run these workouts and so the crew from Mayhem will be there coaching people and just kind of demonstrating their programming at Summit too.

Chris Cooper (12:36):
They’re also going to be on stage talking about coaching. Now they’re going to get really specific with one topic, and they’re not going to reveal what that topic is until we get to Summit. But you know this is some of the best coaching in the world, and you’re going to have an amazing experience—plus there’s going to be some star power there. So, you’re going to want to get some autographs. Your coaches will love being around the Mayhem gang. They’ll love being around Khalipa, the NCFIT guys; they’re going to love being around Ben Bergeron, like all their heroes are going to be there. This is the best gift that you can give your staff as well as something that’s going to give back and build your gym too. Next, Brian Foley is going to take the stage and teach us how to build a 50+ program. Now, Brian has been running a 50+ program for years and years.

Chris Cooper (13:21):
What’s really interesting here is that this is like a growing area of interest within Two-Brain gyms. So, whether you’re in Two-Brain or not, this demographic is the fastest growing demographic in the States, in North America. It’s also a demographic who are most interested in investing in their health and have the resources to invest. So, at my gym, for example, our Legends program, which is for people over 50, is always full. It’s always sold out in advance. We run two classes a week. They pay more than the regular membership. So, the coaches earn more for coaching them. They refer their friends. They want to buy every scrap of Catalyst merchandise that we sell. You know, it’s like just when the gym opened again; they’re so fresh faced and eager. They’re not competitive. They’re very, very fun. You know, think of like your favorite uncle and aunt who play pickleball or whatever.

Chris Cooper (14:15):
Like, that’s what these legends programs do. They’re a lot of fun. They’re very easy to coach; they’re grateful for the coaching. They’re eager to keep going—just amazing. And that’s why they’re growing in popularity so much. And Brian Foley is going to teach your staff how to do this. So, what will happen here is Brian is going to teach your staff how to build this program, how to promote it, how to sell it, where to get clients for it, how to program for it, how to run it. He’ll answer questions about what to charge, all that stuff. The beauty to you is that now you’ve got a focused, targeted track—your own niche within your gym—and your coach is doing the work to build that program for you. You don’t really have to do a lot. So, it’s amazing, and every one of these sessions where we teach your coaches how to run a nutrition program, how to run legends, like that will pay for their trip.

Chris Cooper (15:06):
The coaches’ tickets are not expensive at all. They’re an amazing investment. It’s so easy to get an ROI when you bring your coaches. In fact, attending this as a gym owner, I know that I can get a great ROI out of any one of the sessions on the owner stage. But if my coaches learn something that will earn money, that’s amazing ROI because they’ll keep a lot of that money, they’ll make a better career, and my gym will make more money without me doing anything. That’s why bringing a coach to Summit is such an amazing investment. And finally, Josh Martin, he’s going to talk about the refined art of coaching. And so, what he’s going to talk about is bringing passion, bringing care, bringing behavior and awareness to coaching. He’s a very inspiring guy. He’s going to really fire your coaches up to keep going. You know, one thing that I didn’t mention is that a lot of people quit fitness because of burnout.

Chris Cooper (15:57):
They’re not making enough. Of course, they’re working at 5 a.m. Of course they’re working at 9 p.m. Of course they’re working on weekends. Some people just don’t like coming to the gym; it is like the hardest job there is. And they’re doing it out of a passion for service and a desire to help other people find fitness. Josh is going to stoke up that passion. He’s going to make them want to continue, help you keep your staff and really remind them of why they’re in this game and that’s so valuable. So, I want you to come to Summit. If you go to twobrainsummit.com, you can get tickets; you can bring your coaches. They’re going to be exposed to all of these speakers and, and one more that we’re still confirming, but I am crazy excited about. They’re going to get to meet a lot of their heroes.

Chris Cooper (16:40):
Jason Khalifa, Ben Bergeron, the Crew from Mayhem, other amazing speakers like Jonathan Goodman. You know, there’s so many, and they’re going to get to spend time with you kind of building that team. You can take them out for dinner, you can take them out for drinks. You can do workouts together on the road. Rosemont area is just absolutely beautiful. There’s so many things that you can do. They’re going to interact with coaches from other gyms. They’re going to make friends that they’ll keep for life. They’re going to make connections, so they can talk back and forth about programming with coaches from other gyms. Like it’s just such an amazing win. But if you can’t do it yourself, go back through this episode, make a list of those topics, and deliver a session on each one of them to your coaches this year. Run your own like mini-summit spread throughout the year.

Chris Cooper (17:23):
Take them to a beach house for the weekend and do a session on how to do programming. Call them in on Saturday. You know, get a catered breakfast. Teach them how to do an NSI; take them one by one and do career roadmaps with every single one. Or talk to them about kids’ programs and 50 plus programs and all that other stuff—like inspire them, remind them of why you’re doing this and how they inspire you. It’s so important to do this. And I’ll be frank with you, I’m bad at it—like I’m not good at remembering to do this stuff with my staff. And so, the easy button for me, “boop,” is just bring them to Summit. That’s why I do it every year, and that’s why we have a coaches’ stage at Summit. Twobrainsummit.com. Hope to see you and your coaches there. Come and enjoy coffee and snacks and all the amazing stuff that Summit has to offer. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Thank you for your service.

The post Why Bring Your Coaches to the 2024 Two-Brain Summit? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Starving Coaches With 10 Credentials (I Was One)

A B+ coach will starve in a D+ business. 

That’s why I focus on business coaching and leave technical coach training to NCFIT and others.

If I try to help trainers improve their skills, they’ll still leave the industry if the gyms they work at go under, can’t make payroll or aren’t set up to provide careers.

But if I can help entrepreneurs create strong, stable, profitable businesses that pay them $100,000 a year or more, those entrepreneurs will then be able to provide great careers for coaches, too.

And Two-Brain can partner with the world’s best coach-development companies to ensure you have A+ coaches in A+ businesses.

The Technician’s Curse

I love coaching, and so I was easily afflicted with the “technician’s curse.” The curse causes us to believe we will grow our businesses simply by being amazing coaches. Our training excellence will shine like a beacon, and we’ll win in the marketplace.

Except it doesn’t work that way. Being a great entrepreneur makes your business grow. But I had to learn that through experience, and I spent many years drawing complicated ex.-phys. graphs on the floor to make sure my clients knew that I knew everything about coaching.

About 10 years ago, I even developed a product called Two-Brain Coaching to help trainers develop their skills. I don’t regret it, because I am passionate about helping trainers. But I quickly realized most coaches are pretty good but most businesses are not. So I shuttered that arm of Two-Brain and doubled down on business development to ensure good coaches have great places to work.

Here’s the truth I’ve learned as a gym owner and business coach: To retain great coaches who want to build careers, you must build a sustainable foundation under your business, and you have to guide them to do the things that will build value for your clients.

Does an additional credential build value with a client? No. Clients pay for results, not a list of credentials. It’s about them, not you. That’s true even if we love to collect credentials that fill our business cards and “set us apart.”

If I can help clients lose 10 lb. before the wedding, will they care how many credentials I have?

Nope.

Building Value—and Incomes

Service delivery is critical in the gym business, so we don’t ignore coaching.

We first help gym owners solve staffing problems by teaching them to select great people who fit the business. But instead of focusing on squat progressions and whiteboard briefs, we then help gym owners focus on career development for these coaches.

Your method—the tool you use to get results for clients—is important. Coaches need a credential of some sort to ensure a base level of education. But it’s easy to solve that problem. Fitness credentials can be earned relatively quickly, and even basic training can produce very effective coaches.

Remember, your job as a gym owner isn’t to ensure your coaches have the most credentials or even pay for their training. Your job is to ensure they get results for clients and see paths to fulfilling careers that provide the income they need to support their families.

We’re not building “coach-centric businesses.” We’re building “client-centric businesses.”

That means your coaches don’t need to collect credentials so they get paid more as “senior trainers.” To earn more, they must work to add value for the client by providing results faster and with less pain. This is a critical realization.

Here’s the wrong path: Paying for a coach to take the third level of some credential and then giving them a raise even though the credential doesn’t generate any additional revenue and clients don’t care about it. CEOs don’t operate like that.

The right path: Build value. Show a coach how to solve clients’ problems and put together a detailed plan to market programs and services. An additional credential might be needed, but maybe not. The key question: “Will this help my clients accomplish goals faster?”

If you put the clients’ needs first, the clients will get better results, so they’ll be happy to pay for new levels of service. Your gym will earn more, and so will the coach. Everyone wins.

For example: “A nutrition credential would help you get better results for PT clients who are focusing on weight loss. Instead of charging $75 an hour for fitness coaching, we can sell your fitness and nutrition coaching together for much more as part of a high-value lifestyle coaching program. Here’s the exact breakdown that shows how your income will increase.”

I don’t want you to assemble a team of technicians who have more credentials than anyone else.

I want you to become a better entrepreneur. Create a solid gym business, select great people to staff it and show them how to create careers by solving problems for clients.

To help your coaches build careers in your business, bring them to the Two-Brain Summit in June!

The post Starving Coaches With 10 Credentials (I Was One) appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Why “It Worked for Me” Can Kill Your Gym

“You should totally try a Groupon—it worked for us!”

“If you offer a discount for military personnel, you’ll get more soldiers from the local base!”

“A six-week challenge will help you find a host of perfect clients.”

All of this advice, in my experience, turned out to be BS.

I qualify the statement with “in my experience” because I don’t want to throw more BS at you.

But I really want you to know what it smells like.

Whenever groups of gym owners get together, advice and stories are thrown around. That’s good. Lots of opinions and experiences give you new ideas and stuff to think about.

“I hadn’t thought of that!” is a great thing to hear in these discussions.

It’s not great when someone with limited experience presents their plan as “the answer.”

That can get you into big trouble.

I’ll give you a real-world example: If you pick any sport and dive deep into a niche discussion group, you’ll find all sorts of opinions from aficionados who aren’t experts. Most of them boil down to this: “I’ve always done it like this and never had any problems.”

That’s the worst advice you can ever get: A person has tried exactly one thing and thinks it’s the best method or product solely because nothing awful happened.

“The manual says use this type of oil, but I’ve always ignored that, and nothing went wrong.”

That, to me, sounds like a precursor to a seized engine and a monster repair bill.

And really, if we’re trying to be great instead of just good, we want to know what’s optimal, not what might help you scrape by.

Search for Experts

Online forums, round tables and discussion groups in any niche usually get heated, and you’ll find lots of arguments. Some people are truly belligerent and even abusive when it comes to “offering advice.” They need to be right, even if they don’t have the right answer.

But if you look closely, you can always find spectacular advice from true experts.

Stuff like this: “I’ve tried six different types of oil over the years and documented the results. The oil recommended by the manual is very good. But this other product performed 20 percent better based on close inspection. The other four performed measurably worse. I would not use them ever.”

You’ll see the same sort of thing whenever gym owners talk. If you don’t believe me, search “floor cleaners” in any forum for fitness entrepreneurs. Most gym owners have only tried one floor cleaner, and it is therefore “the best” and “the one you should get.”

Were I to invest in a floor cleaner, I’d want to hear from someone who knows exactly why a certain product is better than all the others.

I bring this up because I want you to make better business decisions than I did back when data was nonexistent or hard to find. I want to you brush aside opinions with a smile and search for facts. I want you to pick “the very best oil” for your machine the first time, not after someone’s flippant recommendation has your engine smoking.

So if you’re ever in a forum for gym owners, I want to give you two questions you can ask to get the info you need to make intelligent decisions:

1. What else have you tried, and how did that compare?

2. What data can you provide?

True experts will have answers to both questions. Others will not, which is fine. Their opinions are valid—but they are just opinions, and you’d do well to remember that.

As a small business, your gym is a high-risk endeavor. Don’t increase the risk by basing decisions on the opinions of the loudest people in the group. Reduce the risk by asking for data and evidence. Then make the best decision.

If you do that, you’ll avoid all kinds of misery and reach your business goals much faster.

If you don’t, you’re gambling.

Smile and nod in discussion groups and thank people for their opinions. Then seek out experts and hard data.

If you’re looking for a forum where experts always back advice with data, check out Gym Owners United.

The post Why “It Worked for Me” Can Kill Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Is the Group Fitness Model Still Viable (and Do Other Models Exist)?

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Meet Starla, the new business model. Does anyone remember that awkward scene from “Arrested Development”? It involved a swimsuit model, not a spreadsheet. The gym world is actually a lot like that at times. Our business models are often super weird or just completely absent. So, do you have a business model? I’ve got good news for you. Chris Cooper has five of them, and they’re all backed by data in our brand-new guide. Each of the models has a spreadsheet that shows you how you can make $100,000 as a gym owner. We’re going to dig into them today. I’m Mike Warkentin. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” With me today is Chris Cooper, Two-Brain Founder. Good morning, Chris. How are you?

Chris Cooper (00:35):
I’m way better, man. That intro made my day.

Mike Warkentin (00:38):
Do you remember that scene?

Chris Cooper (00:40):
The “Arrested Development” joke. Oh yeah. I’m a huge “Arrested Development” fan. It so great.

Mike Warkentin (00:43):
It was so great. Gob is just in the boardroom, and he’s just, “I have a business model, Michael,” and you know, and she comes in on the rock, sitting on the rock, and it went from there, and the board didn’t appreciate it.

Chris Cooper (00:56):
My family has a joke. There’s always money in the banana stands.

Mike Warkentin (00:59):
There’s always money in the banana stand.

Chris Cooper (01:00):
That comes from “Arrested Development” too.

Mike Warkentin (01:02):
Yep. That’s a great show, and it’s a great setup for this one because back when you and I started gyms, there was no business model, and there was no money in the banana stand. We were just making it up as we went. We were making tons of mistakes, and it took us decades to get to profitability, and some of us didn’t make it there at all. So, I’m really pumped about this because I’ve gone through this new guide in detail, and there’s really cool stuff in there. I’m going to put you on the spot right off the beginning because I followed this path, and I want to know if it still works. Is the group model still viable at this point in time? What do you think?

Chris Cooper (01:32):
There are a few outliers who are doing really well with the group model. By and large, these people have “first-mover” advantage. So, they opened up CrossFit Toronto or whatever—you know, that’s a bad example because I think CrossFit Toronto is gone now—but maybe they open up the first CrossFit in Detroit, and they got to name it CrossFit Detroit. And they’ll always have that brand advantage. So, anybody that wants to try CrossFit or people who are looking for better CrossFit, they’re going to go to that brand. But by and large, these are the minority. Like less than 5% of gyms are doing really well with that group model unless they introduce like one-on-one or something else. We’ll talk about that later. And if you look broadly, if you look at—let’s look outside CrossFit. Let’s look at F45; let’s look at spin studios.

Chris Cooper (02:19):
Let’s look—out of Australia, there’s like 12 different brands every single month coming into the market there. What happens is that the um, group model is so commoditized you can’t even tell the difference between F45 and you know, now it’s like the “green theory,” and the only differentiator is price. And so that drives down the pricing model. People can’t make a living there, the owners aren’t making any money, and it’s just kind of this downward spiral. And so if all you’re doing is selling group classes, you’re really going to struggle to compete against a growing market.

Mike Warkentin (02:54):
Well, because you’re still, at that point, you almost get pushed into the micro or the corporate gym model where you need more and more people at these really low rates. But you’ve still got these little labor costs, and you are “coaching” people, but really what you’re doing is hurting people, and screaming at them in a giant pile, and you’re not charging enough to cover any of it. And I’ve seen a lot of those studios start to go under around me. I don’t know what it’s like where you’re at.

Chris Cooper (03:15):
Yeah, they’re gone. I mean, so where that came from in CrossFit—this almost industrial model of like, “let’s pack 30 people in, and we’re all going to do everything in sync,” and it’s almost choreography in some of these gyms—that actually came from martial arts. Like that wasn’t Greg’s original model. We’ll talk more about that later. But CrossFit invited a speaker to the affiliate summit in 2006, and this guy came from karate, and he talked about the model they have in karate, which is 30 kids wearing the exact same uniform, occupying a two-foot-by-two-foot square space doing everything in complete sync. Everybody kicks at the same time, throws punches at the same time. There’s no equipment; there’s no sparring going on, but that’s how you make a living in that model. The problem is that when you add complicated movements, and you add 10 people who are all at different levels, and you add equipment like barbells and boxes that change every single day, it is very, very hard to compete. And now a lot of gyms are seeing that profit margin just shrink and shrink and shrink because they’re trying to compete with the bootcamp next door, the HIIT gym next door, the F45. Clients are moving faster and faster between coaches, and unfortunately, if you don’t do something to differentiate yourself and really focus on building a coaching business, that’s who you’re competing with now.

Mike Warkentin (04:31):
OK, so in our new guide, we actually have a group model that’s just group-only with a little bit of extra stuff in there. We’ll tell you about that in just a sec. But Chris, give me the short version for people who are listening, and they don’t think it’s a swimsuit model. What is a business model? Why should a gym owner care? What are we going at?

Chris Cooper (04:46):
A business model is just your actual plan to succeed. So, it doesn’t have to be fancy. It’s some numbers on a page where you’re basically tracking: Here’s how many clients I have, here’s what each client pays me, here’s how long they stay, and then here’s what I spend on expenses, and here’s what I spend on staff, and here’s what’s left over at the end. And we all came into this as first-time entrepreneurs. I know I was terrified to learn this stuff because I didn’t want to be the witness to my own failure. But the reality is like in the three years that I avoided learning this stuff, my business didn’t improve. And so, you don’t need to become an accountant to run your gym, but you have to have a very basic understanding of what metrics you need to track, and you need to track them.

Chris Cooper (05:29):
And then what that does is it helps you make decisions. So, if you’re looking at your P&L, your profit and loss, like the most basic accounting document there is, you can say, “What if I added five more clients? How would that affect my bottom line? What if I added more space? How would that affect me? What if I increased what I was charging by $5? What if I added on-ramp? What if I did more personal training? What if I did whatever? And so, what we’ve done in this guide is we’ve actually broken down five models that work, including the group-only model because I don’t want to say it never works—sometimes it does—but I want you to see the actual math of how this stuff breaks down so that you can decide for yourself.

Mike Warkentin (06:08):
So let’s talk a little bit about those group models and specifically the group-only one because a key feature of that in the book is that regardless of whether you’re focusing on 150 group clients, we still want to bring them in with one-on-one on-ramps, personal training by another word. Why is that, and why is that such an essential feature of that group model?

Chris Cooper (06:27):
Well, you got two options to make a group model go, right? Number one—well, there’s really three. So, one is you have a ton of clients, and that model is the one that’s most talked about in like CrossFit gyms for example. The next model is that you have 150 to 200 clients, but you charge a high price point. So, that’s really common in Orange Theory, which is a growing brand; they’re probably the fastest growing of all the ones that I’m talking about. And then the third model is that you have mostly group training, but you introduce some one-on-one at some point. We call this the prescriptive model. And basically, what you’re doing is you’re saying, like, “Go to the group classes for exercise, but you are going to be working one-on-one with somebody who oversees your journey.”

Chris Cooper (07:13):
“So you’re going to be checking in with them; they’re going to be measuring your progress, and if your progress isn’t as fast as you would like it, they’re going to change your prescription a little bit. They’re going to tell you to come more often. They might recommend some personal training or whatever. Sometimes they’ll tell you to come left less often, but like there’s somebody overseeing your particular case.” And this is the big differentiator that a lot of brands can’t compete with. So, if you’re a CrossFit gym, and you don’t have to follow the F45 franchise playbook, this is your big opportunity to be different, have a more valuable gym, keep people longer, and really actually change their lives instead of just keeping them for six months and then they’re churning out to Fit Body Boot Camp.

Mike Warkentin (07:52):
I’ll ask you this, and I’ll play devil’s advocate. What if I told you that I think on-ramp is a barrier to entry to group classes? What would you say?

Chris Cooper (07:58):
Well, I mean, the data says that’s just not true. Like, my opinion doesn’t matter. What matters is data from 15,000 gyms that we’ve collected, is the experience of a mentor team of 70 successful gym owners, and you know, we’ve had the experience now of working with well over 2,000 gyms. And on-ramp, like a one-on-one introduction to your course or your group program or whatever is not a barrier to entry, it’s actually a barrier to exit, so what happens is people pay a little bit more; they learn the fundamentals, but more than anything else, they get comfortable. And so, after five or six sessions or whatever you pick, you say, “Do you feel comfortable joining the group class now?” And eight out of 10 will say, “Yep, ready to go.” And then you put a great client into that class who knows all the movements.

Chris Cooper (08:44):
They’re not like, “What’s a power clean again?” But more than anything else, they don’t feel stupid in that class because you know what happens, right? Like they get in that class, and some people will say, “What’s a power clean again?” But most people will just be like, “What am I doing here? I forget.” And then they quickly feel like, “I don’t belong here.” And so, they bail. So, you know, the whole free trials thing that went through CrossFit gyms, like the reason that it doesn’t work isn’t because you’re not going to sign people up. You will, especially if you’re brand new, but you’re not going to keep those people. And so that’s the real key to on-ramp. The other, the other like argument for on-ramp, especially when people say, “It’s a barrier to entry”: If you don’t offer a one-on-one introduction to your program, 20% of the people coming in your door will just not want to do it.

Chris Cooper (09:33):
And it’s because they’re already feeling awkward; they’re already feeling insecure. Like, “I don’t know if I can do this. Man, these workouts look hard.” Now they have got to do that in front of a group of strangers. Like, think about that, OK? Not only have you never played the piano before, but your first lesson is going to be on stage in front of 15 other people who are just going to stand there and watch you. That’s how they feel. So, offering that one-on-one option, most of the time, it invites people who would not normally join a group class. In our gym, there are also people who prioritize their schedule over their budget. For example, like, “I need to come at 10 a.m.” “We don’t have a class at 10 a.m.” “OK, I’ll do personal training.” Or you know, maybe they’ve got a unique characteristic: one leg shorter than the other, they got this old shoulder injury. They should not be in a group class self-moderating or scaling. They should be working one-on-one with a trainer, getting them ready, so they can be successful maybe in your group program later. So having that one-on-one option, it’s great for the business. We didn’t even talk about that. But the most important thing is it’s better for the client, and it’s not a barrier to entry at all. It’s an appropriate entry that also serves as a barrier to exit.

Mike Warkentin (10:42):
Yeah, I’ll give you the feedback from ground level: I was terrified to put an on-ramp in place because I’m like, “OK, I’m going to charge $400 in advance of $150 unlimited group membership.” That seemed horrifying to me because I’m just going to screen out all these people. But what actually happened is when I sold on-ramps, I realized every month that I sold a bunch of on-ramps was a profitable month, and the months that I didn’t were not profitable. And because I had these on-ramps, people stayed longer. And then again, Two-Brain retention data says, I think, 14 months—it takes average retention from eight months with a free trial if they join to 14 months with an on-ramp. That was floating my business because people were staying around longer. So, as I started to look at that, I realized this is actually a huge financial boom, and it’s better for the client.

Mike Warkentin (11:25):
Talk to me now about, so I mean that model—the group model—works, but it’s going to work way, way, way better if you have that introductory one-on-one thing where you build these relationships and move people through. And so, when we have this model in book, 150 people, you can make a hundred grand, but that intake of five people a month with an on-ramp of—I think it’s five sessions or six sessions at $300, something like that—adds in a chunk of revenue and supports the gym and increases retention. So that’s why, listeners, you’ll see that one in there. Chris, talk to me about the group model, but with a lot more PT and a lot more even like high value services, like that’s another evolution of things where we still have group classes, but now we’re adding in other revenue streams. What’s going on in those two models?

Chris Cooper (12:07):
Yeah, I think the next model, which some would call like high-ticket for example, is taking a step up and saying like, “OK, what does the client actually need?” It’s a more holistic view of their fitness. So, they need to exercise? Absolutely. Do they need the support of a community? Maybe. Yeah, probably. Do they need a coach? For sure. They have not succeeded before. They need a coach; they need your guidance. OK, so one element of what we need to change their lives is fitness that’s fun, that keeps them coming around with good retention and coaching. Another element might be nutrition; another element might be sleep. Who’s looking over that whole thing? Or are we just servicing like the one hour of their day and maybe it’s the best hour of their day, but it’s only one hour of their day and maybe three or four hours of their week: Is that enough to change their lives?

Chris Cooper (12:55):
And so if we take the perspective of, like, “What does the client actually need to change their lives?” that becomes a much more valuable service. And I said it’s a more holistic service because usually when people buy a high-ticket item in gyms, what they’re actually doing is buying the whole package, right? The holistic view of fitness, including exercise and nutrition. So, a lot of gyms will have a high-ticket offer. This could be anywhere between 1,000 and 3,000 bucks. I would say that an on-ramp that costs $300 is like a higher-ticket offer than what most gyms sell. So, you know, consider that whole spectrum. But in many cases what these gyms find is that when a client comes in and they’re paying $2,000 for the first two months, month even, they are getting so much attention from the coach that they can’t fail.

Chris Cooper (13:45):
And what’s interesting is that it forces the gym to be just on top of that client because they’re basically saying, “We’re going to guarantee your success here.” After that initial two months, the conversion into group classes is pretty high. Like a lot of people will take that, the first two months, they change their whole life; they get some good habits established, and many will continue with that. But let me go again. Another 90 days at your top tier offer: Some will convert into group, but the best gyms after doing this for a few years have found that they need to build the two things together. So, I’ll give you a great example from a gym that’s really crushing it in Two-Brain. And these guys are in San Francisco, so their high-ticket offer is $2,700, and that gets them through their first three months.

Chris Cooper (14:29):
OK? So, 900 bucks a month. You’ve got a dedicated coach who’s overseeing your journey, and that coach is going to tell you, “OK, you need personal training twice a week, but you need five workouts a week, so your other three are going to be group. Here are our group classes; which ones can you make? Then I need you to talk to our nutritionist. And then I’ve got a sleep expert that you’re going to talk to,” or “I’ve got a habits person,” like they can prescribe anything. They’ve got a bigger toolkit, and three months in the client has established amazing habits and patterns. And so now the client has a different perspective on things, and they say, like, “OK, well, what parts of this do I need to keep going?” “Well, you need to keep exercising four times a week. Do you want to keep going one-on-one, or do you want to do group, or what is it?” And basically, this health coach—or this expert or whatever you want to call them—is telling the client: Go to two classes. Go to two personal training sessions. Like they can draw from all the different offerings that the business has. And that is dramatically different than saying, “You pay this, and you’re allowed to come to this many classes per …”

Mike Warkentin (15:33):
And that kind of leads into the other model that’s in there: group plus personal training, where you’re just selling a number. It’s not like 1,000 personal training sessions a month, but it’s like a smaller number where you have this second revenue stream. We don’t have to beat that one to death, but the idea is just you’ve got a bunch of group clients; you’re also selling personal training—those two revenue streams combined to produce $100,000 a year in net owner benefit in our spreadsheets. Chris, what are the key aspects of that model that you want to point out?

Chris Cooper (16:00):
Yeah, so I mean the person who’s using this uber successfully is Per Mattsson over in Sweden. And this model is working so well for him that he’s actually buying up other CrossFit gyms and partnering with them. And you know, it’s really awesome to see how fast he’s growing. But what happens is somebody signs up for a membership at his gym; that membership includes both group classes and one-on-one training. Now of course the price reflects that the price is quite a bit higher than if he was just selling group classes. But what he’s doing is basically taking the prescriptive model and saying, “Here’s exactly what you need, except here’s our base; our minimum is going to be group plus one personal training session a month so that we can work on your weaknesses, address your program and maybe change course if we need to.”

Chris Cooper (16:45):
The thing is, if people can’t change course—if their option in your gym is just do these group classes, eventually they’re going to change their mind about what they’re doing. But as a real coach who has a higher-level perspective on things, if you can say, “OK, this isn’t working; we need to change and do more personal training or more nutrition,” like that’s how you keep the client because they can shift direction without shifting gyms. And so, adding like that base personal training to the group model does a few things: It increases client value, it serves as a bit of a filter because not everybody’s going to want that—here are other CrossFit gyms close to all of Per’s gyms—but it also creates a more standardized income stream for his trainers, the people who work for him. It creates better long-term client results; it increases retention. So, it’s good for the business and good for the client. And that’s what’s beautiful about some of these models is it’s not just what’s best for the business or what’s best for CrossFit HQ: It’s what’s best for the actual client and the business owner and the staff, and that’s what we want to show in these spreadsheets too.

Mike Warkentin (17:51):
Yeah, and it’s really neat because if you take the industry average for a group training—it’s about $160, something like that—and add in the industry average for a PT session, which is about $75, all of a sudden, your average revenue per member if you sell that hybrid program is about 235, which as opposed to 160 is a huge, huge difference. If my ARM was 235 back when I was running a gym 10 years ago, I’d probably have a different car in the driveway. But the idea is, it makes a huge difference, and it’s just one extra session. The cool part about this though is that people say, “Oh, I can’t find people who are going to pay $235 a month.” We only need 150 in these models. We break down the exact number of clients that you need, and it’s not 500 people.

Mike Warkentin (18:30):
Maybe you can’t find 500 people who want to pay this, but could you find 150? And the spreadsheets will show you exactly what these numbers are. And like Chris said, you can take these things and start playing with them and saying, “If I reduced this to 70 clients, and I charge this, then OK,” and now you’ve all got—this is the beauty of the model. I want to get into this one because it’s a really interesting one. It’s a newer model that we’ve come up with: semi-private training. What is this, and how does it work?

Chris Cooper (18:56):
Yeah, man, so semi-private has been around for a while, and it’s slowly cropping off more and more. And the trend, we spotted it on our leaderboard. Who are these people who are doing $400 or $500 per month in ARM. One of these guys, honestly, Mike, last night texted me, he’s like, “My net owner benefit, so my take-home this month—one month take-home—from two semi-private gyms is $35,000. What do I do with it?” And I just went like, “That’s insane.” So, he’s got two gyms that are about 2,000 square feet each. He provides an income for his trainers that’s like double the industry average. His retention is incredible. What’s he doing? It’s semi-private. So, the way that semi-private works is this: There are 3, 4, 5 of us training together in the gym at the same time.

Chris Cooper (19:47):
You and I have different programs, but we’re sharing the same coach. And so, at 11 o’clock today, literally an hour and a half from now, I’ll go into my gym, there will be three people warming up and each one of us has our clipboard with our program on it. The coach has looked at each of our clipboards in the past, like she knows exactly what we’re doing today, and “Chris, you’re warming up on the rower. Lauren is warming up on the assault bike.” Who else is in there? “Kelsey is like 36-weeks pregnant, so you know, she’s doing like some air squats to warm up and stuff, and Bev is brand new, so she’s going to be doing a lot more one-on-one with me.” So, during the course of the next hour, I know what I have to do.

Chris Cooper (20:27):
I have some press today, and I have some front squats today. So, my coach, Jessica, is going to come around and be like, “Coop, you know, why is your right elbow sagging on your front squats? Like, let’s really focus on that.” Whatever. She goes to Kelsey: “Kelsey, slow it down. We don’t want you to give birth on the floor.” She goes to Lauren: “Lauren, hold that. Get your bum down on the plank.” You know, and that’s semi-private training, and for most of us, that ticks all the boxes. Like I’ve got a fun little group that I work out with. I’ve got a personalized program for my goals, so I know what I’m doing today, but it’s not what they’re doing today. I’ve got a coach overseeing me. 25 years into coaching fitness, I still want a fitness coach. And what’s really amazing about this model is not just that it’s great for the client, but it’s amazing for the gym.

Chris Cooper (21:11):
I mean that that coach will be making $80 an hour to coach four of us. Each person in our little semi-private is paying slightly less than they pay for personal training, but way more than they would pay for like CrossFit group classes at my gym. It’s just such a win for everybody that my coaches really just want to do semi-private all the time now. And this is the biggest challenge in semi-private. It’s a really growing model. It’s very effective. And to be honest with you, Mike, and absolutely frank, if I’d known about this in 2008, I would not have opened up my second location. I would not have tried to jump to group classes. I would not have starved myself for three years and almost gone bankrupt trying to figure this out.

Mike Warkentin (21:48):
It makes sense. Listeners, this is the basic summary. This is like PT light. So, if you think about a PT session and you’re talking to your clients in between sets, and you’re just like shooting stuff about the weekend and so forth, basically think about if you didn’t do that part; you just moved on to another client, coach them on something, watch their thing, go to the next person, next person. You’re just administering, say, four individual programs at once. Takes a lot of skill, but you can do it if you’re a good coach, and you’re just cutting out some of the other stuff that you maybe don’t need.

Chris Cooper (22:14):
Yeah, I mean the hardest part about personal training honestly is boredom for the trainer. Like once the program is written, the exciting part’s kind of done, and what we would find when we were just doing one-on-one training is you would have 10, 11 clients in a day, and you’d have the exact same conversation every hour on the hour, and at the end of the day you’d be like mentally exhausted from making small talk. That doesn’t happen. I mean, yeah, there’s beauty in the group, right? Like, but you can get that beauty from four people instead of from 12. There’s cheerleading that goes on; like, when Linda in our group was coming back from an injury, and she was able to squat to a 13-inch box, like the other four of us just went bananas, and it’s awesome. Semi-private is different from small group though, and maybe this is where we segue into what small group training is, Mike.

Mike Warkentin (23:04):
Yeah, and before you do that, I’m just going to say, listeners, I’m going to put a link in the show notes to—Brian Bott is our expert on semi-private training. He did a whole show on this. So, if you want to dig into this model, Brian lays it out in total detail. You can find out everything you want about this, so if you review our spreadsheets and the new guide and check out what Brian has to say, there’s some really cool stuff in there. Small group, Chris, a little bit different. I’m not doing my own program, but what am I doing?

Chris Cooper (23:27):
We’re all doing the same program. So now instead of you and I training with two other people, and everybody’s got their own program, we’re sharing a coach, we’re all doing the same thing, but we’re sharing a coach, and it’s really, really interesting this model. So usually, you charge quite a bit more for it because what you’re charging for is like—

Mike Warkentin (23:45):
I didn’t. I did this, but I did it with three-person group classes.

Chris Cooper (23:47):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? We were doing small group training at like big group rates, and that’s the mistake is—

Mike Warkentin (23:53):
You can charge more for this?

Chris Cooper (23:55):
Like twice as much, and you know, you’re attracting people who value privacy, having their own little tribe of five or six regular buddies, having their—they can determine kind of the schedule that they’re on. And what’s interesting is this was Glassman’s path. If you listen to my interview with him at his kitchen table, he describes exactly what he was doing, and he went from one-on-one personal training to: “I can’t fill any more sessions. Hey, I’ve got this other person training with me; I think you guys would be a great match. Let’s try it. Let’s do two-on-one to three-on-one to four-on-one.” And you know, he’s talked about this in a lot of the journal videos too. Eventually he got up to maybe five- or six-on-one, but he was still charging close to personal training rates, and that’s why he didn’t need bigger than like 1,500 square feet.

Chris Cooper (24:41):
I mean, I think you’ve been to the original gym, I’ve been there—like, yeah, tiny 800 square feet down below and a little tiny balcony thing up above, right? People can see pictures. That’s where the confusion is: What was small group training back then? And we never heard about that. And so, there are gyms like Daniel Purington who’s absolutely killing this right now. He is doing CrossFit with these people, and they’re getting amazing results. He’s got amazing retention, and he is charging like double what the other gyms are in town. It’s a really good model. And the only thing that stops gyms from doing this is mythology that comes from like other biz coaches telling you to have big groups and what’s in between their own ears.

Mike Warkentin (25:22):
So it’s just creating value instead of saying, you know, “Group classes are this price, and you come and whoever shows up gets the same treatment.” It’s saying, “These are capped small group training sessions where I’m giving you x amount of attention. It’s high value.” You promote it like that, and you can charge more than what essentially worked out to like 7.50 a class for me if I was charging 150 for unlimited, right? So that’s a really interesting way to charge more. And like I said, I literally did this, but I charged the wrong rates because I just charged $150 unlimited. And honestly, many of my classes had three or four people show up. Some had one. I was giving great coaching, but I wasn’t making any money. And then I had to come see you because I was going under.

Chris Cooper (25:59):
Well that’s the real irony, right? Small group coaching is the model, but most of us only have six or seven people in the average class anyway. The problem is not that we’re not doing a good job with this. The problem is just that we don’t understand what our actual service is, and we’re not charging for it. You know, it’s not like, “Oh, you should just double your prices, and that’ll fix everything.” It’s: You need to understand what value is; it’s not just like having a time for people to work out in a big group of 15 and like, I’m going to—if you’re doing something seriously wrong, I’m going to come and triage your knees or whatever. It’s like we’re going to coach you. I’m only going to split my attention five other ways. You’ve got just enough people to keep you moving forward, but not so many people that you’re lost in the big group and that’s—you’ve got some time flexibility there.

Chris Cooper (26:48):
A lot of my clients who do personal training, it’s not because they’re scared of the group, it’s because they’re scared of what happens at noon in their business or their life. Like they can’t come at—so they’re paying for convenience. Yeah. And I really think this is a really successful growing model. There are so many brand-new franchises like Alloy, where they do small group personal training. They will not allow their franchisees to say the word “class” because gyms have basically created such a low value proposition for the term “class” that they don’t even want to be associated with that. So, it really is like a growing market segment, and you’re going to hear a lot more from gyms doing semi-private and doing a small group in the future.

Mike Warkentin (27:30):
Gym owners, if you’re not making what you want to make, I would encourage you to dig into this part of our new guide. Look at that spreadsheet, look at the numbers and think about what you might be able to do with this. I want to go to the last one, model five, and this is one that I hadn’t heard of until earlier this year: guided access. What is that, and how does it work when you’ve got this large space, and you’re not running the corporate gym where you’re handing out towels at the front desk?

Chris Cooper (27:53):
Yeah. This is kind of a different value proposition of clients. And so, Joe and Alessandra from CrossFit Mass, they came out of COVID with no staff. Now they’re in Boston, right? CrossFit Mass is short from Massachusetts, and Boston was locked down longer than a lot of other places—you know, California and Canada, we were kind of the same, New York. But what they found is like, “OK, now we’ve got to reopen. It’s just the two of us. Do we really want to do this again?” They had a very successful gym, and they said, “There’s got to be another way.” And so, what they actually did was incorporate programming with coaching at certain specific times and access to the gym. So, there’s a fantastic podcast on this, but—

Mike Warkentin (28:34):
We’ll link to that.

Chris Cooper (28:35):
Yeah, OK. In a nutshell, you sign up at their gym, Joe, who is an expert at writing programming—or Alessandra, another expert at writing programming—they’re going to write your program for you. You’re going to do some one-on-one sessions until you know exactly what you’re doing. And then you can show up at the gym anytime between like 6 a.m. and 9 o’clock at night. You just boop in with your little key swipe thingy and, or your app, whatever system you’re using. And if you want to come while there’s a coach on the floor, there will be a coach on the floor from 9 until 12. You don’t have to start at 9 sharp, you can start at 9:15, you can start at 10:01, whatever. The coach will guide you, like semi-private. If you can’t make that window of time, no problem. Show up at 1 o’clock.

Chris Cooper (29:18):
There’ll be somebody in the building. And if we’re busy, like we won’t be coaching you, but we’ll be around if you don’t understand something. Do your own thing. You know, if you’ve been around for a while, you don’t really need the coach, but you want to show up when there’s other people here, come between 9 and 12. If you’ve been around for a while and you just need to get in and get it done, hey, come at 3 o’clock; get it done. Let us know it’s—we’ll see it in the app that you’ve completed it. And this model is brilliant because Joe and Alessandra—and I can testify to this; they’re in our Tinker program. They’re with me four times a year, like in Vegas, in Dallas, wherever—they can leave their gym. They have like one part-timer who fills in for them sometimes.

Chris Cooper (29:57):
Alessandra works from about 7 a.m. until about 11 in the morning at the gym. Joe goes in from 4 until 7, the rest of their work is completely remote. Very successful gym, very high ARM; they don’t need a massive space to do it. It’s amazing. So, I do love this. And you know, Mike, I just want to reiterate: Our goal with this guide and this podcast is not to say that one is better than the other. What we’re saying is that you need to have a model. You need to have a plan, and you need to select a plan based on the strengths and weaknesses and your personal preferences. You can make a great living with big group training. Sure, follow the plan. Like if you’re going to do that, you have to have a high ARM, that’s all. Because you’re going to have a higher churn rate.

Chris Cooper (30:39):
That’s just how it is. You’re going to need to recruit more clients; you’re going to need to do more marketing. That’s how it is. But if that’s what you want, you can do it, and we’ll show you how. If you want to do guided access, you need to have a bigger skill set and programming. You need to have a different clientele; you need to have a different space layout, right? Like you need to have the key card access thing. You can do it, and we’ll show you how. You just have to know the pros and cons of each one before you start. And we made semi-private and small group really sound rosy. But of course, there are challenges to that too. Like it’s very hard to introduce semi-private if you’ve just been doing group classes. If you’re a personal trainer, you’re crazy not to do this. But you know, there’s pros and cons to both. We can help you with any one of these models. Absolutely. The key is just to get gym owners picking a model, knowing what’s involved and making an informed decision. We’re not against group coaching; we’re not only telling people to do semi-private. We’re business mentors. We want you to understand your metrics so that you can make decisions that will benefit you for the rest of your life.

Mike Warkentin (31:40):
Yeah. And this guide has that laid out. There are five clearly defined models, but we’re not tied to those models. It’s not the only five that exist; it’s just five very common ones where you can—we’ve got executive summaries in there. So, if you don’t care for spreadsheets, you can look at the bullet points of “Here’s the pros. Here’s the cons. Here’s the essential details.” If you want to dig into the spreadsheets, you can go further, and then you can recreate this stuff and start fiddling around to see where the numbers work for you. But these aren’t the only five models. That’s the benefit of Two-Brain membership is they’re going to create the model and help you implement the model that works for your exact business. And it might be one of these five; it might be a combination. It might be something slightly different. And we’re always looking to figure out what’s working right now. That’s kind of where semi-private and guided access came from. That was something we weren’t talking about a year ago. And then Joe and Alessandra come up with this. Brian Bott starts telling us these amazing things that are working elsewhere, and we get these new things. So that’s the benefit of the data, hey, Coop?

Chris Cooper (32:30):
Yeah, and really this is the long-term benefit of tracking these metrics. Like you, the gym owner listening, watching this, you have to track these metrics so that you can make these decisions yourself. It’s not enough for me to be like, “Big group training is the way to go.” You know, ultimately, you’re going to be doing this for 30 years. I would love to be with you every day, but I won’t be. You need to know how to make these decisions. And so, the interesting thing though is that when you’re as big as Two Brain is, we see these decisions being made and the metrics being tracked across hundreds, thousands of gyms. And so, we start to see these trends. Like we weren’t talking about small group training in the last guide. We had never heard of guided access in the last guide, but as these things prove themselves to be better with actual numbers and owner lifestyle, we can start talking about them more. We’re not just guessing. We’re not hyping our favorite method or like whatever HQ or F45 is telling us to say. We can say, like, “Here’s what actually works because we’ve got the proof.”

Mike Warkentin (33:31):
Proof, and the data is available. Chris, how can people get this new guide?

Chris Cooper (33:35):
You just got to go to gymownersunited.com, and that’s a Facebook group, and you’ll see the guide stuck to the top, and all you do is just send me a quick DM on Facebook and say, “Can I have that guide?” In fact, if you’re just on Facebook, you can shoot me a DM there, and say, “Can I get that guide?” And we’ll give you this five-models guide. It doesn’t mean you have to change what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean that what you’re doing is wrong. It just means like this is—you’re going to pick one of these models, and that’s your goal, and you’re going to slowly work toward that model. If you want to work toward getting to that model faster, you use a mentor.

Mike Warkentin (34:06):
Go on Facebook, send Chris a DM; head to Gym Owners United. You can interact in there. Continue the discussion on this, and another thing, you could talk about models that you see working, ask some questions. Two-Brain mentors are in there all the time. And you can get the guide through that group as well. Thanks, Coop, for laying this out. This is really interesting. I’m really curious to see what happens when some people start working on these newer models and see what happens. Thanks for being here.

Chris Cooper (34:25):
Yeah man, thank you. Use these as a template. Everybody should have their own business model. Use a mentor to help you build one if you don’t know how.

Mike Warkentin (34:33):
This has been “Run a Profitable Gym.” Please hit subscribe on your way, and be sure to get that guy by DMing Coop.

The post Is the Group Fitness Model Still Viable (and Do Other Models Exist)? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Why It’s Not Enough to Be a Great Coach

I was a great CrossFit coach, but that didn’t solve my business problems.

I was great at teaching powerlifting, too. But I still struggled on the profit-and-loss statement.

I might have been the best personal trainer in my city at one point, too. But I still had to ask my parents for grocery money when the business was struggling.

My methods never made me successful as a gym owner.

But my model did.

So I’ve spent the last decade making sure other gym owners have strong business models that ensure their success, too.

Model Vs. Method

Here’s the difference between model and method:

Your model is how you deliver your method. It changes, but rarely. For example, a gym might start as a PT-only facility, then evolve to group plus PT, then evolve again into a semi-private gym without large group classes.

Your method covers all the tools in your toolkit. What will you use to deliver X result to Y people? Your method could be CrossFit or Tae Bo or kettlebells. It could be swim lessons or the Zone Diet. It could be a mix.

Your method will also evolve over time, and it will probably evolve to include more methods. That’s fine. The businesses that fail are usually the ones that don’t evolve (or can’t evolve, like franchises).

Businesses whose methods don’t evolve are fragile. They decline significantly or go under when the market finds something newer or better. The fitness industry is littered with examples.

Remember how popular step aerobics programs were in the mid-’90s? Same thing with Tae Bo.

But what if you were a great Tae Bo coach who wasn’t tied to a method that’s going out of style? Well, you’d just pivot and use your skills as an amazing trainer to keep getting clients results with another method—functional training, for example. And you’d probably even find a use for some aspects of Tae Bo. Trainers with huge toolboxes have lots of ways to produce great results for clients.

Your model is determined by what your clients want to buy. We teach the Prescriptive Model because it’s a good balance of telling people what they need and letting them choose what they want.

I’ve laid that model out in detail here.

The short summary: You meet with a client and ask what they want to accomplish. Then you tell them exactly how you can help them reach their goals by providing a service prescription. You meet with the client every 90 days to measure progress and adjust the prescription.

This is a big deal: If you’re using the Prescriptive Model, shifting the method is really simple.

You aren’t tied to bodybuilding or powerlifting or functional training or Tae Bo—you’re tied to results for the clients. The model allows you to use any method.

5 Gym Business Models That Work

My new guide is out: “5 Gym Business Models That Work.”

In the guide, you’ll find five business models you can use to make $100,000 a year as a gym owner:

1. Group Only (with just 150 clients)
2. Group Plus 1:1 Training
3. Group Plus High-Ticket Offers
4. Semi-Private Training
5. Guided Access

I don’t mention a single method in the guide because these models will work with any method.

I bet you’re already an expert at delivering your method. I don’t need to help you with that. But I know coaching excellence isn’t enough. Remember, I was a great fitness coach, and I was broke.

What I can provide to you after years of research and trial and error is a clear, direct path to profitability for your business and income for your family. The guide lays all that out, with high-level executive summaries and spreadsheets in case you want to go deeper.

The model are examples. You can implement one of them exactly or you can build your own. Our mentors build custom models for every gym in our practice. We don’t force a specific model on anyone.

The key is this: You must have a model, you must have a plan and you must have someone to hold you to the plan.

Without those three elements, you’re at risk of being a great coach with a struggling business.

To get the guide, DM me on Facebook or jump into our Gym Owners United forum for more info.

The post Why It’s Not Enough to Be a Great Coach appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Semi-Private and Small-Group Training: What’s the Difference?

As a gym owner, you need to know about all the services that can help you build a strong business.

You don’t have to offer all of them, but you should know your options so you can create a business that helps clients and generates the revenue you need to live the life you want.

I’ve got two less-common, high-value services for you here: semi-private training and small-group training.

High Value, Low Overhead

Here’s the simple explanation:

In a semiprivate group, all exercisers follow their own customized programs and share one coach who skillfully moves around the group to provide a ton of attention to each person. The clients are essentially doing personal training with a few other PT clients present.In a small group, all exercisers follow the same program and do the same workout at the same time, with the coach providing modifications as needed. The class is capped at a small number of participants, so the coach can give each person a lot of attention—much more than they would receive in a general group class.

These are high-value services because each client gets a lot of attention.

In a group class of seven to 12 people, a good coach circulates and connects with clients periodically as they perform variations of the same workout. In semi-private and small-group sessions, coach-to-client contact is dramatically increased. Workouts are unique to the individual in semi-private sessions, and small groups allow for increased adjustments and far more feedback.

With all that in mind, both semi-private and small-group training are priced closer to personal training than to conventional “group” memberships found in CrossFit gyms and spin studios. Clients are getting greater value, and they’re happy to pay for it—both parties win.

Big-Time Benefits

Other key benefits of semi-private/small-group training for the gym:

The model requires far less space and equipment.You need fewer clients to earn the same amount as you would with group classes at lower rates, so marketing and onboarding costs are lower.Small groups can dramatically improve retention. Stronger coach-client relationships create retention rates similar to those of PT, and the added camaraderie in a group of clients creates another bond that ties people to the gym. Many training groups stick together for years!

Here’s one final thing to consider, and it’s a big one:

If you have some very small classes of two or four people, you’re essentially offering small-group training without being compensated for the increased attention clients receive.

I know this because I regularly delivered personal training to a single person who showed up to a badly attended class and paid the group rate. I essentially offered my highest value service—my undivided attention—for about $7 an hour. Clients were thrilled to get great coaching. My wife was less thrilled when I told her not to buy “the expensive cheese.”

I’ve told you how to calculate the value of your group classes here.

Do that exercise again and zoom in on slots with an average attendance of one to four people—I’ll bet the gross revenue in those classes is something like $10 to $40, depending on your membership price.

You probably pay a coach about $25 for the hour, so you might lose a little money, break even on labor without earning anything to cover fixed costs and profit, or hold onto about $15 or $20 after labor costs are deducted.

Compare that to this:

One Two-Brain gym with a strong program charges about $60 an hour for semi-private training. A four-person hour grosses $240, the coach is paid $80 for the hour (wow, right?), and the gym takes in about $160 after labor costs. If you allocate about $55 to cover fixed costs (approximately 22 percent of gross), the gym earns $105 in profit for the hour.

If you run your numbers and find poorly attended group classes that are costing you money, you need to kill them, fill them or spend the time doing something else.

Dig into the semi-private/small-group model. Could it work for your clients and your business?

To help you answer that question, I have a new guide for you: “5 Gym Business Models That Work.” I break down this model and four more in detail. To get the guide, DM me on Facebook or click here for more info.

The post Semi-Private and Small-Group Training: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Bigger Isn’t Better! $50k Per Month in Under 2,000 Square Feet

John Franklin (00:02):
Welcome to Two-Brain Radio. We have a very special episode and a very special guest for you this week. We are sitting down with Daniel Purington of Woodslawn Fitness in Portland, Oregon. We’re coming at you from the Tinker Meetup in Dallas, Texas. You are my first interview of the weekend, so thank you for laying on the sword and the grenade and making content that helps the Two-Brain community out.

Daniel Purington (00:27):
Yeah. Happy to help. I’m excited to talk to you.

John Franklin (00:30):
So, I gave you a brief little intro. We’ve been going back and forth a little bit getting into the interview. For people who are unfamiliar with your gym, maybe give us a quick rundown of what your gym is, the type of training you do.

Daniel Purington (00:41):
Yeah, so we have a relatively small gym in Southwest Portland. We started out as a CrossFit gym about five years ago, and over the course of COVID and the recent three or four years, we’ve pivoted much more to a personalized model in a semi-private model. So, we do probably about 30% in our CrossFit classes. And the rest of the makeup is through private training, semi-private training and hybrid.

John Franklin (01:07):
And what were you doing pre-COVID? Was it all large group, like traditional CrossFit model?

Daniel Purington (01:12):
Yeah, I mean, we always had class caps because my space—so to give you an idea, my primary location is under 2,000 square feet with usable of like 1,100. So, we always had a size limitation. We’re really fortunate in that I took the space because I got 30 parking spaces with it. And as you can imagine, that came in super handy in COVID, so much so as we actually built an outside gym—full coverings and pull up bars and the whole thing. But when COVID hit, people really didn’t want to be around groups. And so, we started to, to be honest, sit down and listen to people a little bit more. And they told us more and more and more about what they wanted, and not that it wasn’t CrossFit, but they wanted a little bit more personalization. So, as the mandate started to lift, we started to see our model needed to shift to kind of support what people were telling us. And that’s kind of how we got to where we are now.

John Franklin (02:12):
So when I hear—my first gym, we were around 2,000 square feet, 1400 usable, so I’m very familiar with the difficulties of operating in what we call like a submarine, you know? You have to be very mindful of the equipment, the programming, all those things.

Daniel Purington (02:28):
Yeah.

John Franklin (02:28):
Where do you cap out in terms of membership when you were doing that large group model?

Daniel Purington (02:34):
Yeah, I mean, so we had—I mean, we always capped our classes around 12 except for on the weekends, which we strategically do partner workouts, and we can open that cap up to 16 and 18. But we do find, interestingly enough, around that 150, 160 mark is about as much as we can handle. Logistics, like you mentioned in the submarine is critical. So, as we diversified, we really had to be conscious of where the group class was going to go, where it flowed, have that not interfere with some of the other things. And so, working in that small space while limiting actually got us better.

John Franklin (03:11):
Yeah because you really have to be mindful about the service you’re delivering, the programming you’re doing, and then I’m sure your coaches are familiar with drawing out class plans, like where the rowers go when you got a full class or anything like that. So, talk to me a little bit about how you’re packaging and pricing your services. Right, because one of the reasons why we want to talk to you is that you are doing CrossFit slightly differently than the rest of the affiliate community. And what I mean by that is a very large percentage of your revenue comes from—you call it semi-private, correct? There’s a small group and semi-private, but you identify as semi-private. OK. So, explain what that is. Give me a little rundown there. And then tell me how you kind of package and price your services.

Daniel Purington (03:56):
Yeah. So, the way that we define semi-private is we do six-on-one training sessions, and we run those in eight-week blocks. So, we specifically focus on something for eight weeks. We started out with some glute work or some upper body work, and we kind of package that out through that. It’s the same six people, upfront charge. That’s how that runs. Our hybrid program is what we consider our two-on-one or our three-on-one training. And that’s what we pair with our group classes. Our semi-private, which just continually rolls and rolls—like the first two semi-private we started two and a half years ago are still running. And if I were to think really hard, I bet you 70% of the people are still in that same thing. They just turnover and turnover and turnover in that. And so, the price point has gone up as we’ve raised our rates. So right now, for our 16-session semi-private block, it’s 549 per person. It’s all upfront. And a lot of those people are coupling that with additional private training and/or working out with our group classes, both of which are added on top of the membership.

John Franklin (05:05):
If I was at my computer, I would be working the calculator really quick to get the session rate. What does that come out to about, per session?

Daniel Purington (05:11):
For the semi-private, it’s right around $38 a session in our six-on-one environment. What’s really important to me with that semi-private program is we can give people what they want specifically, but to be honest, more importantly, I’m paying coaches $92, $94 a session. So, one hour of work, I’m paying coaches about three times what we can pay them for a general class. And they’re able to build a relationship. So not only am I stabilizing my revenue stream, but I’m making careers more stable for these folks. So, I am controlling my length of engagement with coaches and not just length of engagement with my athletes.

John Franklin (05:53):
And you said you’re thinking about it in eight-week blocks, right? And you said it’ll have a focus, so it’s like: This eight weeks we’re building booty; this eight weeks we’re building arms. And so that’ll rotate, and then people can just opt in or opt out based off of whether they want to do that.

Daniel Purington (06:09):
Yep. Yeah. And so, we are strategic. So, once we get people in, we have a set point. So, we use GLM, which is great to have connection points of them when we want because we just put tags on them, like “Dan semi-private 6 a.m.” They’re going to get some built out things we have for them. But week six, we approach the class and say, “We have two weeks left. Next week we’re going to do this; the week after we’re going to retest everything. This is what I’m seeing as the coach that you all would benefit from. Is there something specific that you want to work on?” So, we’re engaging them. They get three to five days to say, “I’m in.” They get an email that comes out after that conversation that happens that says, “I’ve had a great time with you. This is what our focus is coming up. Smash this button; send me you’re in. If you don’t, we’re going to open this up to the general population.” And so, if we lose a person in there, we’re already actively searching for the next person.

John Franklin (07:05):
So there’s a bit of scarcity to it. Once you lose your spot, someone else is going to pop in there. And spots rarely become available. And so, people naturally want to hold—fear of losing, you know, fear of missing out. They want to hold onto that. And so, you said you’ll pair that with what you called hybrid, which is two-on-one or three-on-one training, right? Yep. And so how is that priced out?

Daniel Purington (07:27):
So we use, similar to the Two-Brain model, we do 25% off for our two-on-one and our three-on one-training. So essentially, person A will buy an eight pack, person B will buy an eight pack, and they’ll get 25% off when they train together. The reason that we do two and three at the same price is so that if we have a three-on-one and one person doesn’t show, we still can run that session, and that’s OK because we’re at the same discounted rate. We don’t discount our class memberships for that though. Like, if they want to add a class membership in, that stays at the standard rate. The only discount we do is for the two-on-one and the three-on-one training.

John Franklin (08:04):
So, if a personal training session is 100 bucks an hour, you say, “Hey John, why don’t you train with Chris, and you’re both going to pay 75 an hour instead of a hundred?” So, I’m understanding that—so instead of 100 for the personal training, you’re making 150 as the gym, and as the client, you’re getting 25 bucks off, and you get to train with somebody presumably that you like.

Daniel Purington (08:23):
Yep. Yeah, we’re strategic about that too. We don’t—well, we recently built out a private semi-private on-ramp, which we started about three months ago that is geared specifically to pair people up throughout an on-ramp. But before that, we were trialing it out and essentially like, “Hey, you each have one session left. Let’s try to train together, and if this is cool, then we’re going to continue on that.” So, it was a little bit cumbersome in the beginning of pairing people up who weren’t friends. And so, we kind of worked through some of that a little bit and have figured out a better way to target that.

John Franklin (08:57):
Got it. And so, what is your PT session rate?

Daniel Purington (09:00):
That’s a good question. So, we do 45-minute sessions. We’re around $72 a session for a 45-minute session.

John Franklin (09:09):
So, it’s about double what you’re charging for your semi-private.

Daniel Purington (09:12):
Yep. It’s exactly double. I love math. And so, the way we set up the semi-private is the cost to do 16 semi-private sessions is the same cost to do eight one-on-one private training sessions.

John Franklin (09:25):
And then, let’s go further then. What is the group cost?

Daniel Purington (09:28):
So our unlimited model, which is the only model that’s available to you unless you do personal training, is 200.

John Franklin (09:36):
OK. And that’s as many classes as you can feast on, groups.

Daniel Purington (09:41):
Yep, just group classes. Yep, yep. And we do—I mean, included, that would be your 90-day goal review, which is where we pull a lot of our semi-private and two-on-one and three-on-one people from is from the goal reviews. But yeah.

John Franklin (09:54):
Like it comes like, “Hey John, you’ve been trying to get a muscle-up for eight weeks now; you’ve been coming to group, but maybe let’s work on this a little bit one-on-one.” And kind of naturally flows into that?

Daniel Purington (10:05):
Yeah. And I think this is something—I was talking to the West Coast CrossFit rep about the semi-private program about a month and a half ago. And I think one thing that we do very differently than your traditional CrossFit gym is we actually don’t dig into the skills as much. Like people talk about doing a double-under one or a muscle-up one, and we go a little bit more towards the strength stuff, and we don’t talk about the movements. We actually talk about the body parts. So, we’ll say, “We’re going to do a glute hypertrophy. We’re going to—you know, this is how we’re going to do this, and we’re going to do it through hip thrust.” And like, that’s the last thing in the conversation. And that has really changed the way people have responded to some our emails and conversations and things like that.

John Franklin (10:53):
Because most of your membership, I would guess, is gen pop. Like are you targeting suburban moms or— You’re in an urban—are you in an urban area or suburban? I was going to say—

Daniel Purington (11:02):
Yeah, so we’re 35+, very high-level working parents. I mean, we’re made up of—the medical center is about eight minutes from us. Nike is about 15 minutes from us. Intel is Nike’s next-door neighbor, and then attorneys—like that’s who we are. And so, we’re with a clientele base that understands the value of something. So, as long as we can show it to them, the financial side of things isn’t necessarily burdensome.

John Franklin (11:31):
Sure. So, it’s just providing that value.

Daniel Purington (11:34):
Yep. That’s the key right there.

John Franklin (11:35):
And trying to solve a problem. Most of them have the disposable income to pay a premium price. So, what does that boil down to in terms of top line? Like what does your membership look like, and what does the top line look like?

Daniel Purington (11:48):
I mean, what are we pulling in every month on average? So, right now, we’re right around 48,000 a month. That’s kind of been our consistent throughout last year, which is a big jump from the previous two years. We missed 60k in November by like a thousand. We should hit it for January because we turned over five, maybe six semi-private programs. So, we’re going to have a pretty big influx coming in January. So, we should hit the 60 threshold.

John Franklin (12:20):
So, sounds like you’re pushing 50 to 60 out of 1,100 usable square feet.

Daniel Purington (12:24):
Yeah, so we have 1,100 and then we have a space next door that’s about 600. And so, we have 1,700 usable, and then we have like our parking lot and stuff.

John Franklin (12:36):
So that’s how that’ll work. I’m assuming the group happens in the 1,100; the 600 is where all the semi-private and private and hybrid is going down.

Daniel Purington (12:45):
Yeah, and a lot of times the group spills out to outside because we still have that all erected, which is nice. That said, during the winter, logistics are critical. I had a conversation with a couple up in New York today, and they have about 800 square feet, and they’re questioning if they could run a six-on-one semi-private Mondays and Thursdays a.m. At 6 a.m., I run a six-person semi-private and a three-on-one training session in that 700 square foot space. As long as you can control your logistics, and you understand how the programming works, and you have that conversation with your coaching staff about having conversations before you get started, you really can maximize your square feet without bumping into each other, and the biggest thing: without diluting the experience of the athlete.

John Franklin (13:33):
Yeah. Some spaces are built better for it than others, but it seems like that sweet spot in terms of square footage for that six-on-one experience seems to be around that 1,200 square-foot area, but I think you could condense it down if you did a well laid out space and were thoughtful about the programming. So, that’s cool. What I like about this is it’s space efficient, which I think a lot of people think a bigger gym is always better. But there’s been just a movement in the sports performance community to move to smaller spaces and do smaller class sizes, higher costs because you can just have more impact. And what I like is the fact that you are still running a CrossFit gym. Right, like you’re affiliated, right?

Daniel Purington (14:19):
Yeah, absolutely.

John Franklin (14:20):
Yeah. And so, you mentioned you’re talking with the reps and stuff. Do you think this is a model more affiliates could use and benefit from?

Daniel Purington (14:28):
Yeah, I really hope so. And that’s—so I spent about an hour on the phone with Katie Hogan before. So, they rolled out a semi-private conversation about two months ago. And I unfortunately had a call during the time there, but I DMed her to ask her if she wanted to converse about that. And that’s one of the things that I talked about was: CrossFit is definitely for anyone, but in the situation or the format that we see in the bigger gym space, it’s really intimidating. People also have a challenging time of saying, “How is this going to get me there?” Right. And so, by adding this in, I feel like we can still get the community aspect from it. I mean, I love the methodology of CrossFit, but some people need a little bit different and a little bit more specificity.

Daniel Purington (15:16):
And so, we can give them the best of both worlds. And so, I think with some focus on—I’ll stand a little pedestal—with some focus on a No Sweat Intro where you’re sitting down and listening to people, and not just letting people come in and try a class, and starting to really understand why someone’s there: There are a lot of CrossFit gyms that could benefit from that understanding and saying, “OK, we can make you really successful in our group classes two to three days a week, and then we’re going to put you in the specific strength block that’s going to help you get further towards where you want to go.”

John Franklin (15:49):
And you bring up the No Sweat Intro, which is how you sell, I’m assuming, all consultative selling. And how does that process work with these different offerings? Like how is it different than when you were just selling a large group and either take it or leave it?

Daniel Purington (16:04):
So, I was fortunate in that before I opened my space, I found Two-Brain. And so, I had been educating myself. I come from the medical community and didn’t—I don’t have a fitness background. And so, I was able to dig into some of the business and understood that consultative process was critical. So, we actually did that since day one. We’ve actually had an on-ramp since day one. It’s looked different throughout the years, but right now, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing CrossFit for 10 years or you’ve never seen a barbell, you come in through a No Sweat Intro process. And we have that; there’s a couple of lead generations that we use through our website where we talk to people. And the biggest reason we want to do that is we want to understand why you’re there; we want to understand what’s worked for you in the past—telling us about your challenges—so that we’re not assuming that we know what you need.

Daniel Purington (16:56):
Right? Like, we want to understand you. And as the experts we can say, “OK, now I get where you’re at. This is what you can do.” Coming into our gym, there’s only three ways you can come in. If you’ve got significant CrossFit experience—and I’m going to put a huge asterisk on this—if you have significant CrossFit experience, then you can come into our class setting. That said, we still talk to you about the on-ramp and a significant portion of people who have CrossFit experience still go through our on-ramp. So just because you have somebody coming in that has CrossFit experience, our immediate question is, “Tell me about your on-ramp process at your old CrossFit gym.” Invariably, they did not have one. And then we tell them about ours, and they’re like, “Oh, that sounds pretty awesome.” Ours is six weeks in length. It’s private training and group classes, so they’re going to get a feel of our community.

Daniel Purington (17:48):
And oftentimes they come through that. So that’s two. And then our third way, which is our newest way, is we have a semi-private and a private training on-ramp where people come in looking for private training. We don’t sell front-end private training, and we do that very deliberately—just over the years we’ve tested some things, and we found this works. They train with the goal of getting into a semi-private or a two-on-one or a three-on-one. But we’re still starting them in that one-on-one environment going through, “Where are your challenges? Where are you really focusing on?”—things of that nature.

John Franklin (18:23):
And what do the price points look like for the different starting packages?

Daniel Purington (18:26):
Yeah, so our semi-private and our private on-ramp is 900. That one includes—let’s see—that one’s eight one-on-one training sessions. They get some at-home programming. They get a walking plan, and they get some nutrition recipes from …  Our general on-ramp is 499; that’s six one-on-one training sessions. And then we start putting them in classes—and I think this is really critical—after they’ve gone over the movement that’s in the class. So, we wouldn’t put someone in a class that has a deadlift when we haven’t covered the deadlift in the on-ramp. And so, we’re progressing them through the on-ramp as they’re learning new movements.

John Franklin (19:08):
So, it’ll be like, “Hey, Sally, Wednesday is dead lifts. We’re not going to do that for you, but we got something on Thursday or Friday that goes over the press that we just learned. So why don’t we sign you up for Friday?”

Daniel Purington (19:21):
Yep. And if we have someone in the on-ramp that has come in and has some barbell experience, we can make our on-ramp modular in it. Like, you know, “John, we’re in the middle of a power-clean block. We don’t usually do power-cleans until session four. This is session three, and I’d like to get you in the class. So, we’re just going to flip flop session three and session four, and we’re going to cover power-clean today so that I can get you in class on Thursday. And then we’ll revisit body weight stuff next week.” So, we can do little shifts like that when we’re making those assessments to make sure that that athlete is getting the exposure to classes that they’re looking for.

John Franklin (19:59):
And the class piece essentially reinforces what they just learned in the on-ramp.

Daniel Purington (20:04):
Yep. Yeah. So, we break people up in class two. Again, going back to controlling logistics, we limit the amount of people moving with a barbell. So, if we have 12 people in class, we try to keep it to only six moving at a time. We’re very strategic about pairing people up. We have a tight-knit community, so people love to do that anyways. Another component to that is when we have somebody on the on-ramp, the on-ramp coach is texting the coach that’s coaching the class that that on-ramp person is going to and saying, “Hey, John’s new. They’re coming in today. This is where they are in their on-ramp.” So that coach knows that this person’s new; they know confidently they have gone through the movement patterns, but it’s also a friendly face and whatnot coming through the gym door that, you know, like, “Oh, I know these coaches know when I’m coming.”

John Franklin (20:47):
So it must make them feel a lot more comfortable than just doing some private training and then just being thrown into group. Because they’ve already been integrating into that throughout the entire process.

Daniel Purington (20:55):
Yeah. We actually control it so much, so we don’t let people register for classes while they’re in the on-ramp. The coach does it for them the entire time.

John Franklin (21:05):
Awesome. And so what percentage of your revenue comes from not group training? Not that $200 a month unlimited group class?

Daniel Purington (21:14):
I’d have to look at my metrics specifically, but somewhere around 40 to 45%. It flexes a little bit just dependent upon where we’re in our semi-private. But we do a significant volume of our revenue. We hit—we typically have a reoccurring revenue of membership of between 21,000 and 23,000. And then we’re averaging 45 to 48, and then we’ve gone over 50 several times last year.

John Franklin (21:43):
And that 20 mark, that recurring piece, which if I had to guess, the average CrossFit gym is probably doing between zero and 15% of revenue coming from non-group training sources. And so that’s substantial. Like that’s the difference between paying the bills and maybe having a couple thousand every month to tuck in your back pocket to being able to make decent money from a gym. So, I’m sure there’s gym owners in a similar situation—you know, in that 20 mark—hearing this and saying, “This sounds awesome. I’m in.” You had COVID as a forcing function that kind of pushed people into this, but if you were coaching a gym owner on how to implement this into their business now—it sounds like you’re having those conversations—

Daniel Purington (22:26):
Yep. Just had one today.

John Franklin (22:27):
Yeah, so what are you telling them to do?

Daniel Purington (22:29):
So, the person that I talked to today was considering kind of flipping their model from group completely to semi-private. And I wouldn’t do that in the beginning. They really needed to double down on kind of their on-ramp and start to sell hybrids coming out of your on-ramp. And at that stage, depending upon the logistics that you have and the space you have, you might just be able to double down on that. Like that’s a great offer. One of the reasons we had to do semi-private is we just don’t have the space to run multiple coaches. To go back to what we have on our reoccurring monthly revenue, one of the really cool things is my payroll is just under 30k a month, so I’m paying my coaches and a whole bunch of coaches to be able to do all this.

Daniel Purington (23:12):
So we really had to be strategic, like in the sense of “we have to put multiple people in in this session, or we’re not going to be able to continue to do that.” If you have a little bit more space, then you can start to run those two-on-ones, three-on-ones coupling with your classes because the CrossFit community is not going to want to go away from that group class. And I totally get that. I love that. But if you want to increase that accountability, you want to meet people where you are, you want to have that length of engagement go up, we know those one-on-one relationships are critical with that.

John Franklin (23:44):
So, 30,000 a month: That’s a spicy payroll number. That’s more than the average gym owner does in top line based off of our numbers. So, sounds like you’re providing people with some real careers here. Maybe break down how many people work for the gym and what they do.

Daniel Purington (24:04):
Yeah. So, I work as—I just do semi-private, and I do a couple of private training. I don’t do any group class coaching, which kind of stinks because I really like that. But I moved out of the way for some other coaches to make a career. Then next in line would be Jonathan; he’s our operations manager. He also runs our on-ramp program. He does a lot of our day-to-day interaction on GLM and things of that nature, but he also makes sure things are flowing. He coaches all three classes—semi-private and the hybrid. Then we have a nutrition coach who handles about 30 clients a month there. Plus, she runs the bulk of our semi-privates. We have another coach who we built a physical therapy program together. We have a tiny little office there.

Daniel Purington (24:51):
So, I brought him on about four years ago. Built that practice out. I sold it to him this past summer. He’s our head coach. He does all of our coaches’ development. He does all of our programming; our programming is done in-house. Does some one-on-one training, then runs his physical therapy practice. And then we have one more coach who we consider full-time. So, all those people that I’ve talked about are full-time. And he does similar as Jonathan in that he does group classes, semi-private, and he does a lot of our two-on-ones and three-on-ones. And then we have two bench coaches with a third that just went out on maternity leave.

John Franklin (25:28):
So three full-time, two part-time.

Daniel Purington (25:30):
Myself, John, Anna, Tyler, and so five people who their sole income comes from us.

John Franklin (25:37):
OK. And then you said two bench coaches with a third who just went on maternity leave.

Daniel Purington (25:43):
Maternity leave, yeah.

John Franklin (25:44):
Yeah. Normally record these earlier in the day. The brain’s moving a little slower. We’re trying here. Alright. So yeah, that is insane. So out of 1,700 usable square feet, you got five people eating off of that. And so, you’re saying if you are a gym owner—this sounds good—don’t pivot; don’t completely change your model. Just slowly filter in maybe a semi-private block. Sell that out. Add another semi-private block. Sell that out. And then at what point do you incorporate the hybrid?

Daniel Purington (26:16):
So, I think it really depends. The folks I talked to today, I actually suggested they start with a hybrid first. If you’re going to start with a semi-private—and the way the rules that we have at our space that are in our SOPs is you need to find three people within the group that want what you are talking about before we can even—like they bring me an idea of like, “Oh, I want to do this.” I’m like, “That’s awesome. This is the expectation of how we roll it out in our email list. The first step though is you need to tell me three people that are good for this.” So, you’re starting with that before you’re throwing all your eggs in the basket and just throwing this errant offering out there. Because then as far as we go, you only need one more. So, we have a limit of a program of four.

Daniel Purington (27:04):
If you can’t get four, we don’t run the program for a semi-private. And so, you only have to get one after that. And so, we have kind of these checkpoints of like, “If you can’t get three, I’m not going to run that through our really curated email list. We’re not going to run that through our groups” and things like that. So, there’s a little bit of a push for the coaches who want to do that. And that would be my suggestion too. And the reason I do that is I want you talking to the athletes to find out what they want. I don’t want you to say, “Oh, you need this.” It’s like, understand what their goals are, understand what they want: How can you provide that? So back to the value thing, how can I solve your problem and not create one and try to solve it there? So that’s what I would tell people who are coming into that semi-private, that hybrid conversation.

John Franklin (27:54):
So with five full-timers, there’s probably a decent element—probably some management going on there. How many hours a week are you working in the gym?

Daniel Purington (28:04):
So, as far as the management goes, I put Jonathan in place about eight months ago to run our operations. And that significantly decreased the amount of time, which was strategic in that that’s when I came on board working with Two-Brain, so it was really great to be able to focus on the mentorship side of things. As far as inside of the gym, not including some of the private training that I do, probably 10 hours a week. And that, to be honest, is by choice. I really like creating emails. I really like curating our list. I do our social media. Like I like to do that stuff. I really enjoy doing the No Sweat Intros and the goal reviews. If I decided to not do them, Jonathan and Brandon would have the bandwidth to take up on. So, I’m choosing to do—everything I do in the gym currently I’m choosing to do.

John Franklin (28:53):
And how much actual coaching are you doing then?

Daniel Purington (28:56):
So, I do four semi-private training sessions. And then I do maybe a total of six private training sessions in addition to that in the week. And the three people that I train in there are small business owners, and that’s why I train them because we talk about small business stuff. And I love those people. They’ve been with me forever, but I haven’t taken a new private training client in at least a year.

John Franklin (29:24):
Yeah. Brian Bott, who’s the other guy who runs semi-private, small group in Two-Brain, he has a handful of choice private training clients as well. And I know some of them; they’re like some of the most successful people in that entire area. And it’s crazy what type of a network you can build off of a small gym like that if you get into the right crowds.

Daniel Purington (29:45):
It’s really cool. Yeah. I enjoy that, and that’s why the two semi-private that I coach, the separate ones, that’s the same thing. Like they’re people that I really just like being around, and I truly enjoy doing that, so I get to do it. It’s cool.

John Franklin (30:00):
So, it’s about 10 sessions and 10 hours a week of non-coaching work that you’re doing. And it’s the stuff you like doing. It sounds like 20 hours; we’ll probably call it 25 because they’re shifting and the task switching and all that going on. The payroll sounds pretty substantial, but are you able to pocket more than 100,000 in net owner benefit from that?

Daniel Purington (30:24):
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yep. No problem with that. We wouldn’t have brought Jonathan on when we did—and to be honest, I mean, I’ve had three full-time coaches for a couple years now, so yeah, we’re doing just fine there.

John Franklin (30:41):
And so what is—how are you thinking about what to do next? Are you just enjoying having the single gym? You know, a lot of talks in these meetups are about taking over the world and buying all the real estate in your city or opening 100 gyms. I sometimes think that may not be the best approach for every single gym owner on the planet. How are you thinking about where to go next? Because it sounds like you’re in a good spot.

Daniel Purington (31:06):
Yeah. So as far as like opening gyms, so I own half of another one, and that was a former coach who left us about a year ago to buy out this other gym, and I helped him with the evaluation. So, as far as increasing our footprint, if I had another coach that wanted to open a facility, then I would invest in them. I would not open another one just in my area. We have a great spot. The area where we’re located, there’s almost zero commercial space. We certainly don’t have any warehouse space. My space is a converted real estate office or something like that. It’s challenging to get quality space in our area. Moving forward, I really enjoy acquisitions and talking people through that and looking into investments around small businesses.

Daniel Purington (32:00):
Real estate-wise, I could see doing a short-term rental or so, and potentially my commercial building; I have first right of refusal on it. I’d have to get really crafty because it’s pretty big building, and I live in an expensive county. So, I would take something like that on, but I don’t have the desire to pivot heavy in that regard. So, it’s more on the business side. I’m spending a lot more time on the Two-Brain mentorship team, which I’ve really enjoyed. And so, yeah, just kind of seeing what that takes me.

John Franklin (32:29):
So, it sounds like the business is going well. Rumor has it, you’re doing some crazy stuff personally with your extra free time. You have some 50k rucks or races, what do you have going on this year that you’re planning for?

Daniel Purington (32:44):
Yeah, so I mean, historically I’ve been a mountain runner. So, I’ve run six or seven 50k races. But I’ve done—I enjoy the unsupported mountain stuff, so circumnavigating Mount Hood, St. Helen’s, the Enchantments, things like that. And so, I tend to plan big, big things like that to spend a lot of time in the mountain, and that takes a lot of training. So, I’ve incorporated rucking in, and so some weeks I’ll ruck 25 or 30 miles, and when I have calls where I’m just the listening piece, then I just ruck with them. Or I do a lot of staff conversations, staff evaluations with rucks. I bought three of my staff members rucks as presents throughout the year and things like that. And so, I get to get some extra fitness in, get to be outside, and it’s getting me ready for the adventures that are coming in this year.

John Franklin (33:40):
What are those?

Daniel Purington (33:41):
So first up, we have a 30k mountain race on Mount Hood, which is going to be in the beginning part of July. We’ll see if snow allows that. And then that really starts to dig into what the year is. I’ll absolutely run around St. Helen’s again, which is 33 miles, and then I’ll do an out and back of the Enchantments, which is another 30 miles. And then I’ll decide if I want to actually schedule a race towards the fall. I enjoy the unsupported bigger distance more than the supported ones. So, I don’t mind the race. Like, I like racing. I just like the aspect of you’re out in the middle of nowhere and the only thing that’s going to get you back is your feet. Like there there’s no aid stations and …, so I really enjoy that.

John Franklin (34:26):
Sounds horrifying.

Daniel Purington (34:26):
I love that. It’s just—that’s what I like to do.

John Franklin (34:30):
I’m from Florida. I’ve seen like three mountains ever. So, all this is news to me. I don’t even know how to ruck, but that sounds insane. And you’re a family man too, right?

Daniel Purington (34:39):
I am. Yeah.

John Franklin (34:40):
You have a few kids, two kids?

Daniel Purington (34:41):
I have two kids. Yep. So, my daughter, Mabel, she’s going to turn eight. Mabel and I have the same birthday, so she turns eight in February. And then my son, Cole, will turn five in May.

John Franklin (34:53):
Because not every gym owner goes into gym life to be a slave to their gym. We talk to way too many people in Two-Brain who are doing every single class, working 60+ hour weeks, making not enough money for the hours they’re putting in. It seems like you’re at the end point; you are towards the top of the mountain here, to use a mountain analogy for you. How are you balancing your rucking and your races and the gym and your side projects and your family? Like, do you have a system for thinking about all of this or?

Daniel Purington (35:31):
Not so much thinking about that, but we have systems in place at the gym that allow me to be a little bit more flexible with the time. Like we’ve had a CRM since the beginning, since we started. We had one previous to GLM that worked OK. GLM, the one we’re using now, works really well. And really digging in with that right in the beginning and taking out a lot of the initial things that you need to do is critical. Having a staff playbook so that—like, I’m not at the gym a lot, or if I am, I’m in my office talking to other gyms around the country or around the world for that matter—my staff needs to know how to do X, Y, and Z if a new person comes in or what the expectations are for a two-on-one or a semi-private or one classes. So having those things really in order allows me to have the flexibility to say, “Oh, I feel like going for a ruck today.” And that doesn’t mean I’m absent of stress. I mean, you’re a small business owner, and you still bear all the responsibility, but having those systems in place helps a lot.

John Franklin (36:39):
And so, you talked about the importance of systems. You got diversified revenue, you talk about consultative selling, you talk about bright spots, all these best practices. You talk to a decent amount of gym owners now, and you’ve got a good finger on the pulse of what people are dealing with. It sounds like you’re having conversations with CrossFit HQ, which, you know, in the Two-Brain realm you’re probably dealing with more business-oriented people than the CrossFit at large. Just based off of your 10,000-foot view of what you’re seeing, what are kind of one or two things that the average gym owner—you’d change about the average gym owner if they wanted to impact both the revenue and the time they’re working?

Daniel Purington (37:19):
Yeah, I mean, the big one I think is, is the No Sweat Intro. It amazes me how many gyms—and I’ll speak specifically for CrossFit ones just because I went to the affiliate gathering and led a couple of the big breakout sessions, and the people that are still doing free trials and not learning about their people—that right there, I think, can make a huge impact on people. And then there’s—it kind of depends on where you are in your journey and things like that. You know, having someone to talk to, like finding a mentor, finding someone who can say, “Do this; do this now.” And then when you meet with them in two weeks or a month or whatever your cadence is, they can say, “OK, how come A) you didn’t do this,” or “Hey, you killed it. Let’s celebrate this.” As a small business owner and as an entrepreneur, there’s a really small set of the population you can celebrate your wins with, right? Like profit still is kind of an ugly word in places, but getting involved with people who recognize everything that goes in to get that $1 of profit is huge, and surrounding yourself with that is really like dumping gas on the flame.

John Franklin (38:32):
So Dan, this has been very helpful. Where would people go if they wanted to follow along in your journey? Find out a little bit more about you.

Daniel Purington (38:41):
I mean, the easiest place is just Instagram: @purington_woodslawn. Or I would follow my Woodslawn fitness account (@woodslawn_fitness). We post a lot more in there. I mostly just post pictures of grilling over the fire or playing with my kids on my private page.

John Franklin (38:54):
That’s content I want on my feed. There we go. That’s what I’m looking for. This is great. And for the listeners listening, like I said in the beginning, we are at the Tinker Meetup in Dallas. This is Two-Brain’s highest-level group. You get to be around guys like Dan, who are doing cool things, testing new models, living a good life. The environment is electric, and you know, he talked about having a mentor, but there’s also something to be said about just putting yourself in a room with gym owners like this, having these conversations and just being able to network because I’m sure you probably agree, once you get to a certain point, the decision tree, the options you have that you can make of what to do next become a lot more convoluted and a lot wider. And I think this phase is where people make a lot of the most expensive mistakes. Like once you get here, you just have more problems you can get yourself into, more landmines you can step on, so getting in the right room with the right people to stop you from shooting yourself in the foot or doing anything crazy is really important. So, sorry to take you away from the group for 45 minutes here, but I appreciate it. I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of value out of this.

Daniel Purington (39:59):
Awesome. It’s good talking to you.

The post Bigger Isn’t Better! $50k Per Month in Under 2,000 Square Feet appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Does Two-Brain Make Everyone Sell Personal Training?

I want gym owners to make a great living while delivering the best service to clients, so I talk about one-on-one coaching a lot.

The short version: Personal training is a high-value service that gets clients the best results in the shortest amount of time, boosts gym revenue and improves client retention.

But some people really want to focus on group training, so I get this question at times: “Does Two-Brain want every mentee to sell personal training?”

Here’s the answer: I have data that shows one-on one coaching can be a key part of successful gym, but we never force a business model on a gym owner. If you’re adamant that you only want to train people in groups, you can do that.

But I want you to think about this:

Coaching gyms should offer one-on-one training because not offering it actually drives high-value clients and prospective clients away. At minimum, you should use a one-on-one on-ramp to get clients ready for group classes.

Again, you don’t have to do any of this. But I want you to have all the info so you can make the best decisions.

The Value of One-on-One Coaching

Group training is amazing. I remember when I first started coaching CrossFit groups. I was so thrilled that I told another coach “this is all I want to do for the rest of my life.”

I haven’t forgotten that group classes staffed by stellar coaches allow people to receive small amounts of one-on-one attention in a program that’s economical. And I haven’t forgotten the energy and camaraderie that make group classes very special.

But I have data that clearly shows the effects of one-on-one training on key gym metrics, and I know one-on-one training in an on-ramp program is the best option for most new clients even if they eventually plan to join group classes.

Here are the numbers: People who join group after a free trial stick around for about eight months on average (if they join; they often don’t). An on-ramp pushes that number to 14 months, and if you can get a client to 14 months, they’re twice as likely to stay for two years. Those are huge numbers—for the client and the gym owner.

On-ramps—aka, personal training before group classes—better prepare clients for group classes and give them more options.

For example, a group client who came in through an on-ramp knows one-on-one training is always available if he wants to make progress faster. If group classes are the only option and that client isn’t getting results, he’s likely to quit fitness altogether or sign up for PT in another gym.

Top athletes? They need personal, direct attention more than anyone else. Any gym owner who’s dealt with upper-tier athletes in a group setting will confirm that they’re quick to demand more personalization and attention than a coach can give them in a group. So one-on-one training is a great option for them, too.

Finally, think about a group client who needs just a little more help than you can provide in that setting. Group training plus personal sessions solve the client’s problem and drive up your average revenue per member. We often call this a “hybrid membership.”

The Model That Works for You

With all that in mind, it’s clear that I think gyms should offer one-on-one coaching. But we’ll never force a mentee to do anything.

In fact, we have a spreadsheet-backed business model that shows exactly how a gym owner can earn $100,000 a year serving 150 clients in group classes. But we still include five $300 on-ramps per month in that group-only model.

Why? Because we know that one-on-one on-ramps aren’t a barrier to entry. They are a barrier to exit. Clients who come into group classes through on-ramps stay longer and get better results—which is good for the client and the gym.

We’ll never force a mentee to do anything. But we’ll always tell you what the data says. In this case, the data is clear: Even if you want to run the group-only model, a one-on-one on-ramp will make it work much, much better.

And if you want to focus on group classes but add in a significant amount of PT, we have a model to help you do that, too.

Our new guide is out tomorrow: “5 Gym Business Models That Work.”

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